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This paper develops axiomatic foundations for a probabilistic-interventionist theory of causal strength. Transferring methods from Bayesian confirmation theory, I proceed in three steps: I develop a framework for defining and comparing measures of causal strength; I argue that no single measure can satisfy all natural constraints; I prove two representation theorems for popular measures of causal strength: Pearl's causal effect measure and Eells' difference measure. In other words, I demonstrate these two measures can be derived from a set of plausible (...) |
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In attempting to form rational personal probabilities by direct inference, it is usually assumed that one should prefer frequency information concerning more specific reference classes. While the preceding assumption is intuitively plausible, little energy has been expended in explaining why it should be accepted. In the present article, I address this omission by showing that, among the principled policies that may be used in setting one’s personal probabilities, the policy of making direct inferences with a preference for frequency information for (...) |
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This paper presents a new analysis of C.G. Hempel’s conditions of adequacy for any relation of confirmation [Hempel C. G. (1945). Aspects of scientific explanation and other essays in the philosophy of science. New York: The Free Press, pp. 3–51.], differing from the one Carnap gave in §87 of his [1962. Logical foundations of probability (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.]. Hempel, it is argued, felt the need for two concepts of confirmation: one aiming at true hypotheses and another (...) |
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The problem addressed in this paper is “the main epistemic problem concerning science”, viz. “the explication of how we compare and evaluate theories [...] in the light of the available evidence” (van Fraassen, BC, 1983, Theory comparison and relevant Evidence. In J. Earman (Ed.), Testing scientific theories (pp. 27–42). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Sections 1– 3 contain the general plausibility-informativeness theory of theory assessment. In a nutshell, the message is (1) that there are two values a theory should exhibit: (...) |
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Over the past years, a number of probabilistic measures of coherence have been proposed. As shown in the paper, however, many of them do not conform to the intuitition that equivalent testimonies are highly coherent, regardless of their prior probability. |
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This is the sequel to my “Fifteen Arguments Against Finite Frequentism” ( Erkenntnis 1997), the second half of a long paper that attacks the two main forms of frequentism about probability. Hypothetical frequentism asserts: The probability of an attribute A in a reference class B is p iff the limit of the relative frequency of A ’s among the B ’s would be p if there were an infinite sequence of B ’s. I offer fifteen arguments against this analysis. I (...) |
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Dans Word and Object, Quine propose explicitement une définition de la notion de signification-stimulus dans les termes du behaviorisme. Cette caractérisation est commandée par son naturalisme, qui consiste à faire de la philosophie une partie de la science empirique. Il est néanmoins généralement admis que la science entend décrire les phénomènes tandis qu’à la suite du tournant linguistique, la philosophie se concentre sur le langage. Dans ces conditions, il est légitime de chercher à déterminer le statut logique que l’on doit (...) |
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Objectivism about evidential support is the thesis that facts about the degree to which a body of evidence supports a hypothesis are objective rather than depending on subjective factors like one’s own language or epistemic values. Objectivism about evidential support is key to defending a synchronic, time-slice-centric conception of epistemic rationality, on which what you ought to believe at a time depends only on what evidence you have at that time, and not on how you were at previous times. Here, (...) |
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In this paper, I consider the relationship between Inference to the Best Explanation and Bayesianism, both of which are well-known accounts of the nature of scientific inference. In Sect. 2, I give a brief overview of Bayesianism and IBE. In Sect. 3, I argue that IBE in its most prominently defended forms is difficult to reconcile with Bayesianism because not all of the items that feature on popular lists of “explanatory virtues”—by means of which IBE ranks competing explanations—have confirmational import. (...) |
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Taking Carnap’s classic exposition as a starting point, this paper develops a pragmatic account of the method of explication, defends it against a range of challenges and proposes a detailed recipe for the practice of explicating. It is then argued that confusions are involved in characterizing explications as definitions, and in advocating precising definitions as an alternative to explications. Explication is better characterized as conceptual re-engineering for theoretical purposes, in contrast to conceptual re-engineering for other purposes and improving exactness for (...) |
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We survey a variety of possible explications of the term “Individual Risk.” These in turn are based on a variety of interpretations of “Probability,” including classical, enumerative, frequency, formal, metaphysical, personal, propensity, chance and logical conceptions of probability, which we review and compare. We distinguish between “groupist” and “individualist” understandings of probability, and explore both “group to individual” and “individual to group” approaches to characterising individual risk. Although in the end that concept remains subtle and elusive, some pragmatic suggestions for (...) |
