bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
What Should We Expect of a Theory of Explanation?
Authors: Klein Barbara V. E. 
Published: January 2016

Few topics in the philosophy of science have received as much discussion as the topic of explanation. Yet as Hanna's (1979, pp. 291-316) survey of recent research on scientific explanation makes abundantly clear, the field is riddled with competing “paradigms”, “models”, and “formulas” with little sign of any consensus.It is useful in this sort of situation to engage in metatheoretic ascent. What do we or ought we to expect of a theory of explanation? Unless some measure of agreement can be reached about that question, how can we expect agreement (or even rationally adjudicable disagreement) on the adequacy of particular candidate theories? The purpose of this paper is to sketch a meta-theoretic characterization of what: a theory of explanation ought to be like. The view I will put forth is surely not the only one, but it is a view which I believe to be implicit in the work of a number of influential writers on the subject, including Hempel (1965).
Units of Selection and the Structure of the Multi-Level Genome
Authors: Wimsatt William C. 
Published: January 2016

The dominant view among evolutionary biologists today is that the gene is the only unit of selection. According to this view, larger units are too unstable in evolutionary time to act as units of selection. Chromosomes are broken up by sexual recombination. At the level of the individual organism, phenotypes pass on genes, but (it is claimed!) last themselves only one generation. Genotypes of individuals, collections of chromosomes, are rearranged by Mendelian independent assortment in sexual reproduction and so also persist for only one generation. Groups of individuals are still more ephemeral, or so we are told.All of these points are argued at length by George C. Williams in his bookAdaptation and Natural Selectionwhich, since its publication in 1966, has been the watershed for the rise to dominance of this reductionistic vision of evolutionary theory.
Confusions of Symbolization in Mental Representation
Authors: Kolers Paul A. 
Published: January 2016

Although we all speak of “representation”, philosophers and psychologists often have quite different referents for the term. Among philosophers, “representation”, or “a representation”, usually refers to a picture of some sort; and concerns with resemblance, realism, abstraction, and the like are prominent (Goodman 1968). Psychologists and some philosophers accept the term more broadly, and by representation mean something like symbol— that is, some mark that stands for, denotes, or represents something else (Howard 1980). I shall use the word in this latter way.Goodman's treatment of symbols and so, willy-nilly, of representation, is the most sophisticated we háve. He has been concerned largely with reference—with what symbols may mean—and expresses the concern with a theory of the structure and function of symbols.
Methodology, Ideology and Feminist Critiques of Science
Authors: Koertge Noretta 
Published: January 2016

This paper deals briefly with two questions which I have discussed elsewhere (Koertge 1981 and forthcoming):a)If all scientists were perfect Popperians (i.e., absolutely scrupulous with respect to methodology), how much influence could their backgrounds have? I include under background: the individual's “background knowledge” (in Popper's sense), psycho-sexual upbringing, class origins or identification, metaphysics, and ideology. This is a rather mixed bag and I hope the context will make clear whether it is primarily the person's values which are influential or his/her prescientific beliefs.b)Having argued that it is possible for background to play a role, I then ask whether the ideals of feminism suggest the need for a new methodology and epistemology for science. I will comment in particular on Harding's paper in this volume.
Is General Relativity Generally Relativistic?
Authors: Jones Roger 
Published: January 2016

Within the lore of nearly every scientific theory, among the facts, laws, theorems, and such that constitute the “truths” it expresses, are one or more principles. Physics textbooks, I know, usually mention them at the beginning, or during some interlude given over to general remarks or speculation. As examples, the uncertainty principle and correspondance principle of quantum mechanics come to mind (see, e.g., Messiah 1960). And associated with the general theory of relativity, which is particularly rich in principles, are a principle of general covariance, a principle of equivalence (or two), Mach's principle, and a general principle of relativity (see, e.g., Misner, Thome, and Wheeler 1973).Where do principles come from? Generally, as I said, they are supposed to be “truths” about the working of the world: observations and experiments are appealed to as their sources. But this doesn't distinguish them from facts and laws.
What's Wrong with the Received View of Evolutionary Theory?
Authors: Beatty John 
Published: January 2016

This idea meant that heredity evolved—an evolution of the hereditary mechanism—an evolution of mitosis and meiosis. I had opened up an immense field of inquiry. I had to find out how the genes could control the chromosomes, how the chromosomes could control themselves at the same time that they were controlling the organism. I first discussed this problem in 1932. Formally anybody can repeat the idea and learn and write it down, but few have grasped its implications, as I think, for biology. (C. D. Darlington 1980, p. 74).In the world of academic specialties and subspecialties, philosophy of biology certainly counts as a self-respecting, if not otherwise respected, field of study. It has its own exemplary works, its own lines of communication, etc. In this regard, philosophy of biology might be compared with philosophy of physics.
Theory Construction and Experiment: An Empiricist View
Authors: Fraassen Bas C. van 
Published: January 2016

