In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to grow during the 1970s and is rapidly expanding today. We review this recent literature and its implications for human evolutionary biology. We show that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as “replicators” which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization. The fundamental question is whether social groups and other higher-level entities can be “vehicles” of selection. When this elementary fact is recognized, group selection emerges as an important force in nature and what seem to be competing theories, such as kin selection and reciprocity, reappear as special cases of group selection. The result is a unified theory of natural selection that operates on a nested hierarchy of units.
 The vehicle-based theory makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution. Humans can facultatively span the full range from self-interested individuals to “organs” of group-level “organisms.” Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals.

Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences

Gru nd legung zur Metaphysik der Sitten

A Study of Concepts

Knowledge in Flux

The fundamental postulate of sociobiology is that individuals exploit favorable environments to increase their genetic representation in the next generation. The data on fertility differentials among contemporary humans are not cotvietent with this postulate. Given the importance of Homo sapiens as an animal species in the natural world today, these data constitute particularly challenging and interesting problem for both human sociobiology and sociobiology as a whole.The first part of this paper reviews the evidence showing an inverse relationship between reproductive fitness and “endowment” (i.e. wealth, success, and measured aptitudes) in contemporary, urbanized societies. It is shown that a positive relationship is observed only for those cohorts who bore their children during a unique period of rising fertility, 1935–1960, and that these cohorts are most often cited by sociobiologists as supporting the central postulate of sociobiology. Cohorts preceding and following these show the characteristic inverse relationship between endowment and fertility. The second section reviews the existing so-ciobiological models of this inverse relationship, namely, those of Barkow, Burley, and Irons, as well as more informal responses among sociobiologists to the persistent violation of sociobiology's central postulate, such as those of Alexander and Dawkins. The third section asks whether the goals of sociobiology, given the violation of its fundamental postulate by contemporary human societies, might not be better thought of as applied rather than descriptive, with respect to these societies. A proper answer to this question begins with the measurement of the pace and direction of natural selection within modern human populations, as compared to other sources of change. The vast preponderance of the shifts in human trait distributions, including the IQ distribution, appears to be due to environmental rather than genetic change. However, there remains the question of just how elastic these distributions are in the absence of reinforcing genetic change.

Social versus reproductive success: The central theoretical problem of human sociobiology

This book defines and develops the program of Natural Logicism for the natural, rational, and real numbers. The central method is to formulate rules of natural deduction governing variable-binding number-abstraction operators and other logico-mathematical expressions such as zero and successor. The introduction and elimination rules for a number-abstraction operator @ allow one to infer to, and away from, identity statements in the canonical form ‘t=@xΦ‎(x)’. These enable ‘single-barreled’ abstraction, in contrast with the ‘double-barreled’ abstraction effected by principles such as Frege's Basic Law V, or Hume's Principle. The logical system used for the foundational reasoning is free Core Logic. It handles non-denoting singular terms and allows only constructive and relevant reasoning. Natural Logicism imposes upon its account of the numbers four conditions of adequacy. First, one must show how it is that the various kinds of number are applicable in our wider thought and talk about the world. One does this by deriving all instances of three respective schemas: Schema N for the naturals, Schema Q for the rationals, and Schema R for the reals. These provide truth-conditions for statements deploying terms referring to numbers of the kind in question. Second, one must show how it is that the naturals sit among the rationals as themselves again, and the rationals likewise among the reals. Third, one should reveal enough of the metaphysical nature of the numbers to be able to derive the mathematician's basic laws governing them. Fourth, one should be able to demonstrate that there are uncountably many reals.

The Logic of Number

conceptual connectedness, which they cannot discern in the usual farraginous reading lists of anthologies and journal articles. To give some indication of the scope of the book, the chapter headings are: I. 'Philosophy of logics'; 2. Validity; 3. Sentence connectives; 4. Quantifiers; 5. Singular terms; 6. Sentences, statements, propositions; 7. Theories of truth; 8. Paradoxes; 9. Logic and logics; io. Modal logic; ii. Many-valued logic; 12. Some metaphysical and epistemological questions about logic. Anyone familiar with the literature will realise how much controversy has to be condensed under each heading. The impressive bibliography alone, if blended in the way one can expect from Haack's fair and even hand, would result in only the most anodyne discussion. Haack can serve as background reading at the very best. One must, as she herself does, point the student firmly in the direction of the classical sources. Otherwise Haack's tentativeness, and way of abruptly ending a discussion just when it starts to bear the fruits of deeper disagreement, might be taken as a model of philosophical style; and the student, in learning the price of every idea, will appreciate the value of none. At several points Haack's survey style renders her discussion too superficial:

From logic to philosophies

Abstract This paper clarifies, revises, and extends the account of the transmission of truthmakers by core proofs that was set out in chap. 9 of Tennant (2017). Brauer provided two kinds of example making clear the need for this. Unlike Brouwer’s counterexamples to excluded middle, the examples of Brauer that we are dealing with here establish the need for appeals to excluded middle when applying, to the problem of truthmaker-transmission, the already classical metalinguistic theory of model-relative evaluations.

Transmission of Verification

We explore the problems that confront any attempt to explain or explicate exactly what a primitive logical rule of inference is, or consists in. We arrive at a proposed solution that places a surprisingly heavy load on the prospect of being able to understand and deal with specifications of rules that are essentially self-referring. That is, any rule is to be understood via a specification that involves, embedded within it, reference to rule itself. Just how we arrive at this position is explained by reference to familiar rules as well as less familiar ones with unusual features. An inquiry of this kind is surprisingly absent from the foundations of inferentialism—the view that meanings of expressions (especially logical ones) are to be characterized by the rules of inference that govern them.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/6C796BC09D3C3A2419E27EDA8E6DB014/S1755020320000441a.pdf/div-class-title-what-is-a-rule-of-inference-div.pdf

What is a rule of inference

Peter Gärdenfors proved a theorem purporting to show that it is impossible to adjoin to the AGM-postulates for belief-revision a principle of monotonicity for revisions. The principle of monotonicity in question is implied by the Ramsey test for conditionals. So Gärdenfors’ result has been interpreted as demonstrating that it is impossible to combine the Ramsey test for conditionals with the basic postulates for rational belief-revision. It is shown here that this interpretation of Gärdenfors’ result is unwarranted. A new diagnosis is offered of a methodological error made in the statement of the key principle of monotonicity. Crucial applications of this principle in Gärdenfors’ proof require one to regard as revisions what are really expansions. If monotonicity is stated only for genuine revisions, then Gärdenfors’ proof does not go through. Nor can it; for, when the monotonicity principle for revisions is correctly formulated, one can actually establish a contrary consistency result. This requires only a slight adjustment to the postulates of AGM-theory, in order to ensure that the three operations of expansion, contraction, and revision trichotomize the domain of theory-changes. It is further shown that being careful in this way about the proper domains of definition of the three operations of expansion, contraction, and revision also disposes of another, more direct, impossibility result, due to Arló-Costa, that targets the Ramsey test.

Neil Tennant

Papers

The Logic of Number

From logic to philosophies

Transmission of Verification

What is a rule of inference

Belief-revision, the ramsey test, monotonicity, and the so-called impossibility results