bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Some Current Trends in Philosophy of Science: With Special Attention to Confirmation, Theoretical Entities, and Mind-Body
Authors: Maxwell Grover 
Published: January 2016

This discussion will be limited to two main topics, the existence of and our knowledge of unobservable entities, on the one hand, and problems about the confirmation of our knowledge claims (scientific and common sense ones), on the other. Unfortunately, this isn’t much of a limitation; for the topics are so large, and their ramifications and implications are so numerous and run so deep that the most that a brief treatment such as this can accomplish is to hit a few of the high spots and, I hope, to generate a little more interest and activity in the areas in question.It is interesting to me that none of the three of us in this symposium knew much of anything about what subjects the others had selected for their talks and nothing at all, except by way of speculation, about what they were going to say.
Reductive Explanation: A Functional Account
Authors: Wimsatt William C. 
Published: January 2016

Philosophical discussions of reduction seem at odds or unsettled on a number of questions:(i) Is it a relation between real or between reconstructed theories, and if the latter, how much reconstruction is appropriate? Or is reduction best construed as a relation between theories at all?(ii) Is it primarily connected with theory succession, with theoretical explanation, or with both?(iii) Is translatability in principle sufficient, or must we have the translations in hand, and if the former, how do we judge the possibility of translation when we don’t have one?(iv) What is the point of defending the formal model of reduction if it doesn’t actually happen (Hull, Ruse), or if the defense has the consequence that if reductions occur, they are trivial and uninformative (Hull), or merely incidental consequences of the purposeful activity of the scientist qua scientist in devising explanations (Schaffner)?
Evaluating Global and Local Theories of Induction
Authors: Adler Jonathan E. 
Published: January 2016

The construction of inductive logics is an attempt to explicate the justification for the acceptance, or rational preference, of a given hypothesis on the basis of empirical evidence. As such it is a main part of epistemology. This paper explores this connection by focusing on the epistemic distinction between the grounds that are relevant for justification in normal knowledge-claim contexts (‘local’) and those that are relevant in philosophical knowledge-claim contexts (‘global’).In Gambling with Truth, Issac Levi introduces the global/local distinction with respect to scepticism and justification. Levi writes,Supplying this [local] justification requires an appeal to evidence, which will include observation reports and theoretical assumptions, as well as much of the apparatus of logic and mathematics.
A Structural Description of Evolutionary Theory
Authors: Brandon Robert N. 
Published: January 2016

What is the structure of evolutionary theory? The question seems to presuppose a unique right answer. But the relevant notion of structure is highly relative to broad philosophic theories about scientific theories. At present no one such theory dominates. One once did. It went by the name ‘Logical Positivism’. During its heyday a unique right answer to our question might have been expected. There is no reason to expect one now.Not only should one not suppose that there is a uniquely correct structural description of evolutionary theory, neither should one suppose that giving a structural description of evolutionary theory is essentially uncovering what is implicit in biological work. That approach is appropriate only when conceptual fossilization has occurred. In the case of evolutionary theory molding is more appropriate than uncovering.
The Levels of Selection
Authors: Brandon Robert 
Published: January 2016

It is a mistake to suppose that the units of selection controversy in biology centers around a single question. In this paper I will take Wimsatt's recent work (1980 and 1981) as defining the question ‘What are the units of selection?’. I will show that there is another important question, what I will call the levels of selection question, separable from the first but easily confused with it. Finally, I will try to show why the levels of selection question is important.First I must make a terminological point. In this paper I will adopt the distinction between fitness and adaptedness. I will not defend the distinction here since that has been done elsewhere (Brandon 1978 and 1981), but I will briefly indicate what the distinction is. ‘Fitness’ in this usage refers to actual reproductive success. ‘Adaptedness’ refers to an expected fitness value, in the mathematical sense of expected value.
The Role of Randomization in Inference
Authors: Lindley Dennis V. 
Published: January 2016

