bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Tests of Significance Violate the Rule of Implication
Authors: Baird Davis 
Published: January 2016

Here follows a puzzle for those attempting to explain inductive inference. Suppose one hypothesis, H, implies another, I. Suppose further we obtain evidence, E, deemed sufficient to warrant the rejection of I. Is this evidence sufficient to warrant the rejection of H as well?It is very tempting to answer this question affirmatively. The inference in question appears to be justified by a single use of modus tollens or denying the consequent:A testament to the obvious plausibility of this sort of inference is the ubiquity of its endorsement in treatises on inductive inference. See, for example, Popper (Popper 1935, p. 76), Hempel (Hempel 1945, p. 31), Hacking (Hacking 1976, p. 33), or Savage (Savage 1954, p. 32). Indeed, a referee reporting on another paper called the following “rule of implication”:(+) If hypothesis H implies hypothesis I, then evidence sufficient to warrant the rejection of I, in turn warrants the rejection of H.
On the Logic of Why-Questions
Authors: Sintonen Matti 
Published: January 2016

In their classic work on the logic of explanation Hempel and Oppenheim (1948) claim that to explain the phenomena in the world of our experience is to answer the question “why?”, rather than the question “what?”. But there is a source of embarrassment, viz., the underdeveloped logic of why-questions itself. In this paper I want to explore some recent advances which, I shall argue, help us to overcome some of the embarrassment.One way in which the logic of questions could help is proposed by Jaakko Hintikka. According to Hintikka (1981a) we can look upon scientific inquiry as a series of questions put to nature. For instance a scientist who tests a theory first derives its consequences C1,...,Cn and then asks nature questions of the form “Is CQ true?”. The inquirer (querier) here attempts to induce from nature one of the conclusive answers “Co is true” or “Co is not true”.
“Time Travel” in the Gödel Universe
Authors: Malament David B 
Published: January 2016

In the late 1940s Gödel (1949a) made a fundamental contribution to relativity theory by finding an important new solution to Einstein's equation. It represents a possible universe with quite remarkable properties. For one thing, the entire material content of the Gödel universe Is In a state of uniform, rigid rotation. For another, free test particles in it exhibit a kind of boomerang effect Most striking of all, the Gödel universe allows for the possibility of “time travel” in a certain sense. It is this third feature I want to discuss today.Of course one can mean various things by “time travel“. In traditional science fiction stories a classical background time structure is presupposed, and the time traveler is described as jumping from the present to the past (or to the future). In a spacetime diagram his worldline would appear as discontinuous.
Anthropology as Science and the Anthropology of Science and of Anthropology or Understanding and Explanation in the Social Sciences, Part II
Authors: Jarvie I.C 
Published: January 2016

To begin with, an apology for ray subtitle, which consciously but unforgivably alludes to Hollywood's current fondness for numbered sequels to successful films. My intention was to signal that this paper, like a film such as Halloween II, will make further use of old materials, partly to bring the story up to date, partly to re-work material of proven box-office value, partly to answer those critics who, perhaps, deserve an answer.Synoptically speaking the paper returns to the issue of whether anthropology aims to understand or to explain. No claim was made in Part I (Jarvie 1970) that the two are mutually exclusive, only that understanding is a vague idea which derives much of its appeal from poor anthropological information about science and its aims. Part I concentrated mainly on criticising Peter Winch's ethnography of science and of Azande witchcraft.
Causal Modeling and the Statistical Analysis of Causation
Authors: Irzik Gurol 
Published: January 2016

Recent studies on probabilistic causation and statistical explanation (Cartwright 1979; Salmon 1984), I believe, have opened up the possibility of a genuine unification between philosophical approaches and causal modeling (CM) in the social, behavioral and biological sciences (Wright 1934; Blalock 1964; Asher 1976). This unification rests on the statistical tools employed, the principle of common cause, the irreducibility of causation to probability or statistics, and the idea of causal process as a suitable framework for understanding causal relationships. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to these four areas of contact by focusing on the relevant aspects of CM.Causal analysis in the social sciences is based on two fundamental notions: model and method. A causal model is an idealized picture of the causal relationships in the world. Method, on the other hand, refers to certain statistical techniques that are used to evaluate and test a causal model using data which consist of joint observations on the model variables.
How The Laws Of Physics Don't Even Fib
Authors: Kline A. David , Matheson Carl A. 
Published: January 2016

