Results for 'inductive metaphysics'

965 found
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  1. Reichenbach, Russell and the Metaphysics of Induction.Michael J. Shaffer - 2019 - Argumenta 8:161-181.
    Hans Reichenbach’s pragmatic treatment of the problem of induction in his later works on inductive inference was, and still is, of great interest. However, it has been dismissed as a pseudo-solution and it has been regarded as problematically obscure. This is, in large part, due to the difficulty in understanding exactly what Reichenbach’s solution is supposed to amount to, especially as it appears to offer no response to the inductive skeptic. For entirely different reasons, the significance of Bertrand (...)
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  2. The problem of induction and metaphysical assumptions concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe.Nicholas Maxwell - 2007 - Philsci Archive.
    Even though evidence underdetermines theory, often in science one theory only is regarded as acceptable in the light of the evidence. This suggests there are additional unacknowledged assumptions which constrain what theories are to be accepted. In the case of physics, these additional assumptions are metaphysical theses concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe. Rigour demands that these implicit assumptions be made explicit within science, so that they can be critically assessed and, we may hope improved. This leads to (...)
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  3. A mug's game? Solving the problem of induction with metaphysical presuppositions.Nicholas Maxwell - 2017 - In Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment. London: UCL Press.
    This paper argues that a view of science, expounded and defended elsewhere, solves the problem of induction. The view holds that we need to see science as accepting a hierarchy of metaphysical theses concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe, these theses asserting less and less as we go up the hierarchy. It may seem that this view must suffer from vicious circularity, in so far as accepting physical theories is justified by an appeal to metaphysical theses in turn (...)
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  4. The Pessimistic Induction, the Flight to Reference and the Metaphysical Zoo.Michael A. Bishop - 2003 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 17 (2):161 – 178.
    Scientific realism says of our best scientific theories that (1) most of their important posits exist and (2) most of their central claims are approximately true. Antirealists sometimes offer the pessimistic induction in reply: since (1) and (2) are false about past successful theories, they are probably false about our own best theories too. The contemporary debate about this argument has turned (and become stuck) on the question, Do the central terms of successful scientific theories refer? For example, Larry Laudan (...)
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  5. Du Châtelet, Induction, and Newton’s Rules for Reasoning.Aaron Wells - 2024 - European Journal of Philosophy 32 (4):1033-1048.
    I examine Du Châtelet’s methodology for physics and metaphysics through the lens of her engagement with Newton’s Rules for Reasoning in Natural Philosophy. I first show that her early manuscript writings discuss and endorse these Rules. Then, I argue that her famous published account of hypotheses continues to invoke close analogues of Rules 3 and 4, despite various developments in her position. Once relevant experimental evidence and some basic constraints are met, it is legitimate to inductively generalize from observations; (...)
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  6. The Ineffability of Induction.David Builes - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (1):129-149.
    My first goal is to motivate a distinctively metaphysical approach to the problem of induction. I argue that there is a precise sense in which the only way that orthodox Humean and non-Humean views can justify induction is by appealing to extremely strong and unmotivated probabilistic biases. My second goal is to sketch what such a metaphysical approach could possibly look like. After sketching such an approach, I consider a toy case that illustrates the way in which such a (...) can help us make progress on the problem of induction. (shrink)
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  7. The Metaphysics of Science and Aim-Oriented Empiricism: A Revolution for Science and Philosophy.Nicholas Maxwell - 2018 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.
    This book gives an account of work that I have done over a period of decades that sets out to solve two fundamental problems of philosophy: the mind-body problem and the problem of induction. Remarkably, these revolutionary contributions to philosophy turn out to have dramatic implications for a wide range of issues outside philosophy itself, most notably for the capacity of humanity to resolve current grave global problems and make progress towards a better, wiser world. A key element of the (...)
