This is a response to the papers in the special issue Logical Perspectives on Science and Cognition—The Philosophy of Gerhard Schurz.

Laws of nature take center stage in philosophy of science. Laws are usually believed to stand in a tight conceptual relation to many important key concepts such as causation, explanation, confirmation, determinism, counterfactuals etc. Traditionally, philosophers of science have focused on physical laws, which were taken to be at least true, universal statements that support counterfactual claims. But, although this claim about laws might be true with respect to physics, laws in the special sciences (such as biology, psychology, economics etc.) (...) appear to have—maybe not surprisingly—different features than the laws of physics. Special science laws—for instance, the economic law “Under the condition of perfect competition, an increase of demand of a commodity leads to an increase of price, given that the quantity of the supplied commodity remains constant” and, in biology, Mendel's Laws—are usually taken to “have exceptions”, to be “non-universal” or “to be ceteris paribus laws”. How and whether the laws of physics and the laws of the special sciences differ is one of the crucial questions motivating the debate on ceteris paribus laws. Another major, controversial question concerns the determination of the precise meaning of “ceteris paribus”. Philosophers have attempted to explicate the meaning of ceteris paribus clauses in different ways. The question of meaning is connected to the problem of empirical content, i.e., the question whether ceteris paribus laws have non-trivial and empirically testable content. Since many philosophers have argued that ceteris paribus laws lack empirically testable content, this problem constitutes a major challenge to a theory of ceteris paribus laws. (shrink)

The animalist says we are animals. This thesis is commonly understood as the universal generalization that all human persons are human animals. This article proposes an alternative: the thesis is a generic that admits of exceptions. We defend the resulting view, which we call ‘generic animalism’, and show its aptitude for diagnosing the limits of eight case-based objections to animalism.

The paper begins by focusing the basic idea that Gestalt phenomena belong not only to the realm of perception but to the realm of inference. It is shown that Gestalt effects often occur both in counterfactual and in ampliative – i.e. inductive and abductive – reasoning. The main thesis of the paper is that the common feature of such forms of non-deductive reasoning is provided by a rational selection between incompatible conclusions, where rationality lies in the choice of the alternative (...) which preserves the maximum of background information. It is also stressed a distinction between a weak and a strong notion of incompatibility. Such distinction may help in giving account of some alleged Gestalt phenomena which have been recognized in theory construction and theory change. (shrink)

This article discusses the concept of evidential reasoning in the context of qualitative research methods in the social sciences. A conceptualization of qualitative evidential reasoning is proposed...

From among philosophical concepts of explanation those referring to causes have been the most influential. The aim of this paper it to show that a particular kind of causal explanations, namely dispositional explanations are particularly suited to explain the workings of the world. Apart from purely philosophical arguments, I claim that the view treating dispositions as important elements of the basic ontology of nature is in line with the Christian worldview and the ways God impacts the world. Also, this paper (...) shows that dispositional explanations are not only appropriate in the domains studied by natural sciences but also in the ones being under investigation in social sciences, and thus the case of economics. (shrink)

In this paper, I present the problem of scientific change as an explanatory problem, that is, as a philosophical problem concerning what logical forms of explanation we should employ in order to un...