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  1. A puzzle about laws and explanation.Siegfried Jaag - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6085-6102.
    In this paper, we argue that the popular claim that laws of nature explain their instances creates a philosophical puzzle when it is combined with the widely held requirement that explanations need to be underpinned by ‘wordly’ relations. We argue that a “direct solution” to the puzzle that accounts for both explanatory laws and explanatory realism requires endorsing at least a radical metaphysics. Then, we examine the ramifications of a “skeptical solution”, i.e., dissolving it by giving up at least one (...)
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  • Curie's principle.Jenann Ismael - 1997 - Synthese 110 (2):167-190.
    A reading is given of Curie''s Principle that the symmetry of a cause is always preserved its effects. The truth of the principle is demonstrated and its importance, under the proposed reading, is defended.As far as I see, all a priori statements in physics have their origin in symmetry. (Weyl, Symmetry, p. 126).
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  • Updating without evidence.Yoaav Isaacs & Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2023 - Noûs 57 (3):576-599.
    Sometimes you are unreliable at fulfilling your doxastic plans: for example, if you plan to be fully confident in all truths, probably you will end up being fully confident in some falsehoods by mistake. In some cases, there is information that plays the classical role of evidence—your beliefs are perfectly discriminating with respect to some possible facts about the world—and there is a standard expected‐accuracy‐based justification for planning to conditionalize on this evidence. This planning‐oriented justification extends to some cases where (...)
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  • Non-Measurability, Imprecise Credences, and Imprecise Chances.Yoaav Isaacs, Alan Hájek & John Hawthorne - 2021 - Mind 131 (523):892-916.
    – We offer a new motivation for imprecise probabilities. We argue that there are propositions to which precise probability cannot be assigned, but to which imprecise probability can be assigned. In such cases the alternative to imprecise probability is not precise probability, but no probability at all. And an imprecise probability is substantially better than no probability at all. Our argument is based on the mathematical phenomenon of non-measurable sets. Non-measurable propositions cannot receive precise probabilities, but there is a natural (...)
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  • Laws and dispositions.Andreas Hüttemann - 1998 - Philosophy of Science 65 (1):121-135.
    Laws are supposed to tell us how physical systems actually behave. The analysis of an important part of physical practice--abstraction--shows, however, that laws describe the behavior of physical systems under very special circumstances, namely when they are isolated. Nevertheless, laws are applied in cases of non-isolation as well. This practice requires an explanation. It is argued that one has to assume that physical systems have dispositions. I take these to be innocuous from an empiricist's standpoint because they can--at least in (...)
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  • There Is No Pure Empirical Reasoning.Michael Huemer - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (3):592-613.
    The justificatory force of empirical reasoning always depends upon the existence of some synthetic, a priori justification. The reasoner must begin with justified, substantive constraints on both the prior probability of the conclusion and certain conditional probabilities; otherwise, all possible degrees of belief in the conclusion are left open given the premises. Such constraints cannot in general be empirically justified, on pain of infinite regress. Nor does subjective Bayesianism offer a way out for the empiricist. Despite often-cited convergence theorems, subjective (...)
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  • Explanationist aid for the theory of inductive logic.Michael Huemer - 2009 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (2):345-375.
    A central problem facing a probabilistic approach to the problem of induction is the difficulty of sufficiently constraining prior probabilities so as to yield the conclusion that induction is cogent. The Principle of Indifference, according to which alternatives are equiprobable when one has no grounds for preferring one over another, represents one way of addressing this problem; however, the Principle faces the well-known problem that multiple interpretations of it are possible, leading to incompatible conclusions. I propose a partial solution to (...)
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  • Biological modalities.Maximilian Huber - unknown
    Biological modalities (e.g., biological possibility, necessity and counterfactuality) play an important explanatory role in biological practice. However, biological modalities lack truth conditions and the inferential relationship between biological and other modalities is unclear. This thesis addresses these problems, first, by improving upon Daniel Dennett's Library of Mendel. Second, a family of modal logics is introduced. In the simplest model, states are interpreted as codons, the binary relation is interpreted as single substitution mutation and the valuation induces a partition of blocks (...)
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  • Theories of probability.Colin Howson - 1995 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (1):1-32.
    My title is intended to recall Terence Fine's excellent survey, Theories of Probability [1973]. I shall consider some developments that have occurred in the intervening years, and try to place some of the theories he discussed in what is now a slightly longer perspective. Completeness is not something one can reasonably hope to achieve in a journal article, and any selection is bound to reflect a view of what is salient. In a subject as prone to dispute as this, there (...)
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  • Bayesian rules of updating.Colin Howson - 1996 - Erkenntnis 45 (2-3):195 - 208.
