Ethnomethodology has been torn between scientific and "radical" aspirations insofar as it moves discoursive practices from resources to the topic of the study. Scientific ethnomethodology, such as conversation analysis, studies discoursive praxis as its topic and resource. Standard scientific criteria are accepted to assess the merits of its findings. "Radical" ethnomethodology addresses mundane reasoning exclusively as its topic without recourse to standardized science. I will show that insofar as "radical" ethnomethodology succeeds in bracketing everyday resources, it loses its phenomenon with (...) the very technical skills it uses for this task. This reconsideration enables the development of ethnomethodological social science. Key Words: conversation analysis • discoursive praxis • ethnomethodology • radical ethnomethodology • social studies of science. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce introduced in the late 19th century the notion of abduction as inference from effects to causes, or from observational data to explanatory theories. Abductive reasoning has become a major theme in contemporary logic, philosophy of science, and artificial intelligence. This paper argues that the new growing branch of applied mathematics called inverse problems deals successfully with various kinds of abductive inference within a variety of scientific disciplines. The fundamental theorem about the inverse reconstruction of plane functions from (...) their line integrals was proved by Johann Radon already in 1917. The practical applications of Radon’s theorem and its generalizations include computerized tomography which became a routine imaging technique of diagnostic medicine in the 1970s.Keywords: Abduction; Inference to the best explanation; Inverse problems; Peirce; Radon’s theorem; Tomography. (shrink)

This book comes to the rescue of scientific realism, showing that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Philosophical realism holds that the aim of a particular discourse is to make true statements about its subject matter. Ilkka Niiniluoto surveys different kinds of realism in various areas of philosophy and then sets out his own critical realist philosophy of science.

Scientific realists use the “no miracle argument” to show that the empirical and pragmatic success of science is an indicator of the ability of scientific theories to give true or truthlike representations of unobservable reality. While antirealists define scientific progress in terms of empirical success or practical problem-solving, realists characterize progress by using some truth-related criteria. This paper defends the definition of scientific progress as increasing truthlikeness or verisimilitude. Antirealists have tried to rebut realism with the “pessimistic metainduction”, but critical (...) realists turn this argument into an optimistic view about progressive science. (shrink)

This book examines the philosophical conception of abductive reasoning as developed by Charles S. Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism. It explores the historical and systematic connections of Peirce's original ideas and debates about their interpretations. Abduction is understood in a broad sense which covers the discovery and pursuit of hypotheses and inference to the best explanation. The analysis presents fresh insights into this notion of reasoning, which derives from effects to causes or from surprising observations to explanatory theories. The (...) author outlines some logical and AI approaches to abduction as well as studies various kinds of inverse problems in astronomy, physics, medicine, biology, and human sciences to provide examples of retroductions and abductions. The discussion covers also everyday examples with the implication of this notion in detective stories, one of Peirce’s own favorite themes. The author uses Bayesian probabilities to argue that explanatory abduction is a method of confirmation. He uses his own account of truth approximation to reformulate abduction as inference which leads to the truthlikeness of its conclusion. This allows a powerful abductive defense of scientific realism. This up-to-date survey and defense of the Peircean view of abduction may very well help researchers, students, and philosophers better understand the logic of truth-seeking. (shrink)

The most elaborate recent accounts of truthlikeness (verisimilitude) apply this notion primarily to generalizations in first-order languages with qualitative predicates. This paper outlines a new approach to the definition of truthlikeness for quantitative statements, including singular statements (point estimation), interval statements (interval estimation), and quantitative laws. In the case of laws, the basic issue is reduced to the topological problem of measuring the distance between two real-valued functions. The solution of this problem makes it possible to define also the notion (...) of approximate truth for quantitative laws. (shrink)

The modern discussion on the concept of truthlikeness was started in 1960. In his influential Word and Object, W. V. O. Quine argued that Charles Peirce's definition of truth as the limit of inquiry is faulty for the reason that the notion 'nearer than' is only "defined for numbers and not for theories". In his contribution to the 1960 International Congress for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science at Stan­ ford, Karl Popper defended the opposite view by defining a compara­tive (...) notion of verisimilitude for theories. The concept of verisimilitude was originally introduced by the Ancient sceptics to moderate their radical thesis of the inaccessibility of truth. But soon verisimilitudo, indicating likeness to the truth, was confused with probabilitas, which expresses an opiniotative attitude weaker than full certainty. The idea of truthlikeness fell in disrepute also as a result of the careless, often confused and metaphysically loaded way in which many philosophers used - and still use - such concepts as 'degree of truth', 'approximate truth', 'partial truth', and 'approach to the truth'. Popper's great achievement was his insight that the criticism against truthlikeness - by those who urge that it is meaningless to speak about 'closeness to truth' - is more based on prejudice than argument. (shrink)

