Bryson Brown

An argument for skepticism about the past exploits a circularity in the arguments connecting present observations to claims about past events. Arguments supporting claims about the past depend on current observations together with processes linking current observations to those claims. But knowledge of processes requires knowledge of the past: Knowledge of the present alone cannot provide evidence for claims about the past. A practical, coherentist response to this challenge rejects the assumption that we come to the problem with no information about the past. Beginning with partial and imperfect information about the past, a coherentist tests ideas about processes against the particular evidence of traces left by past processes, and particular claims about the past against ideas about the processes linking those events to present traces. However, this common-sense response is inadequate when faced with a radical skeptic prepared to insist on the problem of the criterion. An answer to this radicalskeptic can be drawn from Wilfrid Sellars ‘bootstrap’ argument in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” The result is a better response to the problem of the criterion than Chisholm’s ‘particularism’.

Just what forms do (or should) our cognitive attitudes towards scientific theories take? The nature of cognitive commitment becomes particularly puzzling when scientists' commitments are) inconsistent. And inconsistencies have often infected our best efforts in science and mathematics. Since there are no models of inconsistent sets of sentences, straightforward semantic accounts fail. And syntactic accounts based on classical logic also collapse, since the closure of any inconsistent set under classical logic includes every sentence. In this essay I present some evidence that there really was a substantial cognitive commitment to OQT, and that some of its characteristics have a simple and straightforward explanation in terms of a model based on a form of paraconsistent logic.

Empirical adequacy is a central notion in van Fraassen's empiricist view of science. I argue that van Fraassen's account of empirical adequacy in terms of a partial isomorphism between certain structures in some model(s) of the theory and certain actual structures (the observables) in the world, is untenable. The empirical adequacy of a theory can only be tested in the context of an accepted practice of observation. But because the theory itself does not determine the correct practice of observation, its failure to pass the test does not show the failure of an isomorphism between the empirical substructure of some model(s) of the theory and observable structures in nature. Further, because the choice of a practice of observation is a pragmatic one grounded in epistemic goals we seek in observation, van Fraassen's anthropocentric view of observability is epistemically unmotivated.

David Sanford's If P, Then Q is an ambitious book, aimed at two difficult tasks and addressed to two audiences. It combines a survey of historical and contemporary work on-conditionals with a presentation-of, Sanford's personal views. And it is addressed to both undergraduate students, without, logical training, and professionals seriously interested in conditionals. It is marred by the impossibility of achieving both aims in a book this size, and by the strains of simultaneously addressing audiences with such different needs and interests.