There’s a new PhilPaleo “Roadshow” talk starting soon! The speakers will be Tyler Brunet, Yoshi Yoshida and Adrian Currie, and they will be discussing the merits of speculative evolution. Title, abstract and link below…
Counterfactual Natural History, Speculative Evolution & the Minimal Rewrite Rule
We argue that speculative and artistic approaches to future and paleobiological evolution have significant epistemic merits. Speculative evolution, paradigmatically in Dougal Dixon’s The New Dinosaurs (1988) and After Man (1981) is in the business of imagining and representing possible evolutionary paths, as to some extent is paleoart more generally. Although their intentions and evidential bases are often different, we see both speculative evolution and paleoart as forms of scientifically informed and potentially informing artistic practice. These practices are often criticized as failed predictions or unjustified counterfactuals. We argue that these criticisms can be understood as relying on a strong form of the “minimal rewrite rule”—a principle in human history that says that our counterfactual explanations should assume only changes that are as minimal as possible. However, a strong reading of the minimal rewrite rule is appropriate only if speculative evolution really is in the business of telling us what would happen. We argue instead that speculative evolution is in the business of exploring what could happen under interesting antecedent constraints—constraints that need not be minimal to be epistemically fruitful. In either case, paleoart or speculative, we argue that the best interpretation of narrative and artistic practices places them on a spectrum somewhere between employing ‘could’ and ‘would’ counterfactuals, differing only in the extent or kind of imagined rewrite required. We take this to support the epistemic value of these artistic practices and provide a more nuanced basis for discussing the relationships (positive or negative) between their aesthetic and epistemic qualities.
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https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/j/91000214741?pwd=OFrSDDxdPuM7yrUMYlmwe4qQcxZbYQ.1