Hempel and Giere contend that the existence of provisos poses grave difficulties for any regularity account of physical law. However, Hempel and Giere rely upon a mistaken conception of the way in which statements acquire their content. By correcting this mistake, I remove the problem Hempel and Giere identify but reveal a different problem that provisos pose for a regularity account — indeed, for any account of physical law according to which the state of affairs described by a law-statement presupposes (...) a Humean regularity. These considerations suggest a normative analysis of law-statements. On this view, law-statements are not distinguished from accidental generalizations by the kind of Humean regularities they describe because a law-statement need not describe any Humean regularity. Rather, a law-statement says that in certain contexts, one ought to regard the assertion of a given type of claim, if made with justification, as a proper way to justify a claim of a certain other kind. (shrink)

Int. intr nseca i derivada. Condicions de satisfacci . Atribuci literal i metaf rica d'Int. Int. intr nseca-cervell. Ment-cervell. Panorama Filosof a de la Ment. Ryle. Causaci intencional. Teleolog a. Explicaci de les CC. Socials.

Teleological terms such as "function" and "design" appear frequently in the biological sciences. Examples of teleological claims include: A (biological) function of stotting by antelopes is to communicate to predators that they have been detected. Eagles' wings are (naturally) designed for soaring. Teleological notions were commonly associated with the pre-Darwinian view that the biological realm provides evidence of conscious design by a supernatural creator. Even after creationist viewpoints were rejected by most biologists there remained various grounds for concern about the (...) role of teleology in biology, including whether such terms are: 1. vitalistic (positing some special "life-force"); 2. requiring backwards causation (because future outcomes explain present traits); 3. incompatible with mechanistic explanation (because of 1 and 2); 4. mentalistic (attributing the action of mind where there is none); 5. empirically untestable (for all the above reasons). Opinions divide over whether Darwin's theory of evolution provides a means of eliminating teleology from biology, or whether it provides a naturalistic account of the role of teleological notions in the science. Many contemporary biologists and philosophers of biology believe that teleological notions are a distinctive and ineliminable feature of biological explanations but that it is possible to provide a naturalistic account of their role that avoids the concerns above. Terminological issues sometimes serve to obscure some widely-accepted distinctions. (shrink)

Models are of central importance in many scientific contexts. The centrality of models such as the billiard ball model of a gas, the Bohr model of the atom, the MIT bag model of the nucleon, the Gaussian-chain model of a polymer, the Lorenz model of the atmosphere, the Lotka-Volterra model of predator-prey interaction, the double helix model of DNA, agent-based and evolutionary models in the social sciences, or general equilibrium models of markets in their respective domains are cases in point. (...) Scientists spend a great deal of time building, testing, comparing and revising models, and much journal space is dedicated to introducing, applying and interpreting these valuable tools. In short, models are one of the principal instruments of modern science. -/- Philosophers are acknowledging the importance of models with increasing attention and are probing the assorted roles that models play in scientific practice. The result has been an incredible proliferation of model-types in the philosophical literature. Probing models, phenomenological models, computational models, developmental models, explanatory models, impoverished models, testing models, idealized models, theoretical models, scale models, heuristic models, caricature models, didactic models, fantasy models, toy models, imaginary models, mathematical models, substitute models, iconic models, formal models, analogue models and instrumental models are but some of the notions that are used to categorize models. While at first glance this abundance is overwhelming, it can quickly be brought under control by recognizing that these notions pertain to different problems that arise in connection with models. For example, models raise questions in semantics (what is the representational function that models perform?), ontology (what kind of things are models?), epistemology (how do we learn with models?), and, of course, in philosophy of science (how do models relate to theory?; what are the implications of a model based approach to science for the debates over scientific realism, reductionism, explanation and laws of nature?). (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap delivered the hitherto unpublished lecture ‘Theoretical Concepts in Science’ at the meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, at Santa Barbara, California, on 29 December 1959. It was part of a symposium on ‘Carnap’s views on Theoretical Concepts in Science’. In the bibliography that appears in the end of the volume, ‘The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap’, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, a revised version of this address appears to be among Carnap’s forthcoming papers. But although Carnap started (...) to revise it, he never finished the revision,1 and never published the unrevised transcript. Perhaps this is because variants of the approach to theoretical concepts presented for the first time in the Santa Barbara lecture have appeared in other papers of his (cf. the editorial footnotes in Carnap’s lecture). Still, I think, the Santa Barbara address is a little philosophical gem that needs to see the light of day. The document that follows is the unrevised transcript of Carnap’s lecture.2 Its style, then, is that of an oral presentation. I decided to leave it as it is, making only very minor stylistic changes—which, except those related to punctuation, are indicated by curly brackets.3 I think that reading this lecture is a rewarding experience, punctuated as the lecture is with odd remarks and autobiographical points. One can almost envisage.. (shrink)

