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Pluralism and Sex: More Than a Pragmatic Issue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Carla Fehr
Carla Fehr*
Affiliation:
Iowa State University
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author. Department of Philosophy, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011; email: cfehr@iastate.edu.
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Abstract

The evolution of sexual reproduction is a case of explanatory pluralism, meaning that there is more than one explanation for this phenomenon. I use the concept of a domain to more clearly explicate the various explananda that can be found in this case. I argue that although pluralism with respect to some types of domains can be decreased using van Fraassen's pragmatics of explanation, there remains an important class of domain, an orthogonal domain, for which this is not the case.

Type
Philosophy of Biology and Cognition
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 68 , Issue S3: No. 3 Supplement: Proceedings of the 2000 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers Sep., 2001 , 2001 , pp. S237 - S249
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 2001

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Footnotes

‡

Thanks to Robert Brandon and Kevin de Laplante for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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