The empiricism/realism debates have been going on now for so long, in so many philosophical arenas, that any simple statement of the issue is bound to be wrong or biased. Yet we need a simple formulation to begin, if only to know who is meant to pick up which gauntlet. I shall begin with a short sketch of how I see the enterprise of philosophy of science, and then I shall describe what I take to be good empiricist views on two subjects: theory construction and experimentation. At the end I shall sum up with a simple recasting of the main points at issue.Within philosophy, the philosophy of science is comparable to philosophy of law, philosophy of art, of religion, of mathematics. These disciplines are comparable in that each has as subject matter a large-scale cultural phenomenon, with its associated activities, institutions, products, language, and internal standards of evaluation.
Explaining Scientific Discovery
Authors: Koertge Noretta 
Published: January 2016

The history of science provides two prima facie reasons for believing that there is a “logic” to scientific discovery. The first is the phenomenon of multiple or simultaneous discoveries. The second is the fact that internalist historians of science (who eschew non-cognitive explanations) routinely explain how a discovery was made and why scientist X took an important step which scientist Y did not!However, some philosophers have argued that purported historical explanations of discovery are all sleight-of-hand tricks—what we really have is a confused mixture of rational reconstructions of the justification steps in the process combined with a description, not an explanation, of the creative leaps. Others would claim that historians do indeed help us to understand scientific discoveries, but the mode of understanding involved is not that provided by the Hempelian covering law model. Rather we empathize with the creative leaps of past geniuses.
Beyond Inference in Perception
Authors: Stich Stephen P. 
Published: January 2016

The controversy over inference in perception turns on the nature of the processes that intervene between the stimulus.and the perceptual experience or percept. For those who find it useful to conceptualize such matters in boxological shorthand, the dispute can be viewed as focusing on the contents of the box in Figure 1. (Figures will be found at the end of the paper.)Gibsonians have stressed the informational richness of the stimulus and have argued that in virtue of that informational richness no complex inferential processes must be postulated in the box. Rather, the perceptual mechanism can be thought of as “picking up” or “resonating to” the information in the stimulus. But, of course, the suggestion that the perceptual system can pick up information “directly” from the stimulus does not really speak to the issue of what is in the box.
The Bounds of Law: Universality in Science
Authors: Gruender David 
Published: January 2016

The idea that events in nature are, somehow, governed by natural laws, and that to understand those laws would be a key to understanding the events—is a very old one. Whether abstracted from a religious context, or arrived at through independent reflection about nature, this idea first became prominent in the early days of what we now call science. Since the time geometry was worked out in axiomatic form, some 2,300 years ago, the combination of its deductive power, together with the understanding it yielded of the fundamental physical realm of space, I think it is fair to say geometry has stood as the very model of what we ought to expect laws of nature to look like, as well as how they ought to function.This phenomenon can be seen in the work of Euclid himself, especially that in mechanics (Clagett 1955).
Gödel, Wittgenstein and the Nature of Mathematical Knowledge
Authors: Tymoczko Thoma 
Published: January 2016

“And so, if I understand you correctly, you act and you know why act, but you don't know why you know that you know what you do?”The problem that I want to discuss can be stated simply. For the sake of argument, I assume that knowledge is a relation between people and propositions, and that mathematical knowledge is a subspecies of this. Ordinarily, we are inclined to assume that we can account for one mathematician's knowledge without reference to any other mathematician. So in epistemology we assume that there is but a single ideal mathematician or that, at least as far as knowledge goes, an individual mathematician can be considered in isolation from all others. In so far as a community of mathematicians enters epistemology at all, it is after the already established fact of individual knowledge. The community typically serves as a device for the efficient distribution of knowledge.
The Justification of Mathematical Induction
Authors: Boolos Georg 
Published: January 2016

There ie an old (c. 1967) argument due to Dana Scott tnat is not as well known to philosophers and logicians as it ought to be. I shall cone back to it later.The principle of matheaatlcal induction asserts that every number belongs to any class tnat contains zero and also contains tne successor of any member.Can the principle of mathematical induction be proved? That is to say, is there a way to show tnat every numoer oelongs to any class, that, etc?Like any other statement, the principle of mathematical induction can be derived from itself, in zero lines. This quick and easy derivation is not a proof of mathematical induction: it does not show that induction is true.
Large-Scale Biological Entities and the Evolutionary Process
Authors: Eldredge Nile 
Published: January 2016

