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Laws and symmetry

New York: Oxford University Press (1989)

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  1. Recovery recovered.StephenMurray Glaister - 2000 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 29 (2):171-206.
    The most controversial condition that the AGM theory of rational belief change places on belief contraction is the recovery condition. The condition is controversial because of a series of putative counterexamples due (separately) to I. Levi and S. O. Hansson. In this paper we show that the conflicts that Levi and Hansson arrange between AGM contraction and our intuitions about how to give up beliefs are merely apparent. We argue that these conflicts disappear once we attend more closely to the (...)
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  • The role of agency in distributed cognitive systems.Ronald N. Giere - 2006 - Philosophy of Science 73 (5):710-719.
    In previous publications I have argued that much scientific activity should be thought of as involving the operation of distributed cognitive systems. Since these contributions to the cognitive study of science appear in venues not necessarily frequented by philosophers of science, I begin with a brief introduction to the notion of a distributed cognitive system. I then describe what I take to be an exemplary case of a scientific distributed cognitive system, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). I do not here (...)
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  • How models are used to represent reality.Ronald N. Giere - 2004 - Philosophy of Science 71 (5):742-752.
    Most recent philosophical thought about the scientific representation of the world has focused on dyadic relationships between language-like entities and the world, particularly the semantic relationships of reference and truth. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources, I argue that we should focus on the pragmatic activity of representing, so that the basic representational relationship has the form: Scientists use models to represent aspects of the world for specific purposes. Leaving aside the terms "law" and "theory," I distinguish principles, specific conditions, models, (...)
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  • Mathematics and conceptual analysis.Antony Eagle - 2008 - Synthese 161 (1):67–88.
    Gödel argued that intuition has an important role to play in mathematical epistemology, and despite the infamy of his own position, this opinion still has much to recommend it. Intuitions and folk platitudes play a central role in philosophical enquiry too, and have recently been elevated to a central position in one project for understanding philosophical methodology: the so-called ‘Canberra Plan’. This philosophical role for intuitions suggests an analogous epistemology for some fundamental parts of mathematics, which casts a number of (...)
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  • Twenty-one arguments against propensity analyses of probability.Antony Eagle - 2004 - Erkenntnis 60 (3):371–416.
    I argue that any broadly dispositional analysis of probability will either fail to give an adequate explication of probability, or else will fail to provide an explication that can be gainfully employed elsewhere (for instance, in empirical science or in the regulation of credence). The diversity and number of arguments suggests that there is little prospect of any successful analysis along these lines.
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  • Backwards causation and the direction of causal processes.Phil Dowe - 1996 - Mind 105 (418):227-248.
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  • The kinematics of belief and desire.Richard Bradley - 2007 - Synthese 156 (3):513-535.
    Richard Jeffrey regarded the version of Bayesian decision theory he floated in ‘The Logic of Decision’ and the idea of a probability kinematics—a generalisation of Bayesian conditioning to contexts in which the evidence is ‘uncertain’—as his two most important contributions to philosophy. This paper aims to connect them by developing kinematical models for the study of preference change and practical deliberation. Preference change is treated in a manner analogous to Jeffrey’s handling of belief change: not as mechanical outputs of combinations (...)
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  • Quantum Mechanics and 3 N - Dimensional Space.Bradley Monton - 2006 - Philosophy of Science 73 (5):778-789.
    I maintain that quantum mechanics is fundamentally about a system of N particles evolving in three-dimensional space, not the wave function evolving in 3N-dimensional space.
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  • The dispositionalist conception of laws.Alexander Bird - 2005 - Foundations of Science 10 (4):353-70.
    This paper sketches a dispositionalist conception of laws and shows how the dispositionalist should respond to certain objections. The view that properties are essentially dispositional is able to provide an account of laws that avoids the problems that face the two views of laws (the regularity and the contingent nomic necessitation views) that regard properties as categorical and laws as contingent. I discuss and reject the objections that (i) this view makes laws necessary whereas they are contingent; (ii) this view (...)
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  • Anvil or onion? Determinism as a layered concept.Robert C. Bishop - 2005 - Erkenntnis 63 (1):55 - 71.
    Kellert (In the Wake of Chars, University of Chicago press, Chicago, 1993) has argued that Laplacean determinism in classical physics is actually a layered concept, where various properties or layers composing this form of determinism can be peeled away. Here, I argue that a layered conception of determinism is inappropriate and that we should think in terms of different deterministic models applicable to different kinds of systems. The upshot of this analysis is that the notion of state is more closely (...)