    This paper discusses the Bayesian updating rules of ordinary and Jeffrey conditionalisation. Their justification has been a topic of interest for the last quarter century, and several strategies proposed. None has been accepted as conclusive, and it is argued here that this is for a good reason; for by extending the domain of the probability function to include propositions describing the agent's present and future degrees of belief one can systematically generate a class of counterexamples to the rules. Dynamic Dutch (...)
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  • Bayesian conditionalization and probability kinematics.Colin Howson & Allan Franklin - 1994 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (2):451-466.
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  • On Reflection.Leon Horsten - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 71 (4):pqaa083.
    This article gives an epistemological analysis of the reflection process by means of which you can come to know the consistency of a mathematical theory that you already accept. It is argued that this process can result in warranted belief in new mathematical principles without justifying them.
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  • What Keeps the Earth in Its Place? The Concept of Stability in Plato and Aristotle.Giora Hon & Bernard R. Goldstein - 2008 - Centaurus 50 (4):305-323.
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  • Objective chance: not propensity, maybe determinism.Carl Hoefer - 2016 - Lato Sensu, Revue de la Société de Philosophie des Sciences 3 (1):31-42.
    One currently popular view about the nature of objective probabilities, or objective chances, is that they – or some of them, at least – are primitive features of the physical world, not reducible to anything else nor explicable in terms of frequencies, degrees of belief, or anything else. In this paper I explore the question of what the semantic content of primitive chance claims could be. Every attempt I look at to supply such content either comes up empty-handed, or begs (...)
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  • Mathematical representation: playing a role.Kate Hodesdon - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 168 (3):769-782.
    The primary justification for mathematical structuralism is its capacity to explain two observations about mathematical objects, typically natural numbers. Non-eliminative structuralism attributes these features to the particular ontology of mathematics. I argue that attributing the features to an ontology of structural objects conflicts with claims often made by structuralists to the effect that their structuralist theses are versions of Quine’s ontological relativity or Putnam’s internal realism. I describe and argue for an alternative explanation for these features which instead explains the (...)
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  • Two Interpretations of Two Stoic Conditionals.Alan Hájek - 2009 - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 12 (1):206-221.
    Controversy has surrounded the interpretation of the so-called 'Diodorean' and 'Chrysippean' conditionals of the Stoics. I critically evaluate and reject two interpretations of each of them: as expressing natural laws, and as strict conditionals. In doing so I engage with the work of authors such as Frede, Gould, Hurst, the Kneales, Mates, and Prior. I conclude by offering my own proposal for where these Stoic conditionals should be located on a 'ladder' of logical strength.
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  • Triviality Pursuit.Alan Hájek - 2011 - Topoi 30 (1):3-15.
    The thesis that probabilities of conditionals are conditional probabilities has putatively been refuted many times by so-called ‘triviality results’, although it has also enjoyed a number of resurrections. In this paper I assault it yet again with a new such result. I begin by motivating the thesis and discussing some of the philosophical ramifications of its fluctuating fortunes. I will canvas various reasons, old and new, why the thesis seems plausible, and why we should care about its fate. I will (...)
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  • The reference class problem is your problem too.Alan Hájek - 2007 - Synthese 156 (3):563--585.
    The reference class problem arises when we want to assign a probability to a proposition (or sentence, or event) X, which may be classified in various ways, yet its probability can change depending on how it is classified. The problem is usually regarded as one specifically for the frequentist interpretation of probability and is often considered fatal to it. I argue that versions of the classical, logical, propensity and subjectivist interpretations also fall prey to their own variants of the reference (...)
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  • Arguments For—Or Against—Probabilism?Alan Hájek - 2009 - In Franz Huber & Christoph Schmidt-Petri (eds.), Degrees of belief. London: Springer. pp. 229--251.
    Four important arguments for probabilism—the Dutch Book, representation theorem, calibration, and gradational accuracy arguments—have a strikingly similar structure. Each begins with a mathematical theorem, a conditional with an existentially quantified consequent, of the general form: if your credences are not probabilities, then there is a way in which your rationality is impugned. Each argument concludes that rationality requires your credences to be probabilities. I contend that each argument is invalid as formulated. In each case there is a mirror-image theorem and (...)
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  • Contra counterfactism.Alan Hájek - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):181-210.
    ‘If I were to toss a coin 1000 times, then it would land heads exactly n times’. Is there a specific value of n that renders this counterfactual true? According to an increasingly influential view, there is. A precursor of the view goes back to the Molinists; more recently it has been inspired by Stalnaker, and versions of it have been advocated by Hawthorne, Bradley, Moss, Schulz, and Stefánsson. More generally, I attribute to these authors what I call Counterfactual Plenitude:For (...)