According to the foundationalist picture, shared by many rationalists and positivist empiricists, science makes cognitive progress by accumulating justified truths. Fallibilists, who point out that complete certainty cannot be achieved in empirical science, can still argue that even successions of false theories may progress toward the truth. This proposal was supported by Karl Popper with his notion of truthlikeness or verisimilitude. Popper’s own technical definition failed, but the idea that scientific progress means increasing truthlikeness can be expressed by defining degrees (...) of truthlikeness in terms of similarities between states of affairs. This paper defends the verisimilitude approach against Alexander Bird who argues that the “semantic” definition is not sufficient to define progress, but the “epistemic” definition referring to justification and knowledge is more adequate. Here Bird ignores the crucial distinction between real progress and estimated progress, explicated by the difference between absolute degrees of truthlikeness and their evidence-relative expected values. Further, it is argued that Bird’s idea of returning to the cumulative model of growth requires an implausible trick of transforming past false theories into true ones. (shrink)

The concept of verisimilitude is an indispensable tool for the fallibilist and realist epistemology. Part of the argument for this thesis consists in the important applications of this notion within the history and philosophy of science. But perhaps the harder part is to convince a sceptical reader of the existence of this concept. A general programme for defining and estimating degrees of truthlikeness for various kinds of scientific statements is outlined in some detail. Ten years after Miller's and Tichy's refutation (...) of Popper's attempted definition, this paper reviews recent developments and debates, and concludes that the treatment the Popperian problem with Carnapian logical tools leads to a new synthesis which turns out to formally contain Levi's theory of epistemic utilities as a special case. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce argued that, besides deduction and induction, there is a third mode of inference which he called " hypothesis " or " abduction." He characterized abduction as reasoning " from effect to cause," and as " the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis." Peirce ' s ideas about abduction, which are related also to historically earlier accounts of heuristic reasoning, have been seen as providing a logic of scientific discovery. Alternatively, abduction is interpreted as giving reasons for pursuing (...) a hypothesis. Inference to the best explanation has also been regarded as an important mode of justification, both in everyday life, detective stories, and science. In particular, scientific realism has been defended by an abductive nomiracle argument, while the critics of realism have attempted to show that this appeal to abduction is question - begging, circular, or incoherent. This paper approaches these issues by distinguishing weaker and stronger forms of abduction, and by showing how these types of inferences can be given Peircean and Bayesian probabilistic reconstructions. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 91 Heft: 2 Seiten: 295-340.

The article argues that all disciplines examining human thought could use certain shared analytical categories. This would not mean eradicating all differences between various approaches such as intellectual history and discourse analysis, but acknowledging that they are examining partly the same basic entities. The article argues that ideational entities in human thought could be understood as concepts, beliefs, and their constellations. The article discusses the views of scholars who have theorized similar categories and shows how these can be studied through (...) historical language use. Shared analytical categories would enhance interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars of human thought and allow more rigorous debates on issues that truly divide different disciplines, such as the explanatory values of human agency and structures. (shrink)

Despite the opinion held by some that Kant’s Critical philosophy is no longer relevant this essay shows that the problems it deals with are ever present. Kant’s critical insights into these problems can be revealed by citing his open invitation to his critical reader to devote to the first antinomy his chief attention. This paper cites Hegel’s response to this invitation and shows where Hegel failed to meet with Kant’s critical demands. An analogous resolution is proposed that falls in line (...) not only with Kant, but with the science of big bang cosmology. An open as opposed to a closed interpretation of Kant is also argued for that leads to the judgment that Kant did not attempt to put an end to speculative metaphysics, but rather, he attempted to inspire metaphysicians to the end of a science of metaphysics. (shrink)

A fictional Socratic dialogue in which Socrates resurfaces (descends and takes bodily form) and sits down on a park bench to talk with a man (Moe) who's flipping through the pages of Dawkins's "The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene," and Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine." Dawkins, via Moe, is given the Socratic treatment.

