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  1. What Capabilities for the Animal?Dominique Lestel - 2011 - Biosemiotics 4 (1):83-102.
    In this essay, I defend a bi-constructivist approach to ethology—a constructivist ethology assuming that each animal adopts constructivist strategies. I put it in opposition to what I call a realist-Cartesian approach, which is currently the dominant approach to ethology and comparative psychology. The starting point of the bi-constructivist approach can be formulated as a shift from the classical Aristotelian question “What is an animal?” to the Spinozean question, which is much less classical but which seems to me to be much (...)
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  • "Picture theories" as forerunners of the semantic approach to scientific theories.Jean Leroux - 2001 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 15 (2):189 – 197.
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  • Book reviews. [REVIEW]Mary Leng, Kent A. Peacock & Andrew Reynolds - 1999 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 13 (2):195-204.
    Naturalism in Mathematics PENELOPE MADDY, 1997 Oxford, Oxford University Press viii + 254 pp., $CAN91, ISBN 0–19–823573–9 Bohmian Mechanics and Quantum Theory: an Appraisal JAMES T. CUSHING, ARTHUR FINE & SHELDON GOLDSTEIN, 1996 Dordrecht, Kluwer viii + 403, pp., US$159.00, ISBN 0–7923–4028–0 Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: the 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE, 1997 Edited and introduced, with a commentary, by PATRICIA ANN TURRISI Albany, State University of New York Press xi + 305 (...)
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  • An Objective Justification of Bayesianism II: The Consequences of Minimizing Inaccuracy.Hannes Leitgeb & Richard Pettigrew - 2010 - Philosophy of Science 77 (2):236-272.
    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 prequel, 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 the prequel, we made this norm mathematically precise; in this paper, we derive its consequences. We show that the two core tenets of Bayesianism (...)
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  • The Metaphysical Requirement for Models of Prediction and Explanationist Approaches to the Problem of Induction.Jaeho Lee - 2017 - Axiomathes 27 (3):225-242.
    David Armstrong once argued that to solve the problem of induction with inference to the best explanation we need an anti-Humean conception of law. Some Humeans have argued that this argument begs the question against Humeanism. In this paper, I propose a new argument for the same conclusion which is not vulnerable to this criticism. In particular, I argue that explanationist approaches to the problem of induction that are combined with Humeanism is internally incoherent.
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  • Revising Carroll’s Mirror Argument.Jaeho Lee - 2022 - Axiomathes 32 (6):1013-1024.
    In this paper, I examine J. Carroll's “Mirror Argument” against the Humean conception of law and H. Beebee's response to this argument. I will first show that Beebee's criticism is quite plausible if it is refined slightly. Then, I will propose a revised version of the Mirror Argument which is immune to criticisms like that of Beebee's. According to the Humean conception of law, I will argue, we should accept the existence of counterfactual dependence relation where there should not be (...)
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  • A Coherentist Justification of Induction.Byeong D. Lee - 2019 - Erkenntnis 87 (1):35-52.
    In this paper I offer a coherentist justification of induction along the lines of a Sellarsian coherence theory. On this coherence theory, a proposition is justified if we can answer all objections raised against it in our social practice of demanding justification and responding to such demands. On the basis of this theory of justification, I argue that we are justified in accepting the uniformity of nature partly because we have no alternative but to accept it for rationally pursuing our (...)
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  • Defending the Semantic View: what it takes.Soazig Le Bihan - 2012 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 2 (3):249-274.
    In this paper, a modest version of the Semantic View is motivated as both tenable and potentially fruitful for philosophy of science. An analysis is proposed in which the Semantic View is characterized by three main claims. For each of these claims, a distinction is made between stronger and more modest interpretations. It is argued that the criticisms recently leveled against the Semantic View hold only under the stronger interpretations of these claims. However, if one only commits to the modest (...)
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  • Laws Are Not Descriptions.Federico Laudisa - 2015 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 29 (3):251-270.
