Alexander James Bird

Selection explanations explain some non-accidental generalizations in virtue of a selection process. Such explanations are not particulaizable - they do not transfer as explanations of the instances of such generalizations. This is unlike many explanations in the physical sciences, where the explanation of the general fact also provides an explanation of its instances (i.e. standard D-N explanations). Are selection explanations (e.g. in biology) therefore a different kind of explanation? I argue that to understand this issue, we need to see that a standard D-N explanation of some non-accidental generalization (al Fs are Gs) may also ipso facto explain its contrapositive (all non-Gs are non-Fs), but the explanation is particularizable with respect to the former but not to the latter. This can be seen by noting that the Raven Paradox counterexample to the H-D model of confirmation also generates a counterexample to the D-N model of explanation (all ravens are black does not explain why the non-black shoe is a non-raven). In such cases it is natural to take the generalization with the positive predicates to have a particularizable explanation. However, this need not be the case, and in selection explanations it is the generalization with the positive predicates whose explanation is no particularizable. Thus there is no need to suppose that selection explanations are fundamentally different.

I defend against criticism the following claims concening Thomas Kuhn: (i) there is a strong naturalist streak in The structure of scientific revolutions, whereby Kuhn used the results of a posteriori enquiry in addressing philosophical questions; (ii) as Kuhn's career as a philosopher of science developed he tended to drop the naturalistic elements and to replace them with more traditionally philosophical a prior approaches; (iii) at the same there is a significant residue of positivist thought in Kuhm, which Kuhn did not recognise as such; (iv) the naturalist elements referred to in (i) are the most original and fruitful elements of Kuhn's thinking; (v) the positivistic elements referred to in (iii) vitiated his thought and acted as factors in preventing Kuhn from developing the naturalistic elemtns and from following the path taken by much subsequent philosophy of science. Preston presents an alternative reading of Kuhn which emphasizes the Wittgensteinian elements in Kuhn. I argue that this alternative view is, descriptively, poorly supported by the textual evidence and the facts of the history of philosophy of science in the twentieth century. I provide some defence of the naturalistic approach and related themes.

The first obstacle that confronts the student of induction is that of defining the subject matter. One initial point is to note that much of the relevant subject matter goes under the description ‘the theory of confirmation’. The distinction is primarily that the study of induction concerns inference, i.e. cases where one takes the conclusion to be established by the evidence, whereas confirmation concerns the weight of evidence, which one may take to be something like the credibility of a hypothesis in the light of the evidence. Discussions of confirmation often concern incremental confirmation, i.e. cases where the evidence is taken to increase the credibility of some hypothesis, even if not sufficiently to warrant inferring the truth of that hypothesis. However, some uses of ‘confirmation’ clearly refer to absolute confirmation, cases where the credibility of the hypothesis in the light of the evidence exceeds some (high) threshold. One may ask whether inductive inference corresponds to the case of absolute confirmation for some suitable threshold. I shall discuss inference and confirmation together, though it should be noted that some approaches eschew inference altogether. For example, the Bayesian takes scientific reasoning to be a matter of adjusting credences in propositions in the light of evidence, and says nothing about unqualified belief in a proposition. However, if we are interested in inductive knowledge then we must consider inference, since only then do we have a detached proposition that is the possible content of a mental state of knowing. A more pressing question concerns which inferences (or allegedly confirmatory relations) should be classed as inductive. A natural and straightforward approach is to define induction as encompassing any form of reasoning that extrapolates from one population to another, usually from a sample of a population to the whole population. For example, one might note that all observations of the position of some planet fall on an ellipse that has the Sun at one of its foci; from this one concludes that all the positions that planet takes fall on this ellipse (i.e..