I wish to pose an instance in which philosophy has made an explicit and I feel, very useful contribution to the resolution of a set of scientific problems. Some of this work has been done by philosophers with a biological bent, and some by biologists with a philosophical bent. Whether the upshot is philosophy of biology, I cannot say. But recent conceptual advances in the ontology of what we might call “large biological things” holds a number of practical consequences for macroevolutionary theory.Let us begin by asking what is “macroevolution” and, consequently, macroevolutionary theory? The “Modern Synthesis“, of course, maintains thatvthe neo-Darwinian paradigm (i.e., natural selection united with a’ coherent theory of the principles of heredity) is both necessary and sufficient to account for most evolutionary phenomena, including macroevolution.
The Universality of Laws in Space and Time
Authors: Rynaslewicz Robert 
Published: January 2016

Part of our folklore is that genuine laws of nature must be universal in space and time. The purpose of this note is to explicate and compare various senses of this requirement. I am not concerned to argue here that the requirement, in any one of its explicated forms, should or should not be adopted.If it is hard to state straight out exactly what is demanded by universality in space and time, Michael Tooley has provided an example of a hypothetical law which fails the requirement in a significant sense:All fruit in Smith’s garden at any time are apples. When one attempts to take an orange into the garden, it turns into an elephant. Bananas so treated become apples as they cross the boundary, while pears are resisted by a force that cannot be overcome.
Towards a Theory of Theoretical Objects
Authors: Brittan Gordon G. 
Published: January 2016

Science is made possible by the introduction of theoretical objects. Why this should be so has never been made clear. Indeed, it has never been made clear how theoretical objects are rightly to be understood, or in what ways they differ from more ordinary sorts of physical objects. What follows is a sketch of a new theory. In my view, this theory becomes explicit on the so-called “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics. But it has implicitly characterized scientific development since the revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries.How are theoretical objects rightly to be understood? I say that they are objects whose existence is postulated by a theory is alright as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. We also need to know what theories are.
The Explanatory Coherence of Continental Drift
Authors: Thagard Paul , Nowak Gregory 
Published: January 2016

In the nineteen-sixties, plate tectonics became the accepted theoretical framework in the earth sciences. This framework revived the idea of continental drift that had been first proposed in 1912 by Alfred Wegener (1966). This paper offers an analysis of the arguments of Wegener and his opponents. We shall show that from Wegener’s perspective his hypotheses possessed a high degree of explanatory coherence, while from the opponents’ perspective his theory was incoherent with much that was generally known.Our analysis uses a new theory of explanatory coherence that has already been applied to several important cases in the history of science: Lavoisier’s argument for his oxygen theory against the phlogiston theory, Darwin’s argument for the theory of evolution by natural selection, and current disputes about why dinosaurs became extinct (Thagard 1988b). This theory is implemented in a connectionist computer program called ECHO that takes statements of explanatory relations as input and creates a network of units, crudely analogous to neurons, with excitatory and inhibitory links among them.
Understanding Regression
Authors: Woodward James 
Published: January 2016

Although statistical techniques like regression analysis and path analysis are widely used in the biomedical, behavioral and social sciences to make causal inferences there has been surprisingly little philosophical discussion of the details of such techniques and of the conceptions of causation and explanation implicit in them. There also has been relatively little attempt to compare such techniques with various probabilistic models of causation and explanation in the philosophical literature.In this paper I explore, for reasons of space in a very sketchy and schematic way, some issues in philosophy of science raised by regression analysis. One general conclusion I reach is that it is considerably less obvious than one might suppose that the philosophical theories alluded to above are plausibly viewed as reconstructions of regression techniques.
Herbert Feigl
Authors: Aune Bruce 
Published: January 2016

Herbert Feigl was one of the most admirable people I have known. I was fortunate to have him a a friend and as a teacher (he directed my PhD dissertation). He was a very special friend and a very special teacher. To round out what is being said here, I want to share my impressions of him as a teacher and as a person.I don't think I ever took a course from Herbert; he taught me informally as a thesis director and as a helpful older friend. When he guided me through the writing of my thesis, I was almost unaware fo the teaching he was doing. It is only in recent years that I have come to appreciate how important it was for me.In comparison with other teachers, Herbert was extremely permissive—the opposite of coercive. For him, nothing was off-limits.
On the Possibility that the Present Quantum State of the Universe is the Vacuum
Authors: Albert David Z. 
Published: January 2016

This note will consist of a single rather elementary remark about the overall Quantum state of the world.Let me say something at the outset about what this remark is supposed to be good for. It will not support and it will also not raise any doubts about any particular cosmological model. The problems which this remark will turn out to have a bearing on are problems which those models aren't intended to address, problems (about which, however, there has lately been a good deal of speculation) connected with the ‘ultimate beginnings’ of the world; and the remark will merely suggest that those problems need not be worried about; that perhaps, after, there simply aren't genuine problems like that.The remark is that if any linear Quantum-Mechanical equations of motion happen to be the true and universal equations of motion of the world, then it is consistent with everything we observe, and it is consistent with everything we are even likely to observe, to suppose that the present (and past and future) state of the physical world is the vacuum state.
Accommodation, Prediction and Bayesian Confirmation Theory
Authors: Howson Colin 
Published: January 2016

