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  1. The Idealist View of Divine Action in Nature.Edward Epsen - 2020 - Zygon 55 (4):924-947.
    Theologies of divine action in nature have sought to maximize traction with the sciences to secure their credibility. While varying in significant ways, all extant proposals share a commitment to physical realism, the claim that (at least some) physical entities and facts are both mind‐independent and ontologically basic within creation. However, I will argue that this metaphysical commitment undermines the body of scientific knowledge to which theologians wish to be responsive. Is there an alternative? Building on the work of Howard (...)
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  • A comparison of process and non-process theories in the physical sciences.Brian Ellis - 1957 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 8 (29):45-56.
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  • Negative, infinite, and hotter than infinite temperatures.Philip Ehrlich - 1982 - Synthese 50 (2):233 - 277.
    We examine the notions of negative, infinite and hotter than infinite temperatures and show how these unusual concepts gain legitimacy in quantum statistical mechanics. We ask if the existence of an infinite temperature implies the existence of an actual infinity and argue that it does not. Since one can sensibly talk about hotter than infinite temperatures, we ask if one could legitimately speak of other physical quantities, such as length and duration, in analogous terms. That is, could there be longer (...)
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  • Hermeneutics and science education: An introduction.Martin Eger - 1992 - Science & Education 1 (4):337-348.
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  • Replication, falsification, and the crisis of confidence in social psychology.Brian D. Earp & David Trafimow - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6.
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  • On the testability of ECHO.D. C. Earle - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (3):474-474.
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  • How to pursue the adaptationist program in psychology.Russil Durrant & Brian D. Haig - 2001 - Philosophical Psychology 14 (4):357 – 380.
    In recent times evolutionary psychologists have offered adaptation explanations for a wide range of human psychological characteristics. Critics, however, have argued that such endeavors are problematic because the appropriate evidence required to demonstrate adaptation is unlikely to be forthcoming, therefore severely limiting the role of the adaptationist program in psychology. More specifically, doubts have been raised over both the methodology employed by evolutionary psychologists for studying adaptations and about the possibility of ever developing acceptably rigorous evolutionary explanations of human psychological (...)
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  • An Account of the Scientific Titles and Works of Pierre Duhem.Pierre Duhem - 1987 - Science in Context 1 (2):333-348.
    Certain authors, in speaking of their works, say: My book, my commentary, my history, etc. They smack of these bourgeois homeowners, with “my house” always on their lips. They should rather speak of: our book, our commentary, our history, etc., since, generally speaking, there is far more in them of others than of their own.
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  • Popper: Critical Rationalist, Conventionalist, and Virtue Epistemologist.Patrick M. Duerr - 2023 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (1):54-90.
    This article revisits Karl Popper’s falsificationist methodology with respect to three tasks. The first is to illuminate and systematize Popper’s methodological views in light of his core epistemological commitments. A second and related objective is to gauge which aspects of falsificationism should be identified as “conventionalist”—a label that Popper himself uses (albeit with qualifications) but that is compromised by and, thus, stands in need of elucidation because of Popper’s idiosyncratic understanding of conventionalism. Third, by elaborating Popper’s virtue-epistemological, dialogical model of (...)
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  • Redefining Physicalism.Guy Dove - 2018 - Topoi 37 (3):513-522.
    Philosophers have traditionally treated physicalism as an empirically informed metaphysical thesis. This approach faces a well-known problem often referred to as Hempel’s dilemma: formulations of physicalism tend to be either false or indeterminate. The generally preferred strategy to address this problem involves an appeal to a hypothetical complete and ideal physical theory. After demonstrating that this strategy is not viable, I argue that we should redefine physicalism as an interdisciplinary research program seeking to explain the mental in terms of the (...)
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  • The Value of Cognitive Values.Heather Douglas - 2013 - Philosophy of Science 80 (5):796-806.
    Traditionally, cognitive values have been thought of as a collective pool of considerations in science that frequently trade against each other. I argue here that a finer-grained account of the value of cognitive values can help reduce such tensions. I separate the values into groups, minimal epistemic criteria, pragmatic considerations, and genuine epistemic assurance, based in part on the distinction between values that describe theories per se and values that describe theory-evidence relationships. This allows us to clarify why these values (...)