    The view that takes laws of nature to be essentially nothing more than descriptions of facts is still rather popular. The present article, on the contrary, defends the claim that the only real motivation for defending a descriptive view of laws—the quest for ontological parsimony—entails too high a price to pay in philosophical terms. It is argued that nomic primitivism, namely the alternative option that takes laws to be primitive fundamental entities in our ontology, is decisively more appealing, since it (...)
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  • Infinity machines and creation ex nihilo.Jon Perez Laraudogoitia - 1998 - Synthese 115 (2):259-265.
    In this paper a simple model in particle dynamics of a well-known supertask is constructed (the supertask was introduced by Max Black some years ago). As a consequence, a new and simple result about creation ex nihilo of particles can be proved compatible with classical dynamics. This result cannot be avoided by imposing boundary conditions at spatial infinity, and therefore is really new in the literature. It follows that there is no reason why even a world of rigid spheres should (...)
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  • Salience, supervenience, and layer cakes in Sellars's scientific realism, McDowell's moral realism, and the philosophy of mind.Marc Lange - 2000 - Philosophical Studies 101 (2-3):213-251.
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  • Inference to the best explanation as supporting the expansion of mathematicians’ ontological commitments.Marc Lange - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-26.
    This paper argues that in mathematical practice, conjectures are sometimes confirmed by “Inference to the Best Explanation” as applied to some mathematical evidence. IBE operates in mathematics in the same way as IBE in science. When applied to empirical evidence, IBE sometimes helps to justify the expansion of scientists’ ontological commitments. Analogously, when applied to mathematical evidence, IBE sometimes helps to justify mathematicians' in expanding the range of their ontological commitments. IBE supplements other forms of non-deductive reasoning in mathematics, avoiding (...)
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  • Inductive confirmation, counterfactual conditionals, and laws of nature.Marc Lange - 1996 - Philosophical Studies 85 (1):1-36.
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  • Could the laws of nature change?Marc Lange - 2008 - Philosophy of Science 75 (1):69-92.
    After reviewing several failed arguments that laws cannot change, I use the laws' special relation to counterfactuals to show how temporary laws would have to differ from eternal but time-dependent laws. Then I argue that temporary laws are impossible and that neither Lewis's nor Armstrong's analyses of law nicely accounts for the laws' immutability. *Received September 2006; revised September 2007. ‡Many thanks to John Roberts and John Carroll for valuable comments on earlier drafts, as well as to several anonymous referees (...)
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  • A Tale of Two Vectors.Marc Lange - 2009 - Dialectica 63 (4):397-431.
    Why do forces compose according to the parallelogram of forces? This question has been controversial; it is one episode in a longstanding, fundamental dispute regarding which facts are not to be explained dynamically. If the parallelogram law is explained statically, then the laws of statics are separate from and “transcend” the laws of dynamics. Alternatively, if the parallelogram law is explained dynamically, then statical laws become mere corollaries to the dynamical laws. I shall attempt to trace the history of this (...)
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  • Fall and Rise of Aristotelian Metaphysics in the Philosophy of Science.John Lamont - 2009 - Science & Education 18 (6-7):861-884.
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  • What's really wrong with constructive empiricism? Van Fraassen and the metaphysics of modality.James Ladyman - 2000 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (4):837-856.
    Constructive empiricism is supposed to offer a positive alternative to scientific realism that dispenses with the need for metaphysics. I first review the terms of the debate before arguing that the standard objections to constructive empiricism are not decisive. I then explain van Fraassen's views on modality and counterfactuals, and argue that, because constructive empiricism recommends on epistemological grounds belief in the empirical adequacy rather than the truth of theories, it requires that there be an objective modal distinction between the (...)
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  • The scientistic stance: the empirical and materialist stances reconciled.James Ladyman - 2011 - Synthese 178 (1):87-98.
    Abstractvan Fraassen (The empirical stance, 2002) contrasts the empirical stance with the materialist stance. The way he describes them makes both of them attractive, and while opposed they have something in common for both stances are scientific approaches to philosophy. The difference between them reflects their differing conceptions of science itself. Empiricists emphasise fallibilism, verifiability and falsifiability, and also to some extent scepticism and tolerance of novel hypotheses. Materialists regard the theoretical picture of the world as matter in motion as (...)