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  • The mishap at Reichenbach fall: Singular vs. general causation.Christopher Hitchcock - 1995 - Philosophical Studies 78 (3):257 - 291.
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  • Varieties of dispositional essentialism about natural laws.Salim Hirèche - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3):1-28.
    An important task for metaphysicians and philosophers of science is to account for laws of nature – in particular, how they distinguish themselves from ‘mere’ regularities, and the modal force they are endowed with, ‘natural necessity’. Dispositional essentialism about laws is roughly the view that laws distinguish themselves by being grounded in the essences of natural entities. This paper does not primarily concern how essentialism compares to its main rivals – Humeanism and Armstrongeanism. Rather, it distinguishes and comparatively assesses various (...)
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  • The strong arm of the law: a unified account of necessary and contingent laws of nature.Salim Hirèche, Niels Linnemann, Robert Michels & Lisa Vogt - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10211-10252.
    A common feature of all standard theories of the laws of nature is that they are "absolutist": They take laws to be either all metaphysically necessary or all contingent. Science, however, gives us reason to think that there are laws of both kinds, suggesting that standard theories should make way for "non-absolutist" alternatives: theories which accommodate laws of both modal statuses. In this paper, we set out three explanatory challenges for any candidate non-absolutist theory and discuss the prospects of the (...)
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  • What Are the Odds that Everyone is Depraved?Scott Hill - 2020 - American Philosophical Quarterly 57 (3):299-308.
    Why does God allow evil? One hypothesis is that God desires the existence and activity of free creatures but He was unable to create a world with such creatures and such activity without also allowing evil. If Molinism is true, what probability should be assigned to this hypothesis? Some philosophers claim that a low probability should be assigned because there are an infinite number of possible people and because we have no reason to suppose that such creatures will choose one (...)
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  • The nomological argument for the existence of God.Tyler Hildebrand & Thomas Metcalf - 2021 - Noûs 56 (2):443-472.
    According to the Nomological Argument, observed regularities in nature are best explained by an appeal to a supernatural being. A successful explanation must avoid two perils. Some explanations provide too little structure, predicting a universe without regularities. Others provide too much structure, thereby precluding an explanation of certain types of lawlike regularities featured in modern scientific theories. We argue that an explanation based in the creative, intentional action of a supernatural being avoids these two perils whereas leading competitors do not. (...)
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  • Tooley’s account of the necessary connection between law and regularity.Tyler Hildebrand - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (1):33-43.
    Fred Dretske, Michael Tooley, and David Armstrong accept a theory of governing laws of nature according to which laws are atomic states of affairs that necessitate corresponding natural regularities. Some philosophers object to the Dretske/Tooley/Armstrong theory on the grounds that there is no illuminating account of the necessary connection between governing law and natural regularity. In response, Michael Tooley has provided a reductive account of this necessary connection in his book Causation (1987). In this essay, I discuss an improved version (...)
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  • Can bare dispositions explain categorical regularities?Tyler Hildebrand - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (3):569-584.
    One of the traditional desiderata for a metaphysical theory of laws of nature is that it be able to explain natural regularities. Some philosophers have postulated governing laws to fill this explanatory role. Recently, however, many have attempted to explain natural regularities without appealing to governing laws. Suppose that some fundamental properties are bare dispositions. In virtue of their dispositional nature, these properties must be (or are likely to be) distributed in regular patterns. Thus it would appear that an ontology (...)
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  • Bayesianism and Inference to the Best Explanation.Leah Henderson - 2014 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 65 (4):687-715.
    Two of the most influential theories about scientific inference are inference to the best explanation and Bayesianism. How are they related? Bas van Fraassen has claimed that IBE and Bayesianism are incompatible rival theories, as any probabilistic version of IBE would violate Bayesian conditionalization. In response, several authors have defended the view that IBE is compatible with Bayesian updating. They claim that the explanatory considerations in IBE are taken into account by the Bayesian because the Bayesian either does or should (...)
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  • The Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Psychological Arrow of Time.Meir Hemmo & Orly Shenker - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (1):85-107.
    Can the second law of thermodynamics explain our mental experience of the direction of time? According to an influential approach, the past hypothesis of universal low entropy also explains how the psychological arrow comes about. We argue that although this approach has many attractive features, it cannot explain the psychological arrow after all. In particular, we show that the past hypothesis is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the psychological arrow on the basis of current physics. We propose two necessary (...)
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  • Syntax-Semantics Interaction in Mathematics.Michael Heller - 2018 - Studia Semiotyczne 32 (2):87-105.
