bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Incredibility of Rejecting Belief-Desire-Action Explanations
Authors: MacKay Alfred F. 
Published: January 2016

An argument of Donald Davidson's (1970, 1973) has convinced many people that there is something suspect about the commonsense, belief-desire-action explanations that most of us apply to human behavior. Alexander Rosenberg (1980, 1983) has been convinced by Davidson's argument, and uses its conclusion (together with some ideas about sociobiology) to explain what he regards as the persistent failures of the social sciences. In this paper I shall not comment directly upon Davidson's argument. Instead, I will discuss an unacceptable implication of Rosenberg's use of it. Whether this reflects on Davidson's argument I leave for others to decide.This is how Rosenberg uses the conclusion of Davidson's argument to explain the (alleged) failures of economics.Philosophers have shown that the terms in which ordinary thought and the behavioral sciences describe the cause and effects of human action do not describe “natural kinds,” : they do not divide nature at the joints.
Probabilistic Explanation and Probabilistic Causality
Authors: Hanna Joseph F. 
Published: January 2016

The subject of this panel discussion is probabilistic explanation. However, I would like to broaden the scope of my remarks to include the subject of probabilistic causality as well. For, I will argue in this paper that recent attempts to develop a theory of objective probabilistic causality are vulnerable to the same criticisms that in a previous paper I have advanced against the theories of objective probabilistic explanation proposed by Salmon and Fetzer.During the past decade or so, both Salmon and Fetzer have written widely on the subject of probabilistic explanation, - and the Statistical-Relevance and Causal-Relevance models for which they are, respectively, well known have been extensively discussed in the literature. During this same period, Patrick Suppes' (1970) monograph has been a common reference point for discussions of probabilistic causality (though as Salmon points out in a recent article , Suppea' account shares many features with earlier accounts of causality proposed by Good and Reichenbach).
On Writing the History of Special Relativity
Authors: Earman John , Glymour Clark , Rynasiewicz Robert 
Published: January 2016

Einstein himself had a few words to say about the writing of the history of science. From the first of his famous conversations with Einstein, Robert Shankland relates: “Then he gave me his ideas on historical writing of science. ‘Nearly all historians of science are philologists and do not comprehend what physicists were aiming at, how they thought and wrestled with their problems… .’ The struggle with their:problems, their trying everything to find a solution which came at last often by very indirect means, is the correct picture.” (Shankland 1963, p. 50).Why should we take these words seriously? After all, Einstein was not an historian, and, unless we are to pose him as an authority on every topic, these comments represent but a personal opinion. This, however, is precisely why they should be taken seriously, if we are interested in the history of Einstein's own accomplishments.
Philosophy of Science and Public Policy
Authors: Suppes Patric 
Published: January 2016

Many persons would defend a sharp comparison of public policy and public science with judgments uniformly unfavorable to policy. Science is pure, policy is not. Science is essentially theoretical, policy is not. Science is rational, policy is not. Science deals in the factual and uncontroversial, policy does not. Although it is not my claim that public science and public, policy are the same thing, it will be a central thesis of what I have to say that the resemblances between public science and public policy are much closer than they seem, and consequently the philosophy of science and the philosophy of public policy are not widely divergent.There is one meaning of philosophy of public policy, however, that I want to stay clear of. It is also associated with a meaning that can be attached to the philosophy of science.
Biological Science and Feminist Values
Authors: Ruse Michae 
Published: January 2016

My topic is the relationship between science and values. Specifically, I will look at biological science, especially evolutionary theorizing, and at those values held dear (not to mention those values abhorred) by supporters of the feminist movement. Since discussions of this nature rapidly take on all of the fervour of a revivalist camp meeting, it is appropriate to begin with a text. I draw mine from Valley of the Amazons, the recent novel by Noretta Koertge. The conversation is between two women, Helen who is mllitantly anti-male, and Tretona, the heroine, who keeps one foot in the real world (of a kind), namely a philosophy of science department.“So is the claim that men evolved after women? That's pretty speculative, isn't it? Just sounds like an inversion of the old Adam-before-Eve story to me.”
Messianic vs Myopic Realism
Authors: Levi Isaa 
Published: January 2016

Advocates and opponents of nuclear power agree that cold water reactors will not explode like atom boaba. Such a logical poaaibility is incompatible with our knowledge of the design of such plants and the physical principles regulating their operation.No such knowledge rules out the possibility of a core meltdown. Estimates of the rate at which such meltdowns will occur range from one in a million years (so that the probability of a reactor running one year without a meltdown occurring is 0.999999) to one in a thousand years (so that the probability of no meltdown in one year of operation is 0.9990005). (These probabilities are computed on the assumption that the production of meltdowns is a poisson process.)Some philosophers think the difference between the hypothesis about atomic explosions and the one about core meltdowns to be a matter of degree.
Marx and the Objectivity of Science
Authors: Railton Pete 
Published: January 2016