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  • Bootstrap Confirmation Made Quantitative.Igor Douven & Wouter Meijs - 2006 - Synthese 149 (1):97-132.
    Glymour’s theory of bootstrap confirmation is a purely qualitative account of confirmation; it allows us to say that the evidence confirms a given theory, but not that it confirms the theory to a certain degree. The present paper extends Glymour’s theory to a quantitative account and investigates the resulting theory in some detail. It also considers the question how bootstrap confirmation relates to justification.
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  • Science and pseudo-science: The case of creationism.R. G. A. Dolby - 1987 - Zygon 22 (2):195-212.
    The paper reviews criteria which have been used to distinguish science from nonscience and from pseudo–science, and it examines the extent to which they can usefully be applied to “creation science.” These criteria do not force a clear decision, especially as creation science resembles important eighteenth–century forms of orthodox science. Nevertheless, the proponents of creation science may be accused of pious fraud in failing to concede in their political battles that their “science” is tentative and tendentious and will continue to (...)
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  • Inquiry Tickets: Values, Pursuit, and Underdetermination.Marina DiMarco & Kareem Khalifa - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (5):1016-1028.
    We offer a new account of the role of values in theory choice that captures a temporal dimension to the values themselves. We argue that non-epistemic values sometimes serve as “inquiry tickets,” justifying scientists’ pursuit of certain questions in the short run, while the answers to those questions mitigate transient underdetermination in the long run. Our account of inquiry tickets shows that the role of non-epistemic values need not be restricted to belief or acceptance in order to be relevant to (...)
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  • Principles, laws, theories and the metaphysics of science.Craig Dilworth - 1994 - Synthese 101 (2):223 - 247.
    In this paper an outline of a metaphysical conception of modern science is presented in which a fundamental distinction is drawn between scientific principles, laws and theories. On this view, ontologicalprinciples, rather than e.g. empirical data, constitute the core of science. The most fundamental of these principles are three in number, being, more particularly (A) the principle of the uniformity of nature, (B) the principle of the perpetuity of substance, and (C) the principle of causality.These three principles set basic constraints (...)
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  • Descartes’s Deduction of the Law of Refraction and the Shape of the Anaclastic Lens in Rule 8.Tarek R. Dika - 2022 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 12 (2):395-446.
    Descartes’s most extensive discussion of the law of refraction and the shape of the anaclastic lens is contained in Rule 8 of "Rules for the Direction of the Mind". Few reconstructions of Descartes’s discovery of the law of refraction take Rule 8 as their basis. In Rule 8, Descartes denies that the law of refraction can be discovered by purely mathematical means, and he requires that the law of refraction be deduced from physical principles about natural power or force, the (...)
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  • The Essential Connection Between Epistemology and the Theory of Reference.Imogen Dickie - 2016 - Philosophical Issues 26 (1):99-129.
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  • Religious and Secular Statements.D. H. Mellor - 1974 - Philosophy 49 (187):33 - 46.
    The relation between religious and scientific explanations of events and states of affairs has been the subject of much debate. For example, are the statements ‘John's life was saved by surgery’ ‘John's life was saved in answer to prayer’ in competition with each other and, if so, in what way? They do not seem to be rival causal explanations, nor are they straightforwardly contradictory. Yet each seems to cast doubt on the other, or at least to make it to some (...)
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  • Beyond Hempel: Reframing the Debate about Scientific Explanation.Fons Dewulf - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (3):585-603.
    I argue that Carl Hempel’s pioneering work on scientific explanation introduced an assumption that Hempel never motivated, namely, that explanation is an aim of science. Ever since, it has remained largely unquestioned in analytic philosophy of science. By expanding the historical scope of the debate on explanation to philosophers from the first half of the twentieth century, I show that the debate should include a critical reflection on Hempel’s assumption. This reflection includes two problems: how to motivate one’s position on (...)
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  • Underdetermination and Realism.Michael Devitt - 2002 - Philosophical Issues 12 (1):26-50.
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  • How to Do Things with Theory: The Instrumental Role of Auxiliary Hypotheses in Testing.Corey Dethier - 2019 - Erkenntnis 86 (6):1453-1468.
