Alexander James Bird

In this paper I draw a connection between Kuhn and the empiricist legacy, specifically between his thesis of incommensurability, in particular in its later taxonomic form, and van Fraassen's constructive empiricism. I show that if it is the case the empirically equivalent but genuinely distinct theories do exist, then we can expect such theories to be taxonomically incommensurable. I link this to Hacking's claim that Kuhn was a nominalist. I also argue that Kuhn and van Fraassen do not differ as much as might be thought as regards the claim that observation is theory laden.

1.Following Kripke, many philosophers have accepted the existence of propositions concerning essences, and, more generally, propositions asserting necessities, that are knowable only a posteriori. Such an acceptance is consistent with the claim that ultimately all knowledge of necessity is a priori. A posteriori knowledge of necessity may be held to be a consequence of the combination of a priori knowledge of a proposition asserting essence or necessity with a posteriori knowledge of a non-modal proposition. E. J. Lowe (2007: 287–88) denies even this kind of derived a posteriori knowledge of essence or necessity. He reconstructs the form of an argument that is intended to lead to a proposition concerning essence but which is known a posteriori: This schema may be exemplified thus: As this example illustrates, instances of (1) are a priori propositions concerning essence, while instances of (2) are a posteriori propositions; instances of the conclusion are propositions asserting particular essences, and are, it is claimed, knowable only a posteriori.1.

Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby have argued that pornography might create a climate whereby a woman’s ability to refuse sex is literally silenced or removed. Their central argument is that a failure of ‘uptake’ of the woman’s intention means that the illocutionary speech act of refusal has not taken place. In this paper, I challenge the claims from the Austinian philosophy of language which feature in this argument. I argue that uptake is not in general required for illocution, nor is it required for refusal in particular. I conclude with remarks on the relationship between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech-acts.

Int his article, I argue that Kuhn was a historicist in two respects. First, he was a conservative in Mannheim’s sense—tradition is important for understanding scientific change, and the evaluation of a scientific idea is relative to historical context. Secondly, Kuhn embraced determinism—there is a pattern to scientific change, akin to laws of scientific development. I show that Kuhn’s determinism requires that he is an internalist about the causes of scientific change; Kuhn’s internal- ism contrasts with the externalism that characterises much post-Kuhnian science studies. I conclude by considering how Kuhn’s historicism relates to the philosophical purposes of Kuhn’s history of science.

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.

Let us call a property that is essentially dispositional a potency.1 David Armstrong thinks that potencies do not exist. All sparse properties are essentially categorical, where sparse properties are the explanatory properties of the type science seeks to discover. An alternative view, but not the only one, is that all sparse properties are potencies or supervene upon them. In this paper I shall consider the differences between these views, in particular the objections Armstrong raises against potencies.

The usual, comparative, conception of inference to the best explanation (IBE) takes it to be ampliative. In this paper I propose a conception of IBE ('Holmesian inference') that takes it to be a species of eliminative induction and hence not ampliative. This avoids several problems for comparative IBE (for example, how could it be reliable enough to generate knowledge?). My account of Holmesian inference raises the suspicion that it could never be applied, on the grounds that scientific hypotheses are inevitably underdetermined by the evidence (i.e. are inevitably ampliative). I argue that this concern may be resisted by acknowledging, as Timothy Williamson has shown, that all knowledge is evidence. The latter suggests an approach to resisting scepticism different from those (e.g. the reliabilist approach) that embrace fallibilism.

Debates concerning the analysis of the concept of law of nature must address the following problem. On the one hand, our grasp of laws of nature is via our knowledge of their instances. And this seems not only an epistemological truth but also a semantic one. The concept of a law of nature must be explicated in terms of the things that instantiate the law. It is not simply that a piece of metal that conducts electricity is evidence for a law that metals conduct electricity. It is also the case that to explicate what it is for there to be such a law requires, and requires little more than, alluding to the fact that the piece of metal conducting electricity is an instance of that law. This is the driving intuition behind regularity theories of laws — to understand the concept ‘law,’ as in ‘it is a law that metals conduct electricity’ one need only understand little more than what it is for something to be a metal and to conduct electricity and the concept of universal generalization. On this view a law just is a regularity (or some kind of regularity) among its instances.