Methods and goals in philosophy are discussed by first describing an ideal, and then looking at how the ideal might be approached. David Lewis’s work in metaphysics is critically examined and compared to analogous work by Mackie and Carnap. Some large-scale philosophical systematic work, especially in metaphysics, is best treated as model-building, in a sense of that term that draws on the philosophy of science. Models are constructed in a way that involves deliberate simplification, or other imaginative modification of reality, (...) in order to make relationships visible or problems tractable. (shrink)

This paper offers a probabilistic treatment of the conditions for argument cogency as endorsed in informal logic: acceptability, relevance, and sufficiency. Treating a natural language argument as a reason-claim-complex, our analysis identifies content features of defeasible argument on which the RSA conditions depend, namely: change in the commitment to the reason, the reason’s sensitivity and selectivity to the claim, one’s prior commitment to the claim, and the contextually determined thresholds of acceptability for reasons and for claims. Results contrast with, and (...) may indeed serve to correct, the informal understanding and applications of the RSA criteria concerning their conceptual dependence, their function as update-thresholds, and their status as obligatory rather than permissive norms, but also show how these formal and informal normative approachs can in fact align. (shrink)

The concept of fitness has generated a lot of discussion in philosophy of biology. There is, however, relative agreement about the need to distinguish at least two uses of the term: ecological fitness on the one hand, and population genetics fitness on the other. The goal of this paper is to give an explication of the concept of ecological fitness by providing a reconstruction of the theory of natural selection in which this concept was framed, that is, based on the (...) way the theory was put to use in Darwin’s main texts. I will contend that this reconstruction enables us to account for the current use of the theory of natural selection. The framework presupposed in the analysis will be that of metatheoretical structuralism. This framework will provide both a better understanding of the nature of ecological fitness and a more complete reconstruction of the theory. In particular, it will provide what I think is a better way of understanding how the concept of fitness is applied through heterogeneous cases. One of the major advantages of my way of thinking about natural selection theory is that it would not have the peculiar metatheoretical status that it has in other available views. I will argue that in order to achieve these goals it is necessary to make several concepts explicit, concepts that are frequently omitted in usual reconstructions. (shrink)

, Peter Achinstein argues against the long-standing claim that ‘evidence’ is ambiguous in possessing a sense of confirming evidence and a sense of supporting evidence. He argues that explications of supporting evidence will necessarily violate his contentions that evidence is a discontinuous ‘threshold concept’ and that any philosophical account of supporting evidence will be too weak to be useful to working scientists. But an account of supporting evidence may be formulated which includes Achinstein's notion of epistemic thresholds that finds examples (...) in Achinstein's own historical case studies. Thresholds and the denial of ambiguity Achinstein's new account of confirming evidence Achinstein's argument against the ‘ambiguity response’ A threshold-based approach for restoring the ambiguity Maxwell and ‘a subject of rational curiosity’ Bohr and ‘future development of our understanding’ Perrin and the edge of reasonable belief Restoring ambiguity. (shrink)

This short paper serves as an introduction to a debate between representatives of two fundamentally different points of view regarding the nature of scientific inference. Colin Howson and Peter Urbach represent a Bayesian point of view and Deborah Mayo represents a version of classical statistics called error statistics. The paper begins by reviewing earlier versions of the same two points of view due to Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, respectively. After a few remarks about philosophical approaches to understanding scientific reasoning (...) between 1960 and 1980, I turn to substantive differences between the two approaches. (shrink)

In arguing a "role for history," Kuhn was proposing a naturalized philosophy of science. That, I argue, is the only viable approach to the philosophy of science. I begin by exhibiting the main general objections to a naturalistic approach. These objections, I suggest, are equally powerful against nonnaturalistic accounts. I review the failure of two nonnaturalistic approaches, methodological foundationism (Carnap, Reichenbach, and Popper) and metamethodology (Lakatos and Laudan). The correct response, I suggest, is to adopt an "evolutionary perspective." This perspective (...) is defended against one recent critic (Putnam). To argue the plausibility of a naturalistic approach, I next sketch a naturalistic account of theories and of theory choice. This account is then illustrated by the recent revolution in geology. In conclusion I return to Kuhn's question about the role of history in developing a naturalistic theory of science. (shrink)

