Joel Katzav

In 'The Weakness of Strong Justification' Wayne Riggs claims that the requirement that justified beliefs be truth conducive (likely to be true) is not always compatible with the requirement that they be epistemically responsible (arrived at in an epistemically responsible manner)1. He supports this claim by criticising Alvin Goldman's view that if a belief is strongly justified, it is also epistemically responsible. In light of this, Riggs recommends that we develop two independent conceptions of justification, one that insists upon the requirement that beliefs be truth conducive and another that insists that they be epistemically responsible. It will then, on his view, be possible to properly evaluate beliefs with regard to each conception of justification. Riggs, however, is mistaken in supposing that the two epistemic requirements are independent. If a belief is responsibly arrived at, it is therefore likely to be true. He is thus also mistaken in supposing that the two epistemic requirements are incompatible. This mistake arises because Riggs assumes that justification is possible or, at least, that it involves standards that are akin to our own. Moreover, once this assumption is made explicit, we can see why a notion of justification that connects epistemic practice with likely truth is significant

FIRST PARAGRAPH I have argued that dispositionalism is incompatible with the Principle of Least Action (PLA) (Katzav 2004). In ‘Katzav on the Limitations of Dispositionalism,’ Brian Ellis responds, arguing that while naïve dispositionalism is incompatible with the PLA, sophisticated dispositionalism is not. Naive dispositionalism, according to Ellis, is the view that the world is ultimately something like a conglomerate of objects and their dispositions, and that, therefore, dispositions are the ultimate ontological units that explain events. Sophisticated dispositionalism, according to Ellis, supposes that, how things are disposed to behave depends also on what kinds of things they are, what kinds of property they have, and how these kinds of things and properties are placed in the natural kinds hierarchies to which they belong (Ellis 2005). Further, it supposes that at the top of each hierarchy of natural kinds there is a global kind. For example, ‘[t]he global natural kind in the category of substance is that of the physical system’ (Ellis 2005). Ellis continues, claiming that the PLA is of the essence of the global kind in the category of objects or substances. If this is so, then, of course, every continuing object must be Lagrangian, i.e. disposed to evolve in accordance with the principle of least action (Ellis 2005). Ellis concludes that, therefore, a sophisticated dispositionalist can accommodate the PLA and its metaphysical necessity

We develop conceptions of arguments and of argument types that will, by serving as the basis for developing a natural classification of arguments, benefit work in artificial intelligence. Focusing only on arguments construed as the semantic entities that are the outcome of processes of reasoning, we outline and clarify our view that an argument is a proposition that represents a fact as both conveying some other fact and as doing so wholly. Further, we outline our view that, with respect to arguments that are propositions, (roughly) two arguments are of the same type if and only if they represent the same relation of conveyance and do so in the same way. We then argue for our conceptions of arguments and argument types, and compare them to alternative positions. We also illustrate the need for, and some of the strengths of, our approach to classifying arguments through an examination of aspects of two prominent and recent attempts to classify arguments using argumentation schemes, namely those of M. Kienpointner and D. Walton. Finally, we clarify how our conception of arguments and of argument types can assist in developing an exhaustive classification of arguments

I examine, from Mayo's severe testing perspective, the case found in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fourth report for the claim that increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations caused most of the post-1950 global warming. My examination begins to provide an alternative to standard, probabilistic assessments of OUR FAULT. It also brings out some of the limitations of variety of evidence considerations in assessing this and other hypotheses about the causes of climate change, and illuminates the epistemology of optimal fingerprinting studies. Finally, it shows that some features of Mayo's perspective should be kept in whatever approach is preferred for assessing hypotheses about the causes of climate change

ABSTRACTThis paper is concerned with the reasons for the emergence and dominance of analytic philosophy in America. It closely examines the contents of, and changing editors at, The Philosophical Review, and provides a perspective on the contents of other leading philosophy journals. It suggests that analytic philosophy emerged prior to the 1950s in an environment characterized by a rich diversity of approaches to philosophy and that it came to dominate American philosophy at least in part due to its effective promotion by The Philosophical Review’s editors. Our picture of mid-twentieth-century American philosophy is different from existing ones, including those according to which the prominence of analytic philosophy in America was basically a matter of the natural affinity between American philosophy and analytic philosophy and those according to which the political climate at the time was hostile towards non-analytic approaches. Furthermore, our reconstruction suggests a new perspective on the nature of 1950s analytic philosophy.

The present paper draws on climate science and the philosophy of science in order to evaluate climate-model-based approaches to assessing climate projections. We analyze the difficulties that arise in such assessment and outline criteria of adequacy for approaches to it. In addition, we offer a critical overview of the approaches used in the IPCC working group one fourth report, including the confidence building, Bayesian and likelihood approaches. Finally, we consider approaches that do not feature in the IPCC reports, including three approaches drawn from the philosophy of science. We find that all available approaches face substantial challenges, with IPCC approaches having as a primary source of difficulty their goal of providing probabilistic assessments.