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  • The Ultimate Argument Against Armstrong’s Contingent Necessitation View of Laws.Alexander Bird - 2005 - Analysis 65 (2):147-55.
    I show that Armstrong’s view of laws as second-order contingent relations of ‘necessitation’ among categorical properties faces a dilemma. The necessitation relation confers a relation of extensional inclusion (‘constant conjunction’) on its relata. It does so either necessarily or contingently. If necessarily, it is not a categorical relation (in the relevant sense). If contingently, then an explanation is required of how it confers extensional inclusion. That explanation will need to appeal to a third-order relation between necessitation and extensional inclusion. The (...)
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  • BonJour’s Abductivist Reply to Skepticism.James R. Beebe - 2007 - Philosophia 35 (2):181-196.
    The abductivist reply to skepticism is the view that commonsense explanations of the patterns and regularities that appear in our sensory experiences should be rationally preferred to skeptical explanations of those same patterns and regularities on the basis of explanatory considerations. In this article I critically examine Laurence BonJour’s rationalist version of the abductivist position. After explaining why BonJour’s account is more defensible than other versions of the view, I argue that the notion of probability he relies upon is deeply (...)
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  • Should the empiricist be a constructive empiricist?Marc Alspector-Kelly - 2001 - Philosophy of Science 68 (4):413-431.
    Van Fraassen does not argue that everyone should be a constructive empiricist. He claims only that constructive empiricism (CE) is a coherent post-positivist alternative to realism, notwithstanding the realist's charge that CE is arbitrary and irrational. He does argue, however, that the empiricist is obliged to limit belief as CE prescribes. Criticism of CE has been largely directed at van Fraassen's claim that CE is a coherent option. Far less attention has been directed at his claim that empiricists should be (...)
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  • Psychological laws and nonmonotonic logic.Arnold Silverberg - 1996 - Erkenntnis 44 (2):199-224.
    In this essay I enter into a recently published debate between Stephen Schiffer and Jerry Fodor concerning whether adequate sense can be made of the ceteris paribus conditions in special science laws, much of their focus being on the case of putative psychological laws. Schiffer argues that adequate sense cannot be made of ceteris paribus clauses, while Fodor attempts to overcome Schiffer's arguments, in defense of special science laws. More recently, Peter Mott has attempted to show that Fodor's response to (...)
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  • Representation and Realism: On Being a Structuralist All the Way (Up and) Down.Steven French - 2024 - In Claus Beisbart & Michael Frauchiger (eds.), Scientific Theories and Philosophical Stances: Themes from van Fraassen. De Gruyter. pp. 87-108.
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  • Introduction: An Empiricist View of Scientific Theories and Practices.Matthias Egg - 2024 - In Claus Beisbart & Michael Frauchiger (eds.), Scientific Theories and Philosophical Stances: Themes from van Fraassen. De Gruyter. pp. 1-12.
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  • Laudatio: Professor Bas van Fraassen.Steven French - 2024 - In Claus Beisbart & Michael Frauchiger (eds.), Scientific Theories and Philosophical Stances: Themes from van Fraassen. De Gruyter. pp. 13-20.
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  • Scientific Theories and Philosophical Stances: Themes from van Fraassen.Claus Beisbart & Michael Frauchiger (eds.) - 2024 - De Gruyter.
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  • Laws of Nature.Nina Emery - 2020 - In Michael J. Raven (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaphysical Grounding. New York: Routledge. pp. 437-338.
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  • Casting inference to the best explanation's lot with active inference.Majid D. Beni - 2023 - Theoria 89 (2):188-203.
    This paper draws on the resources of computational neuroscience (an account of active inference under the free energy principle) to address Bas van Fraassen's bad lot objection to the inference to the best explanation (IBE). The general assumption of this paper is that IBE is a finessed form of active inferences that self-organising systems perform to maximise the chance of their survival. Under this assumption, the paper aims to establish the following points: first, the capacity to learn to perform explanatory (...)
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  • How to be a powers theorist about functional laws, conservation laws and symmetries.Samuel Kimpton-Nye - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):317-332.