Several authors, e.g. Patrick Suppes and I. J. Good, have recently argued that the paradox of confirmation can be resolved within the developing subjective Bayesian account of inductive reasoning. The aim of this paper is to show that the paradox can also be resolved by the rival orthodox account of hypothesis testing currently employed by most statisticians and scientists. The key to the orthodox statistical resolution is the rejection of a generalized version of Hempel's instantiation condition, namely, the condition that (...) a PQ is inductively relevant to the hypothesis $(x)(Px\supset Qx)$ even in the absence of all further information. Though their reasons differ, it turns out that Bayesian and orthodox statisticians agree that this condition lies at the heart of the paradox. (shrink)

I.T. Oakley claims that the cogency of invalid, but cogent, arguments is context independent. Robert Pargetter and John Bigelow claim that the apparent cogency of any cogent, but invalid, argument is to be explained by the existence of a corresponding valid argument. I argue that both claims are incorrect and provide my own account of the cogency of arguments.

This article reviews a number of different areas in the foundations of formal learning theory. After outlining the general framework for formal models of learning, the Bayesian approach to learning is summarized. This leads to a discussion of Solomonoff's Universal Prior Distribution for Bayesian learning. Gold's model of identification in the limit is also outlined. We next discuss a number of aspects of learning theory raised in contributed papers, related to both computational and representational complexity. The article concludes with a (...) description of how semi-supervised learning can be applied to the study of cognitive learning models. Throughout this overview, the specific points raised by our contributing authors are connected to the models and methods under review. (shrink)

There has been considerable debate in the literature as to whether work in experimental philosophy actually makes any significant contribution to philosophy. One stated view is that many X-Phi projects, notwithstanding their focus on topics relevant to philosophy, contribute little to philosophical thought. Instead, it has been claimed the contribution they make appears to be to cognitive science. In contrast to this view, here we argue that at least one approach to X-Phi makes a contribution which parallels, and also extends, (...) historically salient forms of philosophical analysis, especially contributions from Immanuel Kant, William James, Peter F. Strawson and Thomas Nagel. The framework elaborated here synthesizes philosophical theory with empirical evidence from psychology and neuroscience and applies it to three perennial philosophical problems. According to this account, the origin of these three problems can be illuminated by viewing them as arising from a tension between two distinct types of cognition, each of which is associated with anatomically independent and functionally inhibitory neural networks. If the parallel we draw, between an empirical project and historically highly influential examples of philosophical analysis, is viewed as convincing, it follows that work in the cognitive sciences can contribute directly to philosophy. Further, this conclusion holds whether the empirical details of the account are correct or not. (shrink)

Hempel first introduced the paradox of confirmation in (Hempel 1937). Since then, a very extensive literature on the paradox has evolved (Vranas 2004). Much of this literature can be seen as responding to Hempel’s subsequent discussions and analyses of the paradox in (Hempel 1945). Recently, it was noted that Hempel’s intuitive (and plausible) resolution of the paradox was inconsistent with his official theory of confirmation (Fitelson & Hawthorne 2006). In this article, we will try to explain how this inconsistency affects (...) the historical dialectic about the paradox and how it illuminates the nature of confirmation. In the end, we will argue that Hempel’s intuitions about the paradox of confirmation were (basically) correct, and that it is his theory that should be rejected, in favor of a (broadly) Bayesian account of confirmation. (shrink)

