Standard statistical measures of strength of association, although pioneered by Pearson deliberately to be acausal, nowadays are routinely used to measure causal efficacy. But their acausal origins have left them ill suited to this latter purpose. I distinguish between two different conceptions of causal efficacy, and argue that: 1) Both conceptions can be useful 2) The statistical measures only attempt to capture the first of them 3) They are not fully successful even at this 4) An alternative definition more squarely (...) based on causal thinking not only captures the second conception, it can also capture the first one better too. (shrink)

Faced with realist-resistant sciences and the no-nonsense attitude of the times realism has moved away from the rather grandiose program that had traditionally been characteristic of its school. The objective of the shift seems to be to protect some doctrine still worthy of the "realist" name. The strategy is to relocate the school to where conditions seem optimal for its defense, and then to insinuate that the case for such a " piecemeal realism" could be made elsewhere too, were there (...) but world enough and time. The burden of this paper is to examine this piecemeal approach and to show why, despite the relocation, it cannot escape the difficulties of its grander cousins. For that purpose I begin with some brief historical reminders, and with a quick review of the state of the argument before realism went to pieces. This will help us see what has been abandoned in realism's flight, and what baggage still remains. (shrink)

0.0. Theistic Ethics as a Challenge and a Diagnostic Tool. Naturalistic conceptions in metaethics come in many varieties. Many philosophers who have sought to situate moral reasoning in a naturalistic metaphysical conception have thought it necessary to adopt non-cognitivist, prescriptivist, projectivist, relativist, or otherwise deflationary conceptions. Recently there has been a revival of interest in non-deflationary moral realist approaches to ethical naturalism. Many non-deflationary approaches have exploited the resources of non-empiricist “causal” or “naturalistic” conceptions of reference and of kind definitions (...) in service of the “naturalistic” metaphilosophical conception that substantive moral questions, and questions about the metaphysics of morals, are broadly a posteriori questions, somewhat analogous to scientific questions, and are not amenable to a priori resolution by “conceptual analysis.”. (shrink)

Comparisons of rival explanations or theories often involve vague appeals to explanatory power. In this paper, we dissect this metaphor by distinguishing between different dimensions of the goodness of an explanation: non-sensitivity, cognitive salience, precision, factual accuracy and degree of integration. These dimensions are partially independent and often come into conflict. Our main contribution is to go beyond simple stipulation or description by explicating why these factors are taken to be explanatory virtues. We accomplish this by using the contrastive-counterfactual approach (...) to explanation and the view of understanding as an inferential ability. By combining these perspectives, we show how the explanatory power of an explanation in a given dimension can be assessed by showing the range of answers it provides to what-if-things-had-been-different questions and the theoretical and pragmatic importance of these questions. Our account also explains intuitions linking explanation to unification or to exhibition of a mechanism. (shrink)

This survey of major developments in North American philosophy of science begins with the mid-1960s consolidation of the disciplinary synthesis of internalist history and philosophy of science (HPS) as a response to criticisms of logical empiricism. These developments are grouped for discussion under the following headings: historical metamethodologies, scientific realisms, philosophies of the special sciences, revivals of empiricism, cognitivist naturalisms, social epistemologies, feminist theories of science, studies of experiment and the disunity of science, and studies of science as practice and (...) culture. A unifying theme of the survey is the relation between historical metamethodologists and scientific realists, which dominated philosophical work in the late 1970s. I argue that many of the alternative cognitive naturalisms, social epistemologies, and feminist theories that have been proposed can be understood as analogues to the differences between metamethodological theories of scientific rationality and realist accounts of successful reference to real causal processes. Recent work on experiment, scientific practice, and the culture of science may, however, challenge the underlying conception of the field according to which realism and historical rationalism (or their descendants) are the important alternatives available, and thus may take philosophy of science in new directions. (shrink)

In this paper I argue three things: (1) that the interactionist view underlying Benacerraf's (1973) challenge to mathematical beliefs renders inexplicable the reliability of most of our beliefs in physics; (2) that examples from mathematical physics suggest that we should view reliability differently; and (3) that abstract mathematical considerations are indispensable to explanations of the reliability of our beliefs.