    This paper defends an account of the laws of nature in terms of irreducibly modal properties (aka powers) from the threat posed by functional laws, conservation laws and symmetries. It thus shows how powers theorists can avoid ad hoc explanations and resist an inflated ontology of powers and governing laws. The key is to understand laws not as flowing from the essences of powers, as per Bird (2007), but as features of a description of how powers are possibly distributed, as (...)
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  • Credal imprecision and the value of evidence.Nilanjan Das - 2023 - Noûs 57 (3):684-721.
    This paper is about a tension between two theses. The first is Value of Evidence: roughly, the thesis that it is always rational for an agent to gather and use cost‐free evidence for making decisions. The second is Rationality of Imprecision: the thesis that an agent can be rationally required to adopt doxastic states that are imprecise, i.e., not representable by a single credence function. While others have noticed this tension, I offer a new diagnosis of it. I show that (...)
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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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  • 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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  • Empiricism Must, but Cannot, Presuppose Real Causation.Hans Radder - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (4):597-608.
    In this article, I put forward a basic philosophical claim: empirical scientific knowledge, that is, knowledge generated in experimental and observational practices, presupposes real causation. My discussion exploits two core notions from the philosophical analysis of scientific experimentation and observation: the aim of realizing object-apparatus correlations and the required control of the relevant interactions between environment and experimental or observational system. The conclusion is that, without the notion of real causation, acquiring epistemically sound empirical knowledge is impossible. Several empiricist objections (...)
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  • Laws, Dispositions, Memory: Three Hypotheses on the Order of the World.Joël Dolbeault - 2021 - Metaphysica 22 (1):101-121.
    The more science progresses, the more it is evident that the physical world presents regularities. This raises a metaphysical problem: why is the world so ordered? In the first part of the article, I attempt to clarify this problem and justify its relevance. In the following three parts, I analyze three hypotheses already formulated in philosophy in response to this problem: the hypothesis that the order of the world is explained 1) by laws of nature, 2) by dispositions of the (...)
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  • On the Problem of Relation without Relata.Aboutorab Yaghmaie - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Investigations at University of Tabriz 14 (33):404-425.
    The claim that there can be relations without relata, submitted by the radical ontic structural realist, mounts a serious challenge to her: on the one hand, the world is constituted, according to this sort of realism, just by structures and relations, and on the other hand, relations depend, mathematics says, on individual objects as relata. To resolve the problem, Steven French has argued that while the dependency of relations on relata is conceivable concerning the structure associated with the source of (...)
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  • Floating free from physics: the metaphysics of quantum mechanics.Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo & Jonas Rafael Becker Arenhart - unknown
    We discuss some methodological aspects of the relation between physics and metaphysics by dealing specifically with the case of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. Our main claim is that current attempts to productively integrate quantum mechanics and metaphysics are best seen as approaches of what should be called ‘the metaphysics of science’, which is developed by applying already existing metaphysical concepts to scientific theories. We argue that, in this perspective, metaphysics must be understood as an autonomous discipline. It results that this metaphysics (...)
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  • Inference to the Best Explanation and van Fraassen’s Contextual Theory of Explanation: Reply to Park.Yunus Prasetya - 2021 - Axiomathes 32 (2):355-365.
    Seungbae Park argues that Bas van Fraassen’s rejection of inference to the best explanation (IBE) is problematic for his contextual theory of explanation because van Fraassen uses IBE to support the contextual theory. This paper provides a defense of van Fraassen’s views from Park’s objections. I point out three weaknesses of Park’s objection against van Fraassen. First, van Fraassen may be perfectly content to accept the implications that Park claims to follow from his views. Second, even if van Fraassen rejects (...)
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  • Contrastando reconstrucciones con herramientas computacionales: una aplicación a la cladística.Ariel Jonathan Roffé - 2020 - Dissertation, Universidad de Buenos Aires (Uba)
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  • If consciousness causes collapse, the zombie argument fails.Mousa Mohammadian - 2021 - Synthese 199:1599–1615.
    Many non-physicalists, including Chalmers, hold that the zombie argument succeeds in rejecting the physicalist view of consciousness. Some non-physicalists, including, again, Chalmers, hold that quantum collapse interactionism, i.e., the idea that non-physical consciousness causes collapse of the wave function in phenomena such as quantum measurement, is a viable interactionist solution for the problem of the relationship between the physical world and the non-physical consciousness. In this paper, I argue that if QCI is true, the zombie argument fails. In particular, I (...)