‘A hypothesis can only be received upon the ground of its having been verified by successful prediction’, C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. II, p.466.Hempel, in his classic [1966], raised a problem which already had a long pedigree. Balmer, having examined measurements of the wavelengths of lines in the emission spectrum of hydrogen, constructed a now well-known formula for generating these, and also other lines at that time unknown to him. Hempel asked whether Balmer's formula would have been as strongly confirmed by the new lines had they too formed part of Balmer's database. Hempel's question poses the famous and ancient accommodation-versus-prediction problem: is a hypothesis h, designed among other things to account for data e, confirmed by e as much as h would have been, had it been found to explain e without, however, having been constructed to do so? An unconditionally negative answer has been given by a numerous and influential body of scientists and philosophers; this unconditional view of the matter I shall call predictionism.
Some Public Policy Problems with the Science of Carcinogen Risk Assessment
Authors: Cranor Carl F. 
Published: January 2016

Government agencies and private risk assessors use (quasi) scientific “risk assessment” procedures to try to estimate or predict risks to human health or the environment that might result from exposure to toxic substances in order to take steps to prevent such risks from arising or to eliminate the risks if they already exist We might think of this as an aspect of “regulatory science”.Using carcinogen risk assessment as a model I consider several aspects of risk assessment—use of epidemiology, animal bioassays, and extrapolation models in predicting risks—to show how scientific procedures and uncertainties may determine (in a way often unbeknownst to the practitioners) the public policy debates concerning the estimation of risks from carcinogens.For one thing, actual and possible scientific uncertainties are large enough that two different researchers using exactly the same data could come to quite different conclusions; such uncertainties permit risk assessors in large measure to determine regulatory decisions even though this exceeds their authority.
Beyond Numerical and Causal Accuracy: Expanding the Set of Justificational Criteria
Authors: Ramsey Jeffry L. 
Published: January 2016

Until recently, realists and anti-realists alike have assumed that any approximations which appear in explanations and confirmations in the mathematically oriented physical and biological sciences are “mere distractions” (Laymon 1989, p. 353). When approximation techniques must be used, they are typically justified by appeals to their numerical accuracy. However, recent interest in computational complexity in the sciences has revealed that numerical accuracy is not always the only criterion which should be invoked to justify the use of approximations. Cartwright (1983), Franklin (1988) and others have suggested that causal accuracy should be added as a criterion.Numerical and causal accuracy are important. However, they form a sufficient set of justificational criteria only when certain—often unstated—conditions obtain. These conditions are actually assumptions which are often not satisfied, especially in the computationally complex situations which characterize discovery and exploratory contexts. In these contexts, we need to concentrate on “delineating a justificatory set which is relevant to [the] given epistemic situation” (Duran 1988, p. 273).
The New Experimentalism, Topical Hypotheses, and Learning from
Error
Authors: Mayo Deborah G. 
Published: January 2016

Following a period during which philosophers of science focused on
theory to the near exclusion of experiment, a number of philosophers,
historians and sociologists of science have, in one way or another, turned
their attention to experimentation, instrumentation, and laboratory
practices. Considerable work in philosophy of science of the last decade
reflects this surge of interest in experiment, as promoted by Ackermann,
Cartwright, Franklin, Galison, Giere, Hacking and others. Where has this
movement taken us and where do we still have to go?
In asking this question, my focus is on that subset of the
experimentalist movement whose members, following Ackermann (1989), I dub
the “New Experimentalists”. Although their agendas differ, members of this
group share the core thesis that aspects of experiment might offer an
important, though largely untapped, resource for addressing key problems in
philosophy of science.
Philosophy of Psychology Meets the Semantic View
Authors: Hardcastle Valerie Gray 
Published: January 2016

Philosophers of science have much to say that could be useful to philosophers of mind, especially naturalistic philosophers of psychology. We should listen. In particular, I believe that if philosophers of mind were clearer on how explanations function in science in general, then many of their present worries would either dissolve or be altered beyond recognition. In what follows, I show you what I mean.First, though, I shall spend a few moments recapitulating the semantic view of theories and how it applies to psychology. This section will be fairly brief since details have already been presented elsewhere (see esp. Bickle 1993). However, let me emphasize at the outset that I am not adopting the semantic view because I think it is inherently superior to the more traditional models (though I do). Indeed, everything that I claim can be translated into any view of theory you might have with greater or lesser ease.