Another title in the reissued Oxford Classic Texts in the Physical Sciences series, Jeffrey's Theory of Probability, first published in 1939, was the first to develop a fundamental theory of scientific inference based on the ideas of Bayesian statistics. His ideas were way ahead of their time and it is only in the past ten years that the subject of Bayes' factors has been significantly developed and extended. Until recently the two schools of statistics were distinctly different and set apart. (...) Recent work has changed all that and today's graduate students and researchers all require an understanding of Bayesian ideas. This book is their starting point. (shrink)

" --Maurice A. Finocchiaro,Isis "The best and most original aspect of the book is its overall conception.

This paper considers two reasons that might support Russell’s choice of a ramified-type theory over a simple-type theory. The first reason is the existence of purported paradoxes that can be formulated in any simple-type language, including an argument that Russell considered in 1903. These arguments depend on certain converse-compositional principles. When we take account of Russell’s doctrine that a propositional function is not a constituent of its values, these principles turn out to be too implausible to make these arguments troubling. (...) The second reason is conditional on a substitutional interpretation of quantification over types other than that of individuals. This reason stands up to investigation: a simple-type language will not sustain such an interpretation, but a ramified-type language will. And there is evidence that Russell was tacitly inclined towards such an interpretation. A strong construal of that interpretation opens a way to make sense of Russell’s simultaneous repudiation of propositions and his willingness to quantify over them. But that way runs into trouble with Russell’s commitment to the finitude of human understanding. (shrink)

In recent years largely due to the seminal work of Kit Fine and that of Jonathan Lowe there has been a resurgence of interest in the concept of essence and the project of explaining de re necessity in terms of it. Of course, Quine rejected what he called Aristotelian essentialism in his battle against quantified modal logic. But what he and Kripke debated was a notion of essence defined in terms of de re necessity. The new Aristotelian essentialists regard essence (...) as entailing but prior in the order of explanation to de re necessity. In what follows I argue that the concept of essence so understood has not been adequately explained and that any attempt to explain it, at least along the lines most familiar from the literature, must be flagrantly circular or make use of de re modal notions. (shrink)

This article first surveys a significant set of issues that are intertwined in asking whether social classes are real. It distinguishes two different notions of class: class as organized social entities and class as types of individuals based on individual characteristics. There is good evidence for some classes as social entities—ruling classes and underclasses in some societies—but other classes in contemporary society are sometimes best thought of in terms of types, not social entities. Implications are drawn for pluralist accounts of (...) social classification and the individualism-holism dispute. (shrink)

What are the requirements on an adequate genuine modal realist analysis of modal discourse? One is material adequacy: the modal realist must provide for each candidate analysandum an analysans in the language of counterpart theory which by his lights has the same truth value as the candidate analysandum. Must the material biconditional joining these be necessarily true? This is the requirement of strict adequacy. It is not satisfied if Lewis’s 1968 scheme provides the analysis. John Divers puts forward a modification, (...) which identifies cases of ‘advanced modalizing’ in which the modal operator is semantically redundant. Even with this modification modal realist analyses of statements of modal discourse will be strictly inadequate. Strict adequacy can be achieved by extending the redundancy interpretation to all de dicto modal statements. The price is the denial of de dicto contingency. But perhaps material adequacy is enough. If the modal realist has a systematic means of replacing every sentence of quantified modal logic which he considers true by a sentence of counterpart theory that he considers true, perhaps he need do no more. Still, traditionally philosophical analysis aims at strict adequacy so it is as well to know that this is a test the modal realist analysis fails unless he abandons de dicto contingency. (shrink)

Galileo's study of the heavens through the telescope is one of the earliest systematic uses of this kind of instrument. This study generated a number of direct conflicts between telescopic and naked eye observation, and Galileo responded to these conflicts by attempting to show why the telescopic observations are more reliable than those made with the unaided eye. As we shall see, Galileo regularly returned to this topic, but it has been largely neglected in the extensive literature on Galileo and (...) the telescope. (shrink)