    Pierre Duhem’s influential argument for holism relies on a view of the role that background theory plays in testing: according to this still common account of “auxiliary hypotheses,” elements of background theory serve as truth-apt premises in arguments for or against a hypothesis. I argue that this view is mistaken. Rather than serving as truth-apt premises in arguments, auxiliary hypotheses are employed as “epistemic tools”: instruments that perform specific tasks in connecting our theoretical questions with the world but that are (...)
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  • Reconstructed Empiricism.Finnur Dellsén - 2017 - Acta Analytica 32 (1):95-113.
    According to Bas van Fraassen, scientific realists and anti-realists disagree about whether accepting a scientific theory involves believing that the theory is true. On van Fraassen’s own anti-realist empiricist position, accepting a theory involves believing only that the theory is correct in its claims about observable aspects of the world. However, a number of philosophers have argued that acceptance and belief cannot be distinguished and thus that the debate is either confused or trivially settled in favor of the realist. In (...)
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  • An ecological approach to disjunctivism.Eros Moreira de Carvalho - 2021 - Synthese 198 (Radical Views on Cognition):285–306.
    In this paper I claim that perceptual discriminatory skills rely on a suitable type of environment as an enabling condition for their exercise. This is because of the constitutive connection between environment and perceptual discriminatory skills, inasmuch as such connection is construed from an ecological approach. The exercise of a discriminatory skill yields knowledge of affordances of objects, properties, or events in the surrounding environment. This is practical knowledge in the first-person perspective. An organism learns to perceive an object by (...)
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  • Thagard's Principle 7 and Simpson's paradox.Robyn M. Dawes - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (3):472-473.
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  • In defense of naturalism.Gregory W. Dawes - 2011 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 70 (1):3-25.
    History and the modern sciences are characterized by what is sometimes called a methodological naturalism that disregards talk of divine agency. Some religious thinkers argue that this reflects a dogmatic materialism: a non-negotiable and a priori commitment to a materialist metaphysics. In response to this charge, I make a sharp distinction between procedural requirements and metaphysical commitments. The procedural requirement of history and the sciences—that proposed explanations appeal to publicly-accessible bodies of evidence—is non-negotiable, but has no metaphysical implications. The metaphysical (...)
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  • Analysing interpretation and reinterpreting analysis: exploring the logic of critical reflection.Dawn Freshwater & Mark Avis - 2004 - Nursing Philosophy 5 (1):4-11.
    This paper examines the distinction that is sometimes drawn between analysis and interpretation in the context of qualitative research, and the processes of critical analysis that underpin reflective practice. The authors consider the complementary logical processes involved in analysis and interpretation, and propose a cycle of reductive, inductive and hypothetico-deductive testing that is both rational and creative. The authors argue that the goal of critical reflection and qualitative data analysis is not to produce knowledge that can be justified in terms (...)
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  • Can good science be logically inconsistent?Kevin Davey - 2014 - Synthese 191 (13):3009-3026.
    Some philosophers have recently argued that contrary to the traditional view, good scientific theories can in fact be logically inconsistent. The literature is now full of case-studies that are taken to support this claim. I will argue however that as of yet no-one has managed to articulate a philosophically interesting view about the role of logically inconsistent theories in science that genuinely goes against tradition, is plausibly true, and is supported by any of the case studies usually given.
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  • Motivational realism: The natural classification for Pierre Duhem.Karen Merikangas Darling - 2003 - Philosophy of Science 70 (5):1125-1136.
    This paper addresses a central interpretive problem in understanding Pierre Duhem's philosophy of science. The problem arises because there is textual support for both realist and antirealist readings of his work. I argue that his realist and antirealist claims are different. For Duhem, scientific reasoning leads straight to antirealism. But intuition (reasons of the heart) motivates, without justifying, a kind of realism. I develop this idea to suggest a motivational realist interpretation of Duhem's philosophy.
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  • II—Persistent Philosophical Disagreement.Chris Daly - 2017 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 117 (1):23-40.
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  • How to explain oppression: Criteria of adequacy for normative explanatory theories.Ann E. Cudd - 2005 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 35 (1):20-49.
    This article discusses explanatory theories of normative concepts and argues for a set of criteria of adequacy by which such theories may be evaluated. The criteria offered fall into four categories: ontological, theoretical, pragmatic, and moral. After defending the criteria and discussing their relative weighting, this article uses them to prune the set of available explanatory theories of oppression. Functionalist theories, including Hegelian recognition theory and Foucauldian social theory, are rejected, as are psychoanalytic theory and social dominance theory. Finally, the (...)