Karl Marx has written that “modern Industry … makes science a productive force distinct from labor and presses it into the service of capital” (1867, p. 361) Moreover, according to Marx, “The ideas of the ruling class are In every epoch the ruling ideas”, which are “nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships” (1846, p. 64). Part of what Marx means by ‘ideal expression’ is revealed when he argues that ruling ideas have a legitimating function: a ruling class must “represent its Interest as the conmon interest”, “give its ideas the form of universality, ana represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.” (1846, pp. 65-66).The idea that scientific inquiry is objective is unquestionably among the ruling ideas of our epoch, and it represents science as serving not the Interests of a particular class, but a purely general interest in the understanding of nature.
Quantum Disjunctive Facts
Authors: McGrath James H. 
Published: January 2016

To the memory of John D. TrimmerThis paper assesses the impact of disjunctive facts on the quantum logic read off procedure. The purpose of the procedure is to transfer a significant quantum structure to a set of propositions; its first step is an attempt to discover that structure. Here I propose that disjunctive facts as traditionally conceived have blocked the procedure at its first step and have therefore subverted the best-known attempts to read off quantum logic. Recently however Allen Stairs has proposed a view of disjunctive facts which re-establishes the possibility of reading off quantum logic. Both the traditional conception and Stairs’ revision of disjunctive facts are interesting in their own right, independent of quantum propositional logic.
Too many things are called ‘quantum logic’. The term is disentangled and notation is fixed in this preliminary step which relies on basic lattice theory.
Duhem on Maxwell: A Case-Study in the Interrelations of History of Science and Philosophy of Science
Authors: Ariew Roger , Barker Peter 
Published: January 2016

Since the revival of historicist philosophy of science in the 1960s many philosophers have acknowledged a debt to Duhem. But Duhem’s opinions are imperfectly understood and, as McMullin has shown in his (1970) and (1979), there are many strands in the current revival of historicism. We consider here Duhem’s views on the role of history in the appraisal of scientific theories. However, there is no single text offering Duhem’s views on the subject; rather, they are revealed during their application to various historical and contemporary cases. Duhem’s most sustained examination of a contemporary case is his critique of Maxwell’s science and scientific methodology.Duhem’s critique of Maxwell is not a set of isolated or incidental dicta, but the expression of Duhem’s mature thought over the last quarter-century of his life, ranging from (at least) 1893 to his death in 1916.
Consensus and Evolution in Science
Authors: Munevar Gonzalo 
Published: January 2016

The bulk of this paper will be divided into three sections. I will first sketch what I take to be the main problem in the epistemology of science and explain how the issue of consensus is related to this problem. I will then try to solve the problem by using a social conception of scientific rationality based on evolutionary ideas. And I will finally elaborate that social conception by responding to several objections.For over two decades now, many philosophers have talked about the existence of a crisis in the epistemology of science. This crisis presumably came about as the result of the dispute between two schools of thought: the logical and the socio-historical. The logical school is associated with the analytic and empiricist tradition in the field and is supposed to defend the rationality of science. The socio-historical, whose most notorious exponents are Kuhn (1970) and Feyerabend (1975), has been accused of irrationalism.
Against Correspondence: A Constructivist View of Experiment and the Real
Authors: Pickering Andy 
Published: January 2016

This paper is about realism. The ideas presented were developed as part of a response to a persistent criticism levelled against the relativist/constructivist programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), namely that this programme fails to allow the real any role in the articulation of scientific thought. This criticism I believe to be mistaken, and justified, if at all, only by the relative silence of the SSK tradition on the role of the real. To indicate that this silence is a contingent, rather than a necessary attribute of the tradition, my aim here is to explore what can be said about the relation between the real and the articulated on the basis of empirical studies of scientific practice.To situate what follows, let me note that the standard philosophical debate on realism concerns the reality, or lack of it, of unobservable entities appearing in well confirmed theories (Leplin 1984).
The Hole Argument
Authors: Norton John 
Published: January 2016

The “hole argument” shows that spacetime substantivalism leads to a radical form of indeterminism in a broad class of spacetime theories. My purpose in this note is twofold. First I shall present a short and informal version of the argument in the form developed in Earman and Norton (1987). Second I will show how the argument can be extended to the case of “manifold plus further structure” substantivalism whenever that further structure admits certain common symmetries.The hole argument depends on the possibility of displaying two models of some spacetime theory which agree everywhere but within a small neighborhood of the spacetime manifold. To illustrate how two such models are arrived at, I will describe the construction for the easy to visualize special case of a spatially homogeneous and isotropic expanding universe in general relativity. It will be clear how the construction can be extended to other spacetime theories.
Geometry, Time and Force in the Diagrams of Descartes, Galileo, Torricelli and Newton
Authors: Grosholz Emily R. 
Published: January 2016

