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The “sloppy models” program originated in systems biology, but has seen applications across a range of fields. Sloppy models are dependent on a large number of parameters, but highly insensitive to the vast majority of parameter combinations. Sloppy models proponents claim that the program may explain the success of science. I argue that the sloppy models program can at best provide a very partial explanation. Drawing a parallel with renormalization group realism, I argue that it would only give us grounds (...) |
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We outline Ladyman's 'metaphysical' or 'ontic' form of structuralrealism and defend it against various objections. Cao, in particular, has questioned theview of ontology presupposed by this approach and we argue that by reconceptualisingobjects in structural terms it offers the best hope for the realist in thecontext of modern physics. |
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Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro... |
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In previous work, I defended Larry Laudan against the criticism that the axiological component of his normative naturalism lacks a naturalistic justification. I argued that this criticism depends on an equivocation over the term 'naturalism' and that it begs the question against what we are entitled to include in our concept of nature. In this paper, I generalize that argument and explore its implications for Laudan and other proponents of epistemic naturalism. Here, I argue that a commitment to naturalism in (...) |
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Name der Zeitschrift: SATS Jahrgang: 18 Heft: 1 Seiten: 19-35. |
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Helen Longino argues that the way to ensure scientific knowledge is objective is to have a diversity of scientific investigators. This is the best example of recent feminist arguments which hold that the real value of diversity is epistemic, and not political, but it only partly succeeds. In the end, Longino's objectivity amounts to intersubjective agreement about contextually based standards, and while her account gives us a good reason for wanting diversity in our scientific communities, this reason turns out to (...) |
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Speaking with conversational AIs, technologies whose interfaces enable human-like interaction based on natural language, has become a common phenomenon. During these interactions, people form their beliefs due to the say-so of conversational AIs. In this paper, I consider, and then reject, the concepts of testimony-based beliefs and instrument-based beliefs as suitable for analysis of beliefs acquired from these technologies. I argue that the concept of instrument-based beliefs acknowledges the non-human agency of the source of the belief. However, the analysis focuses (...) |
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I reply to seven objections to anthropomorphic theism: (1) That anthropomorphic theism is idolatrous. In reply I rely on the concept/conception distinction. (2) That faith requires certainty. In reply I argue that full belief may be based on probable inference. (3) That the truly infinite is incomprehensible. In reply I distinguish two senses of knowing what you mean. (4) "You Kant say that!" In reply I distinguish shallow from deep Kantianism. (5) "Shall Old Aquinas be forgot?" In reply I discuss (...) |
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Does science successfully uncover the deep structure of the natural world? Or are the depths forever beyond our epistemic grasp? Since the decline of logical positivism and logical empiricism, scientific realism has become the consensus view: of course our scientific theories apprehend the deep structure of the world. What else could explain the remarkable success of science? This is the explanationist defense of scientific realism, the “ultimate argument.” Kyle Stanford starts here and, using the history of theorizing about biological inheritance (...) |
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The debate over scientific realism, simply put, is a debate over what we can and should believe about reality once we've critically assessed all the available arguments and empirical evidence. Thinking earnestly about the merits of scientific realism as a philosophical thesis requires navigating contentious historiographical issues, being familiar with the technical details of various scientific theories, and addressing disparate philosophical problems spanning aesthetics, metaphysics, epistemology, and beyond. This issue of Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of (...) |
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It has become apparent that the debate between scientific realists and constructive empiricists has come to a stalemate. Neither view can reasonably claim to be the most rational philosophy of science, exclusively capable of making sense of all scientific activities. On one prominent analysis of the situation, whether we accept a realist or an anti-realist account of science actually seems to depend on which values we antecedently accept, rather than our commitment to “rationality” per se. Accordingly, several philosophers have attempted (...) |
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Since the publication of Science and Values in which Laudan unveiled his “reticulated model of scientific change” (Laudan (1984)), he has published a series of articles emphasizing the naturalistic axiology inherent in this model. (Laudan (1986), (1987a), (1987b), (1989), and (forthcoming)). His epistemic naturalism makes the business of fixing rational beliefs about facts, theories, methodologies, and aims all together “cut from the same piece of empirical cloth.” Laudan’s position has numerous attractive qualities: It allows one to accept a great deal (...) |
