bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Experimental philosophy
Authors: Mallon Ron , Nichols Shaun 
Published: September 2018

Experimental philosophy is not a philosophy, it is a method that is supposed to contribute to philosophical inquiry. Characteristically, experimental philosophers use empirical techniques to investigate philosophically significant intuitions about cases. An intuition, in this context, is a spontaneous judgement a person makes about a case with little or no conscious reason for their judgement.
Intuitions play a key role in much philosophical theorizing. The attempt to provide a conceptual analysis or definition for important philosophical concepts, e.g. knowledge, meaning, responsibility, has long been a major theoretical concern in philosophy. One prominent philosophical view holds that the meaning of our concepts is given by the folk theory (or set of common-sense beliefs) in which the concepts are embedded. Intuitions about cases are thought to reveal the contours of the folk theory and the meaning of the concept. As a result, in pursuing conceptual analyses, many philosophers rely on intuitions about cases to descry the folk theories in which those concepts are embedded.
In addition to their role in conceptual analysis, philosophers invoke intuitions as evidence for substantive philosophical claims, perhaps in much the same way as empirical scientists invoke observation as evidence. For instance, the intuition that it is wrong to push one man in front of a speeding trolley to save five others is invoked as evidence that utilitarianism does not give the right theory of how we ought to act. Similarly, intuitions are used to support substantive claims about knowledge, meaning and responsibility.
When philosophers use intuitions - whether in the service of conceptual analysis or in the effort to establish a more substantive philosophical claim - the traditional methodology looks a priori. That is, one arrives at one’s judgements without relying on evidence from sensory perception. For instance, to analyse the concept intentional a philosopher might consult their intuitions about whether the concept applies in various actual and possible circumstances, and a condition of adequacy upon the definition is that it best conforms to these intuitions. In contrast, experimental philosophers use experimental techniques to study intuitions about philosophically important concepts.
Experimental epistemology
Authors: Beebe James 
Published: September 2018

Experimental epistemology is the branch of experimental philosophy devoted to the empirical study of our shared practices of reasoning and making judgments about knowledge, evidence, and justified belief. In addition to trying to construct an empirically grounded account of folk epistemology, experimental epistemologists also attempt to use the results of their studies to make contributions to ongoing debates within mainstream epistemology.
Mainstream contemporary epistemologists generally take themselves to be providing an account of epistemic concepts that are shared by all rational agents. Although the most fundamental questions in epistemology may not be empirical ones, it is an empirical question whether all rational agents employ the same epistemic concepts or reason about them in the same way. If it were discovered that individuals from different cultures made widely varying epistemic judgments about the same cases or that philosophers’ thinking about knowledge diverged significantly from that of ordinary individuals, this would have a major impact on how epistemologists approached their subject. It is on empirical questions such as these that experimental epistemology focuses its attention.
Assertion
Authors: Yang Guiming , Goldberg Sanford C. 
Published: September 2018

In the past two to three decades, most of the philosophical attention that has been paid to the speech act of assertion aims to characterize the nature of the act.
A first question that is pursued concerns where the speech act of assertion fits within the domain of assertives (the category speech acts in which a proposition is presented-as-true). Simply put, assertions are those assertive speech acts in which the speaker advances a claim. But what is it to perform this sort of speech act? What is the nature of the act? Philosophers have proposed six main answers. These include the attitude view (which characterizes the nature of the act in terms of its role in expressing belief), the grammatical view (on which assertion is picked out by the vehicles used to make acts of this kind, namely, declarative sentences), the common ground view (where assertion is understood in terms of its essential effect on a conversation’s common ground), the commitment view (where assertion is characterized in terms of the kind of commitment that is engendered or reconfirmed by the performance of acts of this type), the constitutive rule view (according to which assertions are individuated by the distinctive rule that governs acts of this type) and the no-assertion view (which holds that there is no unique, interesting speech act type picked out by ‘assertion’).
Of these six views, the one that has received the most attention (both critical and supportive) is the constitutive rule view. Such a view has been developed (and criticized) at great length. A leading version of the constitutive rule view is the view that the rule in question requires that one assert only what one knows. The main considerations offered in defense of this version of the view include its role in explaining various features of our assertoric practice, including the paradoxicality of assertions of sentences of the form ‘p, but I do not know that p’, its role in explaining why propositions expressed with, for example, ‘My lottery ticket lost’ are not properly assertable on merely probabilistic grounds (even when the odds of one’s winning are arbitrarily small) and its role in explaining why ‘How do you know?’ is a proper response to an assertion (even when the assertion’s explicit content has nothing to do with the speaker’s knowledge). However, many authors have responded to these arguments for the knowledge rule, finding them unconvincing.
Interestingly, a great amount of attention has also been devoted to forging connections between the speech act of assertion and a variety of other topics of philosophical interest. These include topics in philosophy of language (pragmatics, semantics), epistemology (the epistemology of testimony, the epistemology of disagreement, the nature of epistemic authority, the division of epistemic labor), metaphysics (the nature of future contingents, modality), ethics (the ethics of assertion; what we owe to each other as information-sharing creatures) and social and political philosophy (various forms of epistemic injustice, silencing).
Bell’s theorem
Authors: Fine Arthur 
Published: September 2018