How shall we understand apparently teleological systems? What explains their persistence and their plasticity? Here I argue that all seemingly goal-directed systems—e.g., a food-seeking organism, human-made devices like thermostats and torpedoes, biological development, human goal seeking, and the evolutionary process itself—share a common organization. Specifically, they consist of an entity that moves within a larger containing structure, one that directs its behavior in a general way without precisely determining it. If so, then teleology lies within the domain of the theory (...) of compositional hierarchies. (shrink)

This paper explores the idea that laws express relationships between properties or universals as defended in Michael Tooley's recent book Causation: A Realist Approach. I suggest that the most plausible version of realism will take a different form than that advocated by Tooley. According to this alternative, laws are grounded in facts about the capacities and powers of particular systems, rather than facts about relations between universals. The notion of lawfulness is linked to the notion of invariance, rather than to (...) the metaphysical notion of a necessary connection. (shrink)

Single-case and long-run propensity theories are among the main objective interpretations of probability. There have been various objections to these theories, e.g. that it is difficult to explain why propensities should satisfy the probability axioms and, worse, that propensities are at odds with these axioms, that the explication of propensities is circular and accordingly not informative, and that single-case propensities are metaphysical and accordingly non-scientific. We consider various propensity theories of probability and their prospects in light of these objections. We (...) argue that while propensity theories face challenges, these challenges do not undermine their validity as prospective interpretations of probability in science. (shrink)

The manifest appearance of function and purpose in living systems is responsible for the prevalence of apparently teleological explanations of organismic structure and behavior in biology. Although the attribution of function and purpose to living systems is an ancient practice, teleological notions are largely considered ineliminable from modern biological sciences, such as evolutionary biology, genetics, medicine, ethology, and psychiatry, because they play an important explanatory role. Historical and recent examples of teleological claims include the following: The chief function of the (...) heart is the transmission and pumping of the blood through the arteries to the extremities of the body. (Harvey 1616 [1928: 49]) The Predator Detection hypothesis remains the strongest candidate for the function of stotting [by gazelles]. (Caro 1986: 663) The geographic range of human malaria is much wider than the range of the sickle-cell gene. As it happens, other antimalarial genes take over the protective function of the sickle-cell gene in … other warm parts. (Diamond 1994: 83) Despite the substantial amount of data we now have on theropod dinosaurs, more information is necessary in order to determine the likelihood that early feathers served an adaptive function in visual display as opposed to other proposed adaptive functions such as thermoregulation. (Dimond et al. 2011: 62) The ubiquity of claims such as these raises the question: how should apparently teleological notions in biology be understood? Most post-Darwinian approaches attempt to naturalize teleology in biology, in opposition to nineteenth-century viewpoints which grounded it theologically. Nevertheless, biologists and philosophers have continued to question the legitimacy of teleological notions in biology. For instance, Ernst Mayr (1988), identified four reasons why teleological notions remain controversial in biology, namely that they are: vitalistic (positing some special ‘life-force’); requiring backwards causation (because goal-directed explanations seem to use future outcomes to explain present traits); incompatible with mechanistic explanation (because of 1 and 2); mentalistic (attributing the action of mind where there is none). A fifth complaint is that they are not empirically testable (Allen & Bekoff 1995). The current philosophical literature offers both Darwinian and non-Darwinian accounts of teleology in biology that aim to avoid these concerns. In this article, we hope to bring some clarity to the contemporary debates over the role of teleological notions in biology by sketching a taxonomy of the various accounts of biological function on offer (see Allen & Bekoff 1995 for a more comprehensive taxonomy that forms the basis of this presentation). We primarily focus on naturalistic accounts of biological function, since this is where we see the most lively and productive current debates (see, e.g., Garson 2016 for an extended survey). We also briefly discuss the notion of goal-directedness in section 2. (shrink)

