When do we agree? The answer might once have seemed simple and obvious; we agree that p when we each believe that p. But from a formal epistemological perspective, where degrees of belief are more fundamental than beliefs, this answer is unsatisfactory. On the one hand, there is reason to suppose that it is false; degrees of belief about p might differ when beliefs simpliciter on p do not. On the other hand, even if it is true, it is too (...) vague; for what it is to believe simpliciter ought to be explained in terms of degrees of belief. This paper presents several possible notions of agreement, and corresponding notions of disagreement. It indicates how the findings are fruitful for the epistemology of disagreement, with special reference to the notion of epistemic peerhood. (shrink)

Simon Blackburn has argued that science finds only dispositional properties. If true, this is surprising: we think of the world as containing categorical properties too. But Blackburn thinks that our difficulties go further than this: that the idea of a world containing just dispositional properties is not simply surprising, but incoherent. The problem is made clear, he argues, when we have a counterfactual analysis of dispositions, and then understand counterfactuals in terms of possible worlds.

Science and valuation — remarks about the condition of philosophical re ection on science this text is an attempt at a more general look at twentieth‐century philosophical re ection on science conceived as persistent trials to eliminate the non‐eliminateable, i.e. valuations. In this article, I recall the most important concepts of knowledge developed in the twentieth‐century philosophy of science by exposing assumed axiology in, among other things: the Vienna Circle, Karl raimund Popper’s falsi cationism, the historical and social approach of (...) thomas S. Kuhn’s paradigm, and the concept of the ideals of knowledge by Stefan Amsterdamski. I argue that the axiology, and more broadly philosophy is an indelible com‐ ponent of each accepted concept of scienti c knowledge. each concept of knowledge assumes a form of its valuation. (shrink)

In this paper, three theories of progress and the aim of science are discussed: the theory of progress as increasing explanatory power, advocated by Popper in The logic of scientific discovery ; the theory of progress as approximation to the truth, introduced by Popper in Conjectures and refutations ; the theory of progress as a steady increase of competing alternatives, which Feyerabend put forward in the essay “Reply to criticism. Comments on Smart, Sellars and Putnam” and defended as late as (...) the last edition of Against method. It is argued that, contrary to what Feyerabend scholars have predominantly assumed, Feyerabend's changing attitude towards falsificationism—which he often advocated at the beginning of his career, and vociferously attacked in the 1970s and 1980s—must be explained by taking into account not only Feyerabend's very peculiar view of the aim of science, but also Popper's changing account of progress. (shrink)

In The Philosophy of Information, Luciano Floridi presents a theory of “strongly semantic information”, based on the idea that “information encapsulates truth” (the so-called “veridicality thesis”). Starting with Popper, philosophers of science have developed different explications of the notion of verisimilitude or truthlikeness, construed as a combination of truth and information. Thus, the theory of strongly semantic information and the theory of verisimilitude are intimately tied. Yet, with few exceptions, this link has virtually pass unnoticed. In this paper, we briefly (...) survey both theories and offer a critical comparison of strongly semantic information and related notions, like truth, verisimilitude, and partial truth. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the problem of truth approximation via belief merging, i.e., we ask whether, and under what conditions, a group of inquirers merging together their beliefs makes progress toward the truth about the underlying domain. We answer this question by proving some formal results on how belief merging operators perform with respect to the task of truth approximation, construed as increasing verisimilitude or truthlikeness. Our results shed new light on the issue of how rational (dis)agreement affects the (...) inquirers’ quest for truth. In particular, they vindicate the intuition that scientific inquiry, and rational discussion in general, benefits from some heterogeneity in opinion and interaction among different viewpoints. The links between our approach and related analyses of truth tracking, judgment aggregation, and opinion dynamics, are also highlighted. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on two claims, put forward by Feyerabend in his later writings , which constitute the metaphysical core of his view of scientific inquiry. The first, that we call the pliability thesis, is the claim that the world can be described by indefinitely many conceptual systems, none of them enjoying a privileged status. The second, that we call the resistance thesis, is the claim that the pliability of the world is limited, i.e., not all the different (...) conceptual systems that can be used to describe the world will be equally successful: the world offers resistance to some attempts to describe it. We show that, in spite of the later Feyerabend’s notorious antirealist leanings, the pliability thesis is fully compatible with a robustly realist view of science, and we suggest that, surprisingly, Feyerabend’s insights concerning the limited pliability of the world turn out to be those of a potential ally of sophisticated versions of scientific realism. (shrink)