Our aim in this paper is to bring the woefully neglected literature on predictive modeling to bear on some central questions in the philosophy of science. The lesson of this literature is straightforward: For a very wide range of prediction problems, statistical prediction rules (SPRs), often rules that are very easy to implement, make predictions than are as reliable as, and typically more reliable than, human experts. We will argue that the success of SPRs forces us to reconsider our views (...) about what is involved in understanding, explanation, good reasoning, and about how we ought to do philosophy of science. (shrink)

The present paper discusses Kitcher’s framework for studying conceptual change and progress. Kitcher’s core notion of reference potential is hard to apply to concrete cases. In addition, an account of conceptual change as change in reference potential misses some important aspects of conceptual change and conceptual progress. I propose an alternative framework that focuses on the inferences and explanations supported by scientific concepts. The application of my approach to the history of the gene concept offers a better account of the (...) conceptual progress that occurred in the transition from the Mendelian to the molecular gene than Kitcher’s theory. (shrink)

Recent challenges to non-traditional theories of natural kinds demand clarifications and revisions to those theories. Highlights: The semantics of natural kind terms is a special case of a general naturalistic conception of signaling in organisms that explains the epistemic reliability of signaling. Natural kinds and reference are two aspects of the same natural phenomenon. Natural kind definitions are phenomena in nature not linguistic or representational entities; their relation to conceptualized definitions is complex. Reference and truth are special cases of a (...) broader phenomenon of accommodation between aspects of signaling and epistemically relevant causal structures. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that stories about difference do not promote critical self and social understanding; rather, on the contrary, it is the way we understand ourselves that makes some stories relevantly different. I discuss the uncritical reception of a story about homosexuality in Cuba, urging attention to generalizations explaining judgments of importance. I suggest that some stories from the South will never be relevant to discussions about human flourishing until we critically examine ideas about freedom and democracy, and (...) their role in national identity, explaining the significance we give, or not, to such stories. (shrink)

In this essay, I suggest that significant insights of recent feminist philosophy lead, among other things, to the thought that it is not always better to choose than to be compelled to do what one might have done otherwise. However, few feminists, if any, would defend such a suggestion. I ask why it is difficult to consider certain ideas that, while challenging in theory, are, nonetheless, rather unproblematic in practice. I suggest that some questions are not pursued seriously enough by (...) philosophers, because certain popular liberal conceptions of individuality and freedom are taken too much for granted. (shrink)

Comparisons of causal efficacy are ubiquitous in the practice of science and indeed everyday life. I focus on just one aspect of this task – one to my knowledge nowhere yet addressed satisfactorily – namely, comparing the efficacies of two causes that work in apparently incommensurable ways. Contrary to common opinion I argue that, to be comparable, it is neither necessary nor sufficient that two causes also be commensurable.

Theories of explanation seek to tell us what distinctively explanatory information is. The most ambitious ones, such as the DN-account, seek to tell us what an explanation is, tout court. Less ambitious ones, such as causal theories, restrict themselves to a particular domain of inquiry. The least ambitious theories constitute outright skepticism, holding that there is no reasonably unified phenomenon to give an account of. On these views, it is impossible to give any theories of explanation at all. I argue (...) that both the less ambitious and outright skeptical varieties are committed to a certain context-sensitivity of our explanatory discourse. And though this discourse is almost certainly context-sensitive in some respects, it does not exhibit the context-sensitivity less than fully ambitious theories are committed to. Therefore, all accounts that seek to restrict themselves in scope, including causal accounts of explanation, fail. (shrink)

In this paper I review three different positions on the wave function, namely: nomological realism, dispositionalism, and configuration space realism by regarding as essential their capacity to account for the world of our experience. I conclude that the first two positions are committed to regard the wave function as an abstract entity. The third position will be shown to be a merely speculative attempt to derive a primitive ontology from a reified mathematical space. Without entering any discussion about nominalism, I (...) conclude that an elimination of abstract entities from one’s ontology commits one to instrumentalism about the wave function, a position that therefore is not as unmotivated as it has seemed to be to many philosophers. (shrink)

