De Finetti is one of the founding fathers of the subjective school of probability. He held that probabilities are subjective, coherent degrees of expectation, and he argued that none of the objective interpretations of probability make sense. While his theory has been influential in science and philosophy, it has encountered various objections. I argue that these objections overlook central aspects of de Finetti’s philosophy of probability and are largely unfounded. I propose a new interpretation of de Finetti’s theory that highlights (...) these aspects and explains how they are an integral part of de Finetti’s instrumentalist philosophy of probability. I conclude by drawing an analogy between misconceptions about de Finetti’s philosophy of probability and common misconceptions about instrumentalism. (shrink)

Do component forces exist? I argue that the answer lies in the affirmative, on historical and operational grounds.

The philosophy of measurement studies the conceptual, ontological, epistemic, and technological conditions that make measurement possible and reliable. A new wave of philosophical scholarship has emerged in the last decade that emphasizes the material and historical dimensions of measurement and the relationships between measurement and theoretical modeling. This essay surveys these developments and contrasts them with earlier work on the semantics of quantity terms and the representational character of measurement. The conclusions highlight four characteristics of the emerging research program in (...) philosophy of measurement: it is epistemological, coherentist, practice oriented, and model based. (shrink)

Niels Bohr famously argued that a consistent understanding of quantum mechanics requires a new epistemic framework, which he named complementarity . This position asserts that even in the context of quantum theory, classical concepts must be used to understand and communicate measurement results. The apparent conflict between certain classical descriptions is avoided by recognizing that their application now crucially depends on the measurement context. ;Recently it has been argued that a new form of complementarity can provide a solution to the (...) so-called information loss paradox. Stephen Hawking argues that the evolution of black holes cannot be described by standard unitary quantum evolution, because such evolution always preserves information, while the evaporation of a black hole will imply that any information that fell into it is irrevocably lost---hence a "paradox." Some researchers in quantum gravity have argued that this paradox can be resolved if one interprets certain seemingly incompatible descriptions of events around black holes as instead being complementary. ;In this dissertation I assess the extent to which this black hole complementarity can be undergirded by Bohr's account of the limitations of classical concepts. I begin by offering an interpretation of Bohr's complementarity and the role that it plays in his philosophy of quantum theory. After clarifying the nature of classical concepts, I offer an account of the limitations these concepts face, and argue that Bohr's appeal to disturbance is best understood as referring to these conceptual limits. ;Following preparatory chapters on issues in quantum field theory and black hole mechanics, I offer an analysis of the information loss paradox and various responses to it. I consider the three most prominent accounts of black hole complementarity and argue that they fail to offer sufficient justification for the proposed incompatibility between descriptions. ;The lesson that emerges from this dissertation is that we have as much to learn from the limitations facing our scientific descriptions as we do from the successes they enjoy. Because all of our scientific theories offer at best limited, effective accounts of the world, an important part of our interpretive efforts will be assessing the borders of these domains of description. (shrink)

This paper applies conceptual engineering to deal with four objections that have been levelled against operationalism in psychology. These objections are: operationalism leads to harmful proliferation of concepts, operationalism goes hand-in-hand with untenable antirealism, operationalism leads to arbitrariness in scientific concept formation, and operationalism is incompatible with the usual conception of scientific measurement. Relying on a formulation of three principles of conceptual engineering, I will argue that there is a useful form of operationalism that does not fall prey to these (...) four objections. (shrink)

This paper is a supplement to, and provides a proof of principle of, Kuhn vs. Popper on Criticism and Dogmatism in Science: A Resolution at the Group Level. It illustrates how calculations may be performed in order to determine how the balance between different functions in science—such as imaginative, critical, and dogmatic—should be struck, with respect to confirmation (or corroboration) functions and rules of scientific method.

On analogy with testimony, I define a notion of a scientific theory’s lacking or having candor, in a testing situation, according to whether the theory under test is probabilistically relevant to the processes in the test procedures, and thereby to the reliability of test outcomes. I argue that this property identifies what is distinctive about those theories that Karl Popper denounced as exhibiting “reinforced dogmatism” through their self-protective behavior (e.g., psychoanalysis, Hegelianism, Marxism). I explore whether lack of candor interferes with (...) the testing of theories, and conclude that (1) our default attitude toward theories that lack candor in a given test should be suspicion, but (2) the circumstance that a theory lacks candor in a testing situation does not preclude obtaining independent evidence for the auxiliary assumptions to which the theory is probabilistically relevant, and thereby eliminating the problem that lack of candor creates. Thus, Popper was right to think that lack of candor is a bad thing, but wrong to conclude that candor is a criterion of the scientificity of a theory. Seeing this requires recognition of some differences between intuitive relevance and probabilistic relevance, and proper appreciation of the notion of screening off and of the fact that probabilistic relevance is not transitive. (shrink)

This paper is a supplement to, and provides a proof of principle of, Kuhn vs. Popper on Criticism and Dogmatism in Science: A Resolution at the Group Level. It illustrates how calculations may be performed in order to determine how the balance between different functions in science—such as imaginative, critical, and dogmatic—should be struck, with respect to confirmation functions and rules of scientific method.