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Full-Text Articles in Philosophy of Science
Science And Rationality For One And All, P.D. Magnus
Science And Rationality For One And All, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
A successful scientific community might require different scientists to form different beliefs even when faced with the same evidence. The standard line is that this would create a conflict between the demands of collective rationality which scientists face as members of the community and the demands of individual rationality which they face as epistemic agents. This is expressed both by philosophers of science (working on the distribution of cognitive labor) and by epistemologists (working on the epistemology of disagreement). The standard line fails to take into account the relation between rational belief and various epistemic risks, values of which are …
Hobbes, Definitions, And Simplest Conceptions, Marcus P. Adams
Hobbes, Definitions, And Simplest Conceptions, Marcus P. Adams
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
Several recent commentators argue that Thomas Hobbes’s account of the nature of science is conventionalist. Engaging in scientific practice on a conventionalist account is more a matter of making sure one connects one term to another properly rather than checking one’s claims, e.g., by experiment. In this paper, I argue that the conventionalist interpretation of Hobbesian science accords neither with Hobbes’s theoretical account in De corpore and Leviathan nor with Hobbes’s scientific practice in De homine and elsewhere. Closely tied to the conventionalist interpretation is the deductivist interpretation, on which it is claimed that Hobbes believed sciences such as optics …
State Of The Field: Why Novel Prediction Matters, P.D. Magnus, Heather Douglas
State Of The Field: Why Novel Prediction Matters, P.D. Magnus, Heather Douglas
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
It has become commonplace to say that novel predictive success is not epistemically special. Its value over accommodation, if it has any, is taken to be superficial or derivative. We argue that the value of predictive success is indeed instrumental. Nevertheless, it is a powerful instrument that provides significant epistemic assurances at many different levels. Even though these assurances are in principle dispensable, real science is rarely (if ever) in the position to confidently obtain them in other ways. So we argue for a pluralist instrumental predictivism: novel predictive success is important for inferences from data to phenomena, from phenomena …
What Scientists Know Is Not A Function Of What Scientists Know, P.D. Magnus
What Scientists Know Is Not A Function Of What Scientists Know, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
There are two senses of ‘what scientists know’: An individual sense (the separate opinions of individual scientists) and a collective sense (the state of the discipline). The latter is what matters for policy and planning, but it is not something that can be directly observed or reported. A function can be defined to map individual judgments onto an aggregate judgment. I argue that such a function cannot effectively capture community opinion, especially in cases that matter to us.
Realist Ennui And The Base Rate Fallacy, P.D. Magnus, Craig Callender
Realist Ennui And The Base Rate Fallacy, P.D. Magnus, Craig Callender
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
The no‐miracles argument and the pessimistic induction are arguably the main considerations for and against scientific realism. Recently these arguments have been accused of embodying a familiar, seductive fallacy. In each case, we are tricked by a base rate fallacy, one much‐discussed in the psychological literature. In this paper we consider this accusation and use it as an explanation for why the two most prominent ‘wholesale’ arguments in the literature seem irresolvable. Framed probabilistically, we can see very clearly why realists and anti‐realists have been talking past one another. We then formulate a dilemma for advocates of either argument, answer …