Frege's logicism consists of two theses: the truths of arithmetic are truths of logic; the natural numbers are objects. In this paper I pose the question: what conception of logic is required to defend these theses? I hold that there exists an appropriate and natural conception of logic in virtue of which Hume's principle is a logical truth. Hume's principle, which states that the number of Fs is the number of Gs iff the concepts F and G are equinumerous is the central plank in the neo-logicist argument for and. I defend this position against two objections Hume's principle canot be both a logical truth as required by and also have the ontological import required by ; and the use of Hume's principle by the logicist is in effect an ontological proof of a kind which is not valid

In this article I take a loose, functional approach to defining induction: Inductive forms of reasoning include those prima facie reasonable inference patterns that one finds in science and elsewhere that are not clearly deductive. Inductive inference is often taken to be reasoning from the observed to the unobserved. But that is incorrect, since the premises of inductive inferences may themselves be the results of prior inductions. A broader conception of inductive inference regards any ampliative inference as inductive, where an ampliative inference is one where the conclusion ‘goes beyond’ the premises. ‘Goes beyond’ may mean (i) ‘not deducible from’ or (ii) ‘not entailed by’. Both of these are problematic. Regarding (i), some forms of reasoning might have a claim to be called ‘inductive’ because of their role in science, yet turn out to be deductive after all—for example eliminative induction (see below) or Aristotle’s ‘perfect induction’ which is an inference to a generalization from knowledge of every one of its instances. Interpretation (ii) requires that the conclusions of scientific reasoning are always contingent propositions, since necessary propositions are entailed by any premises. But there are good reasons from metaphysics for thinking that many general propositions of scientific interest and known by inductive inference (e.g. “all water is H2O”) are necessarily true. Finally, both (i) and (ii) fail to take account of the fact that there are many ampliative forms of inference one would not want to call inductive, such as counter-induction (exemplified by the ‘gambler’s fallacy’ that the longer a roulette wheel has come up red the more likely it is to come up black on the next roll). Brian Skyrms (1999) provides a useful survey of the issues involved in defining what is meant by ‘inductive argument’. Inductive knowledge will be the outcome of a successful inductive inference. But much discussion of induction concerns the theory of confirmation, which seeks to answer the question, “when and to what degree does evidence support an hypothesis?” Usually, this is understood in an incremental sense and in a way that relates to the rational credibility of a hypothesis: “when and by how much does e add to the credibility of h?”, although ‘confirms’ is sometimes used in an absolute sense to indicate total support that exceeds some suitably high threshold..

The replication (replicability, reproducibility) crisis in social psychology and clinical medicine arises from the fact that many apparently well-confirmed experimental results are subsequently overturned by studies that aim to replicate the original study. The culprit is widely held to be poor science: questionable research practices, failure to publish negative results, bad incentives, and even fraud. In this article I argue that the high rate of failed replications is consistent with high-quality science. We would expect this outcome if the field of science in question produces a high proportion of false hypotheses prior to testing. If most of the hypotheses under test are false, then there will be many false hypotheses that are apparently supported by the outcomes of well conducted experiments and null hypothesis significance tests with a type-I error rate (α) of 5%. Failure to recognize this is to commit the fallacy of ignoring the base rate. I argue that this is a plausible diagnosis of the replication crisis and examine what lessons we thereby learn for the future conduct of science.

This paper proposes and examines an answer to the special composition question—complex objects compress information about their parts. I start by defending fastenation for material objects and then extract from fastenation the idea that the conjoinment of parts establishes correlations among the locations and motions of those parts. I move from this to the proposal that entities are parts of some object when that object allows for the efficient, if lossy, compression of information about those parts.

Natural kind terms appear to behave like singular terms. If they were genuine singular terms, appearing in true sentences, that would be some reason to believe that there are entities to which the terms refer, the natural kinds. Paul Needham has attacked my arguments that natural kind terms are singular, referring expressions. While conceding the correctness of some of his criticisms, I defend and expand on the underlying view in this paper. I also briefly sketch an account of what natural kinds in fact are—natural complexes of sparse (natural) universals.

In my 'Dispositions and Antidotes', The Philosophical Quarterly, 48 (1998), I raise an objection to the conditional analysis of dispositions, both in its simple formulation and in a more sophisticated version due to David Lewis, The Philosophical Quarterly, 47 (1997). The objection suggests that a disposition may be continuously present and the appropriate stimulus occur without the manifestation occurring, because some outside influence, an antidote, interferes. Gundersen in The Philosophical Quarterly, 50 (2000), argues that my objection rests on an equivocation about which object possesses the disposition and more particularly on an equivocation about the context in which the events referred to take place, and that when the equivocation is resolved the counter-example disappears. I respond by showing that the counter-example does remain if we take contextual and mereological issues into account, and I conclude by remarking that the difference with Lewisdepends on whether certain features are seen as significant for the semanticsand metaphysics of dispositions or as merely characteristic of the pragmaticsof common usage.