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  1. Abduction by Classification and Assembly.John R. Josephson, B. Chandrasekaran, Jack W. Smith & Michael C. Tanner - 1986 - PSA Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1986 (1):458-470.
    We describe a general problem solving mechanism that is especially suited for performing a particular form of abductive inference, or best-explanation finding. A problem solver embodying this mechanism synthesizes composite hypotheses. It does so by by combining hypothesis parts as a means to the satisfaction of explanatory goals. In this way it is able to arrive at complex, integrated conclusions which are not pre-stored.The intent is to present a computationally-feasible, task-specific problem solver for a particular information processing task which is (...)
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  • Inference to the More Robust Explanation.Nicholaos Jones - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (1):75-102.
    ABSTRACT There is a new argument form within theoretical biology. This form takes as input competing explanatory models; it yields as output the conclusion that one of these models is more plausible than the others. The driving force for this argument form is an analysis showing that one model exhibits more parametric robustness than its competitors. This article examines these inferences to the more robust explanation, analysing them as variants of inference to the best explanation. The article defines parametric robustness (...)
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  • Who's afraid of absolute space?John Earman - 1970 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 48 (3):287-319.
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  • The reasonable doubt standard as inference to the best explanation.Hylke Jellema - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):949-973.
    Explanationist accounts of rational legal proof view trials as a competition between explanations. Such accounts are often criticized for being underdeveloped. One question in need of further attention is when guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal trials. This article defends an inference to the best explanation -based approach on which guilt is only established BARD if the best guilt explanation in a case is substantially more plausible than any innocence explanation, and there is no good reason to (...)
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  • Eyewitness evaluation through inference to the best explanation.Hylke Jellema - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-29.
    Eyewitness testimony is both an important and a notoriously unreliable type of criminal evidence. How should investigators, lawyers and decision-makers evaluate eyewitness reliability? In this article, I argue that Testimonial Inference to the Best Explanation is a promising, but underdeveloped prescriptive account of eyewitness evaluation. On this account, we assess the reliability of eyewitnesses by comparing different explanations of how their testimony came about. This account is compatible with, and complementary to both the Bayesian framework of rational eyewitness evaluation and (...)
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  • La teleología aristotélica como una inferencia a la mejor explicación: un análisis epistemológico del principio de finalidad en el libro II de la Física de Aristóteles.Andrés L. Jaume - 2013 - Agora 32 (2).
    El presente artículo examina los argumentos aristotélicos en favor de la teleología para poner de manifiesto su estructura argumentativa que, a juicio del autor, es una inferencia a la mejor explicación. Finalmente se intenta relacionar la estrategia aristotélica con el tratamiento actual que se ha hecho de la finalidad desde la Filosofía de la Ciencia.
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  • COI Stories: Explanation and Evidence in the History of Science.Michel Janssen - 2002 - Perspectives on Science 10 (4):457-522.
    This paper takes as its point of departure two striking incongruities between scientiªc practice and trends in modern history and philosophy of science. (1) Many modern historians of science are so preoccupied with local scientiªc practices that they fail to recognize important non-local elements. (2) Many modern philosophers of science make a sharp distinction between explanation and evidence, whereas in scientiªc practice explanatory power is routinely used as evidence for scientiªc claims. I draw attention to one speciªc way in..
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  • Explanationist aid for the theory of inductive logic.Michael Huemer - 2009 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (2):345-375.
    A central problem facing a probabilistic approach to the problem of induction is the difficulty of sufficiently constraining prior probabilities so as to yield the conclusion that induction is cogent. The Principle of Indifference, according to which alternatives are equiprobable when one has no grounds for preferring one over another, represents one way of addressing this problem; however, the Principle faces the well-known problem that multiple interpretations of it are possible, leading to incompatible conclusions. I propose a partial solution to (...)
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  • The ‘Truth’ Between Realism and Anti-Realism.Samal H. R. Manee - 2018 - International Journal of Philosophy 6 (2):32.
    This article examines what realists and anti-realist debates are all about. Through presenting the core of the main arguments in these debates, these are significant arguments and they are the kind of arguments that can clarify what it meant by ‘truth’ between Realist and anti-realist in general. The concluding remark is that though the main anti- realist’s arguments in these debates can be seen as some powerful arguments through raising questions on the relationship between theory and evidence, success and truth. (...)
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  • Causal explanation and scientific realism.Christopher Hitchcock - 1992 - Erkenntnis 37 (2):151 - 178.
