Cornea (2012) argues that I (2011) was wrong to use the analogy between morality and motion to defend cultural relativism. I reply that the analogy can be used to clarify what cultural relativism asserts and how a cultural relativist can reply to the criticisms against it. Ockham’s Razor favours the relativist view that there are no moral truths, and hence no culture is better than another. Contrary to what Cornea claims, cultural relativism does not entail that we cannot protect ourselves (...) from those who attack us, and that the ruling of an international court lacks moral legitimacy. (shrink)

There are nine antirealist explanations of the success of science in the literature. I raise difficulties against all of them except the latest one, and then construct a pessimistic induction that the latest one will turn out to be problematic because its eight forerunners turned out to be problematic. This pessimistic induction is on a par with the traditional pessimistic induction that successful present scientific theories will be revealed to be false because successful past scientific theories were revealed to be (...) false. (shrink)

Putnam (1975) infers from the success of a scientific theory to its approximate truth and the reference of its key term. Laudan (1981) objects that some past theories were successful, and yet their key terms did not refer, so they were not even approximately true. Kitcher (1993) replies that the past theories are approximately true because their working posits are true, although their idle posits are false. In contrast, I argue that successful theories which cohere with each other are approximately (...) true, and that their key terms refer. My position is immune to Laudan’s counterexamples to Putnam’s inference and yields a solution to a problem with Kitcher’s position. (shrink)

To clarify and illuminate the place of probability in science Ellery Eells and James H. Fetzer have brought together some of the most distinguished philosophers ...

What attitude should we take toward a scientific theory when it competes with other scientific theories? This question elicited different answers from instrumentalists, logical positivists, constructive empiricists, scientific realists, holists, theory-ladenists, antidivisionists, falsificationists, and anarchists in the philosophy of science literature. I will summarize the diverse philosophical responses to the problem of underdetermination, and argue that there are different kinds of underdetermination, and that they should be kept apart from each other because they call for different responses.

This paper starts with an intuitive notion of representational spaces, which is intended to provide an improved version of Kuhn's concept of paradigms. It then proceeds to study the following topics in terms of this new notion: incommensurability, paradigm change, explanation of anomalies, explanation of regularities, explanation of irregularities, and physical necessity. In the course of the investigation, "representational space" gets clarified and defined. It is envisaged that this new concept should throw light on many issues in the philosophy of (...) science. (shrink)

Bilim üzerine yapılan tartışmalar her ne kadar geçmişten beri süregelmekte olsa da modern bilimin gelişimini gösteren bilimsel devrimler, bilim ve bilimsel bilginin ne olduğu tartışmalarını yoğun bir biçimde etkiler. Özellikle bilim hakkında yaygın bir biçimde ifade edilen geleneksel anlayışın temel iddialarından biri, deney bilimlerinin gelişmesine bağlı olarak deneyin de ön plana çıkması nedeniyle, bilimin temelinde saf deney ve gözlemin yer aldığıdır.

Van Fraassen explains rejections and asymmetries in science in terms of his contextual theory of explanation in the same way that scientists explain observable phenomena in the world in terms of scientific theories. I object that van Fraassen’s skeptical view regarding inference to the best explanation together with the English view of rationality jointly imply that the contextual theory is not rationally compelling, so van Fraassen and his epistemic colleagues can rationally disbelieve it. Prasetya replies that the truth of the (...) contextual theory coincides with its empirical adequacy, so the contextual theory is compelling. He also replies that the contextual theory is compelling, provided that van Fraassen’s argument for it instantiates a compelling subset of IBE. I argue that Prasetya’s replies either fail or help scientific realism. (shrink)

Van Fraassen infers the truth of the contextual theory from his observation that it has passed a crucial test. Mizrahi infers the comparative truth of our best theories from his observation that they are more successful than their competitors. Their inferences require, according to the argument from double spaces, the prior belief that it is more likely that their target theories were pulled out from the T-space than from the O-space. The T-space is the logical space of unconceived theories whose (...) appearances agree with their realities; the O-space is the logical space of unconceived theories whose appearances may agree or disagree with their realities. (shrink)