We model scientific theories as Bayesian networks. Nodes carry credences and function as abstract representations of propositions within the structure. Directed links carry conditional probabilities and represent connections between those propositions. Updating is Bayesian across the network as a whole. The impact of evidence at one point within a scientific theory can have a very different impact on the network than does evidence of the same strength at a different point. A Bayesian model allows us to envisage and analyze the (...) differential impact of evidence and credence change at different points within a single network and across different theoretical structures. (shrink)

Our scientific theories, like our cognitive structures in general, consist of propositions linked by evidential, explanatory, probabilistic, and logical connections. Those theoretical webs ‘impinge on the world at their edges,’ subject to a continuing barrage of incoming evidence. Our credences in the various elements of those structures change in response to that continuing barrage of evidence, as do the perceived connections between them. Here we model scientific theories as Bayesian nets, with credences at nodes and conditional links between them modelled (...) as conditional probabilities. We update those networks, in terms of both credences at nodes and conditional probabilities at links, through a temporal barrage of random incoming evidence. Robust patterns of punctuated equilibrium, suggestive of ‘normal science’ alternating with ‘paradigm shifts,’ emerge prominently in that change dynamics. The suggestion is that at least some of the phenomena at the core of the Kuhnian tradition are predictable in the typical dynamics of scientific theory change captured as Bayesian nets under even a random evidence barrage. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Metaphysical Club, a gathering of intellectuals in the 1870s associated with Harvard, is widely recognized as the crucible where pragmatism, America's distinctively original philosophy, was refined and proclaimed. Louis Menand's bestseller about the group was a dramatic publishing success. However, only three actual members - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles S. Peirce, and William James - appear in this book, alongside other thinkers such as John Dewey who were never in the Club. The Real Metaphysical Club tells the full (...) story of how this influential group shifted the course of philosophy in America. In addition to pioneering pragmatism, the group explored radical empiricism and idealism, and formulated personalism and process philosophy, equally important developments. This volume contains thirty-seven important writings dating from 1870 to 1885 by the real members of the Metaphysical Club. The first section centers on pragmatism and science; the second part collects writings of the lawyers; and the third part covers idealist and personalist philosophers. Many of these writings have never been reprinted before, and nothing like this impressive collection has ever been attempted. A general introduction provides a narrative history, and the editors' three introductions to the volume's sections vividly bring to life the intense meetings, sustained debates, and pioneering thought from the Metaphysical Club. (shrink)

Frank Ramsey was the greatest of the remarkable generation of Cambridge philosophers and logicians which included G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maynard Keynes. Before his tragically early death in 1930 at the age of twenty-six, he had done seminal work in mathematics and economics as well as in logic and philosophy. This volume, with a new and extensive introduction by D. H. Mellor, contains all Ramsey's previously published writings on philosophy and the foundations of mathematics. The (...) latter gives the definitive form and defence of the reduction of mathematics to logic undertaken in Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica; the former includes the most profound and original studies of universals, truth, meaning, probability, knowledge, law and causation, all of which are still constantly referred to, and still essential reading for all serious students of these subjects. (shrink)

We attempt to extend the nominalistic project initiated in Hartry Field's Science Without Numbers to modern physical theories based in differential geometry.

This article rebuts Ramsey's earlier theory, in 'Universals of Law and of Fact', of how laws of nature differ from other true generalisations. It argues that our laws are rules we use in judging 'if I meet an F I shall regard it as a G'. This temporal asymmetry is derived from that of cause and effect and used to distinguish what's past as what we can know about without knowing our present intentions.

Space, Time, and Stuff is an attempt to show that physics is geometry: that the fundamental structure of the physical world is purely geometrical structure. Along the way, he examines some non-standard views about the structure of spacetime and its inhabitants, including the idea that space and time are pointless, the idea that quantum mechanics is a completely local theory, the idea that antiparticles are just particles travelling back in time, and the idea that time has no structure whatsoever. The (...) main thrust of the book, however, is that there are good reasons to believe that spaces other than spacetime exist, and that it is the existence of these additional spaces that allows one to reduce all of physics to geometry. Philosophy, and metaphysics in particular, plays an important role here: the assumption that the fundamental laws of physics are simple in terms of the fundamental physical properties and relations is pivotal."--P. [4] of cover. (shrink)

An introduction to informal logic, critical thinking and rhetoric utilizing actual public discourse .

