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1069The Objectivity of ScienceJournal of Philosophical Investigations at University of Tabriz 17 (45): 1-10. 2023.The idea that science is objective, or able to achieve objectivity, is in large part responsible for the role that science plays within society. But what is objectivity? The idea of objectivity is ambiguous. This paper distinguishes between three basic forms of objectivity. The first form of objectivity is ontological objectivity: the world as it is in itself does not depend upon what we think about it; it is independent of human thought, language, conceptual activity or experience. The se…Read more
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136English version of interview on realism published in Persian (2012).
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75Questions of Realism: an InterviewSooreye Andishe 61. 2012.An interview about realism conducted in English and translated into Persian by Reza Alizadeh Mamaghani.
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186Some comments on descriptive and normative aspects of Kuhn's account of science.
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245Some remarks on the significance of Feyerabend's views on meaning and method.
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140Toward a New Model of Scientific RationalityIn Dimitri Ginev (ed.), Meaningfulness, Meaning, Mediation: Essays in Honor of Prof. Dr. Dimitri Ginev, Critique and Humanism Publishing House. pp. 69-81. 1998.The paper presents some thoughts about how an account of rationality might be recovered from what might have first appeared as anti-rationalistic ideas in the work of Kuhn and Feyerabend. The paper draws inspiration from some suggestions of Bernstein and Rorty, as well well as Brown's theory of rationality.
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173Having a HunchLogos and Episteme 14 (2): 215-219. 2023.It has recently been argued that when one conducts an inquiry into some question one ought to suspend belief with respect to that question. But what about hunches? In this short note, a hunch about the cause of a phenomenon is described. The hunch plays a role in the inquiry into the cause of the phenomenon. It appears that the hunch constitutes a belief that need not be suspended during the inquiry even though belief about the precise cause of the phenomenon is suspended.
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267Robert Nola as I remember himMetascience 32 (1): 3-5. 2023.The New Zealand philosopher, Robert Nola (1940-2022), has died. He was a kind man, a good friend, and a fine philosopher. Here is how I remember him.
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170Truth About ArtifactsSymposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences 10 (1): 149-152. 2023.Truth in a correspondence sense is objective in two ways. It is objective because the relation of correspondence is objective and because the facts to which truths correspond are objective. Truth about artifacts is problematic because artifacts are intentionally designed to perform certain functions, and so are not entirely mind independent. Against this, it is argued in this paper that truth about artifacts is perfectly objective despite the role played by intention and purpose in the produc…Read more
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525The Objective Status of Subjective FactsMetaphysica: International Journal for Ontology and Metaphysics 24 (2): 175-179. 2023.Some facts are objective. Some facts are subjective. Subjective facts are personal facts about individuals. It is the purpose of this short note to suggest that subjective facts are in fact objective facts about us. This applies not just to facts involving relations to entities that are independent of us, but to our tastes. It is an objective fact about us that we have the tastes that we do though there may be no objective matter of fact that our tastes reflect or fail to reflect.
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246The Twofold Objectivity of TruthFilozofia Nauki 31 (1): 1-9. 2023.Truth about matters of fact is objective. This is not just because truth is objective. It is also because facts are objective. An objective fact makes an assertion of that fact true. The objectivity of the fact adds a further element of objectivity to the objective truth of the assertion. True assertions of fact are true because truth is objective and because the facts that make them true are objective. True assertions of fact are objective twice over. Their objectivity is twofold. Or, a…Read more
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161This is the original English version of the introduction to Ciencia, Realidad y Racionalidad (University of Cauca Press, 2015), which is a collection of my essays translated into Spanish by Juan Carlos Aguirre Garcia.
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256K. Brad Wray: Interpreting Kuhn: Critical Essays (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 12 (1): 311-314. 2022.This is a book review of Brad Wray (ed.) Interpreting Kuhn: Critical Essays.