Comparing different causes’ importance, and apportioning responsibility between them, requires making good sense of the notion of partial explanation, that is, of degree of explanation. How much is this subjective, how much objective? If the causes in question are probabilistic, how much is the outcome due to them and how much to simple chance? I formulate the notion of degree of causation, or effect size, relating it to influential recent work in the literature on causation. I examine to what extent (...) mainstream social science methods--both quantitative and qualitative--succeed in establishing effect sizes so understood. The answer turns out to be, roughly: only to some extent. Next, the standard understanding of effect size, even though widespread, still has several underappreciated consequences. I detail some of those. Finally, I discuss the separate issue of explanandum-dependence, which is essential to assessing any cause’s explanatory importance and yet which has been comparatively neglected. (shrink)

The 1994 US spectrum auction is now a paradigmatic case of the successful use of microeconomic theory for policy-making. We use a detailed analysis of it to review standard accounts in philosophy of science of how idealized models are connected to messy reality. We show that in order to understand what made the design of the spectrum auction successful, a new such account is required, and we present it here. Of especial interest is the light this sheds on the issue (...) of progress in economics. In particular, it enables us to get clear on exactly what has been progressing, and on exactly what theory has – and has not – contributed to that. This in turn has important implications for just what it is about economic theory that we should value. (shrink)

When philosophers discuss the topic of explanation, they usually have in mind the following question: given the beliefs one has and some proposition that one wishes to explain, which subset of the beliefs constitutes an explanation of the target proposition? That is, the philosophical ‘problem of explanation’ typically has bracketed the issue of how one obtains the beliefs; they are taken as given. The problem of explanation has been the problem of understanding the relation ‘x explains y’. Since Hempel did (...) so much to canonize this way of thinking about explanation, it deserves to be called ‘Hempel's problem’. (shrink)

I present a new definition of verisimilitude, framed in terms of causes. Roughly speaking, according to it a scientific model is approximately true if it captures accurately the strengths of the causes present in any given situation. Against much of the literature, I argue that any satisfactory account of verisimilitude must inevitably restrict its judgments to context-specific models rather than general theories. We may still endorse—and only need—a relativized notion of scientific progress, understood now not as global advance but rather (...) as the mastering of particular problems. This also sheds new light on longstanding difficulties surrounding language-dependence and models committed to false ontologies. (shrink)

In this paper I adduce a new argument in support of the claim that IBE is an autonomous form of inference, based on a familiar, yet surprisingly, under-discussed, problem for Hume’s theory of induction. I then use some insights thereby gleaned to argue for the claim that induction is really IBE, and draw some normative conclusions.

Defenders of pragmatic encroachment in epistemology (or what I call practicalism) need to address two main problems. First, the view seems to imply, absurdly, that knowledge can come and go quite easily—in particular, that it might come and go along with our variable practical interests. We can call this the stability problem. Second, there seems to be no fully satisfying way of explaining whose practical interests matter. We can call this the “whose stakes?” problem. I argue that both problems can (...) be addressed in roughly the same terms. More exactly, I argue that by first clarifying the whose stakes? problem an answer to the stability problem naturally falls out. (shrink)

By focussing on the intentional character of observation in science, we argue that Constructive Empiricism—B.C. van Fraassen’s much debated and explored view of science—is inconsistent. We then argue there are at least two ways out of our Inconsistency Argument, one of which is more easily to square with Constructive Empiricism than the other.

This work consists of two parts. Part I will be a contribution to a philo- sophical discussion of the nature of causal explanation. It will present my contrastive counterfactual theory of causal explanation and show how it can be used to deal with a number of problems facing theories of causal explanation. Part II is a contribution to a discussion of the na- ture of interest explanation in social studies of science. The aim is to help to resolve some controversies (...) concerning interest explanation by explicating the concept of interest and its explanatory uses by using the account of explanation developed in Part I. (shrink)