The modern history of verisimilitude can be divided into three periods. The first began in 1960, when Karl Popper proposed his qualitative definition of what it is for one theory to be more truthlike than another theory, and lasted until 1974, when David Miller and Pavel Trichý published their refutation of Popper's definition. The second period started immediately with the attempt to explicate truthlikeness by means of relations of similarity or resemblance between states of affairs (or their linguistic representations); the (...) work within this similarity approach was summarized in the books of Graham Oddie [1986] and Ilkka Niiniluoto [1987]. During the subsequent third period, studies in verisimilitude have been actively continued, and interesting results and applications have been achieved, but not many dramatic novelties. While it is now obsolete to claim that truthlikeness with reasonable properties cannot be defined at all, there is still a lot of controversy about the best and least arbitrary approach to doing this. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 19 The theory of possible worlds has been minimally employed in the field of theory and philosophy of history, even though it has found a place as a tool in other areas of philosophy. Discussion has mostly focused on arguments concerning counterfactual history’s status as either useful or harmful. The theory of possible worlds can, however be used also to analyze historical writing. The concept of textual possible worlds offers an interesting framework to work with for (...) analyzing a historical text’s characteristics and features. However, one of the challenges is that the literary theory’s notion of possible worlds is that they are metaphorical in nature. This in itself is not problematic but while discussing about history, which arguably deals with the real world, the terminology can become muddled. The latest attempt to combine the literary and philosophical notions of possible worlds and apply it to historiography came from Lubomír Doležel in his _Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage_. I offer some criticism to his usage of possible worlds to separate history and fiction, and argue that when historiography is under discussion a more philosophical notion of possible worlds should be prioritized over the metaphorical interpretation of possible worlds. (shrink)

Conceptual change and its connection to the development of new seien tific theories has reeently beeome an intensively discussed topic in philo sophieal literature. Even if the inductive aspects related to conceptual change have already been discussed to some extent, there has so far existed no systematic treatment of inductive change due to conceptual enrichment. This is what we attempt to accomplish in this work, al though most of our technical results are restricted to the framework of monadic languages. We (...) extend Hintikka's system of inductive logic to apply to situations in which new concepts are introduced to the original language. By interpreting them as theoretica1 concepts, it is possible to discuss a number of currently debated philosophical and methodological problems which have previously escaped systematic and exact treatment. For instance, the role which seientific theories employing theoretical con cepts may play within inductive inference can be studied within this framework. From the viewpoint of seientific realism, sueh a study gives outlines for a theory of what we call hypothetico-induetive inference. Some parts of this work which are based on Hintikka's system of in ductive logic are fairly technical. However, no previous knowledge of this system is required, but, in general, acquaintance with the basic ideas of elementary logic and probability theory is suffieient. This work is part of a project, originated by Professors Jaakko Hintikka and Raimo Tuomela, concerning the role of theoretical concepts in science. (shrink)

Some forms of religion may in some cases alleviate existential anxieties and help maintain morality; yet religion can also persist without serving any such functions. Atran & Norenzayan (A&N) are unclear about the importance of these functions for a theory of the recurrence of religious beliefs and behaviors.

In a seminar with the title “Deduction and Induction in the Sciences”, it is intriguing to ask the following questions: Is there a third type of inference besides deduction and induction? Does this third type of inference play a significant role within scientific inquiry? A positive answer to both of these questions was advocated by Charles S. Peirce throughout his career, even though his opinions changed in important ways during the fifty years between 1865 and 1914. Peirce called the third (...) kind of inference “hypothesis”, “abduction”, or “retroduction”.1 In this paper, I shall follow Peirce’s steps in discussing abduction by analyzing its logical form , its role in science , and the grounds of its validity . We shall see that Peirce’s discussion is more insightful than many recent attempts to analyze abductive inference. Still, recently some progress has been made in the treatment of abduction within the Bayesian theory of epistemic probability and truth-approximation . The results of this work support the view of scientific realism: abduction or inference to the best explanation , combined with empirical and experimental testing of scientific theories, is the best method of seeking informative truths in science. (shrink)

In a recent article [4], Fred I. Dretske has proposed a new analysis of natural laws. Dretske rejects the more or less standard view which says that laws are universal truths with a special function or status in science. As an alternative account, he suggests that laws are expressed by singular statements describing the relationship between universal properties and magnitudes: the statement It is a law that F's are G's3.is to be analysed as F-ness ↦ G-ness.I shall argue, however, that (...) Dretske's reasons for rejecting the standard account are not conclusive. Moreover, his own proposal seems to be either inadequate or reducible to that version of the standard account which takes laws to be nomically necessary generalizations. (shrink)

