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Sherrilyn Roush [27]Sherri Roush [1]
  1. (1 other version)Optimism about the pessimistic induction.Sherrilyn Roush - 2009 - In P. D. Magnus & Jacob Busch (eds.), New waves in philosophy of science. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 29-58.
    How confident does the history of science allow us to be about our current well-tested scientific theories, and why? The scientific realist thinks we are well within our rights to believe our best-tested theories, or some aspects of them, are approximately true.2 Ambitious arguments have been made to this effect, such as that over historical time our scientific theories are converging to the truth, that the retention of concepts and claims is evidence for this, and that there can be no (...)
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  2. The epistemic superiority of experiment to simulation.Sherrilyn Roush - 2018 - Synthese 195 (11):4883-4906.
    This paper defends the naïve thesis that the method of experiment has per se an epistemic superiority over the method of computer simulation, a view that has been rejected by some philosophers writing about simulation, and whose grounds have been hard to pin down by its defenders. I further argue that this superiority does not come from the experiment’s object being materially similar to the target in the world that the investigator is trying to learn about, as both sides of (...)
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  3. Epistemic Self-Doubt.Sherrilyn Roush - 2017 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    When we get evidence that tells us our belief-forming mechanisms may not be reliable this presents a thorny set of questions about whether and how to revise our original belief. This article analyzes aspects of the problem and a variety of approaches to its solution.
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  4. Second Guessing: A Self-Help Manual.Sherrilyn Roush - 2009 - Episteme 6 (3):251-268.
    I develop a general framework with a rationality constraint that shows how coherently to represent and deal with second-order information about one's own judgmental reliability. It is a rejection of and generalization away from the typical Bayesian requirements of unconditional judgmental self-respect and perfect knowledge of one's own beliefs, and is defended by appeal to the Principal Principle. This yields consequences about maintaining unity of the self, about symmetries and asymmetries between the first- and third-person, and a principled way of (...)
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  5. Knowledge, Evidence, and Naked Statistics.Sherrilyn Roush - 2023 - In Luis R. G. Oliveira (ed.), Externalism about Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Many who think that naked statistical evidence alone is inadequate for a trial verdict think that use of probability is the problem, and something other than probability – knowledge, full belief, causal relations – is the solution. I argue that the issue of whether naked statistical evidence is weak can be formulated within the probabilistic idiom, as the question whether likelihoods or only posterior probabilities should be taken into account in our judgment of a case. This question also identifies a (...)
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  6. Sensitivity and Closure.Sherrilyn Roush - 2012 - In Kelly Becker & Tim Black (eds.), The Sensitivity Principle in Epistemology. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 242-268.
    This paper argues that if knowledge is defined in terms of probabilistic tracking then the benefits of epistemic closure follow without the addition of a closure clause. (This updates my definition of knowledge in Tracking Truth 2005.) An important condition on this result is found in "Closure Failure and Scientific Inquiry" (2017).
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  7. Knowledge of Our Own Beliefs.Sherrilyn Roush - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (3):45-69.
    There is a widespread view that in order to be rational we must mostly know what we believe. In the probabilistic tradition this is defended by arguments that a person who failed to have this knowledge would be vulnerable to sure loss, or probabilistically incoherent. I argue that even gross failure to know one's own beliefs need not expose one to sure loss, and does not if we follow a generalization of the standard bridge principle between first-order and second-order beliefs. (...)
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  8. Closure On Skepticism.Sherrilyn Roush - 2010 - Journal of Philosophy 107 (5):243-256.
    It is received wisdom that the skeptic has a devastating line of argument in the following. You probably think, he says, that you know that you have hands. But if you knew that you had hands, then you would also know that you were not a brain in a vat, a brain suspended in fluid with electrodes feeding you perfectly coordinated impressions that are generated by a supercomputer, of a world that looks and moves just like this one. You would (...)