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  • Science, metaphysics and method.James Ladyman - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (1):31-51.
    While there are many examples of metaphysical theorising being heuristically and intellectually important in the progress of scientific knowledge, many people wonder how metaphysics not closely informed and inspired by empirical science could lead to rival or even supplementary knowledge about the world. This paper assesses the merits of a popular defence of the a priori methodology of metaphysics that goes as follows. The first task of the metaphysician, like the scientist, is to construct a hypothesis that accounts for the (...)
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  • Scientific Realism Again.James Ladyman - 2018 - Spontaneous Generations 9 (1):99-107.
    The present paper concerns how scientific realism is formulated and defended. It is argued that van Fraassen is fundamentally right that scientific realism requires metaphysics in general, and modality in particular. This is because of several relationships that raise problems for the ontology of scientific realism, namely those between: scientific realism and common sense realism; past and current theories; the sciences of different scales; and the ontologies of the special sciences and fundamental physics. These problems are related. It is argued (...)
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  • Constructive empiricism and modal metaphysics: A reply to Monton and Van Fraassen.James Ladyman - 2004 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (4):755-765.
    , I argued that Bas van Fraassen's constructive empiricism was undermined in various ways by his antirealism about modality. Here I offer some comments and responses to the reply to my arguments by Bradley Monton and van Fraassen [2003]. In particular, after making some minor points, I argue that Monton and van Fraassen have not done enough to show that the context dependence of counterfactuals renders their truth conditions non-objective, and I also argue that adopting modal realism does after all (...)
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  • Epistemology and the Structure of Language.Travis LaCroix & Jeffrey A. Barrett - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (2):953-967.
    We are concerned here with how structural properties of language may come to reflect features of the world in which it evolves. As a concrete example, we will consider how a simple term language might evolve to support the principle of indifference over state descriptions in that language. The point is not that one is justified in applying the principle of indifference to state descriptions in natural language. Instead, it is that one should expect a language that has evolved in (...)
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  • A critique of van Fraassen’s voluntaristic epistemology.Jonathan L. Kvanvig - 1994 - Synthese 98 (2):325-348.
    Van Fraassen's epistemology is forged from two commitments, one to a type of Bayesianism and the other to what he terms voluntarism. Van Fraassen holds that if one is going to follow a rule in belief-revision, it must be a Bayesian rule, but that one does not need to follow a rule in order to be rational. It is argued that van Fraassen's arguments for rejecting non-Bayesian rules is unsound, and that his voluntarism is subject to a fatal dilemma arising (...)
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  • Imagining as a Guide to Possibility.Peter Kung - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (3):620-663.
    I lay out the framework for my theory of sensory imagination in “Imagining as a guide to possibility.” Sensory imagining involves mental imagery , and crucially, in describing the content of imagining, I distinguish between qualitative content and assigned content. Qualitative content derives from the mental image itself; for visual imaginings, it is what is “pictured.” For example, visually imagine the Philadelphia Eagles defeating the Pittsburgh Steelers to win their first Super Bowl. You picture the greenness of the field and (...)
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  • On having no reason: dogmatism and Bayesian confirmation.Peter Kung - 2010 - Synthese 177 (1):1 - 17.
    Recently in epistemology a number of authors have mounted Bayesian objections to dogmatism. These objections depend on a Bayesian principle of evidential confirmation: Evidence E confirms hypothesis H just in case Pr(H|E) > Pr(H). I argue using Keynes' and Knight's distinction between risk and uncertainty that the Bayesian principle fails to accommodate the intuitive notion of having no reason to believe. Consider as an example an unfamiliar card game: at first, since you're unfamiliar with the game, you assign credences based (...)
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  • The two antirealisms of Bas van Fraassen.Andre Kukla - 1995 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 26 (3):431-454.
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  • Scientific realism, scientific practice, and the natural ontological attitude.André Kukla - 1994 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (4):955-975.