Bell’s theorem is concerned with the outcomes of a special type of ‘correlation experiment’ in quantum mechanics. It shows that under certain conditions these outcomes would be restricted by a system of inequalities (the ‘Bell inequalities’) that contradict the predictions of quantum mechanics. Various experimental tests confirm the quantum predictions to a high degree and hence violate the Bell inequalities. Although these tests contain loopholes due to experimental inefficiencies, they do suggest that the assumptions behind the Bell inequalities are incompatible not only with quantum theory but also with nature.
A central assumption used to derive the Bell inequalities is a species of no-action-at-a-distance, called ‘locality’: roughly, that the outcomes in one wing of the experiment cannot immediately be affected by measurements performed in another wing (spatially distant from the first). For this reason the Bell theorem is sometimes cited as showing that locality is incompatible with the quantum theory, and the experimental tests as demonstrating that nature is nonlocal. These claims have been contested.
Boyle, Robert (1627–91)
Authors: Sargent Rose-Mary 
Published: September 2018

Boyle is often remembered for the contributions that he made to the sciences of chemistry and pneumatics. Like other natural philosophers in seventeenth-century England, however, he was a synthetic thinker who sought to advance knowledge in all areas of human concern. An early advocate of experimental methods, he argued that experimentation would not only reveal the hidden processes operative in the world but would also advance the cause of religion. Through the study of nature, experimentalists would come to understand that the intricacy of design manifest in the world must be the result of an omniscient and omnipotent creator.
Boyle’s experimental investigations and theological beliefs led him to a conception of the world as a ’cosmic mechanism’ comprised of a harmonious set of interrelated processes. He agreed with the leading mechanical philosophers of his day that the corpuscular hypothesis, which explains the causal powers of bodies by reference to the motions of the least parts (corpuscles) of matter, provided the best means for understanding nature. He insisted, however, that these motions and powers could not be known by reasoning alone, but would have to be discovered experimentally.
Chemistry, philosophical aspects of
Authors: Koertge Noretta 
Published: September 2018

Chemistry, like all theoretical sciences, is deeply rooted in philosophical inquiry. Early Greek atomism was a response to Parmenides’ argument that the very concept of change is unintelligible. Aristotle in turn argued that a vacuum is impossible and proposed that qualitative change could be better understood in terms of four elements and an underlying prime matter.
During the Arabic and Latin Middle Ages, philosophical commentaries on the nature of materials were brought into juxtaposition with the practical arts of the alchemist, miner and pharmacist. As chemical speculations became more closely connected to observations during the time of the Scientific Revolution, natural philosophers became more and more interested in the methodological aspects of chemistry. Galileo and Locke tried to clarify the relationship between primary and secondary qualities. Boyle struggled to understand how the selective affinities so characteristic of chemical reagents could be explained within the framework of Descartes’ mechanical philosophy. Lavoisier’s textbook was organized around principles drawn from philosophes such as Condillac.
As chemistry became an autonomous science, chemists turned less often to philosophy as a source of theoretical inspiration. However, they frequently appealed to philosophies of science in order to defend their own theories or criticize those of their opponents. The so-called ’atomic debates’ amongst chemists in the British Association during the 1860s were primarily disputes about the epistemological legitimacy of appeals to unobservable entities. Many of the same issues were taken up at the end of the century by Ostwald, Mach and Duhem.
Logical empiricists in the twentieth century have often turned to chemistry as an example of the successful reduction of a secondary science to physics. Thus, it is claimed that the laws of classical thermodynamics, expressed using concepts such as enthalpy and entropy, can be derived from the laws of statistical mechanics describing the motions of particles. The details of this purported derivation have been questioned. Even more controversial is the attempt to derive accounts of the chemical bond and the shape of molecules from the first principles provided by quantum mechanics.
Colour, theories of
Authors: Hilbert David R. 
Published: September 2018