Who is there that has not longed that the power and privilege of selection among alternatives should be taken away from him in some important crisis of his life, and that his conduct should be arranged for him, either this way or that, by some divine power if it were possible, — by some patriarchal power in the absence of divinity, — or by chance even, if nothing better than chance could be found to do it? Anthony Trollope Phineas Finn Vol. II, Ch. LX.In the design and analysis of an experiment there are several places where an element of randomization can be used: the design can be selected at random, the result can have a random element adjoined to it, or the random element already present can be used in the analysis. The first technique is much used by statisticians; for example, in making a survey of a population, Basu (1980) calls it prerandomization.
Conceptual Combination and Scientific Discovery
Authors: Thagard Paul 
Published: January 2016

How are scientific concepts formed? This question was central for positivist and operationalist philosophers concerned to root scientific thought directly in experience (e.g., Hempel 1952, Bridgman 1927). Although the positivist program has been abandoned, the current interest in the philosophy of scientific discovery shows the need for a theory of conceptual development. This paper offers a theory of how new concepts can arise, not by abstraction from experience or by definition, but by conceptual combination. Such combination produces a new concept as a non-linear, non-definitional amalgam of existing concepts. After proposing rules intended to account for a variety of mundane cases of conceptual combination, the paper presents several illustrations of how scientific concepts have arisen through combination.According to a strict empiricist position (Hume 1739), concepts are abstracted from experience or formed by definition. You form the concept of a dog by experiencing a number of examples of dogs and extracting the common features.
Positive Science and Discoverability
Authors: Nickles Thomas 
Published: January 2016

Several 17th- and 18th-century natural philosophers and methodologists aimed to establish a body of positive scientific results which were more than hypothetical or conjectural. They made exaggerated claims for the truth and empirical pedigree of their scientific conclusions. Since the mid-19th century, investigators have been more circumspect; and, increasingly in the 20th century, reflective scientists have become explicit fallibilists. They frequently acknowledge that current results are unlikely to endure.Seemingly in keeping with the working scientists own attitude, many, perhaps most, contemporary philosophers of science—in the wake of dramatic revolutions in several sciences and philosophical attacks on the quest for certainty—now take for granted the hypothetical, the conjectural nature of all Interesting scientific claims, particularly deep theoretical claims. According to these philosophers, the lesson we have learned from 19th-century methodologists is that 17th-century discovery programs, which aimed to justify theories by “deduction from the phenomena”, were only utopian dreams.
Can We Dispense With Space-Time?
Authors: Field Hartr 
Published: January 2016

According to the relational theory of space-time, the physical world contains spatio-temporal aggregates of matter (spatio-temporally extended physical objects, spatio-temporal parts’ of such objects, and aggregates consisting of spatio-temporal parts of different objects); these aggregates of matter are interrelated in various ways by various geometric (and also non-geometric) relations, but the physical world does not contain a space-time over and above these aggregates of matter and their interrelations.It is tempting to put this doctrine by saying that there are no space-time regions, but only aggregates of matter. This formulation might be faulted, for a relationalist might want to “logically construct” regions out of aggregates of matter, and given such a “logical construction” the relationalist will assert that regions do exist.
Some Broader Evolutionary Issues which Emerge from Contemporary Molecular Biological Data
Authors: Doolittle W. For 
Published: January 2016

Molecular biologists are not accustomed to the attention of philosophers. Ours is a “normal” sort of science, operating very much within the neo-Darwinian paradigm, to flesh out a central dogma (DNA makes RNA makes protein) which is but an articulation, albeit a very important one, of that paradigm (Kuhn 1970). Our success in this enterprise has been remarkable, and we have not until recently had to address our prejudices.” Here I will present my own views on the nature of these prejudices and the troubles they have led us into.Transposabie elements are a special kind of DNA. Evidence leading directly to an appreciation of their prevalence and an understanding of their behavior began to appear in the early 1960s, from studies of spontaneous mutations in bacteria.
Grene on Mechanism and Reductionism: More Than Just a Side Issue
Authors: Brandon Robert N 
Published: January 2016