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  9. The Difference Between Knowledge and Understanding.Sherrilyn Roush - 2017 - In Rodrigo Borges, Claudio de Almeida & Peter David Klein (eds.), Explaining Knowledge: New Essays on the Gettier Problem. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 384-407.
    In the aftermath of Gettier’s examples, knowledge came to be thought of as what you would have if in addition to a true belief and your favorite epistemic goody, such as justifiedness, you also were ungettiered, and the theory of knowledge was frequently equated, especially by its detractors, with the project of pinning down that extra bit. It would follow that knowledge contributes something distinctive that makes it indispensable in our pantheon of epistemic concepts only if avoiding gettierization has a (...)
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  10. (1 other version)The value of knowledge and the pursuit of survival.Sherrilyn Roush - 2010 - Metaphilosophy 41 (3):255-278.
    Abstract: Knowledge requires more than mere true belief, and we also tend to think it is more valuable. I explain the added value that knowledge contributes if its extra ingredient beyond true belief is tracking . I show that the tracking conditions are the unique conditions on knowledge that achieve for those who fulfill them a strict Nash Equilibrium and an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy in what I call the True Belief Game. The added value of these properties, intuitively, includes preparedness (...)
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  11. Copernicus, Kant, and the anthropic cosmological principles.Sherrilyn Roush - 2003 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 34 (1):5-35.
    In the last three decades several cosmological principles and styles of reasoning termed 'anthropic' have been introduced into physics research and popular accounts of the universe and human beings' place in it. I discuss the circumstances of 'fine tuning' that have motivated this development, and what is common among the principles. I examine the two primary principles, and find a sharp difference between these 'Weak' and 'Strong' varieties: contrary to the view of the progenitors that all anthropic principles represent a (...)
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  12. The Rationality of Science in Relation to its History.Sherrilyn Roush - 2015 - In William J. Devlin & Alisa Bokulich (eds.), Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions - 50 Years On. Cham: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 311. Springer. pp. 71-90.
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  13. Skepticism about Reasoning.Sherrilyn Roush, Kelty Allen & Ian Herbert - 2009 - In P. D. Magnus & Jacob Busch (eds.), New waves in philosophy of science. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 112-141.
    Less discussed than Hume’s skepticism about what grounds there could be for projecting empirical hypotheses is his concern with a skeptical regress that he thought threatened to extinguish any belief when we reflect that our reasoning is not perfect. The root of the problem is the fact that a reflection about our reasoning is itself a piece of reasoning. If each reflection is negative and undermining, does that not give us a diminution of our original belief to nothing? It requires (...)
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  14. Randomized Controlled Trials and the Flow of Information: Comment on Cartwright.Sherrilyn Roush - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 143 (1):137-145.
    The transferability problem—whether the results of an experiment will transfer to a treatment population—affects not only Randomized Controlled Trials but any type of study. The problem for any given type of study can also, potentially, be addressed to some degree through many different types of study. The transferability problem for a given RCT can be investigated further through another RCT, but the variables to use in the further experiment must be discovered. This suggests we could do better on the epistemological (...)
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  15. Simulation and Understanding Other Minds.Sherrilyn Roush - 2016 - Philosophical Issues 26 (1):351-373.
    There is much disagreement about how extensive a role theoretical mind-reading, behavior-reading, and simulation each have and need to have in our knowing and understanding other minds, and how each method is implemented in the brain, but less discussion of the epistemological question what it is about the products of these methods that makes them count as knowledge or understanding. This question has become especially salient recently as some have the intuition that mirror neurons can bring understanding of another's action (...)
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  16. Closure Failure and Scientific Inquiry.Sherri Roush - 2017 - Res Philosophica 94 (2):1-25.
    Deduction is important to scientific inquiry because it can extend knowledge efficiently, bypassing the need to investigate everything directly. The existence of closure failure—where one knows the premises and that the premises imply the conclusion but nevertheless does not know the conclusion—is a problem because it threatens this usage. It means that we cannot trust deduction for gaining new knowledge unless we can identify such cases ahead of time so as to avoid them. For philosophically engineered examples we have “inner (...)