    It is widely believed that many of the competing accounts of scientific explanation have ramifications which are relevant to the scientific realism debate. I claim that the two issues are orthogonal. For definiteness, I consider Cartwright's argument that causal explanations secure belief in theoretical entities. In Section I, van Fraassen's anti-realism is reviewed; I argue that this anti-realism is, prima facie, consistent with a causal account of explanation. Section II reviews Cartwright's arguments. In Section III, it is argued that causal (...)
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  • In defense of type materialism.Christopher S. Hill - 1984 - Synthese 59 (June):295-320.
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  • Inductive Incompleteness.Matthias Hild - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 128 (1):109-135.
    Nelson Goodman cast the ‘problem of induction’ as the task of articulating the principles and standards by which to distinguish valid from invalid inductive inferences. This paper explores some logical bounds on the ability of a rational reasoner to accomplish this task. By a simple argument, either an inductive inference method cannot admit its own fallibility, or there exists some non-inferable hypothesis whose non-inferability the method cannot infer (violating the principle of ‘negative introspection’). The paper discusses some implications of this (...)
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  • Turning biases into hypotheses through method: A logic of scientific discovery for machine learning.Maja Bak Herrie & Simon Aagaard Enni - 2021 - Big Data and Society 8 (1).
    Machine learning systems have shown great potential for performing or supporting inferential reasoning through analyzing large data sets, thereby potentially facilitating more informed decision-making. However, a hindrance to such use of ML systems is that the predictive models created through ML are often complex, opaque, and poorly understood, even if the programs “learning” the models are simple, transparent, and well understood. ML models become difficult to trust, since lay-people, specialists, and even researchers have difficulties gauging the reasonableness, correctness, and reliability (...)
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  • Beyond the Turing test.Jose Hernandez-Orallo - 2000 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 9 (4):447-466.
    The main factor of intelligence is defined as the ability tocomprehend, formalising this ability with the help of new constructsbased on descriptional complexity. The result is a comprehension test,or C- test, which is exclusively defined in computational terms. Due toits absolute and non-anthropomorphic character, it is equally applicableto both humans and non-humans. Moreover, it correlates with classicalpsychometric tests, thus establishing the first firm connection betweeninformation theoretical notions and traditional IQ tests. The TuringTest is compared with the C- test and the (...)
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  • A Computational Definition of 'Consilience'.José Hernandez-Orallo - 1998 - Philosophica 61 (1):19-37.
    This paper defines in a formal and computational way the notion of ‘consilience’, a term introduced by Whewell in 1847 for the evaluation of scientific theories. Informally, as has been used to date, a model or theory is ‘consilient’ if it is predictive, explanatory and unifies the evide-nce. Centred in a constructive framework, where new terms can be intro-duced, we essay a formalisation of the idea of unification based on the avoidance of ‘sepa-ration’. However, it is soon manifest that this (...)
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  • Putting inference to the best explanation into context.Leah Henderson - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 94 (C):167-176.
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  • Bayesianism and Inference to the Best Explanation.Leah Henderson - 2014 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 65 (4):687-715.
    Two of the most influential theories about scientific inference are inference to the best explanation and Bayesianism. How are they related? Bas van Fraassen has claimed that IBE and Bayesianism are incompatible rival theories, as any probabilistic version of IBE would violate Bayesian conditionalization. In response, several authors have defended the view that IBE is compatible with Bayesian updating. They claim that the explanatory considerations in IBE are taken into account by the Bayesian because the Bayesian either does or should (...)
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  • A defense of objectivism about evidential support.Brian Hedden - 2015 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (5):716-743.
    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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  • Strong cognitivist weaknesses.Nathan Hauthaler - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (2):161-176.
    Marušić & Schwenkler (Analytic Philosophy, 59, 309) offer a simple and elegant defense of strong cognitivism about intention: the view that an intention to φ is a form of belief that one will φ. I show that their defense fails: however simple and elegant, it fails to account for various aspects about intention and its expression, and faces distinctive challenges of its own, including a dilemma and counterexample. These also undermine Marušić & Schwenkler's claim to a best-explanation type of account (...)
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  • Grounding the neurobiology of language in first principles: The necessity of non-language-centric explanations for language comprehension.Uri Hasson, Giovanna Egidi, Marco Marelli & Roel M. Willems - 2018 - Cognition 180 (C):135-157.
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  • Acceptance of empirical statements: A Bayesian theory without cognitive utilities.John C. Harsanyi - 1985 - Theory and Decision 18 (1):1-30.
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  • An Oblique Epistemic Defence of Conceptual Analysis.Alexander S. Harper - 2012 - Metaphilosophy 43 (3):235-256.