One of three distinct approaches to his famous ‘Trust’ argument, this paper written by Garfinkel in 1960, and never before published, proposed a rethinking of rules, games and linguistic classifications in interactional terms consistent with Wittgenstein’s language games. Garfinkel had been working in collaboration with Parsons since 1958 to craft an approach to culture that would replace conceptual classification with the constitutive expectancies of interaction and systems of interaction. The argument challenged the work of cultural anthropologists influenced by zoology and (...) biology, who called themselves ‘ethnoscientists’ and studied culture in terms of linguistic classification systems. Garfinkel had proposed an alternative sociological ‘ethnoscience’ of culture and language that would focus on how culture was made, on how linguistic events are achieved, and on the rules of their making. This ‘Language Games’ approach followed Wittgenstein in seeking what Garfinkel called a literal description of cultural/linguistic events: meaning by ‘literal’, a step-by-step account of the constitutive and preferred rules participants use to create a recognizable event-in-a-language. Made famous three years later in version associated with Schutz, Garfinkel’s Trust argument also appears in a 1962 text (Parsons’ Primer, published in 2019) in a version built on Parsons. (shrink)

To reduce the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Granich et al. 1 ( 2009 ) have proposed a new strategy for universal voluntary HIV testing immediately followed by antiretroviral therapy. Although this proposal is likely to benefit the partners of those affected and thus promote public health, it is by no means clear that it benefits the infected people themselves and indeed it may be harmful. Since the proposal involves an intervention that is not clinically indicated, it falls (...) foul of the normal ethical standards of clinical medicine, which is to act in the best interests of patients. Neither is it a measure that would be imposed under the protection of public health law on people who are seen as representing such danger to others that significant restrictions in liberty are appropriate. Thus, the proposal represents a third category of public health measure. We argue that a coherent ethical framework including a robust process is appropriate to proposals of this kind and that medical research offers a useful model since some research, like this proposal, is motivated not by the interests of the individual participants but by the common good. We outline some possible elements of such an ethical framework. (shrink)

The essays in this volume apply philosophical analysis to address three kinds of questions: What are the implications of genetic science for our understanding of nature? What might it influence in our conception of human nature? What challenges does genetic science pose for specific issues of private conduct or public policy?

Where $\underline{a}$ is a Turing degree and ξ is an ordinal $ , the result of performing ξ jumps on $\underline{a},\underline{a}^{(\xi)}$ , is defined set-theoretically, using Jensen's fine-structure results. This operation appears to be the natural extension through $(\aleph_1)^{L^\underline{a}}$ of the ordinary jump operations. We describe this operation in more degree-theoretic terms, examine how much of it could be defined in degree-theoretic terms and compare it to the single jump operation.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION Philosophy is a discipline of fundamental diversities and extremely divergent modes of thought some of which occupy center stage in Western ...

Recent work in the philosophy of science has taken a decidedly historicist turn. A number of writers have rejected the traditional thesis that science develops through the accumulation of firmly established truths, maintaining instead that scientific research is founded on beliefs which are presupposed without having been proven. Since these presuppositions are not established truths they are subject to revision, and a change in the presuppositions of a discipline results in a fundamental restructuring of that discipline, i.e., a scientific revolution. (...) There are a number of versions of this general approach currently under debate, and there is considerable disagreement on how the various versions are to be interpreted. The central issue of this debate is the nature of scientific revolutions and it will be useful for our purposes to establish a point of reference by sketching an extreme view of scientific revolutions, a view which is often attributed to Kuhn and Feyerabend. (shrink)

Tuomela (this issue, pp. 96-103) raises several objections to the analysis and critique of methodological individualism in my (1986). In what follows I reply to those criticisms, arguing, among other things, that: (1) the alleged reductions provided by Tuomela and others fail, because they either presuppose rather than eliminate social predicates or do not avoid the problem of multiple realizations; (2) supervenience does not guarantee that the social sciences are reducible, because merely describing supervenieence bases leaves numerous questions unanswered, and (...) (3) the eliminativism that Tuomela favors verges on being self-refuting and is highly implausible short of a detailed empirical critique of the social sciences, something Tuomela does not provide and something there is little reason to think can be provided. (shrink)