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The Uniqueness Thesis holds, roughly speaking, that there is a unique rational response to any particular body of evidence. We first sketch some varieties of Uniqueness that appear in the literature. We then discuss some popular views that conflict with Uniqueness and others that require Uniqueness to be true. We then examine some arguments that have been presented in its favor and discuss why permissivists find them unconvincing. Last, we present some purported counterexamples that have been raised against Uniqueness and (...) |
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Abstract. Richard Feldman’s Uniqueness Thesis holds that “a body of evidence justifies at most one proposition out of a competing set of proposi- tions”. The opposing position, permissivism, allows distinct rational agents to adopt differing attitudes towards a proposition given the same body of evidence. We assess various motivations that have been offered for Uniqueness, including: concerns about achieving consensus, a strong form of evidentialism, worries about epistemically arbitrary influences on belief, a focus on truth-conduciveness, and consequences for peer disagreement. (...) |
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This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) |
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In robustness analysis, hypotheses are supported to the extent that a result proves robust, and a result is robust to the extent that we detect it in diverse ways. But what precise sense of diversity is at work here? In this paper, I show that the formal explications of evidential diversity most often appealed to in work on robustness – which all draw in one way or another on probabilistic independence – fail to shed light on the notion of diversity (...) |
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In this paper I examine the question of logic’s normative status in the light of Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance. I begin by contrasting Carnap’s conception of the normativity of logic with that of his teacher, Frege. I identify two core features of Frege’s position: first, the normative force of the logical laws is grounded in their descriptive adequacy; second, norms implied by logic are constitutive for thinking as such. While Carnap breaks with Frege’s absolutism about logic and hence with the (...) |
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I argue that an adequate semantics for physical theories must be grounded on an account of the way that a theory provides formal and conceptual resources appropriate for---that have propriety in---the construction of representations of the physical systems the theory purports to treat. I sketch a precise, rigorous definition of the required forms of propriety, and argue that semantic content accrues to scientific representations of physical systems primarily in virtue of the propriety of its resources. In particular, neither the adequacy (...) |
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This paper investigates the working-method of three important philosophers of explanation: Carl Hempel, Philip Kitcher and Wesley Salmon. We argue that they do three things: construct an explication in the sense of Carnap, which then is used as a tool to make descriptive and normative claims about the explanatory practice of scientists. We also show that they did well with respect to, but that they failed to give arguments for their descriptive and normative claims. We think it is the responsibility (...) |
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Elliott Sober has suggested his criterion of contrastive testability as an improvement over previous criteria of empirical significance like falsifiability. I argue that his criterion renders almost any theory empirically significant because its restrictions on auxiliary assumptions are to weak. Even when the criterion is modified to avoid this trivialization, it fails to meet other conditions of adequacy for a criterion of empirical significance that follow from Sober's position. I suggest to define empirical significance as empirical non-equivalence to a tautology, (...) |
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Carnap’s search for a criterion of empirical significance is usually considered a failure. I argue that the results from two out of his three different approaches are at the very least problematic, but that one approach led to success. Carnap’s criterion of translatability into logical syntax is too vague to allow for definite results. His criteria for terms—introducibility by chains of reduction sentences and his criterion from “The Methodological Character of Theoretical Concepts”—are almost trivial and have no clear relation to (...) |
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Weight of evidence continues to be a powerful metaphor within formal approaches to epistemology. But attempts to construe the metaphor in precise and useful ways have encountered formidable obstacles. This paper shows that two quite different understandings of evidential weight can be traced back to one 1878 article by C.S. Peirce. One conception, often associated with I.J. Good, measures the balance or net weight of evidence, while the other, generally associated with J.M. Keynes, measures the gross weight of evidence. Conflations (...) |
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Skeptical hypotheses such as the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis provide extremely poor explanations for our sensory experiences. Because these scenarios accommodate virtually any possible set of evidence, the probability of any given set of evidence on the skeptical scenario is near zero; hence, on Bayesian grounds, the scenario is not well supported by the evidence. By contrast, serious theories make reasonably specific predictions about the evidence and are then well supported when these predictions are satisfied. |