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  17. Testability and the Unity of Science.Sherrilyn Roush - 2004 - Journal of Philosophy 101 (11):555-573.
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  18. Pessimistic Induction.Sherrilyn Roush - 2013 - In Byron Kaldis (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
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  19. Hypochondria and Self-Recalibration.Sherrilyn Roush - manuscript
    Health anxiety is, among other things, a response to a universal epistemological problem about whether changes in one’s body indicate serious illness, a problem that grows more challenging to the individual with age and with every advance in medical science, detection, and treatment. There is growing evidence that dysfunctional metacognitive beliefs – beliefs about thinking – are the driving factor, with dysfunctional substantive beliefs about the probability of illness a side‐effect, and that Metacognitive Therapy (MCT) is more effective than Cognitive (...)
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  20. 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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  21. Coherence, Truthfulness, and Efficiency in Communication.Sherrilyn Roush - manuscript
    Why should we make our beliefs consistent or, more generally, probabilistically coherent? That it will prevent sure losses in betting and that it will maximize one’s chances of having accurate beliefs are popular answers. However, these justifications are self-centered, focused on the consequences of our coherence for ourselves. I argue that incoherence has consequences for others because it is liable to mislead others, to false beliefs about one’s beliefs and false expectations about one’s behavior. I argue that the moral obligation (...)
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  22. Bayesian Recalibration: A Generalization.Sherrilyn Roush - manuscript
    This develops a framework for second-order conditionalization on statements about one's own epistemic reliability. It is the generalization of the framework of "Second-Guessing" (2009) to the case where the subject is uncertain about her reliability. See also "Epistemic Self-Doubt" (2017).
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  23. Fallibility and Authority.Sherrilyn Roush - 2011 - In William Sims Bainbridge (ed.), Leadership in Science and Technology: A Reference Handbook. SAGE.
    Over the centuries since the modern scientific revolution that started with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, two things have changed that have required reorientation of our assumptions and re-education of our reflexes. First, we have learned that even the very best science is fallible; eminently successful theories investigated and supported through the best methods, and by the best evidence available, might be not just incomplete but wrong. That is, it is possible to have a justified belief that is false.
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  24. Justification and the growth of error.Sherrilyn Roush - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (2):527-551.
    It is widely accepted that in fallible reasoning potential error necessarily increases with every additional step, whether inferences or premises, because it grows in the same way that the probability of a lengthening conjunction shrinks. As it stands, this is disappointing but, I will argue, not out of keeping with our experience. However, consulting an expert, proof-checking, constructing gap-free proofs, and gathering more evidence for a given conclusion also add more steps, and we think these actions have the potential to (...)
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  25. Testability and candor.Sherrilyn Roush - 2005 - Synthese 145 (2):233 - 275.
    On analogy with testimony, I define a notion of a scientific theory’s lacking or having candor, in a testing situation, according to whether the theory under test is probabilistically relevant to the processes in the test procedures, and thereby to the reliability of test outcomes. I argue that this property identifies what is distinctive about those theories that Karl Popper denounced as exhibiting “reinforced dogmatism” through their self-protective behavior (e.g., psychoanalysis, Hegelianism, Marxism). I explore whether lack of candor interferes with (...)
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  26. Love Science.Sherrilyn Roush - 2008 - Philosophy Department Newsletter UC Berkeley 2:4-5.
    Disclaimer: This work on marginal science has not been funded by the National Science Foundation.
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  27. Belief and Decision under Uncertainty.Sherrilyn Roush - manuscript
    This is a very short textbook on probabilistic reasoning, expected utility decision-making, cognitive biases, and self-correction, especially in application to medical examples. It also includes a chapter on concepts of health.
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