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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access originally published online on October 18, 2005
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2005 56(4):809-821; doi:10.1093/bjps/axi139
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© The Author (2005). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Firing Squads and Fine-Tuning: Sober on the Design Argument

Jonathan Weisberg

Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, 26 Nichol Ave., New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA jweisber{at}rci.rutgers.edu

Elliott Sober has recently argued that the cosmological design argument is unsound, since our observation of cosmic fine-tuning is subject to an observation selection effect (OSE). I argue that this view commits Sober to rejecting patently correct design inferences in more mundane scenarios. I show that Sober's view, that there are OSEs in those mundane cases, rests on a confusion about what information an agent ought to treat as background when evaluating likelihoods. Applying this analysis to the design argument shows that our observation of fine-tuning is not rendered uninformative by an OSE.

  1. Design and the Anthropic Objection
  2. Previous responses to the Anthropic Objection
  3. Variations: experimental squads and survivor reunions
  4. Why there is no OSE in firing squad cases
  5. Application to the design argument


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