Online research in philosophy

Scientific realists contend that theory-conjunction presents a problem for empiricist conceptions of scientific knowledge and practice. Van Fraassen (1980) has offered a competing account of theory-conjunction which I argue fails to capture the mercenary character of epistemic dependence in science. Representative cases of theory-conjunction developed in the present paper show that mercenary reliance implies a "principle of epistemic symmetry" which only a realist can consistently accommodate. Finally, because the practice in question involves the conjunction of theories, a version of realism more robust than the "entity realism" of Cartwright (1983, 1989) and Hacking (1983) is required to explain the success of theory-conjunction.

Scientific realists often appeal to some version of the conjunction objection to argue that scientific instrumentalism fails to do justice to the full empirical import of scientific theories. Whereas the conjunction objection provides a powerful critique of scientific instrumentalism, I will show that mathematical instrumentalism escapes the conjunction objection unscathed.

In (Holton 1996) I argued that the account of value that Michael Smith has offered was vulnerable to a counter-example in the person of the Muggletonians. Smith argued, roughly, that what one values is what one would desire if one were fully rational. I objected that the Muggletonians held the path of Reason to be the path to evil. According to them, a fully rational person would have their desires so corrupted that they would become, quite literally, Satan. Thus they believed that their fully rational selves would have blasphemed against God; but blaspheming against God was not what they valued. Smith and Bigelow have responded to my alleged counter-example (Bigelow and Smith 1997). They object that my understanding of Smith’s position is itself over rationalistic. We shouldn’t think of the fully rational person as someone who follows the path of Reason wherever it might lead. Rather we should think that the fully rational person is someone who does what they have reason to do. The Muggletonians thought that following the path of Reason would lead them to do things that they have no reason to do; so they believed it would not be rational, in the sense relevant to Smith’s analysis, to follow that path. Hence they provide no counterexample to the analysis. This is an unpublished reply to their paper.

Argues for an assimilation of sentential and predicate conjunction to collective conjunction, based on modification of predicates by adverbs such as 'alternately'.

A logic is selfextensional if its interderivability (or mutual consequence) relation is a congruence relation on the algebra of formulas. In the paper we characterize the selfextensional logics with a conjunction as the logics that can be defined using the semilattice order induced by the interpretation of the conjunction in the algebras of their algebraic counterpart. Using the charactrization we provide simpler proofs of several results on selfextensional logics with a conjunction obtained in [13] using Gentzen systems. We also obtain some results on Fregean logics with conjunction.

It is easy to construct pairs of sentences X, Y that lead many people to ascribe higher probability to the conjunction X-and-Y than to the conjuncts X, Y. Whether an error is thereby committed depends on reasoners’ interpretation of the expressions “probability” and “and.” We report two experiments designed to clarify the normative status of typical responses to conjunction problems. © 2004 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.