    This article argues, against contemporary experimentalist criticism, that conceptual analysis has epistemic value, with a structure that encourages the development of interesting hypotheses which are of the right form to be valuable in diverse areas of philosophy. The article shows, by analysis of the Gettier programme, that conceptual analysis shares the proofs and refutations form Lakatos identified in mathematics. Upon discovery of a counterexample, this structure aids the search for a replacement hypothesis. The search is guided by heuristics. The heuristics (...)
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  • The Actual and the Possible.Rebecca Hanrahan - 2017 - Journal of Philosophical Research 42:223-242.
    We can safely infer that a proposition is possible if p is the case. But, I argue, this inference from the actual to the possible is merely explicative in nature, though we employ it at times as if it were ampliative. To make this inference ampliative, we need to include an inference to the best explanation. Specifically, we can draw a substantive conclusion as to whether p is possible from the fact that p is the case, if via our best (...)
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  • Imagination and possibility.Rebecca Hanrahan - 2007 - Philosophical Forum 38 (2):125–146.
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  • Consciousness and modal empiricism.Rebecca Roman Hanrahan - 2009 - Philosophia 37 (2):281-306.
    David Chalmers supports his contention that there is a possible world populated by our zombie twins by arguing for the assumption that conceivability entails possibility. But, I argue, the modal epistemology he sets forth, ‘modal rationalism,’ ignores the problem of incompleteness and relies on an idealized notion of conceivability. As a consequence, this epistemology can’t justify our quotidian judgments of possibility, let alone those judgments that concern the mind/body connection. Working from the analogy that the imagination is to the possible (...)
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  • Criticism and revision of Chisholm's epistemic principle for perception.Richard J. Hall - 1978 - Philosophia 7 (3-4):477-488.
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  • A Bayesian Approach to Informal Argument Fallacies.Ulrike Hahn & Mike Oaksford - 2006 - Synthese 152 (2):207-236.
    We examine in detail three classic reasoning fallacies, that is, supposedly ``incorrect'' forms of argument. These are the so-called argumentam ad ignorantiam, the circular argument or petitio principii, and the slippery slope argument. In each case, the argument type is shown to match structurally arguments which are widely accepted. This suggests that it is not the form of the arguments as such that is problematic but rather something about the content of those examples with which they are typically justified. This (...)
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  • A Normative Theory of Argument Strength.Ulrike Hahn & Mike Oaksford - 2006 - Informal Logic 26 (1):1-24.
    In this article, we argue for the general importance of normative theories of argument strength. We also provide some evidence based on our recent work on the fallacies as to why Bayesian probability might, in fact, be able to supply such an account. In the remainder of the article we discuss the general characteristics that make a specifically Bayesian approach desirable, and critically evaluate putative flaws of Bayesian probability that have been raised in the argumentation literature.
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  • Jacques bernoulli's art of conjecturing.Ian Hacking - 1971 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 22 (3):209-229.
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  • Extragalactic reality: The case of gravitational lensing.Ian Hacking - 1989 - Philosophy of Science 56 (4):555-581.
    My Representing and Intervening (1983) concludes with what it calls an experimental argument for scientific realism about entities. The argument is evidently inapplicable to extragalactic astrophysics, but leaves open the possibility that there might be other grounds for scientific realism in that domain. Here I argue for antirealism in astrophysics, although not for any particular kind of antirealism. The argument is conducted by a detailed examination of some current research. It parallels the last chapter of (1983). Both represent the methodological (...)
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  • The epistemology of ‘just is’-statements.Daniel Greco - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (10):2599-2607.
    Agustín Rayo’s The Construction of Logical Space offers an exciting and ambitious defense of a broadly Carnapian approach to metaphysics. This essay will focus on one of the main differences between Rayo’s and Carnap’s approaches. Carnap distinguished between analytic, a priori “meaning postulates”, and empirical claims, which were both synthetic and knowable only a posteriori. Like meaning postulates, they determine the boundaries of logical space. But Rayo is skeptical that the a priori/a posteriori or analytic/synthetic distinctions can do the work (...)
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  • Conveying information.Peter J. Graham - 2000 - Synthese 123 (3):365-392.
    This paper states three counterexamples to the claim that testimony cannot generate knowledge, that a hearer can only acquire testimonial knowledge from a speaker who knows: a twins case, the fossil case, and an inversion case. The paper provides an explanation for why testimony can generate knowledge. Testimonial knowledge involves the flow of information from a speaker to a hearer through the linguistic channel.