As the ongoing literature on the paradoxes of the Lottery and the Preface reminds us, the nature of the relation between probability and rational acceptability remains far from settled. This article provides a novel perspective on the matter by exploiting a recently noted structural parallel with the problem of judgment aggregation. After offering a number of general desiderata on the relation between finite probability models and sets of accepted sentences in a Boolean sentential language, it is noted that a number (...) of these constraints will be satisfied if and only if acceptable sentences are true under all valuations in a distinguished non-empty set W. Drawing inspiration from distance-based aggregation procedures, various scoring rule based membership conditions for W are discussed and a possible point of contact with ranking theory is considered. The paper closes with various suggestions for further research. (shrink)

Classical logic is explosive in the face of contradiction, yet we find ourselves using inconsistent theories. Mark Colyvan, one of the prominent advocates of the indispensability argument for realism about mathematical objects, suggests that such use can be garnered to develop an argument for commitment to inconsistent objects and, because of that, a paraconsistent underlying logic. I argue to the contrary that it is open to a classical logician to make distinctions, also needed by the paraconsistent logician, which allow a (...) more nuanced ranking of theories in which inconsistent theories can have different degrees of usefulness and productivity. Facing inconsistency does not force us to adopt an underlying paraconsistent logic. Moreover we will see that the argument to best explanation deployed by Colyvan in this context is unsuccessful. I suggest that Quinean approach which Colyvan champions will not lead to the revolutionary doctrines Colyvan endorses. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that, just as the problem of unconceived alternatives provides a basis for a New Induction on the History of Science to the effect that a realist view of science is unwarranted, the problem of unconceived objections provides a basis for a New Induction on the History of Philosophy to the effect that a realist view of philosophy is unwarranted. I raise this problem not only for skepticism’s sake but also for the sake of making a (...) point about philosophical argumentation, namely, that anticipating objections to one’s claim is not the same as supporting one’s claim. In other words, defending p from objections does not amount to support or evidence for p. This, in turn, presents dialectical and pragma-dialectical approaches to argumentation with the following question: does proper argumentation require that arguers anticipate and respond to unconceived objections? (shrink)

In this paper we show that the coherence measures of Olsson (J Philos 94:246–272, 2002), Shogenji (Log Anal 59:338–345, 1999), and Fitelson (Log Anal 63:194–199, 2003) satisfy the two most important adequacy requirements for the purpose of assessing theories. Following Hempel (Synthese 12:439–469, 1960), Levi (Gambling with truth, New York, A. A. Knopf, 1967), and recently Huber (Synthese 161:89–118, 2008) we require, as minimal or necessary conditions, that adequate assessment functions favor true theories over false theories and true and informative (...) theories over true but uninformative theories. We then demonstrate that the coherence measures of Olsson, Shogenji, and Fitelson satisfy these minimal conditions if we confront the hypotheses with a separating sequence of observational statements. In the concluding remarks we set out the philosophical relevance, and limitations, of the formal results. Inter alia, we discuss the problematic implications of our precondition that competing hypotheses must be confronted with a separating sequence of observational statements, which also leads us to discuss theory assessment in the context of scientific antirealism. (shrink)

We investigate the logical and conceptual connections between abductive reasoning construed as a process of belief change, on the one hand, and truth approximation, construed as increasing (estimated) verisimilitude, on the other. We introduce the notion of ‘(verisimilitude-guided) abductive belief change’ and discuss under what conditions abductively changing our theories or beliefs does lead them closer to the truth, and hence tracks truth approximation conceived as the main aim of inquiry. The consequences of our analysis for some recent discussions concerning (...) belief revision aiming at truth approximation and inference to the best explanation are also highlighted. (shrink)

Alexander Bird argues for an epistemic account of scientific progress, whereas Darrell Rowbottom argues for a semantic account. Both appeal to intuitions about hypothetical cases in support of their accounts. Since the methodological significance of such appeals to intuition is unclear, I think that a new approach might be fruitful at this stage in the debate. So I propose to abandon appeals to intuition and look at scientific practice instead. I discuss two cases that illustrate the way in which scientists (...) make judgments about progress. As far as scientists are concerned, progress is made when scientific discoveries contribute to the increase of scientific knowledge of the following sorts: empirical, theoretical, practical, and methodological. I then propose to articulate an account of progress that does justice to this broad conception of progress employed by scientists. I discuss one way of doing so, namely, by expanding our notion of scientific knowledge to include both know-that and know-how. (shrink)