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  8. What Lakatos Overlooked: A Metaphysical “Hard Core” of Unity for Science.Nicholas Maxwell - unknown
    Lakatos held that science proceeds by means of competing research programme, each with its own “hard core” or paradigm. He intended this view to reconcile the competing views of Kuhn and Popper. But what Lakatos overlooked is that science needs to be construed to be one gigantic research programme with, as its “hard core”, a metaphysical thesis that asserts that the universe is such that there is an inherent unity in the laws that govern the way physical phenomena occur. The (...)
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  9. Against Methodological Continuity and Metaphysical Knowledge.Simon Allzén - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (1):1-20.
    The main purpose of this paper is to refute the metaphysicians ‘methodological continuation’ argument supporting epistemic realism in metaphysics. This argument aims to show that scientific realists have to accept that metaphysics is as rationally justified as science given that they both employ inference to the best explanation, i.e. that metaphysics and science are methodologically continuous. I argue that the reasons given by scientific realists as to why inference to the best explanation is reliable in science do (...)
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  10. Quasi-Realism and Inductive Scepticism in Hume’s Theory of Causation.Dominic K. Dimech - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (4):637-650.
    Interpreters of Hume on causation consider that an advantage of the ‘quasi-realist’ reading is that it does not commit him to scepticism or to an error theory about causal reasoning. It is unique to quasi-realism that it maintains this positive epistemic result together with a rejection of metaphysical realism about causation: the quasi-realist supplies an appropriate semantic theory in order to justify the practice of talking ‘as if’ there were causal powers in the world. In this paper, I problematise the (...)
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  11. 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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  12. Three Criticisms of Newton’s Inductive Argument in the Principia.Nicholas Maxwell - 2013 - Advances in Historical Studies 3 (1):2-11.
    In this paper, I discuss how Newton’s inductive argument of the Principia can be defended against criticisms levelled against it by Duhem, Popper and myself. I argue that Duhem’s and Popper’s criticisms can be countered, but mine cannot. It requires that we reconsider, not just Newton’s inductive argument in the Principia, but also the nature of science more generally. The methods of science, whether conceived along inductivist or hypothetico-deductivist lines, make implicit metaphysical presuppositions which rigour requires we make (...)
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  13. Manipulation, machine induction, and bypassing.Gabriel De Marco - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (2):487-507.
    A common style of argument in the literature on free will and moral responsibility is the Manipulation Argument. These tend to begin with a case of an agent in a deterministic universe who is manipulated, say, via brain surgery, into performing some action. Intuitively, this agent is not responsible for that action. Yet, since there is no relevant difference, with respect to whether an agent is responsible, between the manipulated agent and a typical agent in a deterministic universe, responsibility is (...)
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  14. Conceptual Spaces: A Solution to Goodman’s New Riddle of Induction?Sebastian Scholz - 2024 - Philosophia 52 (4).
    Nelson Goodman observed that we use only certain ‘good’ (viz. projectible) predicates during reasoning, with no obvious demarcation criterion in sight to distinguish them from the bad and gruesome ones. This apparent arbitrariness undermines the justifiability of our reasoning practices. Inspired by Quine’s 1969 paper on Natural Kinds, Peter Gärdenfors proposes a cognitive criterion based on his theory of Conceptual Spaces (CS). He argues the good predicates are those referring to natural concepts, and that we can capture naturalness in terms (...)
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  15. Seeing inferences through a metaphysical lens.Matheus Silva - manuscript
    In this paper, I argue that inductive inferences can be reinterpreted as deductive through a metaphysical lens of modal necessity. Instead of viewing deduction as a limit case of induction where the conclusion is certain rather than probable, we can rethinking inductive inferences as a particular type of deductive inferences where the conclusion is necessitated by premises in specific modal ranges.
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  16. Metaphysical libertarianism and the epistemology of testimony.Peter J. Graham - 2004 - American Philosophical Quarterly 41 (1):37-50.