Modal logic has been applied in many different areas, as reasoning about time, knowledge and belief, necessity and possibility, to mention only some examples. In the present paper, an attempt is made to use modal logic to account for the semantics of theoretical sentences in scientific language. Theoretical sentences have been studied extensively since the work of Ramsey and Carnap. The present attempt at a modal analysis is motivated by there being several intended interpretations of the theoretical terms once these (...) terms are introduced through the axioms of a theory. (shrink)

Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903–30) made seminal contributions to philosophy, mathematics and economics. Whilst he was acknowledged as a genius by his contemporaries, some of his most important ideas were not appreciated until decades later; now better appreciated, they continue to bear an influence upon contemporary philosophy. His historic significance was to usher in a new phase of analytic philosophy, which initially built upon the logical atomist doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, raising their ideas to a new level of (...) sophistication, but ultimately he became their successor rather than remain a mere acolyte. (shrink)

Work on analogy has been done from a number of disciplinary perspectives throughout the history of Western thought. This work is a multidisciplinary guide to theorizing about analogy. It contains 1,406 references, primarily to journal articles and monographs, and primarily to English language material. classical through to contemporary sources are included. The work is classified into eight different sections (with a number of subsections). A brief introduction to each section is provided. Keywords and key expressions of importance to research on (...) analogy are discussed in the introductory material. Electronic resources for conducting research on analogy are listed as well. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop and defend a theory of what I call 'implicit goal-directedness', which is a purely causal or dynamical notion, and can be separated from the notion of 'explicit goal-directedness', which implies the representation of a goal-state. I describe the problems that plagued earlier attempts at analyzing goal-directedness in causal/dynamical terms, and then present my own novel solution. I argue that implicit goal-directedness, in the sense presented, plays an important conceptual role in biology and cognitive science, and (...) is distinct, not only from explicit goal-directedness, but also from the other major teleological notion familiar to philosophers of biology: evolutionary function. Indeed, an appreciation of this tripartite distinction is critical for understanding the structure of explanations of behavior in many scientific contexts. (shrink)

The ArgumentScientific tools—measurement and calculation instruments, techniques of inference—straddle the line between the context of discovery and the context of justification. In discovery, new scientific tools suggest new theoretical metaphors and concepts; and in justification, these tool-derived theoretical metaphors and concepts are morelikely to be accepted by the scientific community if the tools are already entrenched in scientific practice.Techniques of statistical inference and hypothesis testing entered American psychology first as tools in the 1940s and 1950s and then as cognitive theories (...) in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only did psychologists resists statistical metaphors of mind prior to the institutionalization of inference techniques in their own practice; the cognitive theories they ultimately developed about “the mind as intuitive statistician” still bear the telltale marks of the practical laboratory context in which the tool was used. (shrink)

Deductive and inductive logic confront this skeptical challenge: we can justify any logical principle only by means of an argument but we can acquire justification by means of an argument only if we are already justified in believing some logical principle. We could solve this problem if probative arguments do not require justified belief in their corresponding conditionals. For if not, then inferential justification would not require justified belief in any logical principle. So even arguments whose corresponding conditionals are epistemically (...) dependent upon their conclusions--epistemically self-supporting arguments--need not be viciously circular. R. B. Braithwaite and James Van Cleve use internalist and externalist versions of this strategy in their proposed solutions to the problem of induction. Unfortunately, their arguments for self-support are unsound and any theory of inferential justification that does not require justified belief in the corresponding conditionals of justification-affording arguments is unacceptably arbitrary. So self-supporting arguments cannot be justification-creating. (shrink)