In this article, through a critical examination of K. Brad Wray's version of the argument from underconsideration against scientific realism, I articulate a modest version of scientific realism. This modest realist position, which I call ‘relative realism’, preserves the scientific realist's optimism about science's ability to get closer to the truth while, at the same time, taking on board the antirealist's premise that theory evaluation is comparative, and thus that there are no good reasons to think that science's best theories (...) are close to the truth. (shrink)

In this paper we provide a compact presentation of the verisimilitudinarian approach to scientific progress (VS, for short) and defend it against the sustained attack recently mounted by Alexander Bird (2007). Advocated by such authors as Ilkka Niiniluoto and Theo Kuipers, VS is the view that progress can be explained in terms of the increasing verisimilitude (or, equivalently, truthlikeness, or approximation to the truth) of scientific theories. According to Bird, VS overlooks the central issue of the appropriate grounding of scientific (...) beliefs in the evidence, and it is therefore unable (a) to reconstruct in a satisfactory way some hypothetical cases of scientific progress, and (b) to provide an explanation of the aversion to falsity that characterizes scientific practice. We rebut both of these criticisms and argue that they reveal a misunderstanding of some key concepts underlying VS. (shrink)

Karl Popper is famous for having proposed that science advances by a process of conjecture and refutation. He is also famous for defending the open society against what he saw as its arch enemies – Plato and Marx. Popper’s contributions to thought are of profound importance, but they are not the last word on the subject. They need to be improved. My concern in this book is to spell out what is of greatest importance in Popper’s work, what its failings (...) are, how it needs to be improved to overcome these failings, and what implications emerge as a result. The book consists of a collection of essays which dramatically develop Karl Popper’s views about natural and social science, and how we should go about trying to solve social problems. Criticism of Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of natural science leads to a conception of science that I call aim-oriented empiricism. This makes explicit metaphysical theses concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe that are an implicit part of scientific knowledge – implicit in the way science excludes all theories that are not explanatory, even those that are more successful empirically than accepted theories. Aim-oriented empiricism has major implications, not just for the academic discipline of philosophy of science, but for science itself. Popper generalized his philosophy of science of falsificationism to arrive at a new conception of rationality – critical rationalism – the key methodological idea of Popper’s profound critical exploration of political and social issues in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, and The Poverty of Historicism. This path of Popper, from scientific method to rationality and social and political issues is followed here, but the starting point is aim-oriented empiricism rather than falsificationism. Aim-oriented empiricism is generalized to form a conception of rationality I call aim-oriented rationalism. This has far-reaching implications for political and social issues, for the nature of social inquiry and the humanities, and indeed for academic inquiry as a whole. The strategies for tackling social problems that arise from aim-oriented rationalism improve on Popper’s recommended strategies of piecemeal social engineering and critical rationalism, associated with Popper’s conception of the open society. This book thus sets out to develop Popper’s philosophy in new and fruitful directions. The theme of the book, in short, is to discover what can be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress towards a better world. (shrink)

The modern history of verisimilitude can be divided into three periods. The first began in 1960, when Karl Popper proposed his qualitative definition of what it is for one theory to be more truthlike than another theory, and lasted until 1974, when David Miller and Pavel Trichý published their refutation of Popper's definition. The second period started immediately with the attempt to explicate truthlikeness by means of relations of similarity or resemblance between states of affairs (or their linguistic representations); the (...) work within this similarity approach was summarized in the books of Graham Oddie [1986] and Ilkka Niiniluoto [1987]. During the subsequent third period, studies in verisimilitude have been actively continued, and interesting results and applications have been achieved, but not many dramatic novelties. While it is now obsolete to claim that truthlikeness with reasonable properties cannot be defined at all, there is still a lot of controversy about the best and least arbitrary approach to doing this. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that qualitative theories (Q-theories) can be used to describe the statistical structure of cross classified populations and that the notion of verisimilitude provides an appropriate tool for measuring the statistical adequacy of Q-theories. First of all, a short outline of the post-Popperian approaches to verisimilitude and of the related verisimilitudinarian non-falsificationist methodologies (VNF-methodologies) is given. Secondly, the notion of Q-theory is explicated, and the qualitative verisimilitude of Q-theories is defined. Afterwards, appropriate measures for the (...) statistical verisimilitude of Q-theories are introduced, so to obtain a clear formulation of the intuitive idea that the statistical truth about cross classified populations can be approached by falsified Q-theories. Finally, it is argued that some basic intuitions underlying VNF-methodologies are shared by the so-called prediction logic, developed by the statisticians and social scientists David K. Hildebrand, James D. Laing and Howard Rosenthal. (shrink)

