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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Ecological Laws And Their Promise Of Explanations, Viorel Pâslaru
Ecological Laws And Their Promise Of Explanations, Viorel Pâslaru
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Marcel Weber (1999) argued that the principle of competitive exclusion is a law of ecology that could explain phenomena (1) by direct application, or (2) by describing default states. Since he did not offer an account of explanation by direct application of laws, I offer an interpretation of explanation by direct application of laws based on a proposal by Elgin and Sober (2002). I show that in both cases it is the descriptions of mechanisms that explain phenomena, and not the laws. Lev Ginzburg and Mark Colyvan (2004) argued Malthus’ Law of Exponential Growth is the first law of ecology, …
Scientific Fictionalism And The Problem Of Inconsistency In Nietzsche, Justin Remhof
Scientific Fictionalism And The Problem Of Inconsistency In Nietzsche, Justin Remhof
Philosophy Faculty Publications
In this article, I begin to develop Nietzsche’s scientific fictionalism in order to make headway toward resolving a central interpretive issue in his epistemology. For Nietzsche knowledge claims are falsifications. Presumably, this is a result of his puzzling view that truths are somehow false. I argue that Nietzsche thinks knowledge claims are falsifications because he embraces a scientific fictionalist view according to which inexact representations, which are false, can also be accurate, or true, and that this position is not inconsistent.