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This is the revised version of an invited keynote lecture delivered at the "1st Australian Computing and Philosophy Conference". The paper is divided into two parts. The first part defends an informational approach to structural realism. It does so in three steps. First, it is shown that, within the debate about structural realism, epistemic and ontic structural realism are reconcilable. It follows that a version of OSR is defensible from a structuralist-friendly position. Second, it is argued that a version of (...) |
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The realist programme has degenerated by now to the point where it is quite beyond salvage. A token of this degeneration is that there are altogether too many realisms. It is as though by splitting into a confusing array of types and kinds, realism has hoped that some one variety might yet escape extinct. I shall survey the debate, and some of these realisms, below. Here I would just point out the obvious; that in so far as the successes of (...) |
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As it is standardly conceived, Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) is a form of ampliative inference in which one infers a hypothesis because it provides a better potential explanation of one’s evidence than any other available, competing explanatory hypothesis. Bas van Fraassen famously objected to IBE thus formulated that we may have no reason to think that any of the available, competing explanatory hypotheses are true. While revisionary responses to the Bad Lot Objection concede that IBE needs to be (...) |
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What are the pillars on which the success of modern science rest? Although philosophers have much discussed what is behind science’s success, this paper argues that much of the discussion is misdirected. The extant literature rightly regards the semantic and inferential tools of formal logic and probability theory as pillars of scientific rationality, in the sense that they reveal the justificatory structure of important aspects of scientific practice. As key elements of our rational reconstruction toolbox, they make a fundamental contribution (...) |
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Historians and sociologists of psychiatry often claim that psychiatric diagnoses are discontinuous. That is, a particular diagnoses will be described in one way in one era and described quite differently in a different era. Historians and sociologists often draw epistemic consequences from such discontinuities, claiming that truth is pluralistic, provisional and historicised. These arguments do not readily fit in with how analytical philosophers of science approach scientific realism. I show how the pessimistic meta induction does not capture the point which (...) |
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The “No Miracle Argument” for scientific realism contends that the only plausible explanation for the predictive success of scientific theories is their truthlikeness, but doesn’t specify what ‘truthlikeness’ means. I argue that if we understand ‘truthlikeness’ in terms of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, the resulting realist thesis (RKL) is a plausible explanation for science’s success. Still, RKL probably falls short of the realist’s ideal. I argue, however, that the strongest version of realism that the argument can plausibly establish is RKL. The (...) |
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Scientific realism, the position that successful theories are likely to be approximately true, is threatened by the pessimistic induction according to which the history of science is full of suc- cessful, but false theories. I aim to defend scientific realism against the pessimistic induction. My main thesis is that our current best theories each enjoy a very high degree of predictive success, far higher than was enjoyed by any of the refuted theories. I support this thesis by showing that both (...) |
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Scientific realism is the position that success of a scientific theory licenses an inference to its approximate truth. The argument from pessimistic meta-induction maintains that this inference is undermined due to the existence of theories from the history of science that were successful, but false. I aim to counter pessimistic meta-induction and defend scientific realism. To do this, I adopt a notion of success that admits of degrees, and show that our current best theories enjoy far higher degrees of success (...) |
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This paper outlines a defense of scientific realism against the pessimistic meta- induction which appeals to the phenomenon of the exponential growth of science. Here, scientific realism is defined as the view that our current successful scientific theories are mostly approximately true, and pessimistic meta- induction is the argument that projects the occurrence of past refutations of successful theories to the present concluding that many or most current successful scientific theories are false. The defense starts with the observation that at (...) |
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A recent series of experiments have demonstrated that a classical fluid mechanical system, constituted by an oil droplet bouncing on a vibrating fluid surface, can be induced to display a number of behaviours previously considered to be distinctly quantum. To explain this correspondence it has been suggested that the fluid mechanical system provides a single-particle classical model of de Broglie’s idiosyncratic ‘double solution’ pilot wave theory of quantum mechanics. In this paper we assess the epistemic function of the bouncing oil (...) |
