The development of science has been a distinctive feature of human history in recent times, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In light of the problems that define the philosophy of science today, James Fetzer provides a foundation for inquiry into the nature of science, the history of science, and the relationship between the two. In Philosophy of Science, Fetzer investigates the aim and methods of empirical science and examines the importance of methodological commitments to the study of (...) science and the significance of interpretations of probability for understanding laws of nature and scientific explanations. This book offers a welcome framework for investigating the most recent work and the most promising solutions to the central problems that arise within this discipline. The result is a timely introduction to an increasingly important field. -- Publisher description. (shrink)

Historian James H. Jones published the first edition of Bad Blood, the definitive history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in 1981. Its clear-eyed examination of that research and its implications remains a bioethics classic, and the 30-year anniversary of its publication served as the impetus for the reexamination of research ethics that this symposium presents. Recent revelations about the United States Public Health Service study that infected mental patients and prisoners in Guatemala with syphilis in the late 1940s in (...) order to determine the efficacy of treatment represent only one of the many attestations to the persistence of ongoing, critical, and underaddressed issues in research ethics that Bad Blood first explored. Those issues include, but are not limited to: the complex and contested matters of the value of a given research question, the validity of the clinical trial designed to address it, and the priorities of science. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore three alternative frameworks for understanding the nature of language and mentality, which accent syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical aspects of the phenomena with which they are concerned, respectively. Although the computational conception currently exerts considerable appeal, its defensibility appears to hinge upon an extremely implausible theory of the relation of form to content. Similarly, while the representational approach has much to recommend it, its range is essentially restricted to those units of language that (...) can be understood in terms of undefined units. Thus, the only alternative among these three that can account for the meaning of primitive units of language is one emphasizing the basic role of skills, habits, and tendencies in relating signs and dispositions. (shrink)

Significant structural, developmental, and financial constraints exist in Scottish soccer that may predicate a different approach to talent identification and development. To our knowledge, no published reports exist evaluating the prevalence of the relative age effect in Scottish soccer players. Consequently, the aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of the RAE among varied playing levels and ages of male Scottish youth soccer players. Birthdates of male youth players from U10 to U17 age groups and from playing levels: (...) “Amateur”, “Development”, and “Performance”, alongside a group of male Scottish senior professional players were recorded and categorized into quartiles and semesters from the start of the selection year. Birthdates were analyzed for: each playing level and each age group irrespective of playing level. For the varied playing levels examined, an RAE was evident in “Development” and “Performance” playing levels only at youth level. When examining each age group, an RAE was observed in U12–U17 players only. While there was a slight asymmetry favoring Q1 born senior professional players, the RAE was not present within this group of our sample. Results from our study suggest that a bias in selecting individuals born earlier in the selection year may exist within male soccer academy structures, but not at amateur level. The asymmetry favoring chronologically older players at youth but not professional level questions the efficacy of this conscious bias within male Scottish soccer players. (shrink)

If the decades of the forties through the sixties were dominated by discussion of Hempel's “covering law“ explication of explanation, that of the seventies was preoccupied with Salmon's “statistical relevance” conception, which emerged as the principal alternative to Hempel's enormously influential account. Readers of Wesley C. Salmon's Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World, therefore, ought to find it refreshing to discover that its author has not remained content with a facile defense of his previous investigations; on the (...) contrary, Salmon offers an original account of different kinds of explications, advances additional criticisms of various alternative theories, and elaborates a novel “two-tiered“ analysis of explanation that tacitly depends upon a “two-tiered” account of homogeneity. Indeed, if the considerations that follow are correct, Salmon has not merely refined his statistical relevance account but has actually abandoned it in favor of a “causal/mechanistic“ construction. This striking development suggests that the theory of explanation is likely to remain as lively an arena of debate in the eighties as it has been in the past. (shrink)

The book uses Zen Buddhism as the opening wedge for an extraordinarily wide-ranging exploration of consciousness.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic defense of the single-case propensity account of probabilistic explanation from the criticisms advanced by Hanna and by Humphreys and to offer a critical appraisal of the aleatory conception advanced by Humphreys and of the deductive-nomological-probabilistic approach Railton has proposed. The principal conclusion supported by this analysis is that the Requirements of Maximal Specificity and of Strict Maximal Specificity afford the foundation for completely objective explanations of probabilistic explananda, so long as (...) they are employed on the basis of propensity criteria of explanatory relevance. (shrink)