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  • On the Possibility of Inference to the Best Explanation.Clark Glymour - 2012 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 41 (2):461-469.
    Various proposals have suggested that an adequate explanatory theory should reduce the number or the cardinality of the set of logically independent claims that need be accepted in order to entail a body of data. A (and perhaps the only) well-formed proposal of this kind is William Kneale’s: an explanatory theory should be finitely axiomatizable but it’s set of logical consequences in the data language should not be finitely axiomatizable. Craig and Vaught showed that Kneale theories (almost) always exist for (...)
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  • Paley’s design argument as an inference to the best explanation, or, Dawkins’ dilemma.Sander Gliboff - 2000 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 31 (4):579-597.
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  • Coherence measures and inference to the best explanation.David H. Glass - 2007 - Synthese 157 (3):275-296.
    This paper considers an application of work on probabilistic measures of coherence to inference to the best explanation. Rather than considering information reported from different sources, as is usually the case when discussing coherence measures, the approach adopted here is to use a coherence measure to rank competing explanations in terms of their coherence with a piece of evidence. By adopting such an approach IBE can be made more precise and so a major objection to this mode of reasoning can (...)
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  • Peirce snatching: Towards a more pragmatic view of evidence. [REVIEW]Steven Gimbel - 1999 - Erkenntnis 51 (2-3):207-231.
    The running debate between Peter Achinstein and his critics concerning the nature of scientific evidence is misguided as each side attempts to explicate a distinct notion of evidence. Achinstein's approach, however, is valuable in helping to point out a problem with Carnap's statistical relevance model. By claiming an increase in probability to be necessary for evidence, the received view is incapable of accounting for evidence which is statistically irrelevant but explanatorily relevant. A broader view of evidence which can account for (...)
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  • What does explanatory coherence explain?Ronald N. Giere - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (3):475-476.
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  • Reconsidering the role of inference to the best explanation in the epistemology of testimony.Axel Gelfert - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (4):386-396.
    In his work on the epistemology of testimony, Peter Lipton developed an account of testimonial inference that aimed at descriptive adequacy as well as justificatory sophistication. According to ‘testimonial inference to the best explanation’, we accept what a speaker tells us because the truth of her claim figures in the best explanation of the fact that she made it. In this paper, I argue for a modification of this picture. In particular, I argue that IBE plays a dual role in (...)
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  • To envision a new particle or change an existing law? Hypothesis formation and anomaly resolution for the curious case of the β decay spectrum.Tjerk Gauderis - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 45:27-45.
    This paper addresses the question of how scientists determine which type of hypothesis is most suitable for tackling a particular problem by examining the historical case of the anomalous β spectrum in early nuclear physics, a puzzle that occasioned the most diverse hypotheses amongst physicists at the time. It is shown that such determinations are most often implicitly informed by scientists' individual perspectives on the structural relations between the various elements of the theory and the problem at hand. In addition (...)
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  • Abduction of Generalizations.Tjerk Gauderis & Frederik Van De Putte - 2012 - Theoria 27 (3):345-363.
    _Abduction of generalizations_ is the process in which explanatory hypotheses are formed for an observed, yet puzzling generalization such as ``pineapples taste sweet" or ``rainbows appear when the sun breaks through the rain". This phenomenon has received little attention in formal logic and philosophy of science. The current paper remedies this lacuna by first giving an overview of some general characteristics of this process, elaborating on its ubiquity in scientific and daily life reasoning. Second, the adaptive logic $\LAG$ is presented (...)
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  • Explanatory and Creative Alternatives to the MDL priciple.Ismael García-Varea & José Hernández-Orallo - 2000 - Foundations of Science 5 (2):185-207.
    The Minimum Description Length principle is the modernformalisation of Occam's razor. It has been extensively and successfullyused in machine learning, especially for noisy and long sources ofdata. However, the MDL principle presents some paradoxes andinconveniences. After discussing all these, we address two of the mostrelevant: lack of explanation and lack of creativity. We present newalternatives to address these problems. The first one, intensionalcomplexity, avoids extensional parts in a description, so distributingcompression ratio in a more even way than the MDL principle. (...)
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  • Coherence: Beyond constraint satisfaction.Gareth Gabrys & Alan Lesgold - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (3):475-475.
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  • Induction and reasoning to the best explanation.Richard A. Fumerton - 1980 - Philosophy of Science 47 (4):589-600.
