Claus Beisbart

With this Editorial, we’d like to inform our readers about some news concerning the editorship of the Journal for General Philosophy of Science:Since its foundation by Alwin Diemer , Lutz Geldsetzer and Gert König in 1970, JGPS was edited by the three founders until 2004. In 2005 and 2008, respectively, Helmut Pulte and Gregor Schiemann joined JGPS as new editors, while Lutz Geldsetzer and Gert König retired by the end of 2008. In 2013, Ulrich Krohs joined the editorial team and thereby restored the ‘trinity’ of the starting years of JGPS.Gregor Schiemann has decided to resign from his editorship with the end of 2014 and has assigned Claus Beisbart as his successor in consultation with the other editors and the publisher. Since 2012, Prof. Dr. Dr. Beisbart is working as a philosopher of science at the University of Bern . His areas of expertise include philosophy of physics, particularly of cosmology, epistemology of model building and simulation ..

The choice of a social decision rule for a federal assembly affects the welfare distribution within the federation. But which decision rules can be recommended on welfarist grounds? In this paper, we focus on two welfarist desiderata, viz. (i) maximizing the expected utility of the whole federation and (ii) equalizing the expected utilities of people from different states in the federation. We consider the European Union as an example, set up a probabilistic model of decision making and explore how different decision rules fare with regard to the desiderata. We start with a default model, where the interests, and therefore the votes of the different states are not correlated. This default model is then abandoned in favor of models with correlations. We perform computer simulations and find that decision rules with a low acceptance threshold do generally better in terms of desideratum (i), whereas the rules presented in the Accession Treaty and in the (still unratified) Constitution of the European Union tend to do better in terms of desideratum (ii). The ranking obtained regarding desideratum (i) is fairly stable across different correlation patterns.

If we are to constrain our place in the world, two principles are often appealed to in science. According to the Copernican Principle, we do not occupy a privileged position within the Universe. The Cosmological Principle, on the other hand, says that our observations would roughly be the same, if we were located at any other place in the Universe. In our paper we analyze these principles from a logical and philosophical point of view. We show how they are related, how they can be supported and what use is made of them. Our main results are: 1. There is a logical gap between both principles insofar as the Cosmological Principle is significantly stronger than the Copernican Principle. 2. A step that is often taken for establishing the Cosmological Principle on the base of the Copernican Principle and observations is not incontestable as it stands, but can be supplemented with a different argument. 3. The Cosmological Principle might be crucial for cosmology to the extent it is not supported by empirical evidence.