Framing systematics as a field consistent with scientific inquiry entails that inferences of phylogenetic hypotheses have the goal of producing accounts of past causal events that explain differentially shared characters among organisms. Linking observations of characters to inferences occurs by way of why-questions implied by data matrices. Because of their form, why-questions require the use of common-cause theories. Such theories in phylogenetic inferences include natural selection and genetic drift. Selection or drift can explain ‘morphological’ characters but selection cannot be causally (...) applied to sequences since fitness differences cannot be directly associated with individual nucleotides or amino acids. The relation of selection to sequence data is by way of downward or top-down causation from those phenotypes upon which selection occurs. The application of phylogenetic inference to explain sequence data is thus restricted to instances where drift is the relevant theory; those nucleotides or amino acids that can be explained via downward causation are precluded from inclusion in the data matrix. The restrictions on the inclusion of sequence data in phylogenetic inferences equally apply to species hypotheses, precluding the more restrictive approach known as DNA barcoding. Not being able to discern drift and selection as relevant causal mechanisms can severely constrain the inclusion and explanations of sequence data. Implications of such exclusion are discussed in relation to the requirement of total evidence. (shrink)

According to orthodox (Kolmogorovian) probability theory, conditional probabilities are by definition certain ratios of unconditional probabilities. As a result, orthodox conditional probabilities are undefined whenever their antecedents have zero unconditional probability. This has important ramifications for the notion of probabilistic independence. Traditionally, independence is defined in terms of unconditional probabilities (the factorization of the relevant joint unconditional probabilities). Various “equivalent” formulations of independence can be given using conditional probabilities. But these “equivalences” break down if conditional probabilities are permitted to have (...) conditions with zero unconditional probability. We reconsider probabilistic independence in this more general setting. We argue that a less orthodox but more general (Popperian) theory of conditional probability should be used, and that much of the conventional wisdom about probabilistic independence needs to be rethought. (shrink)

The important switch from the so-called old B-theory to the new tenseless theory of time (NTT), which had significant implications for the field of tense and indexicals, occurred after Carnap’s era. Against this new background, Carnap’s original inter-translatability thesis can no longer be upheld. The most natural way out would be to modify Carnap’s position according to the NTT; but this is not compatible with Carnap’s metaphysical neutrality thesis. Even worse, Carnap’s work on measurement theory can be used to develop (...) an argument in favour of the A-theory. I argue that there are tensed basic sentences which are needed in order to construct a tenseless system and thus cannot be translated without loss of meaning into tenseless ones (old B-theory) or made true by tenseless facts (NTT). (shrink)

Priority Theory is an increasingly popular view in metaphysics. By seeing metaphysical questions as primarily concerned with what explains what, instead of merely what exists, it promises not only an interesting approach to traditional metaphysical issues but also the resolution of some outstanding disputes. In a recent paper, Louis deRosset argues that Priority Theory isn’t up to the task: Priority Theory is committed to there being explanations that violate a formal constraint on any adequate explanation. This paper critically examines deRosset’s (...) challenge to Priority Theory. We argue that deRosset’s challenge ultimately fails: his proposed constraint on explanation is neither well-motivated nor a general constraint. Nonetheless, lurking behind his criticism is a deep problem for prominent ways of developing Priority Theory, a problem which we develop. (shrink)

Concepts originating in the philosophy of science generally are used only ritualistically and in careful isolation from research practice in political science. But philosophical considerations are fundamental to political research, and critically influence its decisions. The question is whether ideas offered by philosophers of science have practical (that is to say, theoretical) significance for political researchers. This essay argues that philosophy of science has extremely relevant ideas to offer. The argument proceeds through an initial presentation of some elementary notions drawn (...) from reconstructions of the nature of concept formation-theory construction. These are then utilized in a critique of the research of quantitative political scientists. Three rather central concerns of this, still very young, discipline are discussed: measurement problems, the use of recursive and structural systems in causal modeling, and the primary logical function of multivariate analysis in political studies. The discussion is viewed as supporting the general point that applied philosophy of science ought to be, not an adjunct, but one of the key critical contributors to political research. (shrink)

We explore the grammar of Bayesian confirmation by focusing on some likelihood principles, including the Weak Law of Likelihood. We show that none of the likelihood principles proposed so far is satisfied by all incremental measures of confirmation, and we argue that some of these measures indeed obey new, prima facie strange, antilikelihood principles. To prove this, we introduce a new measure that violates the Weak Law of Likelihood while satisfying a strong antilikelihood condition. We conclude by hinting at some (...) relevant links between the likelihood principles considered here and other properties of Bayesian confirmation recently explored in the literature. (shrink)