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  • Constructive Empiricism and the Role of Social Values in Science.Sherrilyn Roush - 2007 - Vale-Free Science - Ideals and Illusions.
    One of the most common criticisms one hears of the idea of granting a legitimate role for social values in theory choice in science is that it just doesn’t make sense to regard social preferences as relevant to the truth or to the way things are. “What is at issue,” wrote Susan Haack, is “whether it is possible to derive an ‘is’ from an ‘ought.’ ” One can see that this is not possible, she concludes, “as soon as one expresses (...)
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  • Sensy obiektywności. Henri Poincaré i Ernst Cassirer w kontekście realizmu strukturalnego.Damian Luty - 2020 - Diametros 18 (67):54-70.
    Celem artykułu jest częściowe uzasadnienie negacji tezy, którą nazywam tezą o genezie realizmu strukturalnego. Dotyczy ona postulowanych w obrębie pewnej metafilozoficznej narracji związków między współczesnymi stanowiskami zwanymi epistemicznym realizmem strukturalnym i ontycznym realizmem strukturalnym a poglądami filozofów z początku XX wieku. W artykule rekonstruuję wymienione dwa stanowiska, postulowane związki, jakie mają one mieć z dwoma filozofami, Henri Poincarém oraz Ernstem Cassirerem, a następnie przedstawiam, dlaczego te postulowane związki są nietrafnie rozpoznane. Niesie to za sobą wnioski dotyczące swoistości wymienionych stanowisk oraz (...)
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  • Indifference to Anti-Humean Chances.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (5):485-501.
    An indifference principle says that your credences should be distributed uniformly over each of the possibilities you recognise. A chance deference principle says that your credences should be aligned with the chances. My thesis is that, if we are anti-Humeans about chance, then these two principles are incompatible. Anti-Humeans think that it is possible for the actual frequencies to depart from the chances. So long as you recognise possibilities like this, you cannot both spread your credences evenly and defer to (...)
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  • Bohmian Mechanics: Realism and the “Box” Experiment.Chunling Yan - 2020 - Foundations of Science 26 (2):429-451.
    It is difficult to articulate how we should take a realist attitude towards Bohmian mechanics because there are many versions of it. This paper aims to clarify the realist commitments of Bohmian mechanics and how we can understand it from a general scientific realist perspective. I use the box experiment, a double-slit like experiment conducted by Cardone et al. :1–13, 2004; Int J Mod Phys B 20:1107–1121, 2006), as a working example to argue that a causal realist account that is (...)
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  • Kusch and van Fraassen on microscopic experience.Alessio Gava - 2019 - Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofia 45 (1):7-31.
    Martin Kusch has recently defended Bas van Fraassen’s controversial view on microscopes, according to which these devices are not ‘windows on an invisible world’, but rather ‘image generators’. The two authors also claim that, since in a microscopic detection it is not possible to empirically investigate the geometrical relations between all the elements involved, one is entitled to maintain an agnostic stance about the reality of the entity allegedly represented by the produced image. In this paper I argue that, contrary (...)
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  • The Inductive Route Towards Necessity.Quentin Ruyant - 2020 - Acta Analytica 35 (2):147-163.
    It is generally assumed that relations of necessity cannot be known by induction on experience. In this paper, I propose a notion of situated possibilities, weaker than nomic possibilities, that is compatible with an inductivist epistemology for modalities. I show that assuming this notion, not only can relations of necessity be known by induction on our experience, but such relations cannot be any more underdetermined by experience than universal regularities. This means that any one believing in a universal regularity is (...)
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  • Formal Epistemology and the New Paradigm Psychology of Reasoning.Niki Pfeifer & Igor Douven - 2014 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (2):199-221.
    This position paper advocates combining formal epistemology and the new paradigm psychology of reasoning in the studies of conditionals and reasoning with uncertainty. The new paradigm psychology of reasoning is characterized by the use of probability theory as a rationality framework instead of classical logic, used by more traditional approaches to the psychology of reasoning. This paper presents a new interdisciplinary research program which involves both formal and experimental work. To illustrate the program, the paper discusses recent work on the (...)
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  • On Being a Random Sample.David Manley - manuscript
    It is well known that de se (or ‘self-locating’) propositions complicate the standard picture of how we should respond to evidence. This has given rise to a substantial literature centered around puzzles like Sleeping Beauty, Dr. Evil, and Doomsday—and it has also sparked controversy over a style of argument that has recently been adopted by theoretical cosmologists. These discussions often dwell on intuitions about a single kind of case, but it’s worth seeking a rule that can unify our treatment of (...)
