Commitment to sparseness amounts to the idea that there is an objective, worldly privileging of certain properties over others that makes the privileged properties suited to play certain roles, and is responsible for their playing such roles. In this chapter I offer a brief, opinionated overview of sparseness. I begin by examining a set of problems that I call “problems of abundance”, which generate canonical motivations for sparseness. I then survey some influential approaches to sparseness and the roles that they (...) attribute to sparse properties, noting that on most approaches sparse properties are deeply connected to inquiry. Finally I consider some problems for sparseness, focusing on the purported connections between sparseness and inquiry, particularly in philosophy of science and inquiry into the social world. (shrink)

Inductive reasoning aims at constructing rules and models of general applicability from a restricted set of observations. Induction is a keystone in natural sciences, and it influences diverse application fields such as engineering, medicine and economics. More generally, induction plays a major role in the way humans learn and operate in their everyday life. The level of reliability that a model achieves depends on how informative the observations are relative to the flexibility of the process by which the model is (...) constructed. When the process is articulated so that the model can incorporate descriptive details and subtleties, a large set of informative observations are required to reliably tune the model, whereas models obtained from simple procedures can be tuned with fewer observations. This article introduces the concept of “dominance”, which refers to the situation in which a reduced subset of observations suffices to reconstruct the model. A mathematical framework is presented to quantify the reliability of learning procedures as a function of the size of the subset of dominant observations. Although limited in scope, we believe that our study can contribute to the understanding of some fundamental mechanisms by which knowledge is generated from observations in inductive reasoning. (shrink)

This paper aims to advance two claims. First, it aims to show that Hume's argument against the rationality of induction is sound. However, I claim that the conclusion does not follow merely from the self-defeating attempts to justify the rule of induction, unlike traditional readings of the argument. Rather, the skeptical conclusion must also take into account Hume's argument that the secret powers that are present in bodies and give rise to sensible qualities are unknowable. The paper's second aim is (...) to show that Newtonian induction escapes Hume's secret powers argument, given that it includes a transductive inference, from observable phenomena to the powers present in the ultimate parts of matter. Consequently Hume's argument against the rationality of induction does not demonstrate the non-rational nature of Newtonian induction. (shrink)

There are two views of the essences of speech acts: according to one view, they are natural kinds; according to the other, they are what I call normative kinds—kinds in the (possibly non-reductive) definition of which some normative term occurs. In this article I show that speech acts can be normative but also natural kinds by deriving Williamson's account of assertion, on which it is an act individuated, and constitutively governed, by a norm (the knowledge rule), from a consideration of (...) the natural characteristics of normal cases of its performance. (shrink)

Deflationism is the view that certain metaphysical debates are defective, leaving it open whether the defect is best explained in semantic, conceptual, or epistemic terms. Local semantic deflationism is the thesis that familiar metaphysical debates, which appear to be about the existence and identity of material objects, are merely verbal. It’s a form of local deflationism because it restricts itself to one particular area of metaphysics. It’s a form of semantic deflationism because the defect it purports to identify in these (...) debates is explained in terms of the broadly semantic notion of a merely verbal disputation. Three questions about this thesis are asked and answered here. Does a commitment to the principle of interpretive charity support it? No. Does it avoid the problems that plagued Carnap? No. Does it support a linguistic turn with respect to questions about the nature of material things? No. The central take-home message is that local semantic deflationism is unstable: advocates of the view must admit that debates about material coincidence and identity are substantive. (shrink)

Commitment to sparseness amounts to the idea that there is an objective, worldly privileging of certain properties over others that makes the privileged properties suited to play certain roles, and is responsible for their playing such roles. In this chapter I offer a brief, opinionated overview of sparseness. I begin by examining a set of problems that I call “problems of abundance”, which generate canonical motivations for sparseness. I then survey some influential approaches to sparseness and the roles that they (...) attribute to sparse properties, noting that on most approaches sparse properties are deeply connected to inquiry. Finally I consider some problems for sparseness, focusing on the purported connections between sparseness and inquiry, particularly in philosophy of science and inquiry into the social world. (shrink)

