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In empirical modeling, an important desiderata for deeming theoretical entities and processes as real is that they can be reproducible in a statistical sense. Current day crises regarding replicability in science intertwines with the question of how statistical methods link data to statistical and substantive theories and models. Different answers to this question have important methodological consequences...
This paper examines issues of ontology and methodology in behavioral economics: the attempt to increase the explanatory and predictive power of economic theory by providing it with more psychologically plausible foundations. Of special interest is the epistemological status of neoclassical economic theory within behavioral economics, the runaway success story of contemporary economics. Behavioral...
Taking Arthur Fine’s The Shaky Game as my inspiration, and the recent 25 $${\textit{th}}$$ th anniversary of the publication of that work as the occasion to exercise that inspiration, I sketch an alternative to the “Naturalism” prevalent among philosophers of physics. Naturalism is a methodology eventuating in a metaphysics. The methodology is to seek the deep framework assumptions that make...
Arguments for the ‘extended mind’ seem to suggest the possibility of ‘extended knowers’—agents whose specifically epistemic virtues may depend on systems whose boundaries are not those of the brain or the biological organism. Recent discussions of this possibility invoke insights from virtue epistemology, according to which knowledge is the result of the application of some kind of cognitive skill...
Deploying distinctions between ignorance of $$p$$ p and ignorance that $$p$$ p (is true), and between knowledge of $$p$$ p and knowledge that $$p$$ p (is true), I address a question that has hitherto received little attention, namely: what is it to have knowledge of propositions? I then provide a taxonomy of ontological conceptions of the nature of propositions,...
There are several important criticisms against the unificationist model of scientific explanation: (1) Unification is a broad and heterogeneous notion and it is hard to see how a model of explanation based exclusively on unification can make a distinction between genuine explanatory unification from cases of ordering or classification. (2) Unification alone cannot solve the asymmetry and irrelevance...
Scientific practice involves two kinds of induction. In one, generalizations are drawn about the states of a particular system of variables. In the other, generalizations are drawn across systems in a class. We can discern two questions of correctness about both kinds of induction: (P1) what distinguishes those systems and classes of system that are ‘projectible’ in Goodman’s (Fact, fiction and forecast,...
Psillos (1999, 2011), Kitcher (1993), and Leplin (1997) have defended convergent scientific realism against the pessimistic meta-induction by arguing for the divide et impera (DEI) strategy. I argue that DEI faces a problem more serious than the pessimistic meta-induction: the problem of accretion. When empirically successful theories and principles are combined, they may no longer make successful...
Several recent arguments by philosophers of biology have challenged the traditional view that evolutionary factors, such as drift and selection, are genuine causes of evolutionary outcomes. In the case of drift, advocates of the statistical theory argue that drift is merely the sampling error inherent in the other stochastic processes of evolution and thus denotes a mathematical, rather than causal,...
This paper defends an interventionist account of causation by construing this account as a contribution to methodology, rather than as a set of theses about the ontology or metaphysics of causation. It also uses the topic of causation to raise some more general issues about the relation between, on the one hand, methodology, and, on the other hand, ontology and metaphysics, as these are understood...
Saul Kripke (Philosophical troubles, 2011) argued that the requirement that knowledge eliminate all possibilities of error leads to dogmatism (i.e., the view that, if one knows that p, then one may rationally decide now to disregard any future evidence against p one may encounter). According to this view, the dogmatism puzzle arises because of a requirement on knowledge that is too strong. The paper...
Our best sciences are frequently held to be one way, perhaps the optimal way, to learn about the world’s higher-level ontology and structure. I first argue that which scientific theory is “best” depends in part on our goals or purposes. As a result, it is theoretically possible to have two scientific theories of the same domain, where each theory is best for some (scientifically plausible) goal, but...
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel and Rudolph Carnap’s classical theory of semantic information entails the counterintuitive feature that inconsistent statements convey maximal information. Theories preserving Bar-Hillel and Carnap’s modal intuitions while imposing a veridicality requirement on which statements convey information—such as the theories of Fred Dretske or Luciano Floridi—avoid this commitment, as...
The experimental interventions that provide evidence of causal relations are notably similar to those that provide evidence of constitutive relevance relations. In the first two sections, I show that this similarity creates a tension: there is an inconsistent triad between (1) Woodward’s popular interventionist theory of causation, (2) Craver’s mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance...
Sharon Street (Can J Philos Suppl Vol 35: 213–248, 2009) argues that realism about epistemic normativity is false. Realists believe there are truths about epistemic reasons that hold independently of the agent’s (or anyone else’s) attitudes. Street argues by dilemma. Either the realist accepts a certain account of the nature of belief, or she does not. If she does, then she cannot consistently accept...
In this paper I show how certain requirements must be set on any tenable account of scientific representation, such as the requirement allowing for misrepresentation. I then continue to argue that two leading accounts of scientific representation—the inferential account and the interpretational account—are flawed for they do not satisfy such requirements. Through such criticism, and drawing on an...
Modern empirical macroeconomic models, known as structural autoregressions (SVARs) are dynamic models that typically claim to represent a causal order among contemporaneously valued variables and to merely represent non-structural (reduced-form) co-occurence between lagged variables and contemporaneous variables. The strategy is held to meet the minimal requirements for identifying the residual errors...
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