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2632La objetividad de la cienciaIn Juan Carlos Aguirre Garcia & L. Jaramillo (eds.), La Objetividad en las ciencias humanas, Samava Ediciones. pp. 15-35. 2022.I distinguish three primary notions of objectivity that may be applied to the sciences. There is an ontological sense of objectivity which relates to the way in which the natural world exists independently of human thought. There is a semantic form of objectivity which relates to the nature of truth. There is an epistemic notion of objectivity which relates to the methodological norms and procedures which are employed in the sciences, and the epistemic justification of beliefs and theories wh…Read more
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217K. Brad Wray: Kuhn's Intellectual Path (review)BJPS Review of Books. 2022.This is a draft of a book review of Brad Wray's book Kuhn's Intellectual Path.
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453On Mr Truetemp's Lack of VirtuePrincipia: An International Journal of Epistemology 26 (2): 313-318. 2022.Keith Lehrer described the case of Mr Truetemp, who has reliably formed true beliefs about the temperature. The beliefs are produced by the action of a device (a "tempucomp" ) which has been surgically implanted in Truetemp's skull without his knowledge. The case is designed as a counterexample to process reliabilism. This short paper explores the question whether virtue epistemology is able to deal with the Truetemp case. It is argued that virtue-theoretic considerations lead to the rejecti…Read more
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774Objective FactsMetaphysica: International Journal for Ontology and Metaphysics 23 (1): 117-121. 2022.This is a brief exploration of the notion of an objective fact. The form of objectivity at issue is distinct from epistemic objectivity or objectivity about truth. It is an ontological form of objectivity. Objective facts may obtain whether or not we know, believe or are aware of them. They depend upon objects, for example, on the properties that objects have or the relationships into which objects enter. Setting scepticism to one side, there is a perfectly mundane sense in which we may com…Read more
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63Theories of Scientific Method: An IntroductionAcumen Publishing. 2007.What is it to be scientific? Is there such a thing as scientific method? And if so, how might such methods be justified? Robert Nola and Howard Sankey seek to provide answers to these fundamental questions in their exploration of the major recent theories of scientific method. Although for many scientists their understanding of method is something they just pick up in the course of being trained, Nola and Sankey argue that it is possible to be explicit about what this tacit understanding of meth…Read more
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772Kuhn, Values and Academic FreedomLogos and Episteme 12 (4): 463-467. 2021.For Kuhn, there are a number of values which provide scientists with a shared basis for theory-choice. These values include accuracy, breadth, consistency, simplicity and fruitfulness. Each of these values may be interpreted in different ways. Moreover, there may be conflict between the values in application to specific theories. In this short paper, Kuhn's idea of scientific values is extended to the value of academic freedom. The value of academic freedom may be interpreted in a number of…Read more
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274How Not To Know The Principle of InductionInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 11 (3): 243-254. 2021.In The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell presents a justification of induction based on a principle he refers to as “the principle of induction”. Owing to the ambiguity of the notion of probability, the principle of induction may be interpreted in two different ways. If interpreted in terms of the subjective interpretation of probability, the principle of induction may be known a priori to be true. But it is unclear how this should give us any confidence in our use of induction, since …Read more
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687Epistemic Objectivity and the VirtuesFilozofia Nauki 28 (3): 5-23. 2020.The aim of this paper is to bring the resources of virtue epistemology to bear on the issue of the epistemic objectivity of science. A distinction is made between theoretical virtues that may be possessed by scientific theories and epistemic virtues that may be exercised by individual scientists. A distinction is then made between ontological objectivity, objectivity of truth and epistemic objectivity, the latter being the principal focus of the paper. It is then noted that a role must be pla…Read more
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534Laudan, Intuition and Normative NaturalismOrganon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 27 (4): 437-445. 2020.The aim of this paper is to document Laudan's rejection of the appeal to intuition in the context of his development of normative naturalism. At one point in the development of his methodological thinking, Laudan appealed to pre-analytic intuitions, which might be employed to identify episodes in the history of science against which theories of scientific methodology are to be tested. However, Laudan came to reject this appeal to intuitions, and rejected this entire approach to the evaluation …Read more
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673Realism and the Epistemic Objectivity of ScienceKriterion - Journal of Philosophy 35 (1): 5-20. 2021.The paper presents a realist account of the epistemic objectivity of science. Epistemic objectivity is distinguished from ontological objectivity and the objectivity of truth. As background, T.S. Kuhn’s idea that scientific theory-choice is based on shared scientific values with a role for both objective and subjective factors is discussed. Kuhn’s values are epistemologically ungrounded, hence provide a minimal sense of objectivity. A robust account of epistemic objectivity on which methodol…Read more
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286Why Must Justification Guarantee Truth? Reply to MizrahiLogos and Episteme 10 (4): 445-447. 2019.This reply provides further grounds to doubt Mizrahi’s argument for an infallibilist theory of knowledge. It is pointed out that the fact that knowledge requires both truth and justification does not entail that the level of justification required for knowledge be sufficient to guarantee truth. In addition, an argument presented by Mizrahi appears to equivocate with respect to the interpretation of the phrase “p cannot be false”.