An important problem in inductive probability theory is the design of exchangeable analogical methods, i.e., of exchangeable inductive methods that take into account certain considerations of analogy by similarity for predictive inferences. Here a precise reformulation of the problem of predictive analogy is given and a new family of exchangeable analogical methods is introduced.Firstly, it is proved that the exchangeable analogical method introduced by Skyrms (1993) does not satisfy the best known general principles of predictive analogy. Secondly, Skyrms's approach — (...) consisting of the usage of particular hyper-Carnapian methods, i.e., mixtures of Carnapian inductive methods — is adopted in the design of a new family of exchangeable analogical methods. Lastly, it is proved that such methods satisfy an interesting general principle of predictive analogy. (shrink)

The concept of causal specificity is drawing considerable attention from philosophers of biology. It became the rationale for rejecting (and occasionally, accepting) a thesis of causal parity of developmental factors. This literature assumes that attributing specificity to causal relations is at least in principle a straightforward (if not systematic) task. However, the parity debate in philosophy of biology seems to be stuck at a point where it is not the biological details that will help move forward. In this paper, I (...) take a step back to reexamine the very idea of causal specificity and its intended role in the parity dispute in philosophy of biology. I contend that the idea of causal specificity across variations as currently discussed in the literature is irreducibly twofold in nature: it is about two independent components that are not mutually entailed. I show this to be the source of prior complications with the notion of specificity itself that ultimately affect the purposes for which it is often invoked, notably to settle the parity dispute. (shrink)

A frequentist confidence interval can be constructed by inverting a hypothesis test, such that the interval contains only parameter values that would not have been rejected by the test. We show how a similar definition can be employed to construct a Bayesian support interval. Consistent with Carnap’s theory of corroboration, the support interval contains only parameter values that receive at least some minimum amount of support from the data. The support interval is not subject to Lindley’s paradox and provides an (...) evidence-based perspective on inference that differs from the belief-based perspective that forms the basis of the standard Bayesian credible interval. (shrink)

Conditional judgements—judgements employing ‘if’—are essential to practical reasoning about what to do, as well as to much reasoning about what is the case. We handle them well enough from an early...

A distinction often drawn is one between conservative versus revisionary conceptions of philosophical analysis with respect to commonsensical beliefs and intuitions. This paper offers a comparative investigation of two revisionary methods: Carnapian explication and ameliorative analysis as developed by S. Haslanger. It is argued that they have a number of common features, and in particular that they share a crucial political dimension: they both have the potential to serve as instrument for social reform. Indeed, they may produce improved versions of (...) key concepts of everyday life, for example those pertaining to social categories such as gender and race, which in turn may lead to social change. The systematic comparison of these two frameworks offered here, where similarities as well as differences are discussed, is likely to provide useful guidance to practitioners of both approaches, as it will highlight important aspects of each of them that tend to remain implicit and under-theorized in existing applications of these methodologies to specific questions. (shrink)

Both I and Belnap, motivated the "Belnap-Dunn 4-valued Logic" by talk of the reasoner being simply "told true" (T) and simply "told false" (F), which leaves the options of being neither "told true" nor "told false" (N), and being both "told true" and "told false" (B). Belnap motivated these notions by consideration of unstructured databases that allow for negative information as well as positive information (even when they conflict). We now experience this on a daily basis with the Web. But (...) the 4-valued logic is deductive in nature, and its matrix is discrete: there are just four values. In this paper I investigate embedding the 4-valued logic into a context of probability. Jøsang's Subjective Logic introduced uncertainty to allow for degrees of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty. We extend this so as to allow for two kinds of uncertainty— that in which the reasoner has too little information (ignorance) and that in which the reasoner has too much information (conflicted). Jøsang's "Opinion Triangle" becomes an "Opinion Tetrahedron" and the 4-values can be seen as its vertices. I make/prove various observations concerning the relation of non-classical "probability" to non-classical logic. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the notion of coherence by explicating in probabilistic terms, step by step, what seem to be our most basic intuitions about that notion, to wit, that coherence is a matter of hanging or fitting together, and that coherence is a matter of degree. A qualitative theory of coherence will serve as a stepping stone to formulate a set of quantitative measures of coherence, each of which seems to capture well the aforementioned (...) intuitions. Subsequently it will be argued that one of those measures does better than the others in light of some more specific intuitions about coherence. This measure will be defended against two seemingly obvious objections. (shrink)