Hume argued that inductive inferences do not have rational justification. My aim is to reject Hume’s argument. The discussion is partly motivated by an analogy with Carroll’s Paradox, which concerns deductive inferences. A first radically externalist reply to Hume (defended by Dauer and Van Cleve) is that justified inductive inferences do not require the subject to know that nature is uniform, though the uniformity of nature is a necessary condition for having the justification. But then the subject does not have (...) reasons for believing what she believes. I defend a moderate externalist account that seeks to partly accommodate that objection to the radical externalist proposal. It is based on an extension of Peacocke’s theory of concepts: possession conditions for predicative concepts standing for natural properties include (fallible) dispositions to project them to new cases in accordance with inductive inferential patterns. (shrink)

Imre Lakatos gained fame in the English-speaking world as a follower and critic of philosopher of science Karl Popper. However, Lakatos’ background involved other philosophical and scientific sources from his native Hungary. Lakatos surreptitiously used Hegelian Marxism in his works on philosophy of science and mathematics, disguising it with the rhetoric of the Popper school. He also less surreptitiously incorporated, particularly in his treatment of mathematics, work of the strong tradition of heuristics in twentieth century Hungary. Both his Marxism and (...) his emphasis on heuristics contained a view of science and mathematics that contrasted with the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy of science. Both involved a dynamic view of science, whether historical or psychological, and an emphasis on practice as opposed to static, formal representations of scientific theories. (shrink)

In “Truth and Probability” Ramsey claimed that the logic of consistency for probability is not a logic of truth. After supporting this claim, he proceeded to explore the possibilities for a logic of truth for probability. An examination of Ramsey's intent reveals that Ramsey was far from being an orthodox Bayesian when it comes to statistical reasoning. The relations between Ramsey's thought and the ideas of Keynes and Peirce are discussed.

To give a causal explanation is to give information about causal history. But a vast amount of causal history lies behind anything that happens, far too much to be included in any intelligible explanation. This is the Problem of Limitation for explanatory information. To cope with this problem, explanations must select for what is relevant to and adequate for answering particular inquiries. In the present paper this idea is used in order to distinguish two kinds of causal explanation, on the (...) grounds of systematic differences in their conditions of relevance and adequacy. It is further argued that these two forms of causal explanation are interdependent and their interaction provides an instrument through which causal knowledge is acquired and enhanced. What we understand causation in the world to be is neither unconditioned regularity, nor counterfactual dependence, but the sum of correct answers to explanatory inquiries of these two interdependent kinds. (shrink)

After delineating the distinguishing features of pragmatism, and noting the resources that pragmatists have available to respond effectively as pragmatists to the two major objections to pragmatism, I examine and critically evaluate the various proposals that pragmatists have offered as a solution to the problem of induction, followed by a discussion of the pragmatic positions on the status of theoretical entities. Thereafter I discuss the pragmatic posture toward the nature of explanation in science. I conclude that pragmatism has (a) a (...) generally compelling solution to Hume's problem of induction; (b) no specific position on the status of theoretical entities, although something like the non-realism of the sort developed by van Fraassen seems a defensible candidate for most pragmatists in general, even though there are non-trivial objections to van Fraassen's position; and (c) central to the pragmatic conception of scientific explanation is the abandonment of our common conception of truth as a necessary condition for sentences to provide adequate explanations, and a drift in the direction of a contextualist account of explanation. (shrink)

The No-Miracles Argument (NMA) is often used to support scientific realism. We can formulate this argument as an inference to the best explanation this accusation of circularity by appealing to reliabilism, an externalist epistemology. In this paper I argue that this retreat fails. Reliabilism suffers from a potentially devastating difficulty known as the Generality Problem and attempts to solve this problem require adopting both epistemic and metaphysical assumptions regarding local scientific theories. Although the externalist can happily adopt the former, if (...) he adopts the latter then the Generality Problem arises again, but now at the level of scientific methodology. Answering this new version of the Generality Problem is impossible for the scientific realist without making the important further assumption that there exists the possibility of a unique rule of Doing this however would make the NMA viciously premise circular. (shrink)