    Reductionism about testimony holds that testimonial warrant or entitlement is just a species of inductive warrant. Anti-Reductionism holds that it is different from inductive but analogous to perceptual or memorial warrant. Perception receives much of its positive epistemic status from being reliably truthconducive in normal conditions. One reason to reject the epistemic analogy is that testimony involves agency – it goes through the will of the speaker – but perception does not. A speaker might always choose to lie (...)
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  17. Fermi Paradox versus Problem of Induction.Federico Re - manuscript
    This paper explores the relationships between some the problems of the Fermi Paradox (FP), with its variety of possible answers; and the Problem of Induction, and thus the possibility of a Theory of Everything. We seek to improve the hierarchy of plausibility within answers to FP, given by what we call “preference criteria”, among which we particularly highlight culture-independence. We argue that, if the question of whether a Theory of Everything is possible is answered negatively, then FP becomes much more (...)
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  18. What’s New about the New Induction?P. D. Magnus - 2006 - Synthese 148 (2):295-301.
    The problem of underdetermination is thought to hold important lessons for philosophy of science. Yet, as Kyle Stanford has recently argued, typical treatments of it offer only restatements of familiar philosophical problems. Following suggestions in Duhem and Sklar, Stanford calls for a New Induction from the history of science. It will provide proof, he thinks, of “the kind of underdetermination that the history of science reveals to be a distinctive and genuine threat to even our best scientific theories” (Stanford 2001, (...)
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  19. Aim-Oriented Empiricism and the Metaphysics of Science.Nicholas Maxwell - 2019 - Philosophia 48 (1):347–364.
    Over 40 years ago, I put forward a new philosophy of science based on the argument that physics, in only ever accepting unified theories, thereby makes a substantial metaphysical presupposition about the universe, to the effect it possesses an underlying unity. I argued that a new conception of scientific method is required to subject this problematic presupposition to critical attention so that it may be improved as science proceeds. This view has implications for the study of the metaphysics of (...)
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  20. Practical certainty and cosmological conjectures.Nicholas Maxwell - 2006 - In Michael Rahnfeld (ed.), Is there Certain Knowledge? Leipziger Universitätsverlag.
    We ordinarily assume that we have reliable knowledge of our immediate surroundings, so much so that almost all the time we entrust our lives to the truth of what we take ourselves to know, without a moment’s thought. But if, as Karl Popper and others have maintained, all our knowledge is conjectural, then this habitual assumption that our common sense knowledge of our environment is secure and trustworthy would seem to be an illusion. Popper’s philosophy of science, in particular, fails (...)
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  21. Understanding Scientific Progress: Aim-Oriented Empiricism.Nicholas Maxwell - 2017 - St. Paul, USA: Paragon House.
    "Understanding Scientific Progress constitutes a potentially enormous and revolutionary advancement in philosophy of science. It deserves to be read and studied by everyone with any interest in or connection with physics or the theory of science. Maxwell cites the work of Hume, Kant, J.S. Mill, Ludwig Bolzmann, Pierre Duhem, Einstein, Henri Poincaré, C.S. Peirce, Whitehead, Russell, Carnap, A.J. Ayer, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, Nelson Goodman, Bas van Fraassen, and numerous others. He lauds Popper for advancing beyond (...)
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  22. Ani racjonalizacja światopoglądu, ani rezygnacja z mądrości. Czy metafilozofia Kazimierza Twardowskiego może być wyznacznikiem rzetelnie uprawianej filozofii klasycznej? / / Can Kazimierz Twardowski's metaphilosophy be the determinant of reliable practiced classical philosophy? 2018.Marek Pepliński - 2018 - Filo-Sofija 18 (40/1):41-78.
    The article aims to determine whether it is possible to build the reliably practiced classical philosophy, understood as a metaphysical research, directed towards the nature of objective reality. The purpose of this kind of philosophizing is knowledge and truth. Moreover, the practice of such philosophizing and its results should meet some of the characteristics of science. The paper establishes a set of conditions that have been imposed on the science of metaphysics by Kazimierz Twardowski. Among the conditions of such (...)