    Mathematical tools of category theory are employed to study the syntax-semantics problem in the philosophy of mathematics. Every category has its internal logic, and if this logic is sufficiently rich, a given category provides semantics for a certain formal theory and, vice versa, for each formal theory one can construct a category, providing a semantics for it. There exists a pair of adjoint functors, Lang and Syn, between a category and a category of theories. These functors describe, in a formal (...)
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  • A defense of objectivism about evidential support.Brian Hedden - 2015 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (5):716-743.
    Objectivism about evidential support is the thesis that facts about the degree to which a body of evidence supports a hypothesis are objective rather than depending on subjective factors like one’s own language or epistemic values. Objectivism about evidential support is key to defending a synchronic, time-slice-centric conception of epistemic rationality, on which what you ought to believe at a time depends only on what evidence you have at that time, and not on how you were at previous times. Here, (...)
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  • Contra Ladyman: What really is right with constructive empiricism.Joseph F. Hanna - 2004 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (4):767-777.
    there be an objective modal distinction between the observable and the unobservable.’ My intent is to counter Ladyman's claim that the irreducibly modal character of empirical adequacy is something that is ‘really wrong with constructive empiricism’. I argue that disposition concepts refer to non-modal properties of types rather than to modal properties of tokens of those types. Solubility, for example, is an ‘occurrent’, though unobservable, property of a type of substance (involving the structure of associated atoms); and observability is, similarly, (...)
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  • What Scientific Theories Could Not Be.Hans Halvorson - 2012 - Philosophy of Science 79 (2):183-206.
    According to the semantic view of scientific theories, theories are classes of models. I show that this view -- if taken seriously as a formal explication -- leads to absurdities. In particular, this view equates theories that are truly distinct, and it distinguishes theories that are truly equivalent. Furthermore, the semantic view lacks the resources to explicate interesting theoretical relations, such as embeddability of one theory into another. The untenability of the semantic view -- as currently formulated -- threatens to (...)
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  • The Semantic View, If Plausible, Is Syntactic.Hans Halvorson - 2013 - Philosophy of Science 80 (3):475-478.
    Halvorson argues that the semantic view of theories leads to absurdities. Glymour shows how to inoculate the semantic view against Halvorson's criticisms, namely by making it into a syntactic view of theories. I argue that this modified semantic-syntactic view cannot do the philosophical work that the original "language-free" semantic view was supposed to do.
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  • Plantinga on Providence and Physics.Hans Halvorson - 2013 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5 (3):19--30.
    Discussion of Alvin Plantinga's book, "Where the Conflict Really Lies".
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  • Determinism, Physical Possibility, and Laws of Nature.Balázs Gyenis - 2020 - Foundations of Physics 50 (6):568-581.
    We call attention to different formulations of how physical laws relate to what is physically possible in the philosophical literature, and argue that it may be the case that determinism fails under one formulation but reigns under the other. Whether this is so depends on our view on the nature of laws, and may also depend on the inter-theoretical relationships among our best physical theories, or so shall we argue.
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  • Decisions under Ignorance and the Individuation of States of Nature.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2022 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 11 (2):86-92.
    How do you make decisions under ignorance? That is, how do you decide when you lack subjective probabilities for some of your options’ possible outcomes? One answer is that you follow the Laplace Rule: you assign an equal probability to each state of nature for which you lack a subjective probability (that is, you use the Principle of Indifference) and then you maximize expected utility. The most influential objection to the Laplace Rule is that it is sensitive to the individuation (...)
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  • Compromisos epistémicos en el enfoque estructuralista de las teorías.Germán Guerrero Pino - 2012 - Revista de Filosofía (Madrid) 37 (1).
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  • Justifying conditionalization: Conditionalization maximizes expected epistemic utility.Hilary Greaves & David Wallace - 2006 - Mind 115 (459):607-632.
    According to Bayesian epistemology, the epistemically rational agent updates her beliefs by conditionalization: that is, her posterior subjective probability after taking account of evidence X, pnew, is to be set equal to her prior conditional probability pold(·|X). Bayesians can be challenged to provide a justification for their claim that conditionalization is recommended by rationality—whence the normative force of the injunction to conditionalize? There are several existing justifications for conditionalization, but none directly addresses the idea that conditionalization will be epistemically rational (...)
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  • Cluelessness.Hilary Greaves - 2016 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116 (3):311-339.
    Decisions, whether moral or prudential, should be guided at least in part by considerations of the consequences that would result from the various available actions. For any given action, however, the majority of its consequences are unpredictable at the time of decision. Many have worried that this leaves us, in some important sense, clueless. In this paper, I distinguish between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ possible sources of cluelessness. In terms of this taxonomy, the majority of the existing literature on cluelessness focusses (...)