I argue that it may well be the case that space and time do not consist of points, indeed that they have no smallest parts. I examine two different approaches to such pointless spaces : a topological approach and a measure theoretic approach. I argue in favor of the measure theoretic approach.

Suppose that two geysers, about one mile apart, erupt at irregular intervals, but usually erupt almost exactly at the same time. One would suspect that they come from a common source, or at least that there is a common cause of their eruptions. And this common cause surely acts before both eruptions take place. This idea, that simultaneous correlated events must have prior common causes, was first made precise by Hans Reichenbach (Reichenbach 1956). It can be used to infer the (...) existence of unobserved and unobservable events, and to infer causal relations from statistical relations. Unfortunately it does not appear to be universally valid, nor is there agreement as to the circumstances in which it is valid. (shrink)

Digital technologies are rapidly transforming economies and societies. Scholars have approached this rise of digital capitalism from various angles. However, relatively little attention has been paid to digital capitalism’s cultural underpinnings and the beliefs of those who develop most digital technologies. In this paper, we argue that a solutionist order of worth – in which value derives from solving social problems through technology – has become central to an emerging spirit of digital capitalism. We use supervised learning to trace the (...) relative importance of different orders of worth in three novel text corpora. We find that solutionism is indeed central to the normative beliefs of digital elites and the broader digital milieu, but not to capitalist discourse at large. We illustrate the importance of these findings by discussing how the spirit of digital capitalism motivates, legitimates, and orients the actions of digital capitalists. (shrink)

The common cause principle states that correlations have prior common causes which screen off those correlations. I argue that the common cause principle is false in many circumstances, some of which are very general. I then suggest that more restricted versions of the common cause principle might hold, and I prove such a restricted version.

I argue that standard decision theories, namely causal decision theory and evidential decision theory, both are unsatisfactory. I devise a new decision theory, from which, under certain conditions, standard game theory can be derived.

Machiavellians are manipulative and deceitful individuals willing to utilize any strategy or behavior needed to attain their goals. This study explores what occurs when Machiavellian employees have a Machiavellian leader with the same negative, manipulative disposition. We argue that Machiavellian employees have a negative worldview and are likely to trust their leaders less. This reduced trust likely results in these employees experiencing higher stress and engaging in more unethical behavior. In addition, we expect these negative relationships to be exacerbated when (...) such followers experience Machiavellian leadership. Thus, we test a moderated mediation model assessing whether Machiavellianism affects employees and whether combining Machiavellian leaders and Machiavellian employees is toxic in the sense of exacerbating the negative impact of Machiavellianism on employee trust. Results do not support the proposed conditional indirect effect of trust for either stress or unethical behavior. Instead, we find a conditional direct effect of employee Machiavellianism on both trust and stress: When Machiavellian employees have Machiavellian leaders, their trust in their leader significantly decreases, and their level of stress significantly increases. We also find support for an unconditional indirect effect of trust for employee stress, Machiavellianism in employees relates to stress via lowered trust in the leader. For unethical behavior, we only find a main effect of employee Machiavellianism. (shrink)

In den drei Büchern der Schrift Über die Seele begründet Aristoteles erst-mals eine philosophische Psychologie als eigene Disziplin, welche empirisch von den Lebensfunktionen auf allen Stufen des Lebendigen ausgehend zu definitorischen Bestimmungen der verschiedenen seelischen Prinzipien kommt, besonders auch zum Vernunftprinzip des Menschen. Diese Ausgabe stützt sich auf die bekannten großen kommentierten Ausgaben des letzten und dieses Jahrhunderts. Der griechische Text ist der Teubner-Ausgabe entnommen; einige Varianten der Oxforder Ausgabe von Ross sind verzeichnet worden. Die Übersetzung orientiert sich an W. (...) Theiler, sucht jedoch eigene Wege des geeigneten Ausdrucks und gliedert zum besseren Verständnis häufiger Sinneinheiten ab, denen der Kommentar folgt. Mit Einleitung, Literaturhinweisen und Registern zum griechischen und deutschen Text. (shrink)