This paper aims to cast light on the reasons that explain the shift of opinion—from scepticism to realism—concerning the reality of atoms and molecules in the beginning of the twentieth century, in light of Jean Perrin’s theoretical and experimental work on the Brownian movement. The story told has some rather interesting repercussions for the rationality of accepting the reality of explanatory posits. Section 2 presents the key philosophical debate concerning the role and status of explanatory hypotheses c. 1900, focusing on (...) the work of Duhem, Stallo, Ostwald, Poincaré and Boltzmann. Section 3 examines in detail Perrin’s theoretical account of the molecular origins of Brownian motion, reconstructs the structure and explains the strength of Perrin’s argument for the reality of molecules. Section 4 draws three important lessons for the current debate over scientific realism. (shrink)

In this paper, I motivate skepticism about the causal efficacy of moral properties in two ways. First, I highlight a tension that arises between two claims that moral realists may want to accept. The first claim is that physically indistinguishable things do not differ in any causally efficacious respect. The second claim is that physically indistinguishable things that differ in certain historical respects have different moral properties. The tension arises to the extent to which these different moral properties are supposed (...) to have different effects on people. I will introduce a class of cases in which this tension arises and suggest that the moral properties in these cases have no causal power. I will also question whether there are differences between the moral properties in these cases and moral properties in other cases that do not involve physically indistinguishable things that could make the latter moral properties causally efficacious. The second way that I motivate skepticism consists in pointing out a unique feature of cases in which moral properties are supposed both to supervene on historical properties and to be causally efficacious. These cases allow us to change moral properties with alleged effects while we hold constant the nonmoral candidates for causal contribution to those effects. This feature of these cases is unique because in most other cases the moral properties supervene on the physical properties in the nonmoral candidates, such that we cannot change the former while holding constant the latter. This way of changing moral properties provides empirical grounds for testing their causal efficacy. (shrink)

Sherri Roush ([2005]) and I ([2001], [2006]) have each argued independently that the most significant challenge to scientific realism arises from our inability to consider the full range of serious alternatives to a given hypothesis we seek to test, but we diverge significantly concerning the range of cases in which this problem becomes acute. Here I argue against Roush's further suggestion that the atomic hypothesis represents a case in which scientific ingenuity has enabled us to overcome the problem, showing how (...) her general strategy is undermined by evidence I have already offered in support of what I have called the 'problem of unconceived alternatives'. I then go on to show why her strategy will not generally (if ever) allow us to formulate and test exhaustive spaces of hypotheses in cases of fundamental scientific theorizing. (shrink)

For moral realists moral judgments will be a kind of factual judgment that involves the basically reliable apprehension of an objective moral reality. I argue that factual judgments display at least some degree of conceptual sensitivity to error, while moral judgments do not. Therefore moral judgments are not a kind of factual judgment.

This paper discusses the nature and the status of inference to the best explanation. We outline the foundational role given IBE by its defenders and the arguments of critics who deny it any place at all ; argue that, on the two main conceptions of explanation, IBE cannot be a foundational inference rule ; sketch an account of IBE that makes it contextual and dependent on substantive empirical assumptions, much as simplicity seems to be ; show how that account avoids (...) the critics ' complaints and leaves IBE an important role ; and sketch how our account can clarify debates over IBE in arguments for scientific realism. (shrink)

Scientists and laypeople alike use the sense of understanding that an explanation conveys as a cue to good or correct explanation. Although the occurrence of this sense or feeling of understanding is neither necessary nor sufficient for good explanation, it does drive judgments of the plausibility and, ultimately, the acceptability, of an explanation. This paper presents evidence that the sense of understanding is in part the routine consequence of two well-documented biases in cognitive psychology: overconfidence and hindsight. In light of (...) the prevalence of counterfeit understanding in the history of science, I argue that many forms of cognitive achievement do not involve a sense of understanding, and that only the truth or accuracy of an explanation make the sense of understanding a valid cue to genuine understanding. (shrink)

