"Are Natural Selection Explanatory Models A Priori?"

LORENZANO, PABLO; DÍEZ, JOSÉ A.

Valle de Bravo

Congreso; II Congreso de la Asociación Iberoamericana de Filosofía de la Biología; 2015

The epistemic status of Natural Selection (NS) has seemed intriguing to biologists and philosophers since the very beginning of the theory to our present times. One prominent contemporary example is Elliott Sober, who claims that NS, and some other theories in biology, and maybe in economics, are peculiar in including explanatory models/conditionals that are a priori in a sense in which explanatory models/conditionals in Classical Mechanics (CM) and most other standard theories are not. Sober's argument focuses on some "would promote" sentences that according to him, play a central role in NS explanations and are both causal and a priori. Lange and Rosenberg criticize Sober arguing that, though there may be some unspecific a priori causal claims, there are not a priori causal claims that specify particular causal factors. Although we basically agree with Lange and Rosenberg's criticism, we think it remains silent about a second important element in Sober's dialectics, namely his claim that, contrary to what happens in mechanics, in NS explanatory conditionals the antecedent a priori implies the explanandum, and that this is so in quite specific explanatory models. In this paper we criticize this second element of Sober's argument by analyzing what we take to be the four possible interpretations of Sober's claim, and argue that, terminological preferences aside, the possible senses in which explanatory models in Natural Selection can qualify, or include elements that can qualify, as a priori, also apply to Classical Mechanics and other standard, highly unified theories. We conclude that this second claim is unsound.