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  • Two problems for the explanatory coherence theory of acceptability.L. Jonathan Cohen - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (3):471-471.
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  • Critical notice.[author unknown] - 2001 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 15 (1):93-98.
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  • Is a General Theory of Life Possible? Seeking the Nature of Life in the Context of a Single Example.Carol E. Cleland - 2013 - Biological Theory 7 (4):368-379.
    Is one of the roles of theory in biology answering the question “What is life?” This is true of theory in many other fields of science. So why should not it be the case for biology? Yet efforts to identify unifying concepts and principles of life have been disappointing, leading some (pluralists) to conclude that life is not a natural kind. In this essay I argue that such judgments are premature. Life as we know it on Earth today represents a (...)
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  • Theories of complexity.Dominique Chu, Roger Strand & Ragnar Fjelland - 2003 - Complexity 8 (3):19-30.
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  • The Reflex Machine and the Cybernetic Brain: The Critique of Abstraction and its Application to Computationalism.M. Chirimuuta - 2020 - Perspectives on Science 28 (3):421-457.
    Objections to the computational theory of cognition, inspired by twentieth century phenomenology, have tended to fixate on the embodiment and embeddedness of intelligence. In this paper I reconstruct a line of argument that focusses primarily on the abstract nature of scientific models, of which computational models of the brain are one sort. I observe that the critique of scientific abstraction was rather commonplace in the philosophy of the 1920s and 30s and that attention to it aids the reading of The (...)
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  • Duhem’s Critical Analysis of Mechanicism and his Defense of a Formal Conception of Theoretical Physics.R. N. Chiappin José & Laranjeiras Cássio Costa - 2017 - Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science 2:36.
    The aim of this paper is to present Duhem’s critical view of the dynamical development of mechanics according to two principles of his theory of the development of physics: the continuous and the rational development of physics. These two principles impose a formal conception of physics that aims at demarcating physics from the metaphysical view on the one hand and the pragmatist/conventionalist view on the other hand. Duhem pursues an intermediary conception of physics, a representational system of empirical laws based (...)
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  • A reconstrução racional do programa de pesquisa sobre o racionalismo clássico: Locke e a vertente empirista.José Raymundo Chiappin & Carolina Leister - 2009 - Filosofia Unisinos 10 (2):125-147.
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  • Assimilating evidence: The key to revision?Michelene T. H. Chi - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (3):470-471.
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  • Explanatory coherence as a psychological theory.P. C.-H. Cheng & M. Keane - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (3):469-470.
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  • Structuralism as a form of scientific realism.Anjan Chakravartty - 2004 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 18 (2 & 3):151 – 171.
    Structural realism has recently re-entered mainstream discussions in the philosophy of science. The central notion of structure, however, is contested by both advocates and critics. This paper briefly reviews currently prominent structuralist accounts en route to proposing a metaphysics of structure that is capable of supporting the epistemic aspirations of realists, and that is immune to the charge most commonly levelled against structuralism. This account provides an alternative to the existing epistemic and ontic forms of the position, incorporating elements of (...)
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  • Phenomenotechnique in historical perspective: Its origins and implications for philosophy of science.Teresa Castelão-Lawless - 1995 - Philosophy of Science 62 (1):44-59.
    This article provides an overview of the historical and philosophical context from which originated G. Bachelard's concept of "phenomenotechnique". It analyzes why phenomenotechnique is crucial for science studies. By incorporating the concept of phenomenotechnique into Hacking's and Galison's models of science, I argue that we can avoid the radicalism of both while also preventing the analysis of scientific practices from collapsing into the interpretive frames mandated by social constructivists.
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  • Underdetermination as an epistemological test tube: expounding hidden values of the scientific community.Martin Carrier - 2011 - Synthese 180 (2):189 - 204.
    Duhem—Quine underdetermination plays a constructive role in epistemology by pinpointing the impact of non-empirical virtues or cognitive values on theory choice. Underdetermination thus contributes to illuminating the nature of scientific rationality. Scientists prefer and accept one account among empirical equivalent alternatives. The non-empirical virtues operating in science are laid open in such theory choice decisions. The latter act as an epistemological test tube in making explicit commitments to how scientific knowledge should be like.
