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Quote by Elliott Sober

“Biologists now pretty universally regard vitalism as a vestige of a bygone age.”

Quote by Elliott Sober

Author

Elliott Sober is a renowned American philosopher known for his work in the fields of scientific philosophy and epistemology. His research focuses on scientific reasoning, probability interpretation, and philosophical methodology. Born on June 6, 1948, Sober has made significant contributions to the field of philosophy, particularly in scientific philosophy. more

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“Philosophers of biology generally recognize that evolutionary fitness (roughly, an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in its environment) is multiply realizable.”

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“The upshot is that most philosophers of biology now hold that biological properties supervene on physical properties (where supervenience is taken to include some kind of "in virtue of" relation), and that fitness and other biological properties are not identical with physical properties.”

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“Just as thought experiments can't show that vitalism is true (or that it is false), they also can't show that dualism is true (or that it is false).”

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“It can be a necessary conceptual truth that pains are painful without this ruling out the physicalist thesis that immaterial minds are impossible or the thesis that conscious states supervene on physical states. The necessity involved in these claims is nomological necessity, not metaphysical necessity (assuming that these are different).”

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“I disagree with the widely held view that it is metaphysical necessity, not nomological, that matters in the mind/body problem.”

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“"Tiger is a natural kind" and "Tiger is a historical particular" are incompatible with each other, and evolutionary biology provides a reason for favoring the latter over the former.”

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“Evolutionary biologists often avoid using the term "race" because there is so much racist baggage that comes with the term. However, they are often okay with the idea that the genealogy of human groups within our species can sometimes be inferred in much the same way as the genealogy of different species.”

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“The racial categories that are used in a given society (for example, in contemporary America) are biologically meaningless, but sometimes it turns out that a vernacular racial category has biological reality.”

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“Instead of thinking of the question of race genealogically, and leaving it open whether vernacular races are genealogical units, the interest in biomedicine has been to determine whether vernacular racial categories are medically useful in diagnosis and treatment. There is on-going debate about this.”

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“The indispensability argument says (roughly) that if you have ample reason to accept an empirical scientific theory that makes indispensable use of mathematics, and that theory entails that numbers exist, then you have ample reason to accept that numbers exist. The argument affirms the antecedent of this conditional, and concludes that you have ample reason to believe that numbers exist. What is striking about this argument is that it seems to show that the empirical reasons that suffice for accepting a scientific theory also suffice for accepting a metaphysical claim.”

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