The covering law model of explanation has a staying power not even to be outdone by Lazarus. For at least forty years, writer after writer has tried to put it in its grave for the last time. The most recent efforts come from Nancy Cartwright (1983). Her slant is at once modern and old fashioned. It is modern in that unlike the familiar charge that the covering law model lets in too much, her charge is that it does not let in enough. It is old fashioned in that the soft spot she presses is one recognized by Hempel and Oppenheim in their classical essay. (1948, p. 248).Cartwright challenges the requirement that the sentences constituting the explanans (in particular the law or laws) must be true.
Popper versus Lorenz: An Exploration Into the Nature of Evolutionary Epistemology
Authors: Hahlweg Kai 
Published: January 2016

In 1941 Konrad Lorenz published a paper with the title “Kant’s Doctrine of the A Priori in the light of Contemporary Biology”. This essay stands as the foundation of the Austro-German School of Evolutionary Epistemology. As indicated by the title of the paper, the Lorenzians attempt to interpret Kantian transcendentalism along biological lines.Lorenz was, however, by no means the first who attempted to biologise Kant. Philosophers and scientists such as Ernst Mach, Henri Poincare, Ludwig Boltzmann and Jean Piaget had made similar points previously. Nevertheless, it remains Lorenz’s achievement to have formulated his thesis explicitly and provided ample empirical evidence in favour of it.Lorenz’s seminal paper remained largely unknown, and even his book on evolutionary epistemology published in 1973 raised little interest among philosophers, particularly in the English-speaking world. Meanwhile several other biologists and philosophers have joined Lorenz in his endeavour to elucidate epistemological issues through biological research.
How Scientists reach Agreement about new Observations
Authors: Gooding David 
Published: January 2016

Epistemology has been socialised. Cognitive and social interactions between observers are now as important as their interventions into the course of nature. This contrasts with traditional views of how we get natural facts into our discourse about nature. These assumed the efficacy of individual observers’ causal interactions with the natural world, making their interactions with other observers irrelevant. Kant’s conclusion that empirical access depends also upon our concepts did not challenge the individualistic character of the epistemology of science. Observers’ agreement about their observations showed that each individual can have independent perceptual access to one and the same world.Historical and sociological studies of science show that social and procedural aspects of observation in the laboratory make an essential contribution to consensus about observations (see Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay (1983) and Gooding (1985a).
Selectivity and Theory Choice
Authors: Sintonen Mattl 
Published: January 2016

In his 1982 Presidential Address to the PSA Ernan McMullin proposed that the Kuhnian “revolution” in the philosophy of science amounts, in part, to the growing awareness that theory-appraisal is to be modelled on decisions and value judgments rather than rule-governed inferences (McMullin 1983). This viewpoint has its attractions but needs developing before it can satisfy skeptics, such as Larry Laudan. For Laudan complains that Kuhn has provided no general model to back up his value-geared account, and that the view leads to untenable subjectivism which Kuhn has tried to avoid.I shall try to show that neither complaint stands to criticism, by joining two ideas. The first – that of modelling theory decisions along decision theory – is not a novel one, but even its supporters have failed to see that it makes Kuhn’s subjectivity a live but respectable possibility.
Unification and Scientific Realism Revisited
Authors: Forster Malcolm R. 
Published: January 2016

Section 2 will begin by formulating Reichenbach’s principle of common cause in a more general way than is usual but in a way that makes the idea behind it a lot clearer. The way that Salmon has pushed the principle into the services of scientific realism will be explained in terms of an example, van Fraassen objects, Salmon modifies his stand and van Fraassen rejoins - all in section 2. (See van Fraassen 1980, chapter 2).In this episode I think van Fraassen right in claiming - against Salmon that there is no categorical imperative for common cause explanation, and I add my own examples in section 3. The first example ‘is the explanation of the correlation between the equilibrium positions of two objects on a balance in terms of their property of “mass” and the law of moments.
Decisions in Dynamic Settings
Authors: Weirich Paul 
Published: January 2016

The expected utility of an option for a decision maker is defined with respect to probability and utility functions that represent the decision maker’s beliefs and desires. Therefore, as the decision maker’s beliefs and desires change, the expected utility of an opinion may change. Some options are such that their realizations change beliefs and desires in ways that change the expected utilities of the options. If a decision is made among options that include one or more of these special options, I call it a decision made in a dynamic setting.The rule to maximize expected utility, MEU, is insufficient for decisions in dynamic settings. It does not say how to take account of information about the way in which the realization of an option would change the expected utility of the option.
The Elusiveness of Consensus in Science
Authors: Fuller Steve 
Published: January 2016