At the heart of Levinas’s work is the apparently simple idea that through the encounter with another person, we are forced to give up our self-concern and take heed of the ethical relation between us. But, while simple on the surface, when one tries to characterize it in more detail, it can be hard to fit together the various ways in which Levinas talks about this relation and to identify precisely what he took its normative structure to be, as this (...) is described in a number of apparently different ways, that are not obviously compatible or equivalent, such as “command,” “call,” “summons,” “demand,” and so on. In this chapter, we intend to focus on these different characterizations and show what makes them different while also endeavoring to find a way in which Levinas’s conception may nonetheless be fitted together into a coherent account of the face-to-face encounter that is at the heart of his ethics. We will begin by considering the different normative terms used to characterize the encounter in that text and show how they are conceptually distinct from one another; we will then offer a way to read Levinas’s position to nonetheless show how these different normative relations can be fitted together into a stable position. (shrink)

This paper pursues the question, To what extent does the propensity approach to probability contribute to plausible solutions to various anomalies which occur in quantum mechanics? The position I shall defend is that of the three interpretations — the frequency, the subjective, and the propensity — only the third accommodates the possibility, in principle, of providing a realistic interpretation of ontic indeterminism. If these considerations are correct, then they lend support to Popper's contention that the propensity construction tends to remove (...) (at least some of) the mystery from quantum phenomena. (shrink)

Being able to ask others to do things, and thereby giving them reasons to do those things, is a prominent feature of our interpersonal lives. In this paper, I discuss the distinctive normative status of requests – what makes them different from commands and demands. I argue for a theory of this normative phenomenon which explains the sense in which the reasons presented in requests are a matter of discretion. This discretionary quality, I argue, is something that other theories cannot (...) accommodate, though it is a significant aspect of the relations that people stand in to one another, and the kinds of practical reasons that flow from those relations. (shrink)

The notion of program verification appears to trade upon an equivocation. Algorithms, as logical structures, are appropriate subjects for deductive verification. Programs, as causal models of those structures, are not. The success of program verification as a generally applicable and completely reliable method for guaranteeing program performance is not even a theoretical possibility.

Recent discussions in the various circles of feminism, postmodernism, and environmentalism have begun to make clear that ontology and epistemology without ethics is deadly - oppressive to women, oppressive to men, oppressive to the earth. In response to this crisis of reason in modernity, this collection of essays suggests the importance of knowing other-wise, non-rational ways of knowing which are wise to the "other" - a spiritual knowing of the heart with the passionate eye of love. Knowing Otherwise calls into (...) question the Western philosophical tradition of giving pride of place to reason in the acquisition of knowledge. Reasoning is only one of many ways in which we engage, i.e. know, the world. We know more than we think. We know by touch, by feel, by taste, by sight, by sounds, by smell, by symbols, by sex, by trust - by means of every modality of human experience. Philosophy becomes, in the fashion of Levinas, "the wisdom of love at the service of love. Tracing connections between epistemology, ethics, and spirituality - between "knowing" and the "other," between an other and the Other - all the essays serve as points of convergence between postmodern discussions and the Calvinian spirituality which is the home for writers in this collection. In particular, this collection explores the contributions of feminist thought and thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Richard Rorty, Jacqes Derrida, and John D. Caputo to a spiritually and ethically sensitive knowing. (shrink)

An approach to inference to the best explanation integrating a Popperianconception of natural laws together with a modified Hempelian account of explanation, one the one hand, and Hacking's law of likelihood (in its nomicguise), on the other, which provides a robust abductivist model of sciencethat appears to overcome the obstacles that confront its inductivist,deductivist, and hypothetico-deductivist alternatives.This philosophy of scienceclarifies and illuminates some fundamental aspects of ontology and epistemology, especially concerning the relations between frequencies and propensities. Among the most important (...) elements of this conception is thecentral role of degrees of nomic expectability in explanation, prediction,and inference, for which this investigation provides a theoretical defense. (shrink)