A particularly important topic for Marxist theory is that of popular politics: the ways in which the underclasses of society express their interests and values through collective action. Classical Marxism postulates a fundamental conflict of interest among classes. It holds that exploited classes will come to an accurate assessment of their class interests, and will engage in appropriate collective actions to secure those interests. The result is a predicted variety of forms of underclass collective action: boycotts, rent strikes, tax and (...) food riots, rebellion, and revolution. Underclass members of society instigate and support such protests because it is in their material class interest to do so. It will emerge, however, that this account is too schematic to provide a basis for explanation of popular politics. The microfoundations approach to Marxist theory will prove useful in this context because it directs us to some of the resources needed to provide a more adequate account of popular collective action. (shrink)

Inference to the Best Explanation has become the subject of a livelydebate in the philosophy of science. Scientific realists maintain, while scientificantirealists deny, that it is a compelling rule of inference. It seems that anyattempt to settle this debate empirically must beg the question against theantirealist. The present paper argues that this impression is misleading. A methodis described that, by combining Glymour's theory of bootstrapping and Hacking'sarguments from microscopy, allows us to test IBE without begging any antirealistissues.

Partial explanations are everywhere. That is, explanations citing causes that explain some but not all of an effect are ubiquitous across science, and these in turn rely on the notion of degree of explanation. I argue that current accounts are seriously deficient. In particular, they do not incorporate adequately the way in which a cause’s explanatory importance varies with choice of explanandum. Using influential recent contrastive theories, I develop quantitative definitions that remedy this lacuna, and relate it to existing measures (...) of degree of causation. Among other things, this reveals the precise role here of chance, as well as bearing on the relation between causal explanation and causation itself. (shrink)

Part of the work for this paper was done during the tenure of a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I am grateful for financial support provided by the National Science Foundation, Grant #BNS-8011494, and for the assistance of the staff of the Center. I also want to thank David Bloor, Stephen Downes, David Hull and Andy Pickering for offering good advice and criticism, some of which I have heeded.

The rise of behavioral economics since the 1980s led to richer mutual influence between economic and psychological theory and experimentation. However, as behavioral economics has become increasingly integrated into the main stream in economics, and as psychology has remained damagingly methodologically conservative, this convergence has recently gone into reverse. At the same time, growing appreciation among economists of the limitations of atomistic individualism, along with advantages in econometric modeling flexibility by comparison with psychometrics, is leading economists to become more pluralistic (...) than psychologists about the ontology of behavioral causation and structures. This, combined with economists’ growing interest in network models, is drawing economists closer in theory and practice to sociologists who use quantitative or mixed methods. (shrink)

The theory of concepts advanced in the dissertation aims at accounting for a) how a concept makes successful practice possible, and b) how a scientific concept can be subject to rational change in the course of history. Traditional accounts in the philosophy of science have usually studied concepts in terms only of their reference; their concern is to establish a stability of reference in order to address the incommensurability problem. My discussion, in contrast, suggests that each scientific concept consists of (...) three components of content: 1) reference, 2) inferential role, and 3) the epistemic goal pursued with the concept's use. I argue that in the course of history a concept can change in any of these three components, and that change in one component—including change of reference—can be accounted for as being rational relative to other components, in particular a concept's epistemic goal.This semantic framework is applied to two cases from the history of biology: the homology concept as used in 19th and 20th century biology, and the gene concept as used in different parts of the 20th century. The homology case study argues that the advent of Darwinian evolutionary theory, despite introducing a new definition of homology, did not bring about a new homology concept (distinct from the pre-Darwinian concept) in the 19th century. Nowadays, however, distinct homology concepts are used in systematics/evolutionary biology, in evolutionary developmental biology, and in molecular biology. The emergence of these different homology concepts is explained as occurring in a rational fashion. The gene case study argues that conceptual progress occurred with the transition from the classical to the molecular gene concept, despite a change in reference. In the last two decades, change occurred internal to the molecular gene concept, so that nowadays this concept's usage and reference varies from context to context. I argue that this situation emerged rationally and that the current variation in usage and reference is conducive to biological practice.The dissertation uses ideas and methodological tools from the philosophy of mind and language, the philosophy of science, the history of science, and the psychology of concepts. (shrink)

