This volume collects some influential essays in which Simon Blackburn, one of our leading philosophers, explores one of the most profound and fertile of philosophical problems: the way in which our judgments relate to the world. This debate has centered on realism, or the view that what we say is validated by the way things stand in the world, and a variety of oppositions to it. Prominent among the latter are expressive and projective theories, but also a relaxed pluralism that (...) discourages the view that there are substantial issues at stake. The figure of the "quasi-realist" dramatizes the difficulty of conducting these debates. Typically philosophers thinking of themselves as realists will believe that they alone can give a proper or literal account of some of our attachments--to truth, to facts, to the independent world, to knowledge and certainty. The quasi-realist challenge, developed by Blackburn in this volume, is that we can have those attachments without any metaphysic that deserves to be called realism, so that the metaphysical picture that goes with our practices is quite idle. The cases treated here include the theories of value and knowledge, modality, probability, causation, intentionality and rule-following, and explanation. A substantial new introduction has been added, drawing together some of the central themes. The essays articulate a fresh alternative to a primitive realist/anti-realist opposition, and their cumulative effect is to yield a new appreciation of the delicacy of the debate in these central areas. (shrink)

This book examines some of the deepest questions in philosophy: What is involved in judging a belief, action, or feeling to be rational?

August 16, 1997 David Lewis2 has long defended an account of scientific law acceptable even to an empiricist with significant metaphysical scruples. On this account, the laws are defined to be the consequences of the best system for axiomitizing all occurrent fact. Here "best system" means the set of sentences which yields the best combination of strength of descriptive content 3 with simplicity of exposition. And occurrent facts, the facts to be systematized, are roughly the particular facts about a localized (...) space-time region that are non-modal, non-dispositional, and non-causal. Scientists providing or attempting to provide laws are plausibly seen as giving general principles that unify a body of data. Thus they organize or systematize the arrangement of occurrences. For this reason, Lewis's account has the important merits of providing contact with actual scientific practice while making sense of the standard philosophical conception that laws should be general but more than mere accidental generalizations. However, Lewis has long known about a potential problem with this account, a problem involving chance and credence.4 In a recent series of articles he, Michael Thau, and Ned Hall have developed a new formulation of the relationship between chance and credence which solves the problem. However, I will argue that these articles leave untouched and even exacerbate a closely related and more fundamental problem with the best system account, the problem of nomic necessity. Laws are supposed to be more than true; in some sense they must be true. Yet a principle's membership in the best systematization for one world seems to say nothing about its necessity, i.e., its truth at other worlds. I close by briefly describing how an alternative empiricist account may remove both problems. (shrink)

In Part I, we presented and motivated a new formulation of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). Here in Part II, we present an epistemological argument in defense of HS, thus formulated. Our contention is that one can combine a modest realism about laws of nature with a proper recognition of the importance of empirical testability in the epistemology of science only if one accepts HS.

Humean supervenience is the doctrine that there are no necessary connections in the world. David Lewis identifies one big bad bug to the programme of providing Humean analyses for apparently non-Humean features of the world. The bug is chance. We put the bug under the microscope, and conclude that chance is no special problem for the Humean.

According to principles of probability coordination, such as Miller's Principle or Lewis's Principal Principle, you ought to set your subjective probability for an event equal to what you take to be the objective probability of the event. For example, you should expect events with a very high probability to occur and those with a very low probability not to occur. This paper examines the grounds of such principles. It is argued that any attempt to justify a principle of probability coordination (...) encounters the same difficulties as attempts to justify induction. As a result, no justification can be found. (shrink)

Faced with the paradox of undermining futures, Humeans have resigned themselves to accounts of chance that severely conflict with our intuitions. However, such resignation is premature: The problem is Humean supervenience (HS), not Humeanism. This paper develops a projectivist Humeanism on which chance claims are understood as normative, rather than fact stating. Rationality constraints on the cotenability of norms and factual claims ground a factual-normative worlds semantics that, in addition to solving the Frege-Geach problem, delivers the intuitive set of possibilia (...) for each chance law. Hence, the account does not entail HS, and the paradox does not arise. A confirmation theory is developed, and the 'principal principle' is justified. (shrink)