According to phenomenal conservatism, seemings can provide prima facie justification for beliefs. In order to fully assess phenomenal conservatism, it is important to understand the nature of seemings. Two views are that (SG) seemings are a sui generis propositional attitude, and that (D2B) seemings are nothing over and above dispositions to believe. Proponents of (SG) reject (D2B) in large part by providing four distinct objections against (D2B). First, seemings have a distinctive phenomenology, but dispositions to believe do not. Second, seemings (...) can provide a non-trivial explanation for dispositions to believe, which wouldn’t be possible if seemings were dispositions to believe. Third, there are some dispositions to believe that are not seemings. Fourth, there are instances of seemings which are not dispositions to believe. I consider and reject each of these objections. The first and third objections rely on a misunderstanding of (D2B). The second objection fails because there are contexts in which an appeal to a previously unknown identity can provide an interesting explanation. The fourth objection overlooks the possibility of finkish and masked dispositions, phenomena which are widely accepted in the dispositions literature. I conclude that (D2B) escapes these common objections unscathed. (shrink)

This paper is an essay review of John Earman's book,\nHume's Abject Failure--the Argument against Miracles\n(Oxford University Press, New York, 2000). Earman is very\ncritical of Hume's famous argument about miracles, I am\nmore sympathetic, though I grant that Earman makes many\ngood critical points. Earman's method of analysis is\nBayesian, as is mine.

This paper seeks to refute one variant of a view that scientific disciplines are intrinsically more objective than non?scientific ones, and that this greater objectivity explains increasing social agreement about the findings of science, by contrast with increasing disagreement about the findings of, e.g., ethics. Such a view rests on the implicit assumption that all forms of discourse aim equally at the generation of consensus; instead, differing degrees of consensus in different disciplines are often explicable by sociological, not metaphysical, differences (...) in the disciplines concerned. A detailed example is presented of a discipline (Indian folk dietary medicine) in which considerable lack of consensus is observed, for sociologically explicable reasons, in spite of its claims to scientific objectivity. It is concluded that disciplines may differ in the degree of truth of the claims advanced in them, and in the importance of consensus among their social aims. But neither of these is to be explained by differences in respect of some independent property of objectivity. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that relations of necessity cannot be known by induction on experience. In this paper, I propose a notion of situated possibilities, weaker than nomic possibilities, that is compatible with an inductivist epistemology for modalities. I show that assuming this notion, not only can relations of necessity be known by induction on our experience, but such relations cannot be any more underdetermined by experience than universal regularities. This means that any one believing in a universal regularity is (...) as well warranted to believe in the corresponding relation of necessity. (shrink)

Philosophers such as Goodman, Scheffler and Glymour aim to answer the Paradox of the Ravens by distinguishing between confirmation simpliciter and selective confirmation. In the latter concept, the evidence both supports a hypothesis and undermines one of its "rivals". In this article, I argue that while selective confirmation does seem to be an important scientific notion, no attempt to formalise it thus far has managed to solve the Paradox of the Ravens.

The idea that we have special access to our own mental states has a distinguished philosophical history. Philosophers as different as Descartes and Locke agreed that we know our own minds in a way that is quite different from the way in which we know other minds. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, this idea carne under serious attack, first from philosophy and more recently from developmental psychology. The attack from developmental psychology arises from the growing body (...) of work on “mindreading,” the process of attributing mental states to people. During the last fifteen years, the processes underlying rnindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states toother people.However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states tooneself.This process ofreading one's own mindorbecoming self-awarewill be our primary concern in this paper. (shrink)

As I head home from work, I’m not sure whether my daughter’s new bike is green, and I’m also not sure whether I’m on drugs that distort my color perception. One thing that I am sure about is that my attitudes towards those possibilities are evidentially independent of one another, in the sense that changing my confidence in one shouldn’t affect my confidence in the other. When I get home and see the bike it looks green, so I increase my (...) confidence that it is green. But something else has changed: now an increase in my confidence that I’m on color-drugs would undermine my confidence that the bike is green. Jonathan Weisberg and Jim Pryor argue that the preceding story is problematic for standard Bayesian accounts of perceptual learning. Due to the ‘rigidity’ of Conditionalization, a negative probabilistic correlation between two propositions cannot be introduced by updating on one of them. Hence if my beliefs about my own color-sobriety start out independent of my beliefs about the color of the bike, then they must remain independent after I have my perceptual experience and update accordingly. Weisberg takes this to be a reason to reject Conditionalization. I argue that this conclusion is too pessimistic: Conditionalization is only part of the Bayesian story of perceptual learning, and the other part needn’t preserve independence. Hence Bayesian accounts of perceptual learning are perfectly consistent with potential underminers for perceptual beliefs. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn this paper it will be shown that Newton'sPrincipiagives an explication of and an argument for the first Law of Motion, that seems to be outside the scope of today's philosophy of science but was familiar to seventeenth-century commentators: The foundation of classical mechanics is possible only by recurrence to results of a successful technical practice. Laws of classical mechanics gain their meaning as well as their claims to validity only when considered as statements about artifacts whose production belongs (...) to the shared know-how of a scientific community. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that we can justify induction deductively relative to one end, and deduction inductively relative to a different end. I will begin by presenting a contemporary variant of Hume ’s argument for the thesis that we cannot justify the principle of induction. Then I will criticize the responses the resulting problem of induction has received by Carnap and Goodman, as well as praise Reichenbach ’s approach. Some of these authors compare induction to deduction. Haack compares (...) deduction to induction, and I will critically discuss her argument for the thesis that we cannot justify the principles of deduction next. In concluding I will defend the thesis that we can justify induction deductively relative to one end, and deduction inductively relative to a different end, and that we can do so in a non-circular way. Along the way I will show how we can understand deductive and inductive logic as normative theories, and I will briefly sketch an argument to the effect that there are only hypothetical, but no categorical imperatives. (shrink)