Starting from the sixties of the past century theory change has become a main concern of philosophy of science. Two of the best known formal accounts of theory change are the post-Popperian theories of verisimilitude (PPV for short) and the AGM theory of belief change (AGM for short). In this paper, we will investigate the conceptual relations between PPV and AGM and, in particular, we will ask whether the AGM rules for theory change are effective means for approaching the truth, (...) i.e., for achieving the cognitive aim of science pointed out by PPV. First, the key ideas of PPV and AGM and their application to a particular kind of propositional theories - the so called "conjunctive propositions" - will be illustrated. Afterwards, we will prove that, as far as conjunctive propositions are concerned, AGM belief change is an effective tool for approaching the truth. (shrink)

One of the fundamental problems of epistemology is to say when the evidence in an agent’s possession justifies the beliefs she holds. In this paper and its sequel, we defend the Bayesian solution to this problem by appealing to the following fundamental norm: Accuracy An epistemic agent ought to minimize the inaccuracy of her partial beliefs. In this paper, we make this norm mathematically precise in various ways. We describe three epistemic dilemmas that an agent might face if she attempts (...) to follow Accuracy, and we show that the only inaccuracy measures that do not give rise to such dilemmas are the quadratic inaccuracy measures. In the sequel, we derive the main tenets of Bayesianism from the relevant mathematical versions of Accuracy to which this characterization of the legitimate inaccuracy measures gives rise, but we also show that Jeffrey conditionalization has to be replaced by a different method of update in order for Accuracy to be satisfied. (shrink)

Both Popper and van Fraassen have used evolutionary analogies to defend their views on the aim of science, although these are diametrically opposed. By employing Price's equation in an illustrative capacity, this paper considers which view is better supported. It shows that even if our observations and experimental results are reliable, an evolutionary analogy fails to demonstrate why conjecture and refutation should result in: (1) the isolation of true theories; (2) successive generations of theories of increasing truth-likeness; (3) empirically adequate (...) theories; or (4) successive generations of theories of increasing proximity to empirical adequacy. Furthermore, it illustrates that appeals to induction do not appear to help. It concludes that an evolutionary analogy is only sufficient to defend the notion that the aim of science is to isolate a particular class of false theories, namely those that are empirically inadequate. (shrink)

Many researchers want to unify probability and logic by defining logical probability or probabilistic logic reasonably. This paper tries to unify statistics and logic so that we can use both statistical probability and logical probability at the same time. For this purpose, this paper proposes the P–T probability framework, which is assembled with Shannon’s statistical probability framework for communication, Kolmogorov’s probability axioms for logical probability, and Zadeh’s membership functions used as truth functions. Two kinds of probabilities are connected by an (...) extended Bayes’ theorem, with which we can convert a likelihood function and a truth function from one to another. Hence, we can train truth functions (in logic) by sampling distributions (in statistics). This probability framework was developed in the author’s long-term studies on semantic information, statistical learning, and color vision. This paper first proposes the P–T probability framework and explains different probabilities in it by its applications to semantic information theory. Then, this framework and the semantic information methods are applied to statistical learning, statistical mechanics, hypothesis evaluation (including falsification), confirmation, and Bayesian reasoning. Theoretical applications illustrate the reasonability and practicability of this framework. This framework is helpful for interpretable AI. To interpret neural networks, we need further study. (shrink)

