Recent work on the logical theory of confirmation has centered on accounts of the confirmation of hypotheses relative to auxiliary assumptions or background theory. Whether such relative confirmation actually increases the credibility of the (relatively) confirmed hypothesis will depend in various ways on the epistemic status of the auxiliaries involved. Most obviously, if the auxiliaries are not themselves credible, confirmation relative to them will not increase the credibility of the hypothesis thus confirmed. A complete theory of confirmation must thus combine (...) an account of relative confirmation with an account of the route from relative confirmation to real confirmation. Some recent criticisms of hypothetico-deductive and bootstrapping accounts of relative confirmation are undermined by failure to appreciate the limitations of relative confirmation. (shrink)

Glymour has developed an account of the confirmation of scientific hypotheses which he advocates as an alternative to the hypothetico-deductive and Bayesian accounts. This account is subject to a counter-example which may be accomodated by a slight modification. So modified it describes an important dimension of confirmation. If the modification of Glymour's account is slightly extended, both the resulting account and the hypothetico-deductive account may be seen as special cases of a Bayesian theory which is immune to Glymour's criticisms.

“Credit-worthiness” accounts of the value of knowledge focus on the exercise of agency as the source of value in question. This focus is shared by an approach suggested by Sally Haslanger to the value of belief. The standard examples and counterexamples from the “value of knowledge” literature treat the relevant sort of agency in fundamentally individualistic terms. But recent work on relational autonomy recommends that we think of agency as fundamentally socially embedded. This reorientation not only disarms a standard objection (...) to the “credit-worthiness” approach, but suggests that the putative counterexample is actually a paradigm-case of the exercise of epistemic agency for creatures like us. In so doing, it also exhibits the agency-based account of the value of knowledge and its main competitor, which focuses on the status of potential informants, as two sides of the same coin. Meanwhile, epistemic agency is an essential component of agency tout court. Effective action requires information. But perhaps the possession of information can take other forms than the having of true beliefs. Paul Churchland characterizes what’s peculiar to belief in terms of the sentential form in “that”-clauses in belief attributions. The alternatives that he envisages divorce informational content from sentence content. But for creatures like us, sentences are the basic units of communication of information. If our agency is paradigmatically exercised in socially embedded contexts, an essential part of the picture is that our information be in substantial measure communicable in sentences, i.e., that it take the form of beliefs. So the socially-oriented version of the agency-based approach to the value of knowledge also confirms Haslanger’s hunch that the value of belief can be vindicated and developed in terms of the role of belief in the exercise of agency for creatures like us. (shrink)

In the philosophy of music and in musicology, apart from ethnomusicology, there is a long tradition of focus on musical compositions as objects of inquiry. But in both disciplines, a body of recent work focuses on the place of performance in the making of music. Most of this work, however, still takes for granted that compositions, at least in Western art music, are the primary objects of aesthetic attention. In this paper I focus on aesthetic attention to the performing activity (...) itself. I begin by roughly characterizing what is involved in attending to the performing activity of musical performers. I then argue that such attention is essential to the full appreciation of the central compositions of the Western art music canon. Finally, I argue that, often enough, recordings provide a suitable vehicle for this sort of attention; listeners to recordings can use them to listen to musical performance. (shrink)

Mostly in blank verse, I consider the question "What value can a student receive from a single course in philosophy?" More specifically, in line with my own teaching duties, I focus on the value to students of a single course in, say, epistemology, metaphysics, or philosophy of science or mind. I consider and reject answers based on the examples of introductory instruction in science or in art, finally concluding that even just a bit of this sort of philosophy can communicate (...) some of the delight philosophers enjoy in finding a world of questions in apparently obvious facts of everyday life. (shrink)