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406Factivity or Grounds? Comment on MizrahiLogos and Episteme 10 (3): 333-4. 2019.This is a comment on Moti Mizrahi's paper ' You Can't Handle the Truth: Knowledge = Epistemic Certainty'. Mizrahi claims that the factivity of knowledge entails that knowledge requires epistemic certainty. But the argument that Mizrahi presents does not proceed from factivity to certainty. Instead, it proceeds from a premise about the relationship between grounds and knowledge to the conclusion about certainty.
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376Neither a Truism nor a Triviality: Reply to GrzankowskiPrincipia: An International Journal of Epistemology 23 (2): 361-365. 2019.This is a reply to Alex Grzankowski’s comment on my paper, ‘To Believe is to Believe True’. I argue that one may believe a proposition to be true without possessing the concept of truth. I note that to believe the proposition P to be true is not the same as to believe the proposition ‘P is true’. This avoids the regress highlighted by Grzankowski in which the concept of truth is employed an infinite number of times in a single belief.
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913Underdetermination in Economics: The Duhem-Quine ThesisEconomics and Philosophy 13 (1): 1-23. 1997.This paper considers the relevance of the Duhem-Quine thesis in economics. In the introductory discussion which follows, the meaning of the thesis and a brief history of its development are detailed. The purpose of the paper is to discuss the effects of the thesis in four specific and diverse theories in economics, and to illustrate the dependence of testing the theories on a set of auxiliary hypotheses. A general taxonomy of auxiliary hypotheses is provided to demonstrate the confounding of aux…Read more
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559Kuhn, Coherentism and PerceptionIn Pablo Melogno, Hernán Miguel & Leandro Giri (eds.), Perspectives on Kuhn: Contemporary Approaches to the Philosophy of Thomas Kuhn, Springer. pp. 1-14. 2023.The paper takes off from the suggestion of Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen that Kuhn’s account of science may be understood in coherentist terms. There are coherentist themes in Kuhn’s philosophy of science. But one crucial element is lacking. Kuhn does not deny the existence of basic beliefs which have a non-doxastic source of justification. Nor does he assert that epistemic justification only derives from inferential relationships between non-basic beliefs. Despite this, the coherentist interpretat…Read more
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1626The Relativistic Legacy of Kuhn and FeyerabendIn Martin Kusch (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism, Routledge. pp. 379-387. 2019.Relativism in the philosophy of science is widely associated with the work of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. Kuhn and Feyerabend espoused views about conceptual change and variation of scientific method that have apparent relativistic implications. Both held that scientific theories or paradigms may be incommensurable due to semantic variation. Two ways that truth may be relative because of semantic incommensurability will be distinguished. Davidson’s criticism of the idea of an untranslat…Read more
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495A Selective Survey of Theories of Scientific MethodIn Robert Nola & Howard Sankey (eds.), After Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend: Recent Issues in Theories of Scientific Method, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 1-65. 2000.This is a survey of theories of scientific method which opens the book "After Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend: Recent Issues in Theories of Scientific Method".
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Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Scientific Realism |
Metaphysical Realism |
Incommensurability in Science |
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