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  • Science and Core Knowledge.Susan Carey & Elizabeth Spelke - 1996 - Philosophy of Science 63 (4):515 - 533.
    While endorsing Gopnik's proposal that studies of the emergence and modification of scientific theories and studies of cognitive development in children are mutually illuminating, we offer a different picture of the beginning points of cognitive development from Gopnik's picture of "theories all the way down." Human infants are endowed with several distinct core systems of knowledge which are theory-like in some, but not all, important ways. The existence of these core systems of knowledge has implications for the joint research program (...)
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  • Mistakes as revealing and as manifestations of competence.Felipe Morales Carbonell - 2019 - Synthese 198 (4):3289-3308.
    The final chapter of Elgin’s defends the claim that some mistakes mark significant epistemic achievements. Here, I extend Elgin’s analysis of the informativeness of mistakes for epistemic policing. I also examine the type of theory of competence that Elgin’s view requires, and suggest some directions in which this can be taken.
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  • Big Systems Versus Stocky Tangles: It Can Matter to the Details.Nancy Cartwright - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (1):3-19.
    Wolfgang Spohn’s Frege prize lecture, like the work on which it is based, is a tour de force of rich, elegant, coherent argument about how the projected world that we experience is constructed. But we do not live in this projected world nor reason about it. The things Spohn constructs are there from the start—or so my Stanford School pragmatism teaches. This paper explores a deep difference in philosophical approaches—Spohn’s elegant proofs versus the stocky, tangled arguments I advocate—and illustrates how (...)
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  • On the Reality of the Base-Rate Fallacy: A Logical Reconstruction of the Debate.Martina Calderisi - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-19.
    Does the most common response given by participants presented with Tversky and Kahneman’s famous taxi cab problem amount to a violation of Bayes’ theorem? In other words, do they fall victim to so-called base-rate fallacy? In the present paper, following an earlier suggestion by Crupi and Girotto, we will identify the logical arguments underlying both the original diagnosis of irrationality in this reasoning task under uncertainty and a number of objections that have been raised against such a diagnosis. This will (...)
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  • Pierre Duhem and Ernst Mach on Thought Experiments.Marco Buzzoni - 2018 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (1):1-27.
    The conventional interpretation that Pierre Duhem condemned outright any type of thought experiment in Ernst Mach’s sense should be, at least in large part, rejected. Although Duhem placed particular emphasis on the perils of thought experiments that Mach had overlooked or at least underestimated, he retained the core idea of Mach’s theory, according to which thought experiments cannot break free from the ultimate authority of real-world experiments. This similarity between Duhem’s and Mach’s views about thought experiments is not the only (...)
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  • Indispensability and Holism.Jacob Busch - 2011 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 42 (1):47-59.
    It is claimed that the indispensability argument for the existence of mathematical entities (IA) works in a way that allows a proponent of mathematical realism to remain agnostic with regard to how we establish that mathematical entities exist. This is supposed to be possible by virtue of the appeal to confirmational holism that enters into the formulation of IA. Holism about confirmation is supposed to be motivated in analogy with holism about falsification. I present an account of how holism about (...)
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  • A Falsificationist Account of Artificial Neural Networks.Oliver Buchholz & Eric Raidl - forthcoming - The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Machine learning operates at the intersection of statistics and computer science. This raises the question as to its underlying methodology. While much emphasis has been put on the close link between the process of learning from data and induction, the falsificationist component of machine learning has received minor attention. In this paper, we argue that the idea of falsification is central to the methodology of machine learning. It is commonly thought that machine learning algorithms infer general prediction rules from past (...)
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  • Chemical atomism: a case study in confirmation and ontology.Joshua D. K. Brown - 2015 - Synthese 192 (2):453-485.
    Quine, taking the molecular constitution of matter as a paradigmatic example, offers an account of the relation between theory confirmation and ontology. Elsewhere, he deploys a similar ontological methodology to argue for the existence of mathematical objects. Penelope Maddy considers the atomic/molecular theory in more historical detail. She argues that the actual ontological practices of science display a positivistic demand for “direct observation,” and that fulfillment of this demand allows us to distinguish molecules and other physical objects from mathematical abstracta. (...)
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