Two summers ago Marjorie Grene described a mutual acquaintance as a young fogy. That immediately suggested a fourfold classification: Young fogies, old fogies, young turks and old turks. Marjorie's place in this classification is obvious; moreover, it is relevant to today's session. Were she just out of graduate school we would wait awhile to honor her. Here she a fogy we wouldn't bother.One of the ways Grene has expressed her anti-fogyism has been her consistent attacks on reductionism, especially reductionism in the philosophy of biology. In this paper I want to discuss the common association between ontological reductionism and a methodological position I will call mechanism. I wish to make three major points: (1) Mechanism (as I characterize it) is not to be identified with reductionism in any of its forms; in fact, mechanism leads to a nonreductionist ontology.
Computerized Implementation of Biomedical Theory Structures: an Artificial Intelligence Approach
Authors: Schaffner Kenneth F. 
Published: January 2016

At a recent conference I attended involving physicists, biologists, historians, and sociologists, a question about the development of theory in biology in comparison with theory in physics arose, with special interest in the nature of the theorists in the two domains and where they ranked in prestige. The biologists, primarily biochemists, maintained that “theory had a bad name in contemporary biology.” As they saw it from the perspective of biochemists and bench scientists, experimental work was much more highly regarded than theoretical work in biology, in interesting contrast to physics.Certainly not all biologists are theory averse. In the preface to the first of three volumes edited by C.H. Waddington, the late distinguished geneticist wrote in 1968 that he felt” …that the time is ripe to formulate some skeleton of concepts and methods around which Theoretical Biology can grow….
Lorentz’s Local Time and the Theorem of Corresponding States
Authors: Rynasiewicz Robert 
Published: January 2016

1.Here is a well known theorem. Consider the homogeneous Maxwell equations(where E and H are functions of x, y, z, and t, and ).Use the coordinate substitutionsand the following substitutions for the field variablesThen, if terms depending on second and higher powers of (v/c) are dropped, the resulting equations have the same form as the original homogeneous Maxwell equations, i.e.,
Philosophers of Experiment
Authors: Hacking Ian 
Published: January 2016

The Neglect of Experiment:that is the title of Alan Franklin's (1986). He did not mean to imply that scientists were neglecting experiments, spinning well financed cobwebs of theories while laboratories decayed for lack of funds. He meant that historians and philosophers neglected the experimental side of science. That was true, and is no longer so. Although his title was fine when he was writing, the times have passed it by.A decade before there had been almost no reflective philosophy of experiment. What little had been published was not seen as writing about experiment—that was not something to write about—but as discussion of the theory/observation distinction, or the impossibility of eliminating a theory by crucial experiment, etc. The even-handedDictionary of Scientific Biographydiscreetly cut articles on experimenters and expanded those on theorists. Thaddeus Trenn's (1977) on the experimental discovery of isotopes was poorly received.
Ceteris Paribus Clauses and Causality in Economics
Authors: Hausman Daniel M. 
Published: January 2016

Explicit or implicit ceteris paribus clauses are pervasive in economics. People do not always buy more of x when the price of x decreases. The generalization holds only “other things being equal” or ceteris paribus. Not everybody wants more wealth, but economists have held that the generalization holds, ceteris paribus. When government imposes price controls, shortages do not always arise, but, ceteris paribus, they do. Ceteris paribus clauses are common in other sciences, but I shall confine my remarks to economics.Many have found such ceteris paribus clauses problematic. For they are vague, and they seem to insulate theories from empirical criticism and correction. When the observed phenomena are not as the theory predicted, one can (or so it has been alleged) always claim that other things were not “equal”, that there was some “disturbance” or “interference” and thus that the ceteris paribus condition was not met.
The Many Worlds Interpretation of Set Theory
Authors: Hellman Geoffrey 
Published: January 2016

