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  1. Optimality justifications: new foundations for foundation-oriented epistemology.Gerhard Schurz - 2018 - Synthese 195 (9):3877-3897.
    In this paper a new conception of foundation-oriented epistemology is developed. The major challenge for foundation-oriented justifications consists in the problem of stopping the justificational regress without taking recourse to dogmatic assumptions or circular reasoning. Two alternative accounts that attempt to circumvent this problem, coherentism and externalism, are critically discussed and rejected as unsatisfactory. It is argued that optimality arguments are a new type of foundation-oriented justification that can stop the justificational regress. This is demonstrated on the basis of a (...)
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  • Towards a theory of abduction based on conditionals.Rolf Pfister - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-30.
    Abduction is considered the most powerful, but also the most controversially discussed type of inference. Based on an analysis of Peirce’s retroduction, Lipton’s Inference to the Best Explanation and other theories, a new theory of abduction is proposed. It considers abduction not as intrinsically explanatory but as intrinsically conditional: for a given fact, abduction allows one to infer a fact that implies it. There are three types of abduction: Selective abduction selects an already known conditional whose consequent is the given (...)
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  • We Have Big Data, But Do We Need Big Theory? Review-Based Remarks on an Emerging Problem in the Social Sciences.Hermann Astleitner - 2024 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 54 (1):69-92.
    Big data represents a significant challenge for the social sciences. From a philosophy-of-science perspective, it is important to reflect on related theories and processes for developing them. In this paper, we start by examining different views on the role of theories in big data-related social research. Then, we try to show how big data is related to standards for evaluating theories. We also outline how big data affects theory- and data-based research approaches and the process of theory building. Discussions include (...)
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  • Methods of Inference and Shaken Baby Syndrome.Nicholas Binney - 2023 - Philosophy of Medicine 4 (1).
    Exploring the early development of an area of medical literature can inform contemporary medical debates. Different methods of inference include deduction, induction, abduction, and inference to the best explanation. I argue that early shaken baby research is best understood as using abduction to tentatively suggest that infants with unexplained intracranial and ocular bleeding have been assaulted. However, this tentative conclusion was quickly interpreted, by some at least, as a general rule that infants with these pathological signs were certainly cases of (...)
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  • Analyzing Theories in the Frame Model.Stephan Kornmesser & Gerhard Schurz - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (6):1313-1346.
    The frame model was developed in cognitive psychology and imported into the philosophy of science in order to provide representations of scientific concepts and conceptual taxonomies. The aim of this article is to show that beside the representation of scientific concepts the frame model is an efficient instrument to represent and analyze scientific theories. That is, we aim to establish the frame model as a representation tool for the structure of theories within the philosophy of science. For this, we will (...)
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  • Modeling creative abduction Bayesian style.Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla & Alexander Gebharter - 2019 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (1):1-15.
    Schurz (Synthese 164:201–234, 2008) proposed a justification of creative abduction on the basis of the Reichenbachian principle of the common cause. In this paper we take up the idea of combining creative abduction with causal principles and model instances of successful creative abduction within a Bayes net framework. We identify necessary conditions for such inferences and investigate their unificatory power. We also sketch several interesting applications of modeling creative abduction Bayesian style. In particular, we discuss use-novel predictions, confirmation, and the (...)
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