Consider Larry Laudan's (1984) recent statement of the role that consensus plays in scientific validation:What makes the broad degree of agreement in science even more perplexing is the fact that the theories around which consensus forms do themselves rapidly come and go. The high degree of agreement, which characterizes science might be surprising if science, like some monastic religions, had settled upon a body of doctrine which was to be its permanent dogma. Consensus, once reached in those circumstances, could well be expected to sustain itself for a long period of time. But science offers us the remarkable spectre of a discipline in which older views on many central issues are quite rapidly and frequently displaced by newer ones, and where nonetheless most members of the scientific community will unhesitatingly change horses in midstream to embrace a point of view which may even have been mooted a decade earlier (p. 4).
On The Intertheoretic Competition Hypothesis
Authors: Kline A. David 
Published: January 2016

A commonplace thesis of the “new philosophy of science” is the view that the testing of a given theory is not a simple comparison of the theory with nature but also requires the comparison of the theory with competing theories. More specifically the version of the intertheoretic competition thesis that shall be examined is as follows:(ITC) In addition to comparing a theory with nature, a necessary condition for the rejection of a theory is the acceptance of an alternative theory.It is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that is responsible for the widespread popularity of (ITC).1,2…a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternative candidate is available to take its place. No process yet disclosed by the historical study of scientific development at all resembles the methodological stereotype of falsification by direct comparison with nature. …the act of judgment that leads scientists to reject a previously accepted theory is always based upon more than a comparison of that theory with the world.
Is Our Universe a Mere Fluke? The Cosmological Argument and Spinning the Universes
Authors: van Brakel J. 
Published: January 2016

Recent discussions about the argument from design have taken into account developments in cosmological theories, most especially the so-called anthropic principle associated with the “Wheeler”- and “Carter”-universes. Part of these discussions can perhaps be summarized as briefly as can be in the following opposition:1.The world is very unusual, so it must have been made by an intelligent creator.2.The world is very unusual, but unusual things do occur by chance.The phrase “the world is very unusual” is short-hand for something like:3.It is extremely improbable that a random concatenation of the forces, energies, particles, fields of the universe (or whatever we think the building blocks are) should, in a single trial, form into anything orderly, let alone anything that supports our form of intelligent life.
Constructive Empiricism and Anti-Realism
Authors: Mitchell Sam 
Published: January 2016

Van Fraassen stresses two distinct but interrelated themes in The Scientific Image: the semantic view of theories and the epistemic status of unobservables. The first of these could easily be accepted by a scientific realist, and indeed realists like Giere have already adapted it to their purposes. So the specifically empiricist thread in van Fraassen’s philosophy stems from the second.Van Fraassen breaks from tradition in founding his empiricism not on the ontological status of unobservable entities but on the epistemic attitude we take to them. The main points of his position are these:1)The claims of scientific theories, including claims about unobservable entities, are to be taken literally. Theories are not reconstructed so as to remove claims of the existence of unobservable objects.2)Observation is a matter of direct observation by accepted participants in the human scientific community.
The Problem of Protocol Statements and Schlick’s Concept of “Konstatierungen”
Authors: Zhai Zhenming 
Published: January 2016

Traditionally, the proponents of empiricism sought for the starting point of knowledge in sensations that happen to us when we open our sense organs to the world. They analyzed the functioning of human faculties of sensation and cognition and the way these faculties are activated so as to discover the origin of ideas. Thus, they insisted on the priority of particulars to universals in the body of synthetic knowledge, and granted empirical facts the authority of truth. For that reason, they are opposed to the rationalists, who maintained that the most important part of synthetic knowledge is derived solely from first principles or ideas, and that these principles or ideas are “innate”—that reason can ascertain their truth intuitively without the use of the senses.Logical positivism belongs to the empiricist tradition. However, it distinguishes itself from its empiricist predecessors in a very important way, so that its proponents thought they could overcome the difficulties raised against the older empiricists.
Getting to the Truth Through Conceptual Revolutions
Authors: Kelly Kevin T. , Glymour Clark 
Published: January 2016

[I]t would be absurd for us to hope that we can know more of any object than belongs to the possible experience of it or lay claim to the least knowledge of how anything not assumed to be an object of possible experience is determined according to the constitution that it has in itself.* * *It would be… a still greater absurdity if we conceded no things in themselves or declared our experience to be the only possible mode of knowing things….[Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics]A certain line of skepticism about normative epistemology has become more or less standard in contemporary philosophy of science. It runs like this.Scientific method is a matter of choosing among theories on the basis of evidence.But in “conceptual revolutions”, meaning, truth, and even what counts as observable can all be theory-relative.
Stich, Content, Prediction, and Explanation in Cognitive Science
Authors: Wallis Charles S. 
Published: January 2016