What are ceteris paribus laws? Which disciplines appeal to cp laws and which semantics, metaphysical underpinning, and epistemological dimensions do cp law statements have? Firstly, we give a short overview of the recent discussion on cp laws, which addresses these questions. Secondly, we suggest that given the rich and diverse literature on cp laws a broad conception of cp laws should be endorsed which takes into account the different ways in which laws can be non-universal . Finally, we provide an (...) overview of the special issue on that basis and describe the individual contributions to the special issue according to the issues they address: the range of applications of cp laws as well as the semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology pertaining to cp law statements. (shrink)

To ascribe a telos is to ascribe a norm or standard of performance. That fact underwrites the plausibility of, say, teleological theories of mind. Teleosemantics, for example, relies on the normative character of teleology to solve the problem of “intentional inexistence”: a misrepresentation is just a malfunction. If the teleological ascriptions of such theories to natural systems, e.g., the neurological structures of the brain, are to be literally true, then it must be literally true that norms can exist independent of (...) intentional and psychological agency. Davies, for one, has argued that such norms are impossible within a naturalistic worldview. Consequently, teleological theories of mind, for example, cannot be literally true. I will show, however, that the truth conditions on normative statements do not presuppose intentional and psychological agency and, further, that a selectional regime is one naturalistic mechanism that satisfies those truth conditions. Norms, then, exist in the world independent of intentional and psychological agency. (shrink)

In concrete applications of probability, statistical investigation gives us knowledge of some probabilities, but we generally want to know many others that are not directly revealed by our data. For instance, we may know prob(P/Q) (the probability of P given Q) and prob(P/R), but what we really want is prob(P/Q& R), and we may not have the data required to assess that directly. The probability calculus is of no help here. Given prob(P/Q) and prob(P/R), it is consistent with the probability (...) calculus for prob(P/Q& R) to have any value between 0 and 1. Is there any way to make a reasonable estimate of the value of prob(P/Q& R) 1 A related problem occurs when probability practitioners adopt undefended assumptions of statistical independence simply on the basis of not seeing any connection between two propositions. This is common practice, but its justification has eluded probability theorists, and researchers are typically apologetic about making such assumptions. Is there any way to defend the practice? This paper shows that on a certain conception of probability—nomic probability—there are principles of "probable probabilities" that license inferences of the above sort. These are principles telling us that although certain inferences from probabilities to probabilities are not deductively valid, nevertheless the second-order probability of their yielding correct results is 1. This makes it defeasibly reasonable to make the inferences. Thus I argue that it is defeasibly reasonable to assume statistical independence when we have no information to the contrary. And I show that there is a function Y(r, s, a) such that if prob(P/Q) = r, prob(P/R) = s, andprob(P/U) = a (where U is our background knowledge) then it is defeasibly reasonable to expect that prob(P/Q&R) = Y(r, s, a). Numerous other defeasible inferences are licensed by similar principles of probable probabilities. This has the potential to greatly enhance the usefulness of probabilities in practical application. (shrink)

'Theory' is one of the most important words in the lexicon of contemporary sociology. Yet, their ubiquity notwithstanding, it is quite unclear what sociologists mean by the words 'theory,' 'theoretical,' and 'theorize.' I argue that confusions about the meaning of 'theory' have brought about undesirable consequences, including conceptual muddles and even downright miscommunication. In this paper I tackle two questions: what does 'theory' mean in the sociological language?; and what ought 'theory' to mean in the sociological language? I proceed in (...) five stages. First, I explain why one should ask a semantic question about 'theory.' Second, I lexicographically identify seven different senses of the word, which I distinguish by means of subscripts. Third, I show some difficulties that the current lack of semantic clarity has led sociology to. Fourth, I articulate the question, 'what ought "theory" to mean?,' which I dub the 'semantic predicament', and I consider what one can learn about it from the theory literature. Fifth, I recommend a 'semantic therapy' for sociology, and advance two arguments about SP: the principle of practical reason--SP is to a large extent a political issue, which should be addressed with the help of political mechanisms; and the principle of ontological and epistemological pluralism--the solution to SP should not be too ontologically and epistemologically demanding. (shrink)

