David Papineau

The newest addition to the successful Oxford Readings in Philosophy series, this collection contains the most important contributions to the recent debate on the philosophy of science. The contributors crystallize the often heated arguments of the last two decades, assessing the skeptical attitudes within philosophy of science and the counter-challenges of the scientific realists. Contributors include Nancy Cartwright, Brian Ellis, Arthur Fine, Clark Glymour, Larry Laudan, Peter Lipton, Alan Musgrave, Wesely C. Salmon, Lawrence Sklar, Bas C. van Fraassen, and John Worrall.

This book is concerned with those aspects of the theory of meaning for scientific terms that are relevant to questions about the evaluation of scientific theories. The contemporary debate about theory choice in science is normally presented as a conflict between two sets of ideas. On the one hand are notions of objectivity, realism, rationality, and progress in science. On the other is the view that meanings depend on theory, with associated claims about the theory dependence of observation, the theoretical context account of meaning, incommensurability, and so on. The book shows that there is no real contest here; that the two sets of ideas are in fact quite compatible. More specifically, it argues that the meanings of all scientific terms, including those used to report observations, are inseparable from the total context of surrounding theory and so will inevitably vary with theoretical change, but that this is quite consistent with a broadly objectivist account of science. The first half of the book shows how ideas about the theory dependence of observation and meaning have led to the breakdown of the traditional empiricist account of science, and how some of the more obvious responses to these ideas are inadequate. The second half shows how these ideas can satisfactorily be accommodated within a non-relativist account of science.

This chapter challenges the entailment from physicalism to microphysicalism — the view that all facts metaphysically supervene on the microphysical facts. It observes that physicalists can avoid microphysicalism by rejecting physical microscopism. Humean supervenience is a strong version of microphysicalism, and it is false if a non-Humean view of laws is true. But such a view is consistent with physicalism. A weaker form of microphysicalism adds microphysical non-Humean laws to get a broader microphysicalist supervenience base for all facts. On this view, all the laws are metaphysically determined by microphysical laws and microphysical initial conditions. In response, the chapter argues that the existence of emergent Broad-laws, i.e. macroscopic laws that are not metaphysically dependent on microphysical laws and microphysical initial conditions, is consistent with physicalism. It also argues that physicalists can consistently deny that facts about persisting objects, including organic and artefactual objects, metaphysically supervene on microphysical facts.

By way of an example, Lewis imagines your being invited to join Schrödinger’s cat in its box for an hour. This box will either fill up with deadly poison fumes or not, depending on whether or not some radioactive atom decays, the probability of decay within an hour being 50%. The invitation is accompanied with some further incentive to comply (Lewis sets it up so there is a significant chance of some pretty bad but not life-threatening punishment if you don’t get in the box). Lewis argues that the many minds theory implies that you should get in the box with the cat, despite this making it 50% likely you will die.

Since the publication of Elga's seminal paper in 2000, the Sleeping Beauty paradox has been the source of much discussion, particularly in this journal. Over the past few decades the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics 1 has also been much debated. There is an interesting connection between the way these two topics raise issues about subjective probability assignments.This connection is often alluded to, but as far as we know Peter J. Lewis's ‘Quantum Sleeping Beauty’ is the first attempt to examine it explicitly. Lewis claims that the two debates are not independent: to be specific, he argues that accepting the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics requires you to be a ‘halfer’ about Sleeping Beauty, in opposition to the more widely accepted ‘thirder’ solution.This paper will argue that Lewis is wrong. Everettians do not have to be halfers. It is perfectly cogent to be both an Everettian and a thirder.

[David Papineau] This paper disputes the common assumption that the normativity of conceptual judgement poses a problem for naturalism. My overall strategy is to argue that norms of judgement derive from moral or personal values, particularly when such values are attached to the end of truth. While there are philosophical problems associated with both moral and personal values, they are not special to the realm of judgement, nor peculiar to naturalist philosophies. This approach to the normativity of judgement is made possible by naturalist views of truth, that is, views which do not presuppose normativity in explaining truth. /// [Julia Tanney] This paper attempts to describe why it is not possible to account for normative phenomena in non-normative terms. It argues that Papineau's attempt to locate norms of judgement 'outside' content, grounded in an individual's desires or reasons, mislocates the normativity that is thought to resist appropriation within a 'world that conceives nature as the realm of law'. It agrees, however, that a theory of content that locates norms 'inside' content will not be forthcoming-at least if this is to require fashioning the norms that in some sense govern judgment or thought into individually necessary conditions for contentful states.