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While Bayesian methods have become very popular in phylogenetic systematics, the foundations of this approach remain controversial. The star-tree paradox in Bayesian phylogenetics refers to the phenomenon that a particular binary phylogenetic tree sometimes has a very high posterior probability even though a star tree generates the data. I argue that this phenomenon reveals an unattractive feature of the Bayesian approach to scientific inference and discuss two proposals for how to address the star-tree paradox. In particular, I defend the polytomy (...) |
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In Meaning and Necessity (1947/1950), Carnap advances an intensional semantic framework on which modal claims are true in virtue of semantical rules alone, and so are a priori. In 'Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology' (1950), Carnap advances an epistemic-ontological framework on which metaphysical claims are either trivial or meaningless, since lacking any means of substantive confirmation. Carnap carried out these projects two decades before Kripke influentially argued, in Naming and Necessity (1972/1980), that some modal claims are true a posteriori. How should (...) |
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Is evidential support transitive? The answer is negative when evidential support is understood as confirmation so that X evidentially supports Y if and only if p(Y | X) > p(Y). I call evidential support so understood “support” (for short) and set out three alternative ways of understanding evidential support: support-t (support plus a sufficiently high probability), support-t* (support plus a substantial degree of support), and support-tt* (support plus both a sufficiently high probability and a substantial degree of support). I also (...) |
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An early, very preliminary edition of this book was circulated in 1962 under the title Set-theoretical Structures in Science. There are many reasons for maintaining that such structures play a role in the philosophy of science. Perhaps the best is that they provide the right setting for investigating problems of representation and invariance in any systematic part of science, past or present. Examples are easy to cite. Sophisticated analysis of the nature of representation in perception is to be found already (...) |
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Probability and logic are two branches of mathematics that have important philosophical applications. This article discusses several areas of intersection between them. Several involve the role for probability in giving semantics for logic or the role of logic in governing assignments of probability. Some involve probability over non-classical logic or self-referential sentences. |
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Similarly to other accounts of disease, Christopher Boorse’s Biostatistical Theory (BST) is generally presented and considered as conceptual analysis, that is, as making claims about the meaning of currently used concepts. But conceptual analysis has been convincingly critiqued as relying on problematic assumptions about the existence, meaning, and use of concepts. Because of these problems, accounts of disease and health should be evaluated not as claims about current meaning, I argue, but instead as proposals about how to define and use (...) |
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The standard treatment of conditional probability leaves conditional probability undefined when the conditioning proposition has zero probability. Nonetheless, some find the option of extending the scope of conditional probability to include zero-probability conditions attractive or even compelling. This article reviews some of the pitfalls associated with this move, and concludes that, for the most part, probabilities conditional on zero-probability propositions are more trouble than they are worth. |
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There are some candidates that have been thought to measure the degree to which evidence incrementally confirms a hypothesis. This paper provides an argument for one candidate—the log-likelihood ratio measure. For this purpose, I will suggest a plausible requirement that I call the Requirement of Collaboration. And then, it will be shown that, of various candidates, only the log-likelihood ratio measure \(l\) satisfies this requirement. Using this result, Jeffrey conditionalization will be reformulated so as to disclose explicitly what determines new (...) |
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Quayshawn Spencer (2014) misunderstands my treatment of racial naturalism. I argued that racial naturalism must entail a strong claim, such as “races are subspecies”, if it is to be a substantive position that contrasts with anti-realism about biological race. My recognition that not all race naturalists make such a strong claim is evident throughout the article Spencer reviews (Hochman, 2013a). Spencer seems to agree with me that there are no human subspecies, and he endorses a weaker form of racial naturalism. (...) |
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The rise of experimental philosophy has placed metaphilosophical questions, particularly those concerning concepts, at the center of philosophical attention. X-phi offers empirically rigorous methods for identifying conceptual content, but what exactly it contributes towards evaluating conceptual content remains unclear. We show how x-phi complements Rudolf Carnap’s underappreciated methodology for concept determination, explication. This clarifies and extends x-phi’s positive philosophical import, and also exhibits explication’s broad appeal. But there is a potential problem: Carnap’s account of explication was limited to empirical and (...) |