The world as perceived by human beings is full of colour. The world as described by physical scientists is composed of colourless particles and fields. Philosophical theories of colour since the Scientific Revolution have been driven primarily by a desire to harmonize these two apparently conflicting pictures of the world. Any adequate theory of colour has to be consistent with the characteristics of colour as perceived without contradicting the deliverances of the physical sciences.
Given this conception of the aim of a theory of colour, there are three possibilities for resolving the apparent conflict between the scientific and perceptual facts. The first is to deny that physical objects have colours. Theories of this kind admit that objects appear coloured but maintain that these appearances are misleading. The conflict is resolved by removing colour from the external world. Second, it might be that colour is a relational property. For an object to possess a particular colour it must be related in the right way to a perceiver. One common version of this view analyses colour as a disposition to cause particular kinds of perceptual experience in a human being. Since the physical sciences deal only with the intrinsic properties of physical objects and their relations to other physical objects and not their relations to perceiving subjects, the possibility of conflict is removed. A third possible response is to maintain that colour really is a property of external objects and that the conflict is merely apparent. Some theories of this form maintain that colour is identical to a physical property of objects. Others maintain that colour is a property that physical objects possess over and above all their physical properties. Philosophical discussions of colour typically take the form of either elaborating on one of these three possibilities or attempting to show more generally that one of these three types of response is to be preferred to the others.
Computer science
Authors: Winnie John 
Published: September 2018

At first sight, computers would seem to be of minimal philosophical importance; mere symbol manipulators that do the sort of things that we can do anyway, only faster and more conveniently. Nevertheless, computers are being used to illuminate the cognitive abilities of the human and animal mind, explore the organizational principles of life, and open up new approaches to modelling nature. Furthermore, the study of computation has changed our conception of the limits and methodology of scientific knowledge.
Computers have been able to do all this for two reasons. The first is that material computing power (accuracy, storage and speed) permits the development and exploration of models of physical (and mental) systems that combine structural complexity with mathematical intransigence. Through simulation, computational power allows exploration where mathematical analysis falters. The second reason is that a computer is not merely a concrete device, but also can be studied as an abstract object whose rules of operation can be specified with mathematical precision; consequently, its strengths and limitations can be systematically investigated, exploited and appreciated. Herein lies that area of computer science of most interest to philosophers: the theory of computation and algorithms. It is here where we have learned what computers can and cannot do in principle.
Cosmology
Authors: McMullin Ernan 
Published: September 2018

The term ’cosmology’ has three main uses. At its most general, it designates a worldview, for example, the Mayan cosmology. In the early eighteenth century, shortly after the term made its first appearance, Christian Wolff used it to draw a distinction between physics, the empirical study of the material world, and cosmology, the branch of metaphysics dealing with material nature in its most general aspects. This usage remained popular into the twentieth century, especially among Kantian and neo-scholastic philosophers. But recent developments in science that allow the construction of plausible universe models have, effectively, pre-empted the use of the term in order to designate the science that deals with the origins and structure of the physical universe as a whole.
Cosmology may be said to have gone through three major phases, each associated with a single major figure – Aristotle, Newton and Einstein. The ancient Greeks were the first to attempt to give a reasoned account of the cosmos. Aristotle constructed a complex interlocking set of spheres centred on an immovable central earth to account for the motions of the heavenly bodies. Newton formulated a theory of gravitational force that required space and time to be both absolute and infinite. Though the laws of nature could, in principle, be specified, nothing could be said about the origins or overall structure of the cosmos. In 1915, Einstein proposed a general theory of relativity whose field-equations could be satisfied by numerous universe-models. Hubble’s discovery of the galactic red shift in 1929 led Lemaître in 1931 to choose from among these alternatives an expanding-universe model, which, though challenged in the 1950s by a rival steady-state theory, became the ‘standard’ view after the cosmic microwave background radiation it had predicted was observed in 1964. The ‘Big Bang’ theory has since been modified in one important respect by the addition of an inflationary episode in the first fraction of a second of cosmic expansion. As a ‘cosmic’ theory, it continues to raise issues of special interest to philosophers.
Darwin, Charles Robert (1809–82)
Authors: Bowler Peter J. 
Published: September 2018

