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Gouldian Arguments & the Sources of Contingency

McConwell, Alison and Currie, Adrian (2017) Gouldian Arguments & the Sources of Contingency. [Preprint]

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Abstract

‘Gouldian arguments’ appeal to the contingency of a scientific domain to establish that domain’s autonomy from some body of theory. For instance, pointing to evolutionary contingency, Stephen Jay Gould suggested that natural selection alone is insufficient to explain life on the macroevolutionary scale. In analysing contingency, philosophers have provided source-independent accounts, understanding how events and processes structure history without attending to the nature of those events and processes. But Gouldian Arguments require source-dependent notions of contingency. An account of contingency is source-dependent when it is indexed to (1) some pattern (i.e, microevolution or macroevolution) and (2) some process (i.e., Natural Selection, species sorting, etc.). Positions like Gould’s do not turn on the mere fact of life’s contingency—that life’s shape could have been different due to its sensitivity to initial conditions, path-dependence or stochasticity. Rather, Gouldian arguments require that the contingency is due to particular kinds of processes: in this case, those which microevolutionary theory cannot account for. This perspective clarifies both debates about the nature and importance of contingency, and empirical routes for testing Gould’s thesis.


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Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
McConwell, Alison
Currie, Adrian
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Biology
Specific Sciences > Earth Sciences
Depositing User: Dr Adrian Currie
Date Deposited: 30 Apr 2018 01:08
Last Modified: 30 Apr 2018 01:08
Item ID: 14626
Official URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10539...
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Biology
Specific Sciences > Earth Sciences
Date: 2017
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/14626

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