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Academic and corporate research departments alike face a crucial dilemma: to exploit known frameworks or to explore new ones; to specialize or to innovate? Here I show that these two conflicting epistemic desiderata are sufficient to explain pluralistic ignorance and its boom-and-bust-like dynamics, exemplified in the collapse of the efficient markets hypothesis as a modern risk management paradigm in 2007. The internalist nature of this result, together with its robustness, suggests that pluralistic ignorance is an inherent feature rather than a (...) |
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We show that as a chain of confirmation becomes longer, confirmation dwindles under screening-off. For example, if E confirms H1, H1 confirms H2, and H1 screens off E from H2, then the degree to which E confirms H2 is less than the degree to which E confirms H1. Although there are many measures of confirmation, our result holds on any measure that satisfies the Weak Law of Likelihood. We apply our result to testimony cases, relate it to the Data-Processing Inequality (...) |
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Ordinary Language Philosophy has largely fallen out of favour, and with it the belief in the primary importance of analyses of ordinary language for philosophical purposes. Still, in their various endeavours, philosophers not only from analytic but also from other backgrounds refer to the use and meaning of terms of interest in ordinary parlance. In doing so, they most commonly appeal to their own linguistic intuitions. Often, the appeal to individual intuitions is supplemented by reference to dictionaries. In recent times, (...) |
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I reconsider the monism/pluralism debate about natural kinds. Monism claims that there is a privileged division of reality into natural kinds, while pluralism states that there are many ways of classifying objects according to different purposes. I compare three different monistic accounts of natural kinds with the pluralism advocated by promiscuous realism. The analysis of some examples of the classification of celestial objects suggest that there are indeed different legitimate ways of classifying things according to different purposes; contrary to monism, (...) |
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The study expresses some personal experiences based on long collaborations and contacts with specialists in engineering or design spheres during more than two decades. These specialists had mostly bad experiences with some opinions or standpoints carried out by the decisions called as political or in the public interests or, as it was usually denoted, in the people’s interests. It was A.M. Weinberg who emphasized that the public frequently cannot know what the best is. The public meaning could be manipulated by (...) |
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I argue for a theory that combines elements of reliabilism and evidentialism. |
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A critical examination of the dialectical approach, focusing on a comparison ofthe illative and the dialectical definitions of argument. I distinguish a moderate, a strong and a hyper dialectical conception of argument. I critique Goldman's argument for the moderate conception and Johnson's argument for the strong conception, and argue that the moderate conception is correct. |
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An important question in the current debate on the epistemic significance of peer disagreement is whether evidence of evidence is evidence. Fitelson argues that, at least on some renderings of the thesis that evidence of evidence is evidence, there are cases where evidence of evidence is not evidence. I introduce a condition and show that under this condition evidence of evidence is evidence. |
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Es werden vier verbreitete Verwendungsweisen des Wortes ‘Argument’ beschrieben, an Beispielen erläutert und dann schrittweise expliziert. Die wichtigsten Explikata sind: ‘eine Satzfolge x ist ein deskriptives Argument in Standardform’, ‘ein deskriptives Argument x in Standardform ist bei der subjektiven Wahrscheinlichkeitsverteilung p stark (bzw. schwach)’, ‘ein Aussagesatz x ist bei der subjektiven Wahrscheinlichkeitsverteilung p ein Argument für (bzw. gegen) einen Aussagesatz y’, ‘ein geordneter Tripel x von deskriptiven Argumenten in Standardform, von Argumentebenen und von Argumentsträngen ist eine deskriptive Argumenthierarchie in Standardform’, (...) |
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The recent development of the research field of Computing and Philosophy has triggered investigations into the theoretical foundations of computing and information. This thesis consists of two parts which are the result of studies in two areas of Philosophy of Computing and Philosophy of Information regarding the production of meaning and the value system with applications. The first part develops a unified dual-aspect theory of information and computation, in which information is characterized as structure, and computation is the information dynamics. (...) |
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I advocate Time-Slice Rationality, the thesis that the relationship between two time-slices of the same person is not importantly different, for purposes of rational evaluation, from the relationship between time-slices of distinct persons. The locus of rationality, so to speak, is the time-slice rather than the temporally extended agent. This claim is motivated by consideration of puzzle cases for personal identity over time and by a very moderate form of internalism about rationality. Time-Slice Rationality conflicts with two proposed principles of (...) |
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