A model $\mathscr{M} = (M,+,\times, 0,1,<)$ of Peano Arithmetic $({\sf PA})$ is boundedly saturated if and only if it has a saturated elementary end extension $\mathscr{N}$. The ordertypes of boundedly saturated models of $({\sf PA})$ are characterized and the number of models having these ordertypes is determined. Pairs $(\mathscr{N},M)$, where $\mathscr{M} \prec_{\sf end} \mathscr{N} \models({\sf PA})$ for saturated $\mathscr{N}$, and their theories are investigated. One result is: If $\mathscr{N}$ is a $\kappa$-saturated model of $({\sf PA})$ and $\mathscr{M}_0, \mathscr{M}_1 \prec_{\sf end} (...) \mathscr{N}$ are such that $\aleph_1 \leq \mathrm{min}(\mathrm{cf}(M_0),\mathrm{dcf}(M_0)) \leq \mathrm{min}(\mathrm{cf}(M_1), \mathrm{dcf}(M_1)) < \kappa$, then $(\mathscr{N},M_0) \equiv (\mathscr{N},M_1)$. (shrink)

In a countable, recursively saturated model of Peano Arithmetic, an interstice is a maximal convex set which does not contain any definable elements. The interstices are partitioned into intersticial gaps in a way that generalizes the partition of the unbounded interstice into gaps. Continuing work of Bamber and Kotlarski [1], we investigate extensions of Kotlarski's Moving Gaps Lemma to the moving of intersticial gaps.

It is a commonplace in our histories of Greek philosophy that the first thinker to fashion deductive arguments was Parmenides of Elea. One corollary of this view is that Ionian philosophers before Parmenides provided no arguments in support of their views. In what follows I offer a critique of this dismissive characterization, focusing on the first thinker for whom we have a substantial body of evidence, Xenophanes of Colophon. Specifically, Xenophanes argued that retelling the old stories of divine strife and (...) warfare was out of keeping with the qualities of cleanliness and purity considered essential to a proper symposium. He held also that the presence of fossilized remains at inland and mountainous locations was best explained by positing cycles of worldwide flooding and drought, and he linked many other phenomena with the presence of earth and/or water. He also distinguished between having direct perceptual access to events and knowing the clear and sure truth about them, and concluded that about far-off matters such as the gods and the nature of all things no man can know the certain truth. He held also that a series of contrasts between divine and human attributes followed from an initial assumption of divine greatness. (shrink)

This paper is primarily concerned with ℵ 0 -categoricity of theories of partially ordered sets. It contains some general conjectures, a collection of known results and some new theorems on ℵ 0 -categoricity. Among the latter are the following. Corollary 3.3. For every countable ℵ 0 -categorical U there is a linear order of A such that $(\mathfrak{U}, is ℵ 0 -categorical. Corollary 6.7. Every ℵ 0 -categorical theory of a partially ordered set of finite width has a decidable theory. (...) Theorem 7.7. Every ℵ 0 -categorical theory of reticles has a decidable theory. There is a section dealing just with decidability of partially ordered sets, the main result of this section being. Theorem 8.2. If $(P, is a finite partially ordered set and K P is the class of partially ordered sets which do not embed $(P, , then Th(K P ) is decidable iff K P contains only reticles. (shrink)

We need to clarify at least four aspects of selfhood if we are to reach a better understanding of consciousness in general, and of its alternate states. First, how did we develop our self-centred psychophysiology? Second, can the four familiar lobes of the brain alone serve, if only as preliminary landmarks of convenience, to help understand the functions of our many self-referent networks? Third, what could cause one's former sense of self to vanish from the mental field during an extraordinary (...) state of consciousness? Fourth, when a person's physical and psychic self do drop off briefly, how has conscious experience then been transformed? In particular, what happens to that subject's personal sense of time? Our many-sided self arose in widely distributed brain networks. Since infancy, these self-oriented circuits have been over-conditioned by limbic biases. Selfhood then seems to have evolved along lines suggesting at least in shorthand the operations of a kind of ‘I-Me-Mine’ complex. But what happens when this egocentric triad briefly dissolves? Novel states of consciousness emerge. Two personally-observed states are discussed: insight-wisdom ; internal absorption. How do these two states differ phenomenologically? The physiological processes briefly suggested here emphasize shifts in deeper systems, and pivotal roles for thalamo-cortical interactions in the front and back of the brain. (shrink)