As standardly presented in axiomatic form, set theory exhibits two fundamental features which together give rise to a number of foundational and philosophical problems. These features are so basic that they are seldom even isolated. The first is that the axioms are taken as categorical assertions (e.g. “There exists an empty set”, “There exists an infinite set”, “The power set of any set exists”, etc.). The second is that actualist quantifiers are employed in these axioms, so that they appear to be about actual objects; the domain of these quantifiers forms the fixed universe of sets (up to a choice of urelement basis), relata of a unique, fixed membership relation entering into the statement of the axioms.Such presentations are associated with the philosophical positions of platonism and set-theoretic foundationalism.
Acceptance Without Belief
Authors: Maher Patrick 
Published: January 2016

Bas van Fraassen (1980) maintained that acceptance of a scientific theory does not involve belief that the theory is true, though it does involve belief that the theory is empirically adequate. This provoked a large literature attempting to refute van Fraassen’s position. For the most part, the critics attempted to show that van Fraassen’s position violates principles of inductive inference, or of rationality.2 Such criticisms do not question the possibility of conforming to van Fraassen’s conception of science; they merely argue that there is good reason not to do so.But some of van Fraassen’s critics have taken a different tack. Simon Blackburn (1984, p. 223) has remarked, and Sam Mitchell (1988) and Paul Horwich (forthcoming) have argued, that acceptance of a theory, as understood by van Fraassen, is the same as believing the theory to be true. If this is right, then what van Fraassen is advocating is a logically contradictory position, and thus one to which it is impossible to conform.
Scientific Realism, Perceptual Beliefs, and Justification
Authors: Otte Richard 
Published: January 2016

If one compares various skeptical arguments about our perceptual beliefs with arguments against scientific realism one immediately notices important similarities. Skeptical arguments about perceptual beliefs are often based on the premise that all of our perceptual beliefs could be wrong. Our experience is consistent with many different states of affairs; some familiar examples are hallucination, an evil demon, and brains in a vat. Thus it is claimed we have no reason to believe that the perceptual beliefs we normally form are true and alternative beliefs are false.One of the most powerful arguments against scientific realism is based on the claim that our data underdetermines our theory. There exist empirically equivalent theories, which means that there is no observation that could lead us to accept one and reject the other. Each member of a class of empirically equivalent theories will be equally supported by the evidence.
I. Dynamical Reduction Theories: Changing Quantum Theory so the Statevector Represents Reality
Authors: Ghirardi GianCarlo , Pearle Philip 
Published: January 2016

We dedicate these papers to the memory of John Bell, whose contributions to, support for, and encouragement of the research program described here has meant more than words can say to those involved in it.In Schrödinger’s “cat paradox” example, a nucleus which has a 50% probability of decaying within an hour is coupled to a cat by a “hellish contraption” which, if it detects the decay, will kill the cat. If we take the point of view that what we see around us is real, what occurs in reality is one of the two following evolutions :(—> means “evolves in an hour into“).According to Schrödinger’s equation, the evolution of the statevector describing this situation isThe right hand side of Eq. (1.2) does not correspond to either the reality on the right hand side of (1.1a) nor to the reality on the right hand side of (1.1b).
Material Models in Biology
Authors: Griesemer James R. 
Published: January 2016

Propositions are no more constitutive of science than they are of any activity: a body of knowledge is not all there is to the life of science. Thus I take the premise underlying the topic of this symposium to be uncontroversial, there is a “non-propositional” side of science and of biology in particular. From time to time, however, philosophers ask whether the “non-propositional” side of science is theoretically superfluous, or as Duhem put it, logically dispensable. What they mean to ask is whether science can be fully analyzed in propositional terms; must philosophy of science, in other words, consider the non-propositional side in order to adequately account for science?Negative answers to the question often rest on the tacit view that the most (or only) important thing about science is scientific theories.
Experimental Reproducibility and the Experimenters’ Regress
Authors: Radder Hans 
Published: January 2016