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  23. The rationality of scientific discovery part I: The traditional rationality problem.Nicholas Maxwell - 1974 - Philosophy of Science 41 (2):123-153.
    The basic task of the essay is to exhibit science as a rational enterprise. I argue that in order to do this we need to change quite fundamentally our whole conception of science. Today it is rather generally taken for granted that a precondition for science to be rational is that in science we do not make substantial assumptions about the world, or about the phenomena we are investigating, which are held permanently immune from empirical appraisal. According to this standard (...)
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  24. Popper's paradoxical pursuit of natural philosophy.Nicholas Maxwell - 2016 - In Jeremy Shearmur & Geoffrey Stokes (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Popper. Cambridge University Press. pp. 170-207.
    Philosophy of science is seen by most as a meta-discipline – one that takes science as its subject matter, and seeks to acquire knowledge and understanding about science without in any way affecting, or contributing to, science itself. Karl Popper’s approach is very different. His first love is natural philosophy or, as he would put it, cosmology. This intermingles cosmology and the rest of natural science with epistemology, methodology and metaphysics. Paradoxically, however, one of his best known contributions, his (...)
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  25. Misunderstanding Understanding Scientific Progress.Nicholas Maxwell - manuscript
    In my book Understanding Scientific Progress, I argue that fundamental philosophical problems about scientific progress, above all the problem of induction, cannot be solved granted standard empiricism (SE), a doctrine which most scientists and philosophers of science take for granted. A key tenet of SE is that no permanent thesis about the world can be accepted as a part of scientific knowledge independent of evidence. For a number of reasons, we need to adopt a rather different conception of science which (...)
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  26. Center indifference and skepticism.David Builes - 2024 - Noûs 58 (3):778-798.
    Many philosophers have been attracted to a restricted version of the principle of indifference in the case of self‐locating belief. Roughly speaking, this principle states that, within any given possible world, one should be indifferent between different hypotheses concerning who one is within that possible world, so long as those hypotheses are compatible with one's evidence. My first goal is to defend a more precise version of this principle. After responding to several existing criticisms of such a principle, I argue (...)
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  27. Explaining causal closure.Justin Tiehen - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (9):2405-2425.
    The physical realm is causally closed, according to physicalists like me. But why is it causally closed, what metaphysically explains causal closure? I argue that reductive physicalists are committed to one explanation of causal closure to the exclusion of any independent explanation, and that as a result, they must give up on using a causal argument to attack mind–body dualism. Reductive physicalists should view dualism in much the way that we view the hypothesis that unicorns exist, or that the Kansas (...)
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  28. The Comprehensibility of the Universe: A New Conception of Science.Nicholas Maxwell - 1998 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
    The Comprehensibility of the Universe puts forward a radically new conception of science. According to the orthodox conception, scientific theories are accepted and rejected impartially with respect to evidence, no permanent assumption being made about the world independently of the evidence. Nicholas Maxwell argues that this orthodox view is untenable. He urges that in its place a new orthodoxy is needed, which sees science as making a hierarchy of metaphysical assumptions about the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe, these assumptions (...)
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  29. Agentive Modals and Agentive Modality: A Cautionary Tale.Timothy Kearl & Robert H. Wallace - 2024 - American Philosophical Quarterly 61 (2):139–155.
    In this paper, we consider recent attempts to metaphysically explain agentive modality in terms of conditionals. We suggest that the best recent accounts face counterexamples, and more worryingly, they take some agentive modality for granted. In particular, the ability to perform basic actions features as a primitive in these theories. While it is perfectly acceptable for a semantics of agentive modal claims to take some modality for granted in getting the extension of action claims correct, a metaphysical explanation of agentive (...)
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  30. Aim-Oriented Empiricism Since 1984.Nicholas Maxwell - 2007 - In From knowledge to wisdom: a revolution for science and the humanities. London: Pentire Press.