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Robustness is often presented as a guideline for distinguishing the true or real from mere appearances or artifacts. Most of recent discussions of robustness have focused on the kind of derivational robustness analysis introduced by Levins, while the related but distinct idea of robustness as multiple accessibility, defended by Wimsatt, has received less attention. In this paper, I argue that the latter kind of robustness, when properly understood, can provide justification for ontological commitments. The idea is that we are justified (...) |
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Although scientific realism is the default position in the life sciences, philosophical accounts of realism are geared towards physics and run into trouble when applied to fields such as biology or neuroscience. In this paper, I formulate a new robustness-based version of entity realism, and show that it provides a plausible account of realism for the life sciences that is also continuous with scientific practice. It is based on the idea that if there are several independent ways of measuring, detecting (...) |
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The logical empiricists knew that scientific theories sometimes arise out of the attempt to reconcile or unify two existing theories. They also thought that, at best, old theories would be retained as approximations to their successors. Kuhn lost both insights when he rejected the logical empiricists' formal approach in favor of an exclusively historical and psychological one. But when Putnam tried to restore such ideas he failed to provide them with the historical support they require. An account of revolutionary unifications (...) |
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Contemporary debate surrounding the nature of scientific progress has focused upon the precise role played by justification, with two realist accounts having dominated proceedings. Recently, however, a third realist account has been put forward, one which offers no role for justification at all. According to Finnur Dellsén’s (Stud Hist Philos Sci Part A 56:72–83, 2016) noetic account, science progresses when understanding increases, that is, when scientists grasp how to correctly explain or predict more aspects of the world that they could (...) |
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Hasok Chang is developing a new form of pragmatic scientific realism that aims to reorient the debate away from truth and towards practice. Central to his project is replacing truth as correspondence with his new notion of ‘operational coherence’, which is introduced as: 1) A success term with probative value to judge and guide epistemic activities. 2) A more useful alternative than truth as correspondence in guiding scientific practice. I argue that, given its current construal as neither necessary nor sufficient (...) |
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I argue in this paper that anyone who accepts the ontology of scientific realism can only accept a pragmatic theory of truth, i.e., a theory on which truth is what it is epistemically right to believe. But the combination of realism with such a theory of truth is a form of internal realism; therefore, a scientific realist should be an internal realist. The strategy of the paper is to argue that there is no adequate semantic or correspondence theory of truth (...) |
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Bas van Fraassen’s Darwinian explanation for the success of science has sparked four decades of discussion, with scientific realists and antirealists alike using biologically inspired reasoning to support their points of view. Based on critical engagement with van Fraassen’s proposal itself and later contributions by Stathis Psillos and K. Brad Wray, we claim that central arguments on both sides of this controversy suffer from an insufficient understanding of Darwinism and its underlying biological concepts. Adding the necessary biological background turns out (...) |
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I argue that scientific realism, insofar as it is only committed to those scientific posits of which we have causal knowledge, is immune to Kyle Stanford’s argument from unconceived alternatives. This causal strategy is shown not to repeat the shortcomings of previous realist responses to Stanford’s argument. Furthermore, I show that the notion of causal knowledge underlying it can be made sufficiently precise by means of conceptual tools recently introduced into the debate on scientific realism. Finally, I apply this strategy (...) |
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There is an ever-growing literature on what exactly the condition or criterion is that enables some (but not all) debunking arguments to undermine our beliefs. In this paper, I develop a novel schema for debunking argumentation, arguing that debunking arguments generally have a simple and valid form, but that whether or not they are sound depends on the particular aetiological explanation which the debunker provides in order to motivate acceptance of the individual premises. The schema has three unique features: (1) (...) |
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This paper aims to answer the question: what does the realism of laws of nature consist of? To achieve this, in the first part, three philosophical accounts of laws of nature are presented and examined: the universalist, the dispositionalist and the counter-factualist. The presentation and examination focuses on the answer given by each of these accounts to the question: what is a law of nature? Later, in the second part, convergences and divergences between these three accounts are shown. Finally, in (...) |