This book argues for the need to put into practice a profound and comprehensive intellectual revolution, affecting to a greater or lesser extent all branches of scientific and technological research, scholarship and education. This intellectual revolution differs, however, from the now familiar kind of scientific revolution described by Kuhn. It does not primarily involve a radical change in what we take to be knowledge about some aspect of the world, a change of paradigm. Rather it involves a radical change in (...) the fundamental, overall intellectual aims and methods of inquiry. At present inquiry is devoted to the enhancement of knowledge. This needs to be transformed into a kind of rational inquiry having as its basic aim to enhance personal and social wisdom. This new kind of inquiry gives intellectual priority to the personal and social problems we encounter in our lives as we strive to realize what is desirable and of value – problems of knowledge and technology being intellectually subordinate and secondary. For this new kind of inquiry, it is what we do and what we are that ultimately matters: our knowledge is but an aspect of our life and being. (shrink)

Karl Popper is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. No other philosopher of the period has produced a body of work that is as significant. What is best in Popper's output is contained in his first four published books. These tackle fundamental problems with ferocious, exemplary integrity, clarity, simplicity and originality. They have widespread, fruitful implications, for science, for philosophy, for the social sciences, for education, for art, for politics and political philosophy. This article provides a critical survey of (...) Popper’s work. (shrink)

(i) Scientific realism is primarily a metaphysical doctrine about the existence and nature of the unobservables of science. (ii) There are good explanationist arguments for realism, most famously that from the success of science, provided abduction is allowed. Abduction seems to be on an equal footing, at least, with other ampliative methods of inference. (iii) We have no reason to believe a doctrine of empirical equivalence that would sustain the underdetermination argument against realism. (iv) The key to defending realism from (...) the pessimistic meta-induction is that we have greatly improved our capacity to understand the unobservable world over recent centuries. (shrink)

The main formal notion involved in qualitative truth approximation by the HD-method, viz. ‘more truthlike’, is shown to not only have, by its definition, an intuitively appealing ‘model foundation’, but also, at least partially, a conceptually plausible ‘consequence foundation’. Moreover, combining the relevant parts of both leads to a very appealing ‘dual foundation’, the more so since the relevant methodological notions, viz. ‘more successful’ and its ingredients provided by the HD-method, can be given a similar dual foundation. According to the (...) resulting dual foundation of ‘naive truth approximation’, the HD-method provides successes (established true consequences) and counterexamples (established wrongly missing models) of theories. Such HD-results may support the tentative conclusion that one theory seems to remain more successful than another in the naive sense of having more successes and fewer counterexamples. If so, this provides good reasons for believing that the more successful theory is also more truthlike in the naive sense of having more correct models and more true consequences. (shrink)

Popper's definition of verisimilitude was criticized for its paradoxical consequences in the case of false theories. The aim of this paper is to show that paradoxes disappear if the falsity content of a theory is defined with help of dCn or Cn –1.

Zwart and Franssen’s impossibility theorem reveals a conflict between the possible-world-based content-definition and the possible-world-based likeness-definition of verisimilitude. In Sect. 2 we show that the possible-world-based content-definition violates four basic intuitions of Popper’s consequence-based content-account to verisimilitude, and therefore cannot be said to be in the spirit of Popper’s account, although this is the opinion of some prominent authors. In Sect. 3 we argue that in consequence-accounts , content-aspects and likeness-aspects of verisimilitude are not in conflict with each other, but (...) in agreement . We explain this fact by pointing towards the deep difference between possible-world- and the consequence-accounts, which does not lie in the difference between syntactic (object-language) versus semantic (meta-language) formulations, but in the difference between ‘disjunction-of-possible-worlds’ versus ‘conjunction-of-parts’ representations of theories. Drawing on earlier work, we explain in Sect. 4 how the shortcomings of Popper’s original definition can be repaired by what we call the relevant element approach. We propose a quantitative likeness-definition of verisimilitude based on relevant elements which provably agrees with the qualitative relevant content-definition of verisimilitude on all pairs of comparable theories. We conclude the paper with a plea for consequence-accounts and a brief analysis of the problem of language-dependence (Sect. 6). (shrink)

The modern history of verisimilitude can be divided into three periods. The first began in 1960, when Karl Popper proposed his qualitative definition of what it is for one theory to be more truthlike than another theory, and lasted until 1974, when David Miller and Pavel Trich published their refutation of Popper's definition. The second period started immediately with the attempt to explicate truthlikeness by means of relations of similarity or resemblance between states of affairs (or their linguistic representations); the (...) work within this similarity approach was summarized in the books of Graham Oddie [1986] and Ilkka Niiniluoto [1987]. During the subsequent third period, studies in verisimilitude have been actively continued, and interesting results and applications have been achieved, but not many dramatic novelties. While it is now obsolete to claim that truthlikeness with reasonable properties cannot be defined at all, there is still a lot of controversy about the best and least arbitrary approach to doing this. (shrink)