Mathematics plays a central role in the description, explanation and manipulation of natural phenomena. To what extent, and how and why mathematics applies to nature is a problem that has long occupied philosophers. Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Mach and Poincaré, to mention some of the most distinguished names, offer global solutions to this problem that are based on deep-lying metaphysical assumptions. In this essay, I would like to suggest an alternative approach, which is piecemeal rather than global, and historical before it is metaphysical.I want to propose, first, that the question of applied mathematics be recast as a question about how mathematics and physics, a physics “always already” mathematized, are partially unified at various points in history, in such a way that they can share certain items, problems and methods while nonetheless remaining quite distinct. And, second, I suggest that these unifications may be quite heterogeneous and variable over time.
The Semantic Approach and its application to Evolutionary Theory
Authors: Lloyd Elisabeth A. 
Published: January 2016

The semantic view of theory structure, as developed by Suppes (1957,1967), Suppe (1974, 1976, 1977, 1988), and van Fraassen (1970, 1972, 1980), represents theories as classes of models or structures. These models are, on the version of the semantic approach used here, defined by specifying their laws, parameters, and variables. The semantic approach to theory structure is simply a method of formalizing the content of scientific theories.In a series of articles and a book, I have analyzed the structure of modern evolutionary theory using the semantic view as a framework (Lloyd 1984, 1986a, 1986b, 1987a, 1987b, 1988, forthcoming; cf. Thompson 1983, 1985, 1988). I shall briefly recap the analyses I have done, in order to demonstrate the range of problems accessible to the semantic view.First, I have used the semantic view to analyze the structure of population genetics models, including kin and group selection models.
When Fair Betting Odds are not Degrees of Belief
Authors: Seidenfeld T. , Schervish M.J. , Kadane J.B. 
Published: January 2016

The “Dutch Book” argument, tracing back to Ramsey (1926) and deFinetti (1974), offers prudential grounds for action in conformity with personal probability. Under several structural assumptions about combinations of stakes (that is, assumptions about the combination of wagers), your betting policy is consistent (coherent) only if your fair-odds are probabilities. The central question posed here is the following one: Besides providing an operational test of coherent betting, does the “Book” argument also provide for adequate measurement (elicitation) of the agent’s degrees of beliefs? That is, are an agent’s fairodds also his/her personal probabilities for those events?We argue the answer is “No!” The problem is created by state-dependent utilities. The methods of elicitation proposed by Ramsey, by deFinetti and by Savage (1954), are inadequate to the challenge of state-dependent values.1
Phylogenetic Analogies in the Conceptual Development of Science
Authors: Mishler Brent D. 
Published: January 2016

David Hull’s approach to science, which culminated in his important book Science as a Process(1988), represents an unprecedented conjunction of philosophy of science with the results and concepts of a particular science. Hull takes an evolutionary approach to the conceptual development of science, importing much of his explanatory framework from comparative biology, the discipline where his empirical observations of scientists have been made. On the surface, such a cozy relationship between data, theory, and metatheory leads to worries about circular reasoning (Mishler 1989). Nevertheless, I will argue here that Hull’s approach is basically sound, and that the strength of his arguments comes precisely from his recognition of key analogies between the evolution of organisms and the conceptual evolution of scientists; however, certain disanalogies must also be taken into account.Comparative biology can be divided into two distinct (although interrelated) halves based on differing orientations and types of questions asked.
Explanatory Unification and Scientific Understanding
Authors: Barnes Eric 
Published: January 2016

The theory of explanatory unification was first proposed by Michael Friedman (1974) and developed in more detail by Philip Kitcher (1981,1989). The primary motivation for this theory is the case that the theory adequately accounts for the genesis of scientific understanding. Standard models of explanation are, moreover, allegedly constructed on the basis of a misconception of the nature of understanding. My thesis is that the unificationist account of understanding proposed by Friedman and Kitcher is false, and hence, that the theory of explanatory unification is fundamentally misconceived.How does an explanation of some explanandum render the explanandum as ‘understood’? Carl Hempel wrote of the D-N covering law model that it shows that “given the particular circumstances and the laws in question, the occurrence of the phenomenon was to be expected; and it is in this sense that the explanation allows us to understand why the phenomenon occurred.”
A Representational Reconstruction of Carnap's Quasianalysis
Authors: Mormann Thomas 
Published: January 2016