The notion of truthlikeness or verisimilitude has been a topic of intensive discussion ever since the definition proposed by Karl Popper was refuted in 1974. This paper gives an analysis of old and new debates about this notion. There is a fairly large agreement about the truthlikeness ordering of conjunctive theories, but the main rival approaches differ especially about false disjunctive theories. Continuing the debate between Niiniluoto’s min-sum measure and Schurz’s relevant consequence measure, the paper also gives a critical assessment (...) of Oddie’s new defense of the average measure and Kuipers’ refined definition of truth approximation. (shrink)

Tadeusz Kotarbiski is widely recognized as a major philosopher of theLvov–Warsaw school. His reism, which is a contribution to semantics andontology, is still discussed and debated, and his most original creation, praxiology,has grown into an entire research field. However, Kotarbiski's philosophy ofscience has not received much attention by later commentators. This paper attemptsto correct this situation by considering the hypothesis that Kotarbiski succeededalready in 1929 in formulating a position that can be regarded as an early version ofscientific realism. Unlike most (...) other ``scientific philosophers'' before the mid-thirties,he was able to combine ontological realism (by defending a form of physicalism andnominalism) and semantical realism (by defending the classical correspondence theoryof truth). He was also a critical epistemological realist. Further, in spite of theinstrumentalist flavour of his reductionist programme in eliminating terms apparentlyreferring to abstract entities, Kotarbiski accepted theories as statements with truth values and theoretical entities as long as they can be understood as physical bodies. (shrink)

This paper discusses alternative ways of defining and measuring institutional, pragmatic, empirical, and cognitive success in science. Four realist measures of epistemic credit are compared: posterior probability, confirmation (corroboration), expected verisimilitude, and probable verisimilitude. Laudan's non-realist concept of the empirical problem-solving effectiveness of a theory is found to be similar to Hempel's notion of systematic power. It is argued that such truth-independent concepts alone are insufficient and inadequate to characterize cognitive success. But if they are used as truth-dependent epistemic utilities, (...) they serve as fallible indicators of the truth or truthlikeness of a theory. (shrink)

Two recent conversation analytical studies draw contrary conclusions from seemingly very similar materials. Hutchby and Barnett ‘show that, far from revolutionizing the organization of telephone conversation, mobile phone talk retains many of the norms associated with landline phone talk’. Arminen and Leinonen, however, state that landline and mobile calls differ systematically from each other. These incommensurate findings raise the question of why the comparisons between landline and mobile call openings have not been able to determine whether social and communicative practices (...) are changing. It is suggested that auxiliary elements in CA allow the emergence of incompatible findings. The auxiliary assumptions enable authors to construct the phenomenon examined from their chosen perspective. Further, it will be shown that unquestioned assumptions materialize into theoretical notions that guide the research. CA studies seem to conceptualize the relationship between sequential order and sequence structure in different ways, which leads to different findings and results. (shrink)

Proceedings of the 2016 "one word" colloquium of the The Philosophical Society of Finland. The word was "Possibility".

(1994). European dimensions of Finnish culture: A survey of international and European orientation of Finnish intellectuals. World Futures: Vol. 39, The Evolution of European Identity: Surveys of the Growing Edge A Report by the European Culture Impact Research Consortium (EUROCIRCON), pp. 25-46.

In the gloomy year of 1943, when Finland was fi ghting against the Soviet Union in the turmoil of World War II, Finnish philosopher Eino Kaila published a highly personal book Syvähenkinen elämä , with the subtitle Keskusteluja perimmäisistä kysymyksistä . An extended version in Swedish, Tankens oro appeared one year later.2 Kaila’s Syvähenkinen elämä mixes discussions on the meaning of life with considerations on philosophical topics that occupied its author as a proponent of logical empiricism. The main part of (...) the book is written in the form of dialogues between two characters: Aristofi los and Eubulos. The painter Aristofi los eloquently presents a colourful pantheist vision of the world: reality is a process where Life with a capital L presses against the surface of space-matter and fl ows through its holes; human minds constituted by this process are the Eyes of Life through which Life looks around at the surrounding space-matter. Eubulos, who represents the scientifi c world conception, points out that the ideas of Aristofi los resemble the vitalism of Bergson and Driesch . Eubulos asserts that the real content of the doctrine of Life with a capital L is nothing but an expression of a personality transformed by religious conversion . As a metaphysical explanation, it appeals to superfi cial pseudo-concepts , and at the same time goes beyond experience in an unacceptable manner. (shrink)