    This chapter outlines improvements and developments made to aim-oriented empiricism since "From Knowledge to Wisdom" was first published in 1984. It argues that aim-oriented empiricism enables us to solve three fundamental problems in the philosophy of science: the problems of induction and verisimilitude, and the problem of what it means to say of a physical theory that it is unified.
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  31. The Need for a Revolution in the Philosophy of Science.Nicholas Maxwell - 2002 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 33 (2):381-408.
    There is a need to bring about a revolution in the philosophy of science, interpreted to be both the academic discipline, and the official view of the aims and methods of science upheld by the scientific community. At present both are dominated by the view that in science theories are chosen on the basis of empirical considerations alone, nothing being permanently accepted as a part of scientific knowledge independently of evidence. Biasing choice of theory in the direction of simplicity, unity (...)
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  32. Aim-Oriented Empiricism since 1984.Nicholas Max - 2007 - In Nicholas Maxwell (ed.), From knowledge to wisdom: a revolution for science and the humanities. London: Pentire Press.
    This chapter indicates a number of improvements and developments that have been made to aim-oriented empiricism since the publication of the first edition of "From Knowledge to Wisdom" in 1984. It also argues that aim-oriented empiricism enables us to solve three fundamental problems in the philosophy of science: the problems of induction, verisimilitude, and the problem of what it means to say of a physical theory that it is unified - a problem that baffled even Einstein. This chapter improves earlier (...)
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  33. Being pessimistic about the objective present.Derek Lam - 2020 - Synthese (12):1-16.
    Some philosophers argue that non-presentist A-theories problematically imply that we cannot know that this moment is present. The problem is usually presented as arising from the combination of the A-theoretic ideology of a privileged presentness and a non-presentist ontology. The goal of this essay is to show that the epistemic problem can be rephrased as a pessimistic induction. By doing so, I will show that the epistemic problem, in fact, stems from the A-theoretic ideology alone. Hence, once it is properly (...)
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  34. Justification as a loaded notion.Yuval Avnur - 2019 - Synthese 198 (5):4897-4916.
    The problem of skepticism is often understood as a paradox: a valid argument with plausible premises whose conclusion is that we lack justification for perceptual beliefs. Typically, this conclusion is deemed unacceptable, so a theory is offered that posits conditions for justification on which some premise is false. The theory defended here is more general, and explains why the paradox arises in the first place. Like Strawson’s (Introduction to logical theory, Wiley, New York, 1952) “ordinary language” approach to induction, the (...)
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  35. We Need to Recreate Natural Philosophy.Nicholas Maxwell - 2018 - Philosophies 3 (4):28.
    Modern science began as natural philosophy, an admixture of philosophy and science. It was then killed off by Newton, as a result of his claim to have derived his law of gravitation from the phenomena by induction. But this post-Newtonian conception of science, which holds that theories are accepted on the basis of evidence, is untenable, as the long-standing insolubility of the problem of induction indicates. Persistent acceptance of unified theories only in physics, when endless equally empirically successful disunified rivals (...)
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  36. Has science established that the universe is physically comprehensible?Nicholas Maxwell - 2013 - In Anderson Travena & Brady Soren (eds.), Recent Advances in Cosmology. Nova Science. pp. 1-56.
    Most scientists would hold that science has not established that the cosmos is physically comprehensible – i.e. such that there is some as-yet undiscovered true physical theory of everything that is unified. This is an empirically untestable, or metaphysical thesis. It thus lies beyond the scope of science. Only when physics has formulated a testable unified theory of everything which has been amply corroborated empirically will science be in a position to declare that it has established that the cosmos is (...)
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  37. The Putnam-Goodman-Kripke Paradox.Robert Kowalenko - 2022 - Acta Analytica 37 (4):575-594.