In this paper an attempt is made at developing the notion of a real and complete empirical explanation as excluding all forms of potential or incomplete explanations. This explanation is, however, no longer conceived as the proper aim of empirical science, for it can certainly be gleaned from recent epistemological publications that no comprehensive notion of a real and complete scientific explanation is likely to be constructed from within empirical science. Contrary to common understanding the empirical explanation, deductive-nomological as well (...) as statistical explanation, is considered here only as motive of scientific activities, i.e., as common aim of a transcending cooperation of scientific and non-scientific social practice. Following from this the proper aim of empirical science now consists in the development of practically relevant explanatory theories.This redetermination of the aim of scientific activities of empirical science also means criticism of the unification of deductive-nomological and statistical explanations, as it has been proposed by Wolfgang Stegmüller in his pragmatisch-epistemische Wende. For both forms of empirical explanation must be referred to fundamentally different kinds of practical relevance, the former playing a more important role in the advancement of social practice. Stegmüller's development of a comprehensive probabilistic notion of empirical explanation, as tied up to pragmatic knowledge-situations, in a way already transcends a scientifically immanent determination of it, but he seems to have stopped halfway on the road to practically relevant empirical explanations. Several insufficiencies with his probabilistic notion of empirical explanation are shown up in this paper as a consequence of his abiding by pragmatic, and not penetrating to practical, knowledge-situations. The final result of it, however, consists in a clarification and a modification of the concept of deductive-nomological explanation, originally developed by Hempel and Oppenheim. (shrink)

Auguste Comte's doctrine of the three phases through which sciences pass (the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive) allows us to explain what John Stuart Mill was attempting in his magnum opus, the System of Logic: namely, to move the science of logic to its terminal and 'positive' stage. Both Mill's startling account of deduction and his unremarked solution to the Humean problem of induction eliminate the notions of necessity or force—in this case, the 'logical must'—characteristic of a science's metaphysical (...) stage. Mill's treatment had a further surprising payoff: his solution to the Problem of Necessity (what today we call the problem of determinism and freedom of the will). (shrink)

Scholars concerned with the foundations of quantum mechanics (QM) usually think that contextuality (hence nonobjectivity of physical properties, which implies numerous problems and paradoxes) is an unavoidable feature of QM which directly follows from the mathematical apparatus of QM. Based on some previous papers on this issue, we criticize this view and supply a new informal presentation of the extended semantic realism (ESR) model which embodies the formalism of QM into a broader mathematical formalism and reinterprets quantum probabilities as conditional (...) on detection rather than absolute. Because of this reinterpretation a hidden variables theory can be constructed which justifies the assumptions introduced in the ESR model and proves its objectivity. When applied to special cases the ESR model settles long-standing conflicts (it reconciles Bell’s inequalities with QM), provides a general framework in which previous results obtained by other authors (as local interpretations of the GHZ experiment) are recovered and explained, and supports an interpretation of quantum logic which avoids the introduction of the problematic notion of quantum truth. (shrink)

The received theories of epistemology identify abductive inferences with the cognitive patterns of speculation (hypothesis formation) and insist that they cannot verify or confirm hypotheses. I criticize various descriptions of abduction, offer a structural analysis of abductive inference,, characterize abduction without alluding to its putative role in inquiry, and then demonstrate that some abductions do provide evidence and that not all scientific hypotheses derive from abductive inferences. This result challenges those notions of scientific k knowledge that dismiss some central scientific (...) ideas (for example, evolution) as ‘meta-physical research programs’ or ‘just theories’ when they are instead well substantiated by abductive evidence. (shrink)

Summary Some leading ideas of the constructivist protophysics are discussed on the basis of P. Janich's Protophysik der Zeit. After having reviewed the contents of the second edition Janich's claim that analytical philosophy of science is purely affirmative and not critical towards science in its historical appearence is refuted. In the next section the principles of constructivist methodology of physics are criticised, and the claim is refuted that prescriptions for measurement cannot without circularity be shown to be invalid by experimental (...) results. In the last section we discuss Janich's foundation of time measurement in a mathematical frame similar to that for extensive systems. Thus the relation between Janich's and the ordinary account is cleared up. (shrink)