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  • Handbook of philosophical logic. [REVIEW]Graham White - 2004 - History and Philosophy of Logic 25 (2):147-152.
    D. M. GABBAY and F. GUENTHER, Handbook of philosophical logic, 2nd edn, vol. 9. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 2002. xiv + 368 pp. €129.00, US$112.00, £79.00. ISBN1 402 00699 3. The philo...
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  • The difference between epistemic and metaphysical necessity.Martin Glazier - 2017 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 6):1409-1424.
    Philosophers have observed that metaphysical necessity appears to be a true or real or genuine form of necessity while epistemic necessity does not. Similarly, natural necessity appears genuine while deontic necessity does not. But what is it for a form of necessity to be genuine? I defend an account of genuine necessity in explanatory terms. The genuine forms of necessity, I argue, are those that provide what I call necessitarianexplanation. I discuss the relationship of necessitarian explanation to ground.
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  • Symmetry and belief revision.Stephen Murray Glaister - 1998 - Erkenntnis 49 (1):21-56.
    This paper continues the recent tradition of investigating iterated AGM revision by reasoning directly about the dynamics for total pre-order (“implausibility ordering”) representations of AGM revision functions. We reorient discussion, however, by proving that symmetry considerations, almost by themselves, suffice to determine a particular, AGM-friendly implausibility ordering dynamics due to Spohn 1988, which we call “J-revision”. After exploring the connections between implausibility ordering dynamics and the social choice theory of Arrow 1963, we provide symmetry arguments in the social choice-theoretic framework (...)
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  • Inference to the best explanation: does it track truth?David H. Glass - 2012 - Synthese 185 (3):411-427.
    In the form of inference known as inference to the best explanation there are various ways to characterise what is meant by the best explanation. This paper considers a number of such characterisations including several based on confirmation measures and several based on coherence measures. The goal is to find a measure which adequately captures what is meant by 'best' and which also yields the truth with a high degree of probability. Computer simulations are used to show that the overlap (...)
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  • Dynamical Phenomena and Their Models: Truth and Empirical Correctness.Marco Giunti - 2020 - Foundations of Science 28 (1):327-375.
    In the epistemological tradition, there are two main interpretations of the semantic relation that an empirical theory may bear to the real world. According to realism, the theory-world relationship should be conceived as truth; according to instrumentalism, instead, it should be limited to empirical adequacy. Then, depending on how empirical theories are conceived, either syntactically as a class of sentences, or semantically as a class of models, the concepts of truth and empirical adequacy assume different and specific forms. In this (...)
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  • Between epistemology and hermeneutics.Dimitri Ginev - 1995 - Science & Education 4 (2):147-159.
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  • Skepticism and elegance: problems for the abductivist reply to Cartesian skepticism.Matthew B. Gifford - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 164 (3):685-704.
    Some philosophers argue that we are justified in rejecting skepticism because it is explanatorily inferior to more commonsense hypotheses about the world. Focusing on the work of Jonathan Vogel, I show that this “abductivist” or “inference to the best explanation” response rests on an impoverished explanatory framework which ignores the explanatory gap between an object's having certain properties and its appearing to have those properties. Once this gap is appreciated, I argue, the abductivist strategy is defeated.
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  • A New Framework for Teaching Scientific Reasoning.Ronald N. Giere - 2001 - Argumentation 15 (1):21-33.
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  • Dated Truths Without Dated Powers.Giacomo Giannini & Donatella Donati - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-21.
    Dispositionalism is the theory of modality according to which all (metaphysical and natural) modal truths are made true by some actual irreducibly dispositional property. The relationship between Dispositionalism and time is yet to be satisfactorily explored. In this paper we contribute to this task by examining how Dispositionalism deals with ‘dated truths’: propositions involving a specific time, e.g. “It might rain at 12.30”. We examine two possible accounts: the first, 'Dated Manifestations Strategy', is the idea that powers are very fine-grained, (...)
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  • Defending Scientific Realism Without Relying on Inference to the Best Explanation.Michel Ghins - 2017 - Axiomathes 27 (6):635-651.
    Explanationist strategies for defending epistemological scientific realism make heavy use of a particular version of inference to the best explanation known as the no-miracle argument. I consider ESR to be a genuinely philosophical—non-naturalistic—thesis which contends that there are strong arguments to believe in some non-observational claims made by scientific theories that are partially observationally correct. In this paper, I examine the grounds of the strength of these arguments from what I call a contemplative perspective which focuses on the end products, (...)
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