Time travel has been a staple of science fiction. With the advent of general relativity it has been entertained by serious physicists. But, especially in the philosophy literature, there have been arguments that time travel is inherently paradoxical. The most famous paradox is the grandfather paradox: you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, thereby preventing your own existence. To avoid inconsistency some circumstance will have to occur which makes you fail in this attempt to kill your grandfather. Doesn't (...) this require some implausible constraint on otherwise unrelated circumstances? We examine such worries in the context of modern physics. (shrink)

Zeno argued that since at any instant an arrow does not change its location, the arrow does not move at any time, and hence motion is impossible. I discuss the following three views that one could take in view of Zeno's argument:(i) the "at-at" theory, according to which there is no such thing as instantaneous velocity, while motion in the sense of the occupation of different locations at different times is possible,(ii) the "impetus" theory, according to which instantaneous velocities do (...) exist but these are only contingently and causally related to the temporal developments of positions,(iii) the "no instants" theory, according to which instants in time do not exist, and hence instantaneous velocities do not exist, while motion, in the sense of different areas occupied during different time intervals, is possible.I argue that, despite the fact that there have been interesting and relevant developments in mathematics and physics since the time of Zeno, each of these views still has serious drawbacks. (shrink)

What is it that troubles and preoccupies us about the anxieties and anguishes of social and private life? Have advances in the disciplines of psychoanalysis, psychology or the social sciences in general ministered to our needs in these areas? In this forcefully argued collection of essays, Frank Cioffi examines Wittgenstein's reflections on the comparative claims of clarification and empirical enquiry. Though writing out of admiration and indebtedness, he expresses reservations as to the limits Wittgenstein places on the relevance and (...) desirability of empirical knowledge. His discusssions extend from Wittgenstein's reflections on human sacrifice and other ritual practices dealt with by Frazer to Freud's account of the sources of anxiety, depression, dreams and laughter. He asks both whether it is empirical investigation or more lucid reflection that these phenomena demand, and what kind of question this itself is. (shrink)

This note is a postscript to Ramsey's 'Truth and Probability'. It replaces that article's psychological reading of subjective probability with a reading of it as a consistency condition on the theory that we act to maximise expected utility.

Richard Feynman has claimed that anti-particles are nothing but particles `propagating backwards in time'; that time reversing a particle state always turns it into the corresponding anti-particle state. According to standard quantum field theory textbooks this is not so: time reversal does not turn particles into anti-particles. Feynman's view is interesting because, in particular, it suggests a nonstandard, and possibly illuminating, interpretation of the CPT theorem. In this paper, we explore a classical analog of Feynman's view, in the context of (...) the recent debate between David Albert and David Malament over time reversal in classical electromagnetism. (shrink)

In this article, I will provide a critical overview of the form of non-deductive reasoning commonly known as “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE). Roughly speaking, according to IBE, we ought to infer the hypothesis that provides the best explanation of our evidence. In section 2, I survey some contemporary formulations of IBE and highlight some of its putative applications. In section 3, I distinguish IBE from C.S. Peirce’s notion of abduction. After underlining some of the essential elements of IBE, (...) the rest of the entry is organized around an examination of various problems that IBE confronts, along with some extant attempts to address these problems. In section 4, I consider the question of when a fact requires an explanation, since presumably IBE applies only in cases where some explanation is called for. In section 5, I consider the difficult question of how we ought to understand IBE in light of the fact that among philosophers, there is significant disagreement about what constitutes an explanation. In section 6, I consider different strategies for justifying the truth-conduciveness of the explanatory virtues, e.g., simplicity, unification, scope, etc., criteria which play an indispensable role in any given application of IBE. In section 7, I survey some of the most recent literature on IBE, much of which consists of investigations of the status of IBE from the standpoint of the Bayesian philosophy of science. (shrink)