Cognitive science, at least as done by many philosophers, seeks to develop what one might call a content-based theory of cognition. These theorists generally seek to predict/explain cognition by employing generalizations between contentful states like beliefs and desires. In his book, From Folk Psychology To Cognitive Science, Stephen Stich argues that cognitive science should not attempt to employ content-based theories in its explanations of human (and other) behavior. For the most part Stich directs his arguments towards belief/desire psychology. Some of his arguments, however, are directed at content-based theories in general. In this paper, I will be concerned with one of these more general arguments—the principle of autonomy argument.The conclusion of the principle of autonomy argument is that the predictions and explanations generated by content-based theories, in so far as they are possible, do not fall within the domain of prediction and explanation in cognitive science.
Measuring the Success of Science
Authors: Niiniluoto Ilkka 
Published: January 2016

While most philosophers of science agree that science is, perhaps in many ways, a highly successful enterprise, there is no consensus about the best way of defining and measuring this success. Philosophers are also divided in their views about two further issues: What does the success of a scientific theory indicate? What is the best way of explaining this success?After some remarks about institutional and pragmatic measures of success, this paper concentrates on rival ways of defining cognitive success. Four realist measures of epistemic credit are discussed: probability, confirmation (corroboration), expected verisimilitude, and probable verisimilitude. Laudan’s non-realist concept of the problem-solving effectiveness of a theory is compared to Hempel’s notion of systematic power. I argue that such truth-independent concepts alone are insufficient to characterize scientific advance. But if they are used as truth-dependent epistemic utilities, they serve as fallible indicators of the truth or truthlikeness of a theory.
Assessing Inductive Logics Empirically
Authors: Smokler Howard 
Published: January 2016

Philosophers of science have recently been urged by Arthur Fine to collaborate with physicists and with other scientists in constructing scientific theories.2 What I am proposing is a collaboration at the other pole of scientific activity; the pole of experiment.I consider this effort to be part of a tendency within philosophy to naturalize epistemology. The banner of naturalistic epistemology has attracted such men as Quine and Goldman. I consider the effort as one small part of that program which involves not only theoretical integration of at least portions of the two corpuses of knowledge, but the employment of methodologies which are common to them both.The theory of inductive logic today is in stasis. A number of highly ingenious and very sophisticated theories of inference vie for primacy. As in the case of many philosophical theses, no closure seems in sight.
Do Mutants Have to be Slain, or Do They Die of Natural Causes?: The Case of Atomic Parity Violation Experiments
Authors: Franklin Allan 
Published: January 2016

In Constructing Quarks (1984) Andrew Pickering discussed the early experiments on atomic parity violation performed at Oxford University and at the University of Washington and published in 1976 and 1977. The results disagreed with the predictions of the Weinberg-Salam (W-S) theory of unified electroweak interactions. Another experiment, performed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1978, on the scattering of polarized electrons from deuterons confirmed the theory. Pickering regards the Oxford and Washington experiments as mutants, slain by the SLAC experiment.By 1979 the W-S theory was regarded by the high-energy physics community as established, despite the fact that as Pickering recounts, “there had been no intrinsic change [emphasis in original] in the status of the Washington-Oxford experiments.” (Pickering 1984, p. 301).
The Structure Thirty Years Later: Refashioning a Constructivist Metaphysical Program
Authors: Sismondo Sergio 
Published: January 2016

I argue here that for the past thirty years there has been a persistent misreading of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Not everybody has participated in this misreading, but its persistence is remarkable. So one of my tasks is to diagnose the reasons for its continuance. It is also an important misreading, because it attributes to Kuhn a view that is from most people’s perspective highly untenable, that scientists in some strong sense construct the world by choosing a paradigm.To avoid repeating work done by Gutting and many others (see Gutting 1980) I will focus on Kuhn’s constructivist metaphysical program, as seen by commentators.
Locality, Complex Numbers, and Relativistic Quantum Theory
Authors: Saunders Simon W. 
Published: January 2016

What is relativistic quantum theory? How does it differ from non-relativistic quantum mechanics? Is there something more involved than the transition from the Galilean group to the Lorentz group?These questions are evidently of great importance to the understanding of relativistic quantum theory (RQT), in particular to the distinction between the basic principles of quantum theory, and the characterization of a particular class of dynamical evolutions. Within non-relativistic quantum mechanics (NRQM) a reasonably precise response is possible (differences concern the number of degrees of freedom, the existence of internal symmetries, and the form of the Hamiltonian as a function of the canonical variables); what appears characteristic of RQT is the appearance of a dynamics of a qualitatively different character (involving the creation and annihilation of particles), involving new kinds of constraints (renormalization theory: anomalies). Nevertheless, it seems we must know how to pass from the inhomogeneous Galilean group (IHGG) to the Lorentz group (IHLG), if only because we have successfully constructed a RQT, surely, then, we know what it is that we hold invariant in this transition.