Anti-exceptionalists about logic claim that logical methodology is not different from scientific methodology when it comes to theory choice. Two anti-exceptionalist accounts of theory choice in logic are abductivism and predictivism. These accounts have in common reliance on pre-theoretical logical intuitions for the assessment of candidate logical theories. In this paper, I investigate whether intuitions can provide what abductivism and predictivism want from them and conclude that they do not. As an alternative to these approaches, I propose a Carnapian view (...) on logical theorizing according to which logical theories do not simply account for pre-theoretical intuitions, but rather improve on them. In this account, logical theories are ameliorative, rather than representational. (shrink)

The primary aim of this chapter is to explain the nature of evidential reasoning, the characteristic difficulties encountered, and the tools to address these difficulties. Our focus is on evidential reasoning in criminal cases. There is an extensive scholarly literature on these topics, and it is a secondary aim of the chapter to provide readers the means to find their way in historical and ongoing debates.

In this paper, we examine possible formalisations of the riskiness condition for hypothesis testing. First, we informally introduce derivability and riskiness as testing conditions together with the corresponding arguments for refutation and confirmation. Then, we distinguish two different senses of confirmation and focus our discussion on one of them with the aid of a historical example. In the remaining sections, we offer a brief overview of the main references to the risky condition in the literature and scrutinise different options for (...) formally capturing riskiness; we show why none of them works. We conclude with some remarks about the relation between derivability and riskiness and claim that riskiness essentially involves a contextual, pragmatic component that eludes a complete formal reconstruction. (shrink)

A central problem in the interpretation of non-relativistic quantum mechanics is to relate the conceptual structure of the theory to the classical idea of the state of a physical system. This paper approaches the problem by presenting an analysis of the notion of an elementary physical proposition. The notion is shown to be realized in standard formulations of the theory and to illuminate the significance of proofs of the impossibility of hidden variable extensions. In the interpretation of quantum mechanics that (...) emerges from this analysis, the philosophically distinctive features of the theory derive from the fact that it seeks to represent a reality of which complete knowledge is essentially unattainable. (shrink)

Book review of Paul Horwich, Probability and Evidence (Cambridge Philosophy Classics edition), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, 147pp, £14.99 (paperback).

Conceptual engineering wants analytic philosophy to be centered around the assessment and improvement of philosophical concepts. But contemporary debates about conceptual engineering do not engage much with the vast literature on conceptual change that exists in philosophy of science. In this article, I argue that an adequate appreciation of the history of philosophy of science can contribute to discussions about conceptual engineering. Specifically, I show that the evolution of debates over scientific conceptual change arguably demonstrates that, contrary to what is (...) commonly assumed in the literature about conceptual engineering, conceptual change is possible within an externalist metasemantics and that any adequate theory of conceptual change should be metasemantically plastic. (shrink)