The vagueness or imprecision of ‘the normal’ allows it to be exploited for various purposes and political ends. It is conspicuous in both medicine and athletics; I am going to try to say something about the normal in each of these areas. In medicine the idea of the normal is often deployed in understanding what constitutes disease and hence, as some see it, in determining the role of physicians, in determining what is or ought to be covered by insurance, and (...) in underwriting certain views on social justice. In athletics the use of performance enhancing substances raises different sorts of questions about the normal, especially when it comes to deciding what constitutes an enhancement and which enhancements, if any, are acceptable. (shrink)

En este trabajo hago una comparación sistemática entre las dos teorías de la confirmación más populares en la actualidad: el método hipotético-deductivo y el bayesianismo. En primer lugar, enumero los cinco problemas fundamentales de la teoría hipotético-deductivista. Estos son el problema de las hipótesis estadísticas, el del grado de confirmación, el de la conjunción irrelevante, el del holismo epistemológico y el de las hipótesis alternativas. Luego, hago una presentación general de la epistemología bayesiana y muestro de qué manera estos problemas (...) resultan tratables en el marco bayesiano. Finalmente, concluyo que los tres primeros admiten una solución satisfactoria, sobre la base de algunos supuestos razonables. Los dos últimos, en cambio, todavía son problemas abiertos para la teoría bayesiana de la confirmación. Bayesians often affirm they have produced the best available theory of confirmation. In particular, they claim to have superseded the venerable hypothetico-deductive method. In this paper I intend to assess that claim by making a systematic comparison between both theories of confirmation. I begin by listing the main problems of hypothetico-deductive confirmation. I then show that this conception is incompatible with Hempel's conditions of adequacy for qualitative confirmation. I expound the Bayesian theory of confirmation with some detail in order to show that this theory is able to solve three out of the five fundamental problems of hypothetico-deductive confirmation. largue that the remaining two problems are still open questions for the Bayesians. (shrink)

Arguably, there is no substantial, general answer to the question of what makes for the approximate truth of theories. But in one class of cases, the issue seems simply resolved. A wide class of applied dynamical theories can be treated as two-component theories—one component specifying a certain kind of abstract geometrical structure, the other giving empirical application to this structure by claiming that it replicates, subject to arbitrary scaling for units etc., the geometric structure to be found in some real-world (...) dynamical phenomenon. In such a case, a theory is approximately true just if the one geometric structure approximately replicates the other (and if problems remain here, they are problems in geometry, of specifying suitable metric approximation relations, not conceptual problems). This article amplifies and defends this simple approach to approximate truth for dynamical theories. (shrink)

A few years ago, Bas van Fraassen reminded philosophers of science that there are two central questions that a theory of explanation ought to answer. First, what is a explanation—when has something been explained satisfactorily? Second, why do we value explanations? . For a long time, discussions of explanation concentrated on technical problems connected with the first of these questions, and the second was by and large ignored. But, in fact, I think it is the second question which raises the (...) more fundamental and interesting philosophical issues. I shall offer reasons for thinking that the answer to the first question requires acceptance of the sort of fullblown notion of causation that only a scientific realist can love, and that the answer to the second question requires a realist construal of scientific theories and scientific methodology. My argument will be mainly negative, surveying the problems facing some major alternative accounts of explanation. A full elaboration of the realist perspective will have to await the completion of work in progress. (shrink)

Philosophers and historians of philosophy have come to recognize that at the core of logical positivism was an attachment to prediction as the necessary condition for scientific knowledge.1 The inheritors of their tradition, especially the Bayesians among us, continue to seek a theory of confirmation that reflects this epistemic commitment. The importance of prediction in the growth of scientific knowledge is a commitment I share with the positivists, so I do not blanch at that designation, much less employ it as (...) a term of abuse. Precisely expressing and conclusively establishing the claims of prediction as a necessary condition for certifying claims as increments of knowledge is a goal that has so far eluded us post-positivists. Philosophers know the problems well: defining a positive instance, distinguishing projectible from nonprojectible predicates, deciding whether retrodiction is as epistemically probative as prediction. 2 But I can't help thinking that these problems are technicalities - important and arresting, but not impediments to embracing the positivist demand that increments in scientific knowledge withstand tests of predictive success. (shrink)