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) popularized the theory that all living things have evolved by natural processes from pre-existing forms. This displaced the traditional belief that species were designed by a wise and benevolent God. Darwin showed how many biological phenomena could be explained on the assumption that related species are descended from a common ancestor. Furthermore, he proposed a radical mechanism to explain how the transformations came about, namely, natural selection. This harsh and apparently purposeless mechanism was seen as a major threat to the claim that the universe has a transcendent goal.
Because Darwin openly extended his evolutionism to include the human race, it was necessary to re-examine the foundations of psychology, ethics and social theory. Moral values might be merely the rationalization of instinctive behaviour patterns. Since the process which produced these patterns was driven by struggle, it could be argued that society must inevitably reflect the harshness of nature (’social Darwinism’). Darwin’s book has been seen as the trigger for a ’scientific revolution’. It took many decades for both science and Western culture to assimilate the more radical aspects of Darwin’s theory. But since the mid-twentieth century Darwin’s selection mechanism has become the basis for a highly successful theory of evolution, the human consequences of which are still being debated.
Demarcation problem
Authors: Achinstein Peter 
Published: September 2018

The problem of demarcation is to distinguish science from nonscientific disciplines that also purport to make true claims about the world. Various criteria have been proposed by philosophers of science, including that science, unlike ‘non-science’, (1) is empirical, (2) seeks certainty, (3) proceeds by the use of a scientific method, (4) describes the observable world, not an unobservable one, and (5) is cumulative and progressive.
Philosophers of science offer conflicting viewpoints concerning these criteria. Some reject one or more completely. For example, while many accept the idea that science is empirical, rationalists reject it, at least for fundamental principles regarding space, matter and motion. Even among empiricists differences emerge, for example between those who advocate that scientific principles must be verifiable and those who deny that this is possible, claiming that falsifiability is all that is required.
Some version of each of these five criteria – considered as goals to be achieved – may be defensible.
Determinism and indeterminism
Authors: Butterfield Jeremy 
Published: September 2018

Over the centuries, the doctrine of determinism has been understood, and assessed, in different ways. Since the seventeenth century, it has been commonly understood as the doctrine that every event has a cause; or as the predictability, in principle, of the entire future. To assess the truth of determinism, so understood, philosophers have often looked to physical science; they have assumed that their current best physical theory is their best guide to the truth of determinism. It seems that most have believed that classical physics, especially Newton’s physics, is deterministic. And in this century, most have believed that quantum theory is indeterministic. Since quantum theory has superseded classical physics, philosophers have typically come to the tentative conclusion that determinism is false.
In fact, these impressions are badly misleading. The above formulations of determinism are unsatisfactory. Once we use a better formulation, we see that there is a large gap between the determinism of a given physical theory, and the bolder, vague idea that motivated the traditional formulations: the idea that the world in itself is deterministic. Admittedly, one can make sense of this idea by adopting a sufficiently bold metaphysics; but it cannot be made sense of just by considering determinism for physical theories.
As regards physical theories, the traditional impression is again misleading. Which theories are deterministic turns out to be a subtle and complicated matter, with many open questions. But broadly speaking, it turns out that much of classical physics, even much of Newton’s physics, is indeterministic. Furthermore, the alleged indeterminism of quantum theory is very controversial: it enters, if at all, only in quantum theory’s account of measurement processes, an account which remains the most controversial part of the theory.
Einstein, Albert (1879–1955)
Authors: Fine Arthur , Howard Don , Norton John D. 
Published: September 2018

Albert Einstein was a German-born Swiss and American naturalized physicist and the twentieth century’s most prominent scientist. He produced the special and general theories of relativity, which overturned the classical understanding of space, time and gravitation. According to the special theory (1905), uniformly moving observers with different velocities measure the same speed for light. From this he deduced that the length of a system shrinks and its clocks slow at speeds approaching that of light. The general theory (completed 1915) proceeds from Hermann Minkowski’s geometric formulation of special relativity as a four-dimensional spacetime. Einstein’s theory allows, however, that the geometry of spacetime may vary from place to place. This variable geometry or curvature is associated with the presence of gravitational fields. Acting through geometrical curvature, these fields can slow clocks and bend light rays.
Einstein made many fundamental contributions to statistical mechanics and quantum theory, including the demonstration of the atomic character of matter and the proposal that light energy is organized in spatially discrete light quanta. In later life, he searched for a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism as an alternative to the quantum theory developed in the 1920s. He complained resolutely that this new quantum theory was not complete. Einstein’s writings in philosophy of science developed a conventionalist position, stressing our freedom to construct theoretical concepts; his later writings emphasized his realist tendencies and the heuristic value of the search for mathematically simple laws.