    Both sides in the debate about scientific realism have argued that their view provides a better account of actual scientific practice. For example, it has been claimed that the practice of theory conjunction presupposes realism, and that scientists' use of multiple and incompatible models presupposes some form of instrumentalism. Assuming that the practices of science are rational, these conclusions cannot both be right. I argue that neither of them is right, and that, in fact, all scientific practices are compatible with (...)
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  • Theory-dependence, warranted reference, and the epistemic dimensions of realism.Frederick Kroon - 2011 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 1 (2):173-191.
    The question of the role of theory in the determination of reference of theoretical terms continues to be a controversial one. In the present paper I assess a number of responses to this question (including variations on David Lewis’s appeal to Ramsification), before describing an alternative, epistemically oriented account of the reference-determination of such terms. The paper concludes by discussing some implications of the account for our understanding of both realism and such competitors of realism as constructive empiricism.
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  • Ceteris Paribus Laws: A Naturalistic Account.Robert Kowalenko - 2014 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 28 (2):133-155.
    An otherwise lawlike generalisation hedged by a ceteris paribus (CP) clause qualifies as a law of nature, if the CP clause can be substituted with a set of conditions derived from the multivariate regression model used to interpret the empirical data in support of the gen- eralisation. Three studies in human biology that use regression analysis are surveyed, showing that standard objections to cashing out CP clauses in this way—based on alleged vagueness, vacuity, or lack of testability—do not apply. CP (...)
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  • Scientific understanding.Peter Kosso - 2006 - Foundations of Science 12 (2):173-188.
    Knowledge of many facts does not amount to understanding unless one also has a sense of how the facts fit together. This aspect of coherence among scientific observations and theories is usually overlooked in summaries of scientific method, since the emphasis is on justification and verification rather than on understanding. I argue that the inter-theoretic coherence, as the hallmark of understanding, is an essential and informative component of any accurate description of science.
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  • Fundamental and accidental symmetries.Peter Kosso - 2000 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14 (2):109 – 121.
    The Standard Model of elementary particle physics distinguishes between fundamental and accidental symmetries. The distinction is not based on empirical features of the symmetry, nor on a metaphysical notion of necessity. A symmetry is fundamental to the extent that other aspects of nature depend on it, and it is recognized as fundamental by its being theoretically well-connected. This paper clarifies the concept of what it is to be fundamental in this sense, and suggests broader implications for the analysis of scientific (...)
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  • The Anti-Metaphysical Argument Against Scientific Realism: A Minimally Metaphysical Response.Raphaël Künstler - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (4):577-595.
    The anti-metaphysical argument against scientific realism is the following: Knowledge of unobservable entities implies metaphysical knowledge; There is no metaphysical knowledge. Therefore, there is no knowledge of unobservable entities. This argument has strangely received little attention in the profuse literature on scientific realism. This paper claims that the AMA is logically more fundamental than both the pessimistic meta-induction and the underdetermination argument. The second and main claim of this paper is that the instrumentalists’ use of AMA is incoherent. The gist (...)
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  • The Challenge of Scientific Revolutions: Van Fraassen's and Friedman's Responses.Vasso Kindi - 2011 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 25 (4):327-349.
    This article criticizes the attempts by Bas van Fraassen and Michael Friedman to address the challenge to rationality posed by the Kuhnian analysis of scientific revolutions. In the paper, I argue that van Fraassen's solution, which invokes a Sartrean theory of emotions to account for radical change, does not amount to justifying rationally the advancement of science but, rather, despite his protestations to the contrary, is an explanation of how change is effected. Friedman's approach, which appeals to philosophical developments at (...)
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  • Limitation of analogy in the Sleeping Beauty debate: the case of Singer’s argument.Namjoong Kim - 2020 - Synthese 198 (11):10513-10528.
    Ever since Elga presented his famous puzzle of Sleeping Beauty, philosophers have debated between the Thirder and the Halfer positions. In his recent article, Daniel Singer proposes a new position, according to which Beauty ought to assign [0, 1/2] to the coin’s landing heads. For this argument, he exploits the similarity between Elga’s original puzzle and Bovens’s modified one. According to Singer, Beauty ought to assign the same credence to H in both versions of Sleeping Beauty. Since Beauty ought to (...)