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  • Counterfactual reasoning within physical theories.Samuel C. Fletcher - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 16):3877-3898.
    If one is interested in reasoning counterfactually within a physical theory, one cannot adequately use the standard possible world semantics. As developed by Lewis and others, this semantics depends on entertaining possible worlds with miracles, worlds in which laws of nature, as described by physical theory, are violated. Van Fraassen suggested instead to use the models of a theory as worlds, but gave up on determining the needed comparative similarity relation for the semantics objectively. I present a third way, in (...)
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  • Varieties of Justification—How (Not) to Solve the Problem of Induction.Marius Backmann - 2019 - Acta Analytica 34 (2):235-255.
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  • Psa 2018.Philsci-Archive -Preprint Volume- - unknown
    These preprints were automatically compiled into a PDF from the collection of papers deposited in PhilSci-Archive in conjunction with the PSA 2018.
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  • Truth-Seeking by Abduction.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2018 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
    This book examines the philosophical conception of abductive reasoning as developed by Charles S. Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism. It explores the historical and systematic connections of Peirce's original ideas and debates about their interpretations. Abduction is understood in a broad sense which covers the discovery and pursuit of hypotheses and inference to the best explanation. The analysis presents fresh insights into this notion of reasoning, which derives from effects to causes or from surprising observations to explanatory theories. The (...)
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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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  • Beyond Vision: Philosophical Essays By Casey O’Callaghan. [REVIEW]Matthew Fulkerson - 2018 - Analysis 78 (3):577-580.
    Beyond Vision: Philosophical Essays By O’CallaghanCaseyOxford University Press, 2017. xii + 204 pp.
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  • Laws of Nature and Free Will.Pedro Merlussi - 2017 - Dissertation, Durham University
    This thesis investigates the conceptual relationship between laws of nature and free will. In order to clarify the discussion, I begin by distinguishing several questions with respect to the nature of a law: i) do the laws of nature cover everything that happens? ii) are they deterministic? iii) can there be exceptions to universal and deterministic laws? iv) do the laws of nature govern everything in the world? In order to answer these questions I look at three widely endorsed accounts (...)
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  • The Problem of Induction Dissolved; But are we better off?Ruth Weintraub - 2016 - American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (1):69-84.
    I begin by making some distinctions between kinds of response to a skeptical claim, the purpose of which is to explain what I mean by a "dissolution" of the problem of induction, and to focus on one of the ways it can be implemented. I then argue that previous attempts to dissolve the problem in this way fail, present mine, and defend it. Finally, I show that the dissolution of the problem doesn't improve our normative situation and may even worsen (...)
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  • Explanation and the Nature of Scientific Knowledge.Kevin McCain - 2015 - Science & Education 24 (7-8):827-854.
    Explaining phenomena is a primary goal of science. Consequently, it is unsurprising that gaining a proper understanding of the nature of explanation is an important goal of science education. In order to properly understand explanation, however, it is not enough to simply consider theories of the nature of explanation. Properly understanding explanation requires grasping the relation between explanation and understanding, as well as how explanations can lead to scientific knowledge. This article examines the nature of explanation, its relation to understanding, (...)
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  • Inference to the Best Explanation in Uncertain Evidential Situations.Borut Trpin & Max Pellert - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (4):977-1001.
    It has recently been argued that a non-Bayesian probabilistic version of inference to the best explanation (IBE*) has a number of advantages over Bayesian conditionalization (Douven [2013]; Douven and Wenmackers [2017]). We investigate how IBE* could be generalized to uncertain evidential situations and formulate a novel updating rule IBE**. We then inspect how it performs in comparison to its Bayesian counterpart, Jeffrey conditionalization (JC), in a number of simulations where two agents, each updating by IBE** and JC, respectively, try to (...)
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  • (1 other version)Abduction.Igorn D. Douven - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Most philosophers agree that abduction (in the sense of Inference to the Best Explanation) is a type of inference that is frequently employed, in some form or other, both in everyday and in scientific reasoning. However, the exact form as well as the normative status of abduction are still matters of controversy. This entry contrasts abduction with other types of inference; points at prominent uses of it, both in and outside philosophy; considers various more or less precise statements of it; (...)
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