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Standard proposals of scientific anti-realism assume that the methodology of a scientific research program can be endorsed without accepting its metaphysical commitments. I argue that the distinction between competence, the rules governing one’s language faculty, and performance, or linguistic behavior, precludes this. Linguistic theories aim to describe competence, not performance, and so must be able to distinguish observations reflective of the former from those reflective of the latter. This classification of data makes sense only against the background of a psychologically (...) |
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The Principle of the Benefit of Doubt dictates that, whenever reasonably possible, we interpret earlier-day scientists as referring to entities posited by current science. Putnam has presented the principle as supplementary to his Causal Theory of Reference in order to make this theory generally applicable to theoretical terms. The present paper argues that the principle is of doubtful standing. In particular, it will be argued that the principle lacks a justification and, indeed, is unjustifiable as it stands. |
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Fitch’s paradox shows, from fairly innocent-looking assumptions, that if there are any unknown truths, then there are unknowable truths. This is generally thought to deliver a blow to antirealist positions that imply that all truths are knowable. The present paper argues that a probabilistic version of antirealism escapes Fitch’s result while still offering all that antirealists should care for. |
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A common objection against deflationist theories of truth is that they cannot do justice to the correspondence intuition, i.e. the intuition that there is an explanatory relationship between, for instance, the truth of ‘Snow is white’ and snow's being white. We scrutinize two attempts to meet this objection and argue that both fail. We then propose a new response to the objection which, first, sheds doubt on the correctness of the correspondence intuition and, second, seeks to explain how we may (...) |
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It is widely believed that the so-called knowledge account of assertion best explains why sentences such as “It’s raining in Paris but I don’t believe it” and “It’s raining in Paris but I don’t know it” appear odd to us. I argue that the rival rational credibility account of assertion explains that fact just as well. I do so by providing a broadly Bayesian analysis of the said type of sentences which shows that such sentences cannot express rationally held beliefs. (...) |
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In this paper I analyze the difficult question of the truth of mature scientific theories by tackling the problem of the truth of laws. After introducing the main philosophical positions in the field of scientific realism, I discuss and then counter the two main arguments against realism, namely the pessimistic metainduction and the abstract and idealized character of scientific laws. I conclude by defending the view that well-confirmed physical theories are true only relatively to certain values of the variables that (...) |
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The aim of this essay is to argue for a new version of ‘inference-to-the-best-explanation’ scientific realism, which I characterize as Best Theory Realism or ‘BTR’. On BTR, the realist needs only to embrace a commitment to the truth or approximate truth of the best theories in a field, those which are unique in satisfying the highest standards of empirical success in a mature field with many successful but falsified predecessors. I argue that taking our best theories to be true is (...) |
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In this essay, I critically evaluate the approaches to explaining the success of science in Kuhn and the works of inference-to-the-best-explanation scientific realists. Kuhn ’s challenge to realists, who invoke the truth of theories to explain their success, is two-fold. His paradigm-account of success confronts realists with the problem of theory change, and the historical fact of successful theories later rejected as false. Secondly, Kuhn ’s account of the success of science has no need to bring truth into the explanation. (...) |
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I defend a realist commitment to the truth of our most empirically successful current scientific theories—on the ground that it provides the best explanation of their success and the success of their falsified predecessors. I argue that this Best Current Theory Realism (BCTR) is superior to preservative realism (PR) and the structural realism (SR). I show that PR and SR rest on the implausible assumption that the success of outdated theories requires the realist to hold that these theories possessed truthful (...) |
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This paper focuses on Horwich's metaphilosophical interpretation of Wittgenstein. Specifically, it focuses on Horwich's charge that all philosophy is irrational. First, I coordinate the various aspects of Horwich's metaphilosophical program to make sense of his charge of irrationality against philosophy. Second, I argue that this metaphilosophical program misfires in two distinct ways. However, third, I close by calling attention to what I posit to be a critical insight of Horwich's account. |
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In his paper "A Confutation of Convergent Realism", Larry Laudan offered one of the most powerful criticisms of scientific realism. I defend here that although Laudan's criticism is right, this does not refute the realist position. The thesis that Laudan confutes is a much stronger thesis than realist needs to maintain. As I will exemplify with Salmon's statistical-relevance model, a less strict notion of explanation would allow us to claim that (approximate) truth is the best explanation for such success, even (...) |
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