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  • Imprecise Bayesianism and Inference to the Best Explanation.Namjoong Kim - 2023 - Foundations of Science 28 (2):755-781.
    According to van Fraassen, inference to the best explanation (IBE) is incompatible with Bayesianism. To argue to the contrary, many philosophers have suggested hybrid models of scientific reasoning with both explanationist and probabilistic elements. This paper offers another such model with two novel features. First, its Bayesian component is imprecise. Second, the domain of credence functions can be extended.
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  • Interrogative Reasoning and Discovery: a New Perspective on Kepler's Inquiry.Mika Kiikeri - 1999 - Philosophica 63 (1).
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  • Understanding, Knowledge, and Scientific Antirealism.Kareem Khalifa - 2011 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 83 (1):93-112.
    Epistemologists have recently debated whether understanding is a species of knowledge. However, because they have offered little in the way of a detailed analysis of understanding, they lack the resources to resolve this issue. In this paper, I propose that S understands why p if and only if S has the non-Gettierised true belief that p, and for some proposition q, S has the non-Gettierised true belief that q is the best available explanation of p, S can correctly explain p (...)
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  • Default privilege and bad lots: Underconsideration and explanatory inference.Kareem Khalifa - 2010 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 24 (1):91 – 105.
    The underconsideration argument against inference to the best explanation and scientific realism holds that scientists are not warranted in inferring that the best theory is true, because scientists only ever conceive of a small handful of theories at one time, and as a result, they may not have considered a true theory. However, antirealists have not developed a detailed alternative account of why explanatory inference nevertheless appears so central to scientific practice. In this paper, I provide new defences against some (...)
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  • Willensfreiheit.Geert Keil (ed.) - 2017 - Berlin: De Gruyter.
    Das Buch verschafft einen Überblick über die neuere Willensfreiheitsdebatte, wobei es auch die Konsequenzen der Hirnforschung für das Freiheitsproblem erörtert. Ferner entwickelt der Autor eine eigene Position, die er 'fähigkeitsbasierten Libertarismus' nennt. Er widerspricht dem breiten philosophischen Konsens, dass jedenfalls eine Art von Freiheit mit einem naturwissenschaftlichen Weltbild unverträglich sei, nämlich die Fähigkeit, sich unter gegebenen Bedingungen so oder anders zu entscheiden. Im Buch wird argumentiert, dass der libertarischen Freiheitsauffassung, die wir im Alltag alle teilen, bei näherer Betrachtung keine Tatschen (...)
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  • Physical Theories are Prescriptions, not Descriptions.Shahin Kaveh - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (5):1825-1853.
    Virtually all philosophers of science have construed fundamental theories as descriptions of entities, properties, and/or structures. Call this the “descriptive-ontological” view. I argue that this view is incorrect, at least insofar as physical theories are concerned. I propose a novel construal of theories that I call the “prescriptive-dynamical” view. The central tenet of this view, roughly put, is that the _essential_ content of fundamental physical theories is a _prescription for interfacing with natural systems and translating local data into compact theoretical (...)
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  • Scientific Structuralism: Presentation and Representation.Katherine Brading & Elaine Landry - 2006 - Philosophy of Science 73 (5):571-581.
    This paper explores varieties of scientific structuralism. Central to our investigation is the notion of `shared structure'. We begin with a description of mathematical structuralism and use this to point out analogies and disanalogies with scientific structuralism. Our particular focus is the semantic structuralist's attempt to use the notion of shared structure to account for the theory-world connection, this use being crucially important to both the contemporary structural empiricist and realist. We show why minimal scientific structuralism is, at the very (...)
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  • Identity, Nature, and Ground.Joel Katzav - 2002 - Philosophical Topics 30 (1):167-187.
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  • Humean Supervenience in the Light of Contemporary Science.Vassilios Karakostas - 2009 - Metaphysica 10 (1):1-26.