It is argued that philosophical realism is well suited to serve as a perspective from which to understand nursing, and that it should be considered as an alternative to positivist, interpretivist, hermeneutical and phenomenological approaches. However, existing forms of realism, including theory and entity realism are shown to be faced with serious problems. In response, an alternative form ‘constraint realism’ is outlined, and shown to be apposite for illuminating the rule or convention governed behaviour characteristic of human beings. A brief (...) sketch is offered of its application to the social practice of nursing. (shrink)

There is a large literature exploring how accuracy constrains rational degrees of belief. This paper turns to the unexplored question of how accuracy constrains knowledge. We begin by introducing a simple hypothesis: increases in the accuracy of an agent’s evidence never lead to decreases in what the agent knows. We explore various precise formulations of this principle, consider arguments in its favour, and explain how it interacts with different conceptions of evidence and accuracy. As we show, the principle has some (...) noteworthy consequences for the wider theory of knowledge. First, it implies that an agent cannot be justified in believing a set of mutually inconsistent claims. Second, it implies the existence of a kind of epistemic blindspot: it is not possible to know that one’s evidence is misleading. (shrink)

According to Karl Popper, science cannot verify its theories empirically, but it can falsify them, and that suffices to account for scientific progress. For Popper, a law or theory remains a pure conjecture, probability equal to zero, however massively corroborated empirically it may be. But it does just seem to be the case that science does verify empirically laws and theories. We trust our lives to such verifications when we fly in aeroplanes, cross bridges and take modern medicines. We can (...) do some justice to this apparent capacity of science to verify if we make a number of improvements to Popper’s philosophy of science. The key step is to recognize that physics, in accepting unified theories only, thereby makes a big metaphysical assumption about the nature of the universe. The outcome is a conception of scientific method which facilitates the criticism and improvement of metaphysical assumptions of physics. This view provides, not verification, but a perfect simulacrum of verification indistinguishable from the real thing. (shrink)

The books’ goal is to answer the question: Do the weaknesses of value-free economics imply the need for a paradigm shift? The author synthesizes criticisms from different perspectives (descriptive and methodological). Special attention is paid to choices over time, because in this area value-free economics has the most problems. In that context, the enriched concept of multiple self is proposed and investigated. However, it is not enough to present the criticisms towards value-free economics. For scientists, a bad paradigm is better (...) than no paradigm. Therefore, the author considers whether value-based economics with normative approaches such as economics of happiness, capability approach, libertarian paternalism, and the concept of multiple self can be the alternative paradigm for value-free economics. This book is essential reading to everyone interested in the current state of economics as a discipline. (shrink)

The notion of truthlikeness or verisimilitude has been a topic of intensive discussion ever since the definition proposed by Karl Popper was refuted in 1974. This paper gives an analysis of old and new debates about this notion. There is a fairly large agreement about the truthlikeness ordering of conjunctive theories, but the main rival approaches differ especially about false disjunctive theories. Continuing the debate between Niiniluoto’s min-sum measure and Schurz’s relevant consequence measure, the paper also gives a critical assessment (...) of Oddie’s new defense of the average measure and Kuipers’ refined definition of truth approximation. (shrink)

The paper sets up a general framework for defining the notion of verisimilitude. Popper’s own account of verisimilitude is then located within this framework; and his account is defended on the grounds that it can be seen to provide a reasonable structural or Pareto criterion, rather than a substantive criterion, of verisimilitude. Some other criteria of verisimilitude that may be located within the framework are also considered and their relative merits compared.