According to a widely held view of science, scientific hypotheses are evaluated on the basis of observational data in accordance with the rules of inductive logic. Inductive logic, like deductive logic, is supposed to consist of a set of formal rules. These rules abstract from any details of the specific hypothesis under examination, the context in which the evaluation is taking place, and the individuals who carry out the evaluation. Observational data are also independent of the context or the observer (...) in the following sense: there may be individual and cultural limitations on what observations are undertaken, but the outcome of an observation procedure is presumably independent of the observer's preferences or peculiarities. Now, given impersonal data and a set of formal rules, the assessment of a hypothesis will be completely impersonal. The fact that a scientist thinks of a hypothesis and undertakes to evaluate that hypothesis may depend on individual features of that scientist and on the current state of science, but the resulting evaluation will be free of individual, historical, or cultural factors. Any two scientists who evaluate a hypothesis on the basis of the same observational evidence must arrive at the same evaluation of that hypothesis. (shrink)

An alternative account of Merton to that provided by Turner is sketched. It shows strong similarities to some quite plausible contemporary understandings of science in general. Given this reading, it would seem that Merton did not drastically change his position nor does it suffer from the ambiguities that Turner describes. Key Words: theory • naturalism • causation • functional explanation.

In Chapter 12 of his book Material Beings (Van Inwagen, Peter. 1990. Material Beings. Ithaca: Cornell University Press) van Inwagen argues that there are no artefacts, or very few, certainly fewer than most people believe. Artisans very rarely create, at least in the sense of causing things to come into existence. The argument in Chapter 12 is a very powerful one. I do not think that it establishes van Inwagen’s conclusion, but it does, I think, given its (plausible) premise, establish (...) that if there are not far fewer material things in the world than we ordinarily believe, then there are far more. In this sense it establishes, as Russell once said, ‘the truth about physical objects must be strange’. Furthermore, I argue at the end, we cannot avoid this conclusion even if we reject van Inwagen’s premise. Thus the defender of our common sense ontology is caught on the horns of a dilemma. So our commonsense ontology is indefensible. (shrink)

Every discipline has its foundational terms, those words that practitioners use to name what they study, or how they study, or why that study is valid. These terms often go unscrutinized when a discipline is up and running, but in the formative stages of a discipline and in periods of contention or crisis they often become subject to intensive criticism and attempts at redefinition. Challenging foundational terms is no simple task. Because they are foundational, they are difficult to do without, (...) even by those who would reject them. They are often used or assumed by those who question them, and after intensive questioning is done they often simply recur, even in their most unquestioned, naive form. The “foundational” nature of foundational terms, one begins to see, is not just a matter of a basic organizing concept or a description of some natural process, but of a term that is invested with aspirations of different sorts. The term also offers authorization to interpret, enacts a wish, suggests a cultural utopia, or puts in place a political program. The density of functions found in foundational terms guarantees that even the most questioned term will return. (shrink)

Scientific realism is usually a thesis or theses advanced about our best natural science. In contrast, this book defends scientific realism applied to the social and behavioral sciences. It does so, however, by applying the same argument strategy that many have found convincing for the natural sciences, namely, by arguing that we can only explain the success of the sciences by postulating their approximate truth. The particular success that Trout emphasizes for the social sciences is the effective use of statistical (...) testing. Social scientists apply diverse statistical measurement tools to social reality; they are able to refine and improve those measurements over time. The best explanation for such success is that the social sciences give us an approximately true account of some of the laws and entities of the social world. (shrink)

The origins of research projects, the duties of supervisors and research workers, the subjective elements in research and the difficulties of publication are reviewed, as a guide to the complexities of executing an honest research project. It is assumed that research carried out with maximal intellectual integrity will result in real advances.