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| Program > 19th Century Philosophy of Science |
| Programme > La philosophie des sciences au XIXe siècle |
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Frederic Bouchard (Duke
University) An Examination of Peirce's Intuition about the Statistical Character of Evolutionary Theory |
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In Fixation of Belief, C.S. Peirce (1877) alludes to a possible analogy between the statistical character of evolutionary theory and thermodynamics. The general consensus today is that some evolutionary processes are ontologically probabilistic. The disagreement is about the origin of probabilities in evolutionary theory. In this paper I will examine current alternatives and discard them in favour of Peirce's original intuition. The alternatives currently considered are partly right: the probabilities are function of our epistemic limitations (Graves, Horan and Rosenberg, 1999) or the probabilities are the result of some sort of propensities (Brandon and Carson, 1996 and Stamos, 2000). Each contemporary account highlights an important aspect of the theory, but a complete explanation of the statistical character of evolutionary theory hasn't been provided. Although Peirce's understanding of Darwin's theory and motives were flawed, his insight can still be vindicated.
Philosophy
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