    In this paper I want to cast doubt on the claim that there is a legitimate process of reasoning to the best explanation which can serve as an alternative to either straightforward inductive reasoning or a combination of inductive and deductive reasoning. I shall argue a) that paradigmatic cases of acceptable arguments to the best explanation must be considered enthymemes and b) that when the suppressed premises are made explicit we have all of the premises we need to present either (...)
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  • Scientific Inference and Ordinary Cognition: Fodor on Holism and Cognitive Architecture.Tim Fuller & Richard Samuels - 2014 - Mind and Language 29 (2):201-237.
    Do accounts of scientific theory formation and revision have implications for theories of everyday cognition? We maintain that failing to distinguish between importantly different types of theories of scientific inference has led to fundamental misunderstandings of the relationship between science and everyday cognition. In this article, we focus on one influential manifestation of this phenomenon which is found in Fodor's well-known critique of theories of cognitive architecture. We argue that in developing his critique, Fodor confounds a variety of distinct claims (...)
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  • Cognitive Architecture, Holistic Inference and Bayesian Networks.Timothy J. Fuller - 2019 - Minds and Machines 29 (3):373-395.
    Two long-standing arguments in cognitive science invoke the assumption that holistic inference is computationally infeasible. The first is Fodor’s skeptical argument toward computational modeling of ordinary inductive reasoning. The second advocates modular computational mechanisms of the kind posited by Cosmides, Tooby and Sperber. Based on advances in machine learning related to Bayes nets, as well as investigations into the structure of scientific and ordinary information, I maintain neither argument establishes its architectural conclusion. Similar considerations also undermine Fodor’s decades-long diagnosis of (...)
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  • Toulmin: razonamiento, sentido común y derrotabilidad.Claudio Fuentes Bravo & Cristián Santibáñez Yãnez - 2014 - Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy 55 (130):531-548.
    Primeiramente, oferecemos uma apresentação teórica da representação do pensamento prático, começando pela distinção entre silogismo dialético e silogismo demonstrativo. Fazemos referência à crítica de Toulmin contra o dedutivismo dominante de seu tempo. Em seguida, fornecemos argumentos para apoiar a relevância heurística do modelo de Toulmin para entender a discussão sobre a inclusão da lógica padrão na representação do pensamento comum. Afirmamos que o projeto analítico toulmaniano permite entender, com clareza metódica, a derrotabilidade dos argumentos do senso comum por meio da (...)
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  • The discovery of archaea: from observed anomaly to consequential restructuring of the phylogenetic tree.Michael Fry - 2024 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 46 (2):1-38.
    Observational and experimental discoveries of new factual entities such as objects, systems, or processes, are major contributors to some advances in the life sciences. Yet, whereas discovery of theories was extensively deliberated by philosophers of science, very little philosophical attention was paid to the discovery of factual entities. This paper examines historical and philosophical aspects of the experimental discovery by Carl Woese of archaea, prokaryotes that comprise one of the three principal domains of the phylogenetic tree. Borrowing Kuhn’s terminology, this (...)
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  • Interpreting Heisenberg interpreting quantum states.Simon Friederich - 2012 - Philosophia Naturalis 50 (1):85-114.
    The paper investigates possible readings of the later Heisenberg's remarks on the nature of quantum states. It discusses, in particular, whether Heisenberg should be seen as a proponent of the epistemic conception of states – the view that quantum states are not descriptions of quantum systems but rather reflect the state assigning observers' epistemic relations to these systems. On the one hand, it seems plausible that Heisenberg subscribes to that view, given how he defends the notorious "collapse of the wave (...)
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  • Forgetting memory skepticism.Matthew Frise & Kevin McCain - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (2):253-263.
    Memory skepticism denies our memory beliefs could have any notable epistemic good. One route to memory skepticism is to challenge memory’s epistemic trustworthiness, that is, its functioning in a way necessary for it to provide epistemic justification. In this paper we develop and respond to this challenge. It could threaten memory in such a way that we altogether lack doxastic attitudes. If it threatens memory in this way, then the challenge is importantly self-defeating. If it does not threaten memory in (...)
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  • Rational Belief and Probability Kinematics.Bas C. Van Fraassen - 1980 - Philosophy of Science 47 (2):165-187.
    A general form is proposed for epistemological theories, the relevant factors being: the family of epistemic judgments, the epistemic state, the epistemic commitment, and the family of possible epistemic inputs. First a simple theory is examined in which the states are probability functions, and the subject of probability kinematics introduced by Richard Jeffrey is explored. Then a second theory is examined in which the state has as constituents a body of information and a recipe that determines the accepted epistemic judgments (...)
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