Many philosophers of science tend to take for granted the proposition that, as a rule, scientific experiments are reproducible (or, in other words, repeatable, replicable). Very few of them, however, have examined the issue in any detail (a recent exception is Hones 1990). Yet, by now an important body of literature exists, mainly written by sociologists and historians of science, in which the above proposition is discussed and analyzed on the basis of elaborate studies of experimental practice. These studies claim to offer not only a descriptively adequate account of experimentation, but also a number of fundamental philosophical conclusions concerning (experimental) science as a whole.In the present paper I analyze and evaluate the views of H.M. Collins, an early and influential thinker concerning the issue in question. In particular I discuss what he has called the ‘experimenters’ regress’.
Neo-classical Economics and Evolutionary Theory: Strange Bedfellows?
Authors: Rosenberg Alex 
Published: January 2016

On the surface and to a first approximation, economic theory and evolutionary theory share salient features: a commitment to optimality and maximizing, a consequent similarity in mathematical formalism, an appeal to equilibrium as the preferred explanatory strategy. Moreover, both have at various times been stigmatized as empirically empty. However, the theory of natural selection has been widely accepted as the scientific cornerstone of modern biology, while microeconomics has remained open to repeated challenges as an explanation of human action and its aggregate consequences.Because of their similarity, evolutionary theory looks like part of a powerful defense of the status quo in economic theory. I think that Darwinian theory is a remarkably inappropriate model, metaphor, inspiration, or theoretical framework for economic theory.
Space-Time and Isomorphism
Authors: Mundy Brent 
Published: January 2016

Leibniz indiscernibility argument: If the points of space or space-time are real, then shifting everything by a geometric symmetry transformation f (e.g., translation or rotation) produces a physically different situation, since the same bodies or events now occupy different points: whatever occupied point p now occupies the distinct point fp. This may violate identity of indiscernibles, or other principles of verifiability or theoretical parsimony.Leibniz’s f was a symmetry of Euclidean space E, so the argument seems inapplicable to the inhomogeneous space-times of GTR. However, the underlying manifold M always possesses symmetries f, so one may take f also to move the geometric structure across M, along with the physical objects and events. The resulting variant models still represent physically distinct worlds, since the objects and geometric structure formerly at p are now at fp. Indeed there is more variability, since M has far more symmetries than E.
The Relativity Principle and the Isotropy of Boosts
Authors: Budden Tim 
Published: January 2016

In 1905 Einstein derived the Lorentz transformations linking inertial coordinate systems. He took as his central principles the relativity principle (RP) and the light postulate (LP), and assumed along the way a symmetry that has become known as ‘spatial isotropy’ (Berzi and Gorini 1969). This symmetry will be defined below but it basically requires that boosting has the same effect whether to the right or left or to the north or south etc. Since it really is a symmetry about boosts I shall call it ‘boost isotropy'.The purpose of this paper is to explore the relativistic kinematics (both Einsteinian and Galilean) resulting from implementing RP but breaking with the venerable tradition of implementing ‘boost isotropy’.
Spacetime and Holes
Authors: Brighouse Carolyn 
Published: January 2016

Here I describe and defend a version of space-time substantivalism. My
account is meant partly as a reply to an argument against a particular
substantivalist position that can be found both in John Earman and John
Norton's “What price spacetime substantivalism? The hole story”, and
Earman's World Enough and Spacetime. Their
argument, the Hole Argument, purports to show that substantivalism leads to
a radical form of indeterminism within a class of theories that includes our
best theory of spacetime, namely, General Relativity (GTR). The hole
argument contends that the substantivalist must view diffeomorphic models of
a spacetime theory as representing genuinely distinct physical situations.
It is this contention I argue against.
The version of substantivalism I present, although not a traditional
account, incorporates the important features of traditional substantivalist
views.