Debates about scientific realism are closely connected to almost everything else in the philosophy of science, for they concern the very nature of scientific knowledge. Scientific realism is a positive epistemic attitude toward the content of our best theories and models, recommending belief in both observable and unobservable aspects of the world described by the sciences. This epistemic attitude has important metaphysical and semantic dimensions, and these various commitments are contested by a number of rival epistemologies of science, known collectively (...) as forms of scientific antirealism. This article explains what scientific realism is, outlines its main variants, considers the most common arguments for and against the position, and contrasts it with its most important antirealist counterparts. (shrink)

This paper aims at elucidating the connection between explanatory considerations and epistemic justification stipulated by explanationism which take epistemic justification to be definable in terms of best explanations. By relying on the notion of truthlikeness, this paper argues that it is rational for a subject to expect the best explanation she has for her evidence to be more truthlike than any of the other potential explanations available to her by virtue of containing a class of propositions that, given her evidence, (...) she is justified in believing. Based on this elucidation of the connection between explanatory considerations and epistemic justification, an explanationist account of the evidential support relation is then offered. (shrink)

There is a need to bring about a revolution in the philosophy of science, interpreted to be both the academic discipline, and the official view of the aims and methods of science upheld by the scientific community. At present both are dominated by the view that in science theories are chosen on the basis of empirical considerations alone, nothing being permanently accepted as a part of scientific knowledge independently of evidence. Biasing choice of theory in the direction of simplicity, unity (...) or explanatory power does not permanently commit science to the thesis that nature is simple or unified. This current ‘paradigm’ is, I argue, untenable. We need a new paradigm, which acknowledges that science makes a hierarchy of metaphysical assumptions concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe, theories being chosen partly on the basis of compatibility with these assumptions. Eleven arguments are given for favouring this new ‘paradigm’ over the current one. (shrink)

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)

A typical guiding principle of an account of truth is: “truth is objective,” or, to be clear, judging whether an assertion is true or false depends upon how things are in the world rather than how someone or some community believes it to be. Accordingly, whenever a claim is objectively true, its truth conditions ought not depend upon the context in which it is uttered or the utterer making the claim. Part of our ongoing empirical studies surveying people’s responses to (...) questions about truth involved prompts on objectivity. Our studies suggest the following: overall, individuals tend to endorse claims that are consistent with the objectivity of truth; not all conceptions of objectivity are equal, even people who endorse the objectivity of truth sometimes assent to one form of truth’s objectivity over other forms; philosophers and non-philosophers both endorse the objectivity of truth, but the apparent commitment of philosophers is stronger. (shrink)

It's widely supposed that unification is an epistemic virtue: the degree to which a theory is unified contributes to its overall confirmation. However, this supposition has consequences which haven't been noted, and which undermine the leading accounts of unification. For, given Hempel's equivalence condition, any epistemic virtue must be such that logically equivalent theories must equally well unify any body of evidence, and logically equivalent bodies of evidence must be equally well unified by any theory. Yet the leading accounts of (...) unification in Bayesian terms, or those in terms of argument patterns, cannot satisfy these constraints conditions. The reason for this runs deep: these accounts of unification make unity depend on factors that vary between equivalent theories: the probabilistic relations of their components, or their relations to argument patterns. The solution is to abandon such accounts and instead adopt an account of unity based on worldly relations such as causation, rather than inferential relations. Such an account effortlessly satisfies the equivalence conditions, and so may describe the epistemic virtue of unity. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a unified account of scientific and mathematical change in a thoroughly empiricist setting. After providing a formal modelling in terms of embedding, and criticising it for being too restrictive, a second modelling is advanced. It generalises the first, providing a more open-ended pattern of theory development, and is articulated in terms of da Costa and French's partial structures approach. The crucial component of scientific and mathematical change is spelled out in terms of (...) partial embeddings. Finally, an application of this second pattern is made, with the examination of the early formulation of set theory. (shrink)

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 (...) to argue in favour of scientific realism or constructive empiricism by showing that one set of values is exclusively best, for anyone and everyone, and that the downstream choice of the philosophy of science which best serves those values is therefore best, for anyone and everyone. These efforts, however, seem to have failed. In response, I suggest that philosophers of science should suspend the effort to determine which philosophy of science is best for everyone, and instead begin investigating which philosophy of science is best for specific people, with specific values, in specific contexts. I illustrate how this might be done by briefly sketching a single case study from the history of science, which seems to show that different philosophies of science are better at motivating different forms of scientific practice. (shrink)

Popper’s original definition of verisimilitude in terms of comparisons of truth content and falsity content has known counter-examples. More complicated approaches have met with mixed success. This paper uses a new account of logical content to develop a definition of verisimilitude that is close to Popper’s original account. It is claimed that Popper’s mistake was to couch his account of truth and falsity content in terms of true and false consequences. Comparison to a similar approach by Schurz and Wiengartner show (...) certain advantages of this new approach. (shrink)