Stephen Law

NATURALISM, EVOLUTION AND TRUE BELIEF Analysis , Volume 72, Issue 1, January 2012, Pages 41–48. Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN) is currently one of the most widely discussed arguments targeting philosophical naturalism (see, for example, Beilby 2002).   Plantinga aims to show that naturalism, in combination with evolutionary theory, is, as he puts it, ‘incoherent or self-defeating’. His argument turns crucially on the claim that, in the absence of any God-like being to guide the process, natural selection is unlikely to favour true belief. This, Plantinga supposes, is because natural selection selects only for adaptive behaviour. It is irrelevant, from the point of view of unguided evolution, whether the beliefs that happen to cause that adaptive behaviour are true.   I argue that, even in its most recent incarnation, the EAAN fails. In particular, Plantinga overlooks the fact that adherents of naturalism may hold, se...

(prepublication draft, 'How Can We Tell Science From Pseudoscience?' in Kevin McCain and  Kostas Kampourakis What is Scientific Knowledge? An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology of Science (Routledge 2019 ) Introduction What is pseudoscience? Most of us will intuitively class more or less the same phenomena together under the umbrella of 'pseudoscience'. Paradigm examples include astrology, Young Earth Creationism, Christian Science, feng shui, homeopathy, flat earthism, and Chinese medicine (though there are contested borderline cases: not everyone agrees about the status of Freud's psychoanalytic theories, for example). But while it seems most of us recognise pseudoscience when we see, providing an adequate philosophical definition of pseudoscience is not so easy. The aim of this chapter is to survey some of the suggestions that have been made, and to make a recommendation of my own. Necessary and sufficient conditions Asking 'Wha...