    The extensions of Goodman’s ‘grue’ predicate and Kripke’s ‘quus’ are constructed from the extensions of more familiar terms via a reinterpretation that permutes assignments of reference. Since this manoeuvre is at the heart of Putnam’s model-theoretic and permutation arguments against metaphysical realism (‘Putnam’s Paradox’), both Goodman’s New Riddle of Induction and the paradox about meaning that Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein are instances of Putnam’s. Evidence cannot selectively confirm the green-hypothesis and disconfirm the grue-hypothesis, because the theory of which the green-hypothesis (...)
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  38. The Rules of Logic Composition for the Bayesian Epistemic e-Values.Wagner Borges & Julio Michael Stern - 2007 - Logic Journal of the IGPL 15 (5-6):401-420.
    In this paper, the relationship between the e-value of a complex hypothesis, H, and those of its constituent elementary hypotheses, Hj, j = 1… k, is analyzed, in the independent setup. The e-value of a hypothesis H, ev, is a Bayesian epistemic, credibility or truth value defined under the Full Bayesian Significance Testing mathematical apparatus. The questions addressed concern the important issue of how the truth value of H, and the truth function of the corresponding FBST structure M, relate to (...)
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  39. Improve Popper and procure a perfect simulacrum of verification indistinguishable from the real thing.Nicholas Maxwell - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science.
    According to Karl Popper, science cannot verify its theories empirically, but it can falsify them, and that suffices to account for scientific progress. For Popper, a law or theory remains a pure conjecture, probability equal to zero, however massively corroborated empirically it may be. But it does just seem to be the case that science does verify empirically laws and theories. We trust our lives to such verifications when we fly in aeroplanes, cross bridges and take modern medicines. We can (...)
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  40. Continuous versions of Haack’s puzzles: equilibria, eigen-states and ontologies.Julio Michael Stern - 2017 - Logic Journal of the IGPL 25 (4):604-631.
    This article discusses some continuous limit cases of Susan Haack’s crossword puzzle metaphor for the coherent development and foundation of science. The main objective of this discussion is to build a bridge between Haack’s foundherentism and the epistemological framework of objective cognitive constructivism, including its key metaphor of objects as tokens for eigen-solutions. The historical development of chemical affinity tables is used to illustrate our arguments.
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  41. Kiss the Ship of Theseus Goodbye!Shane J. Ralston - 2020 - In Courtland Lewis (ed.), KISS and Philosophy: Wiser than Hell. Popular Culture and Philosophy. pp. 105-111.
    The American rock band KISS is notorious. Its notoriety derives not only from the band’s otherworldly costumes (except for of course during the unmasked period), the fact that they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, their numerous hit records or the amazing stage theatrics and pyrotechnics of their live shows. It’s also related to the band’s constantly changing makeup (and I don’t mean the kind on their faces!). Of the four members, only Paul Stanley and Gene (...)
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  42. Phenomenal Powers.Hedda Hassel Mørch - manuscript
    The phenomenal powers view claims that phenomenal properties metaphysically necessitate their effects in virtue of how they feel, and thereby constitute non-Humean causal powers. For example, pain necessitates that subjects who experience it try to avoid it in virtue of feeling bad. I argue for this view based on the inconceivability of certain phenomenal properties necessitating different effects than their actual ones, their ability to predict their effects without induction, and their ability to explain their effects without appeal to laws (...)
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  43. Physik und Ontologie – oder Die 'Ontologiebeladenheit' der Epistemologie und die 'Realismusdebatte'.Rudolf Lindpointner - manuscript
    The question of what ontological insights can be gained from the knowledge of physics (keyword: ontic structural realism) cannot obviously be completely separated from the view of physics as a science from an epistemological perspective. This is also visible in the debate about 'scientific realism'. This debate makes it clear, in the form of the importance of perception as a criterion for the assertion of existence in relation to the 'theoretical entities' of physics, that epistemology itself is 'ontologically loaded'. This (...)
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  44. All and Nought.Amir Naseri - 2024 - Institue for Advance Studies on Consciousness (IASC) Press.
