Steve Gimbel

The running debate between Peter Achinstein and his critics concerning the nature of scientific evidence is misguided as each side attempts to explicate a distinct notion of evidence. Achinstein's approach, however, is valuable in helping to point out a problem with Carnap's statistical relevance model. By claiming an increase in probability to be necessary for evidence, the received view is incapable of accounting for evidence which is statistically irrelevant but explanatorily relevant. A broader view of evidence which can account for pragmatic concerns such as explanation is thereby required.

Hans Reichenbach, a philosopher of science who was one of five students in Einstein's first seminar on the general theory of relativity, became Einstein's bulldog, defending the theory against criticism from philosophers, physicists, and popular commentators. This book chronicles the development of Reichenbach's reconstruction of Einstein's theory in a way that clearly sets out all of its philosophical commitments and its physical predictions as well as the battles that Reichenbach fought on its behalf, in both the academic and popular press. The essays include reviews and responses to philosophical colleagues; polemical discussions with physicists Max Born and D. C. Miller; as well as popular articles meant for the layperson. At a time when physics and philosophy were both undergoing revolutionary changes in content and method, this book is a window into the development of scientific philosophy and the role of the philosopher.

Garry Kasparov made two allegations of unfairness in his recent chess match with the computer ‘Deep Blue’. The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether the ethos of the contest would be violated if the purported activities had occurred and on what grounds. Kasparov’s first allegation, that the program was tampered with during play, would if true, violate fair play as it would encroach on Deep Blue’s autonomy, a necessary condition for fair play in individual strategic endeavours. The most charitable interpretation of Kasparov’s second allegation, that scouting information was used in an unfair manner, concerns questions of the nature of the identity of artificial individuals. Consideration of this issue finds Kasparov’s claim groundless

The standard understanding of tautologies is that they are semantically vacuous. Yet tautological utterances occur frequently in conversational discourse. One approach contends that apparent tautological statements are either genuinely tautologous and thereby semantically vacuous or are what we term “pseudo-tautologies”, i.e., sentences that only bear a formal syntactic resemblance to tautologies but are not in fact tautologous. Another approach follows Grice and asserts that the meaning of a tautological utterance derives from an inference made by the listener from the utterance via universal rules of conversation to a non-tautological proposition. We deny both accounts for a subset of tautological utterances that are both content-bearing and truly tautological. Such “deep tautologies” acquire meaning not by shedding their tautological status, but by drawing attention to it. Since only non-vague noun phrases will support tautological statements of the form N is N, the use of a tautology of this form in conversational context will, by its use as a tautology, indicate the speaker’s intention that the noun phrase be considered non-vague.

, Peter Achinstein argues against the long-standing claim that ‘evidence’ is ambiguous in possessing a sense of confirming evidence and a sense of supporting evidence. He argues that explications of supporting evidence will necessarily violate his contentions that evidence is a discontinuous ‘threshold concept’ and that any philosophical account of supporting evidence will be too weak to be useful to working scientists. But an account of supporting evidence may be formulated which includes Achinstein's notion of epistemic thresholds that finds examples in Achinstein's own historical case studies. Thresholds and the denial of ambiguity Achinstein's new account of confirming evidence Achinstein's argument against the ‘ambiguity response’ A threshold-based approach for restoring the ambiguity Maxwell and ‘a subject of rational curiosity’ Bohr and ‘future development of our understanding’ Perrin and the edge of reasonable belief Restoring ambiguity.

This paper describes an argumentative fallacy we call ‘Retroductive Analogy.’ It occurs when the ability of a favored hypothesis to explain some phenomena, together with the fact that hypotheses of a similar sort are well supported, is taken to be sufficient evidence to accept the hypothesis. This fallacy derives from the retroductive or abductive form of reasoning described by Charles Sanders Peirce. According to Peirce’s account, retroduction can provide good reasons to pursue a hypothesis but does not, by itself, provide good reasons to believe the hypothesis. In successful applications of retroduction, pursuit leads to the accumulation of evidence. In retroductive analogy, comparison with other successful hypotheses is substituted for the genuine pursuit of evidence. We describe a case from ecological genetics in which retroduction plays a legitimate role as the initial phase of an ongoing research program that serves to accumulate genuine evidence for a hypothesis. We also examine two contexts in which the fallacy of retroductive analogy occurs: in defenses of Intelligent Design Theory and in defense of some hypotheses in Evolutionary Psychology