According to general wisdom, quasianalysis belongs to the large family of Carnap's ingenious, but finally failed contributions to epistemology and philosophy of science. In this paper I want to show that this is not the case. Rather, Carnapian quasianalysis is to be considered as a promising theory of a representational constitution of scientific objects. That is to say, I intend to embed Carnap's approach of quasianalytical constitution in the framework of a general theory of meaningful representation (cf. Mundy (1986)).The outline of this paper is as follows: In section 2 I recall the basics of the quasianalytical approach, taking into consideration not only the well-known account in “Der Logische Aufbau der Welt”(Aufbau)but also a rather unknown first version of quasianalysis (“Quasizerlegung”) which Carnap developed in an unpublished manuscript written in 1923. This paper deserves attention not only for philosophicohistorical reasons, rather it contains quite a lot of interesting features of the quasianalytical approach which do not appear in theAufbauaccount.
Non-Turing Computers and Non-Turing Computability
Authors: Hogarth Mark 
Published: January 2016

Building on an idea by Pitowsky (1990), David Malament (private
communications), Hogarth (1992) and Earman and Norton (1993) have shown how
it is possible to perform computational supertasks—that is, an infinite
number of computational steps in a finite span of time—in a kind of
relativistic spacetime that Earman and Norton (1993) have dubbed a
Malament-Hogarth spacetime.
Definition 1 A spacetime (M,g) is
Malament-Hogarth just when there is a future
endless curve with past endpoint and a
point q∊M such that .
(Hereafter, the symbols “q” and “λ” are assumed to have the properties
they have in Definition 1.1 shall also speak of a “λ-curve”.)
Various examples of Malament-Hogarth (hereafter,
M-H) spacetimes are given in Hogarth (1992),
but the following artificial example from Earman and Norton (1993) is
perhaps the simplest.
Ideal Reaction Types and the Reactions of Real Alloys
Authors: Ramsey Jeffry L. 
Published: January 2016

Scientists must often solve analytically or computationally intractable
problems. Philosophers of science have problematized the nature and role of
laws, theories and evidence by examining how scientists use abstractions
(Cartwright 1990), idealizations (Laymon 1985, Brezinski et. al. 1990),
approximations (Cartwright 1983; Laymon 1989; Ramsey 1990, 1992), and visual
images (Wimsatt 1991, Ruse 1991) in such situations. Here, I problematize
the nature and role of concepts by examining ideal types as a response to
intractability. I focus on the work of Carl Wagner, a former director of the
Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Goettingen. Wagner used ideal
types in his research on the oxidation of metal alloys during the middle
third of this century.
I argue that: natural scientists do use ideal typical concepts; these
concepts are distinct from ‘standard’ concepts; and ideal typical concepts
provide one means of connecting a tractable theoretical model with the
experimental evidence.
On the Paradoxical Aspects of New Quantum Experiments
Authors: Vaidman Lev 
Published: January 2016

I shall discuss two recently suggested quantum experiments. These
experiments lead to paradoxical situations. I will argue that in the
framework of a particular Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory the
paradoxes do not arise.
The first experiment is the “interaction-free measurement” (Elitzur and
Vaidman 1993). The experimental group at Innsbruck headed by Prof. Zeilinger
is working now on its realization. Before describing the experiment let me
discuss a general question: “How do we know that there is an object in a
region of space?”
The simplest case is when the object itself causes some physical changes
outside the region:

i) The object is charged, so there is a field outside. We
can measure this field.

ii) The object yields a potential outside. Aharonov and Bohm
have taught us that potential even without field leads to a
measurable effect.

iii) The objects radiates photons or other
particles.
Wavefunction Tails in the Modal Interpretation
Authors: Dickson Michael 
Published: January 2016

Consider the general form of the state of a quantum system,
(eq. 1), where the
are (non-degenerate)
eigenvectors of an operator, A, corresponding to
an observable, A. According to the standard interpretation of quantum
mechanics (the precise details of which do not concern me here), A does not
have a definite value on the system in the state . But now suppose we measure
A by coupling the system to a measuring apparatus. The composite system is
then (eq. 2) where the
are the indicator-states of
the apparatus. Again, the standard interpretation tells us that the
apparatus is not in a definite indicator-state. But how can this be?
Measurements do have definite results. The apparatus is always in a definite
state.
I have just reviewed one version of the measurement problem. The modal
interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes a solution.
Shifting Frames: From Divided to Distributed Psychologies of Scientific Agents
Authors: Taylor Peter J. 
Published: January 2016

When reading the papers of Solomon, Thagard and Goldman, I observed their framing doing considerable explicit and implicit work. Framing, a visual metaphor, stimulated me to respond with images of one kind or another. These should allow readers to visualize more issues and propositions than an argumentive format could have pinned down in the limited space available.Figure 1 conveys how the three papers seem to me to frame the issue of integrating the cognitive and social: Scientists’beliefsare the focal phenomena, within three nested boxesof factorssurrounding them: thinking (reasoning etc.); cognition (information input and processing); and social (interaction among agents). (The other objects and lines will be explained in due course.) These factors are referred to asinfluences,something outside that gets into beliefs (1). The authors then argue about which set of influences is strongest or how to think about the factors “intermingling,” “overlapping,” “interacting.”.