In recent years two different axiomatic characterizations of the intuitive concept of effective calculability have been proposed, one by Sieg and the other by Dershowitz and Gurevich. Analyzing them from the perspective of Carnapian explication, I argue that these two characterizations explicate the intuitive notion of effective calculability in two different ways. I will trace back these two ways to Turing’s and Kolmogorov’s informal analyses of the intuitive notion of calculability and to their respective outputs: the notion of computorability and (...) the notion of algorithmability. I will then argue that, in order to adequately capture the conceptual differences between these two notions, the classical two-step picture of explication is not enough. I will present a more fine-grained three-step version of Carnapian explication, showing how with its help the difference between these two notions can be better understood and explained. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in the method of explication as a procedure for conceptual engineering in philosophy and in science. In the philosophical literature, there has been a lively debate about the different desiderata that a good explicatum has to satisfy. In comparison, the goal of explicating the concept of explication itself has not been central to the philosophical debate. The main aim of this work is to suggest a way of filling this gap by explicating (...) ‘explication’ by means of conceptual spaces theory. Specifically, I show how different, strictly-conceptual readings of explication desiderata can be made precise as geometrical or topological constraints over the conceptual spaces related to the explicandum and the explicatum. Moreover, I show also how the richness of the geometrical representation of concepts in conceptual spaces theory allows us to achieve more fine-grained readings of explication desiderata, thereby overcoming some alleged limitations of explication as a procedure of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in the method of explication as a procedure for conceptual engineering in philosophy and in science. In the philosophical literature, there has been a lively debate about the different desiderata that a good explicatum has to satisfy. In comparison, the goal of explicating the concept of explication itself has not been central to the philosophical debate. The main aim of this work is to suggest a way of filling this gap by explicating (...) ‘explication’ by means of conceptual spaces theory. Specifically, I show how different, strictly-conceptual readings of explication desiderata can be made precise as geometrical or topological constraints over the conceptual spaces related to the explicandum and the explicatum. Moreover, I show also how the richness of the geometrical representation of concepts in conceptual spaces theory allows us to achieve more fine-grained readings of explication desiderata, thereby overcoming some alleged limitations of explication as a procedure of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

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 (...) progress are made. (shrink)

Metaphilosophy, Volume 53, Issue 2-3, Page 185-198, April 2022.

There is a recent and growing trend in philosophy that involves deferring to the claims of certain disciplines outside of philosophy, such as mathematics, the natural sciences, and linguistics. According to this trend— deferentialism , as we will call it—certain disciplines outside of philosophy make claims that have a decisive bearing on philosophical disputes, where those claims are more epistemically justified than any philosophical considerations just because those claims are made by those disciplines. Deferentialists believe that certain longstanding philosophical problems (...) can be swiftly and decisively dispatched by appeal to disciplines other than philosophy. In this paper we will argue that such an attitude of uncritical deference to any non-philosophical discipline is badly misguided. With reference to the work of John Burgess and David Lewis, we consider deference to mathematics. We show that deference to mathematics is implausible and that main arguments for it fail. With reference to the work of Michael Blome-Tillmann, we consider deference to linguistics. We show that his arguments appealing to deference to linguistics are unsuccessful. We then show that naturalism does not entail deferentialism and that naturalistic considerations even motivate some anti-deferentialist views. Finally, we set out deferentialism’s failings and present our own anti-deferentialist approach to philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Epistemologists and philosophers of science have often attempted to express formally the impact of a piece of evidence on the credibility of a hypothesis. In this paper we will focus on the Bayesian approach to evidential support. We will propose a new formal treatment of the notion of degree of confirmation and we will argue that it overcomes some limitations of the currently available approaches on two grounds: (i) a theoretical analysis of the confirmation relation seen as an extension of (...) logical deduction and (ii) an empirical comparison of competing measures in an experimental inquiry concerning inductive reasoning in a probabilistic setting. (shrink)

This paper investigates the logic of reasons. Its aim is to provide an analysis of the sentences of the form ‘p is a reason for q’ that yields a coherent account of their logical properties. The idea that we will develop is that ‘p is a reason for q’ is acceptable just in case a suitably defined relation of incompatibility obtains between p and ¬q. As we will suggest, a theory of reasons based on this idea can solve three challenging (...) puzzles that concern, respectively, contraposing reasons, conflicting reasons, and supererogatory reasons, and opens a new perspective on some classical issues concerning non-deductive inferences. (shrink)

The current state of inductive logic is puzzling. Survey presentations are recurrently offered and a very rich and extensive handbook was entirely dedicated to the topic just a few years ago [23]. Among the contributions to this very volume, however, one finds forceful arguments to the effect that inductive logic is not needed and that the belief in its existence is itself a misguided illusion , while other distinguished observers have eventually come to see at least the label as “slightly (...) antiquated” .What seems not to have lost any of its currency is the problem which inductive logic is meant to address. Inference from limited ascertained information to uncertain hypotheses is ubiquitous in learning, prediction and discovery. The logical insight that such kind of inference is fallible m .. (shrink)