The model function for induction of Goodmans's composite predicate "Grue" was examined by analysis. Two subpredicates were found, each containing two further predicates which are mutually exclusive (green and blue, observed before and after t). The rules for the inductive processing of composite predicates were studied with the more familiar predicate "blellow" (blue and yellow) for violets and primroses. The following rules for induction were violated by processing "grue": From two subpredicates only one (blue after t) appears in the conclusion. (...) As a statement about a future and unobserved condition this subpredicate, however, is not projectible for induction whereas the only suitable predicate (green before t) does not show up in the conclusion. In a disjunction "a v b" where "a" is true and "b" false the disjunction is true. When, however, the only true component is dropped, what remains is necessarily false. An analogous mistake may be observed in the processing of "grue", where the only true component (green) was dropped in the conclusion. - As a potent criterion for correct inductions a check of the necessity of the conclusions is recommended. (shrink)

Comparative concepts such as greener than or higher than are ways of ordering objects. They are fundamental to our grasp of gradable concepts, that is, the type of meanings expressed by gradable general terms, such as "is green" or "is high", which are embeddable in comparative constructions in natural language. Some comparative concepts seem natural, whereas others seem gerrymandered. The aim of this paper is to outline a theoretical approach to comparative concepts that bears both on the account of naturalness (...) for comparative concepts and on the theory of gradable concepts. The approach is novel in that it carries some basic assumptions from Peter Gärdenfors' conceptual spaces account of categorical concepts over to comparative concepts. The offered approach is more general than Gärdenfors' account in that it supplies a framework of graded categorisation that includes his categorisation rule as a limiting case. Importantly, it provides also a new argument for adopting Gärdenfors' particular model of categorisation. (shrink)

Peter Ludlow presents the first book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, including both Chomsky's government and binding theory and his minimalist ...

In this chapter, I propose the mechanism of cognitive enhancement based on studies of cognitive-enhancing drugs and behavioral training. I argue that there are mechanistic differences between cognitive-enhancing drugs and behavioral training due to their different enhancing effects. I also suggest possible mechanisms for cognitive-enhancing drugs and behavioral training and for the synergistic effects of their simultaneous application.

One of the great successes of the application of generalized quantifiers to natural language has been the ability to formulate robust semantic universals. When such a universal is attested, the question arises as to the source of the universal. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that many semantic universals arise because expressions satisfying the universal are easier to learn than those that do not. While the idea that learnability explains universals is not new, explicit accounts of learning that can (...) make good on this hypothesis are few and far between. We propose a model of learning — back-propagation through a recurrent neural network — which can make good on this promise. In particular, we discuss the universals of monotonicity, quantity, and conservativity and perform computational experiments of training such a network to learn to verify quantifiers. Our results are able to explain monotonicity and quantity quite well. We suggest that conservativity may have a different source than the other universals. (shrink)

Recent attempts to define and support realism in semantics seem to acknowledge, as the only defence from skeptical attacks to the notion of meaning, a flat acceptance of the existence of representational relations between language and things in the world. In this paper I reconsider part of the mistrust about the normative character of meaning, in order to show that some of the worries urging the realists to cling on representationalism actually rest on misconceptions. To the contrary, I suggest that (...) normativity is the main strength of a stable realist stance in semantics. Support to this suggestion comes from the reanalysis of some oft-ignored sellarsian themes. (shrink)