    It is shown that Lewis’ ontological doctrine of Humean supervenience incorporates at its foundation the so-called separability principle of classical physics. In view of the systematic violation of the latter within quantum mechanics, the claim that contemporary physical science may posit non-supervenient relations beyond the spatiotemporal ones is reinforced on a foundational basis concerning constraints on the state representation of physical systems. Depending on the mode of assignment of states to quantum systems — unit state vectors versus statistical density operators (...)
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  • Epistemic theories of objective chance.Richard Johns - 2020 - Synthese 197 (2):703-730.
    Epistemic theories of objective chance hold that chances are idealised epistemic probabilities of some sort. After giving a brief history of this approach to objective chance, I argue for a particular version of this view, that the chance of an event E is its epistemic probability, given maximal knowledge of the possible causes of E. The main argument for this view is the demonstration that it entails all of the commonly-accepted properties of chance. For example, this analysis entails that chances (...)
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  • Reasonable Doubt from Unconceived Alternatives.Hylke Jellema - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (3):971-996.
    In criminal trials, judges or jurors have to decide whether the facts described in the indictment are proven beyond a reasonable doubt. However, these decision-makers cannot always imagine every relevant sequence of events—there may be unconceived alternatives. The possibility of unconceived alternatives is an overlooked source of reasonable doubt. I argue that decision-makers should not consider the defendant’s guilt proven if they have good reasons to believe that plausible, unconceived scenarios exist. I explore this thesis through the lens of the (...)
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  • The reasonable doubt standard as inference to the best explanation.Hylke Jellema - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):949-973.
    Explanationist accounts of rational legal proof view trials as a competition between explanations. Such accounts are often criticized for being underdeveloped. One question in need of further attention is when guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal trials. This article defends an inference to the best explanation -based approach on which guilt is only established BARD if the best guilt explanation in a case is substantially more plausible than any innocence explanation, and there is no good reason to (...)
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  • Unknown probabilities.Richard Jeffrey - 1996 - Erkenntnis 45 (2-3):327 - 335.
    From a point of view like de Finetti's, what is the judgmental reality underlying the objectivistic claim that a physical magnitude X determines the objective probability that a hypothesis H is true? When you have definite conditional judgmental probabilities for H given the various unknown values of X, a plausible answer is sufficiency, i.e., invariance of those conditional probabilities as your probability distribution over the values of X varies. A different answer, in terms of conditional exchangeability, is offered for use (...)
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  • Projection, symmetry, and natural kinds.Benjamin C. Jantzen - 2015 - Synthese 192 (11):3617-3646.
    Scientific practice involves two kinds of induction. In one, generalizations are drawn about the states of a particular system of variables. In the other, generalizations are drawn across systems in a class. We can discern two questions of correctness about both kinds of induction: what distinguishes those systems and classes of system that are ‘projectible’ in Goodman’s sense from those that are not, and what are the methods by which we are able to identify kinds that are likely to be (...)
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  • Discovery without a ‘logic’ would be a miracle.Benjamin C. Jantzen - 2016 - Synthese 193 (10).
    Scientists routinely solve the problem of supplementing one’s store of variables with new theoretical posits that can explain the previously inexplicable. The banality of success at this task obscures a remarkable fact. Generating hypotheses that contain novel variables and accurately project over a limited amount of additional data is so difficult—the space of possibilities so vast—that succeeding through guesswork is overwhelmingly unlikely despite a very large number of attempts. And yet scientists do generate hypotheses of this sort in very few (...)
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  • Invariance or equivalence: a tale of two principles.Caspar Jacobs - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):9337-9357.
    The presence of symmetries in physical theories implies a pernicious form of underdetermination. In order to avoid this theoretical vice, philosophers often espouse a principle called Leibniz Equivalence, which states that symmetry-related models represent the same state of affairs. Moreover, philosophers have claimed that the existence of non-trivial symmetries motivates us to accept the Invariance Principle, which states that quantities that vary under a theory’s symmetries aren’t physically real. Leibniz Equivalence and the Invariance Principle are often seen as part of (...)
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