    "All-and-Nought" is the 2nd Edition of a series of books that study the nature of Reality and Being. The first edition of the book, "The Metaphysics of All-and-None", was published by Edwin Mellen Press in January 2022; since then the book has been under severe investigations and reviews by many scholars and pundits worldwide. The 2nd edition of the book contains the original text plus a foreword by Professor Richard Howells from King’s College London and some reports by Physicists, (...)
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  45. Must Science Make Cosmological Assumptions if it is to be Rational?Nicholas Maxwell - 1997 - In T. Kelly (ed.), The Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the Irish Philosophical Society Spring Conference. Irish Philosophical Society.
    Cosmological speculation about the ultimate nature of the universe, being necessary for science to be possible at all, must be regarded as a part of scientific knowledge itself, however epistemologically unsound it may be in other respects. The best such speculation available is that the universe is comprehensible in some way or other and, more specifically, in the light of the immense apparent success of modern natural science, that it is physically comprehensible. But both these speculations may be false; in (...)
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  46.  82
    Is the History of Science Evidence for Naturalism? A Reply to Jeffery Jay Lowder.Don McIntosh - 2023 - Trinity Journal of Natural and Philosophical Theology 1 (2):69-87.
    As formulated by atheist Jeffery Jay Lowder, the Evidential Argument from the History of Science, or AHS, is premised on the observation that over the course of modern history, naturalistic explanations have progressively overtaken supernaturalistic explanations. That history, says Lowder, constitutes evidence that metaphysical naturalism is true (hence that theism is false). But it’s possible that the historical pattern as described is not actually the result of any genuine explanatory virtues of naturalistic over supernaturalistic explanations. If there are good reasons (...)
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  47. No purely epistemic theory can account for the naturalness of kinds.Olivier Lemeire - 2018 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 12):2907-2925.
    Several philosophers have recently tried to define natural kinds in epistemic terms only. Given the persistent problems with finding a successful metaphysical theory, these philosophers argue that we would do better to describe natural kinds solely in terms of their epistemic usefulness, such as their role in supporting inductive inferences. In this paper, I argue against these epistemology-only theories of natural kinds and in favor of, at least partly, metaphysical theories. I do so in three steps. In the first (...)
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  48. Inference to the Best Explanation, Naturalism, and Theism.Seungbae Park - 2023 - Implicit Religion 24 (3-4):472-485.
    De Ray argues that relying on inference to the best explanation (IBE) requires the metaphysical belief that most phenomena have explanations. I object that instead the metaphysical belief requires the use of IBE. De Ray uses IBE himself to establish theism that God is the cause of the metaphysical belief, and thus he has the burden of establishing the metaphysical belief independently of using IBE. Naturalism that the world is the cause of the metaphysical belief is preferable to theism, contrary (...)
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  49. Ipotesi e metodo: Osservazioni su Newton, Bacon e Descartes.Simone Guidi - 2019 - Syzetesis 6.
    In this article, I deal with the role of hypothesis in the scientific methodology of Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon and René Descartes. The first paragraph is about hypothesis in Newton's lexicon, especially trying to understand the meaning of his famous hypotheses non fingo. The second paragraph deals with Bacon's methodology, arguing especially that his epis-temology was the first to propose an artificial way for inductive inferences, also giving up all hypothesis in science. The third paragraph shows how Descartes, following (...)
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  50. All men are animals: hypothetical, categorical, or material?Rani Lill Anjum & Johan Arnt Myrstad - manuscript
    The conditional interpretation of general categorical statements like ‘All men are animals’ as universally quantified material conditionals ‘For all x, if x is F, then x is G’ suggests that the logical structure of law statements is conditional rather than categorical. Disregarding the problem that the universally quantified material conditional is trivially true whenever there are no xs that are F, there are some reasons to be sceptical of Frege’s equivalence between categorical and conditional expressions. -/- Now many philosophers will (...)
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