Alexander James Bird

Many introductions to this field start with the problem of justifying scientific knowledge but Alexander Bird begins by examining the subject matter, or metaphysics, of science. Using topical scientific debates he vividly elucidates what it is for the world to be governed by laws of nature. This idea provides the basis for explanations and causes and leads to a discussion of natural kinds and theoretical entities. With this foundation in place he goes on to consider the epistemological issues of how science arrives at knowledge, favouring a treatment of scientific reasoning based on inference to the best explanation. Drawing on contemporary work in epistemology, Bird argues that scepticism about induction should not be a problem for science and examines the consequences of this position for controversies surrounding the ideas of scientific progress and scientific revolution. Bird's insightful treatment makes Philosophy of Science an ideal text for undergraduate courses. The guides to further reading provided in each chapter help the reader pursue interesting topics and facilitate the use of the book in conjunction with primary sources.

Dispositional monism is the view that natural properties and relations are ‘pure powers’. It is objected that dispositional monism involves some kind of vicious or otherwise unpalatable regress or circularity. I examine ways of making this objection precise. The most pressing interpretation is that is fails to make the identities of powers determinate. I demonstrate that this objection is in error. It does however puts certain constraints on what the structure of fundamental properties is like. I show what a satisfactory structure would be.

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.

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922–1996) is one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, perhaps the most influential. His 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited academic books of all time. Kuhn’s contribution to the philosophy of science marked not only a break with several key positivist doctrines, but also inaugurated a new style of philosophy of science that brought it closer to the history of science. His account of the development of science held that science enjoys periods of stable growth punctuated by revisionary revolutions. To this thesis, Kuhn added the controversial ‘incommensurability thesis’, that theories from differing periods suffer from certain deep kinds of failure of comparability.

Those who favour an ontology based on dispositions are thereby able to provide a dispositional essentialist account of the laws of nature. In part 1 of this paper I sketch the dispositional essentialist conception of properties and the concomitant account of laws. In part 2, I characterise various claims about the modal character of properties that fall under the heading ‘quidditism’ and which are consequences of the categoricalist view of properties, which is the alternative to the dispositional essentialist view. I argue that quidditism should be rejected. In part 3, I address a criticism of a strong dispositional essentialist view, viz. that ‘structural’ (i.e. geometrical, numerical, spatial and temporal) properties must be regarded as categorical.

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.

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.

Many authors have argued in favour of an ontology of properties as powers, and it has been widely argued that this ontology allows us to address certain philosophical problems in novel and illuminating ways, for example, causation, representation, intentionality, free will and liberty. I argue that the ontology of powers, even if successful as an account of fundamental natural properties, does not provide the insight claimed as regards the aforementioned non-fundamental phenomena. I illustrate this argument by criticizing the powers theory of causation presented by Mumford and Anjum and showing that related criticisms can be directed at other abuses of powers.

In this paper I examine two aspects of Hempel’s covering-law models of explanation. These are (i) nomic subsumption and (ii) explication by models. Nomic subsumption is the idea that to explain a fact is to show how it falls under some appropriate law. This conception of explanation Hempel explicates using a pair of models, where, in this context, a model is a template or pattern such that if something fits it, then that thing is an explanation. A range of well-known counter-examples to Hempel’s models has led his successors to seek alternatives. Problems with limited amendments have encouraged some theorists of explanation to abandon nomic subsumption. So, in particular, causal components have come to be regarded as essential, even though Hempel had intended his model to capture causal explanation as well.1 Here I want to examine the prospects for retaining nomic subsumption by rejecting the other feature of Hempel’s approach – explication by models. An examination of the counter-examples will suggest that it is a mistake to imagine that a limited quantity of information about laws and antecedent conditions will be able to provide an actual explanation – other information, about explanations, may be relevant. This in turn leads me to examine what I shall call structural approaches. They are structural because the status of something as an explanation depends on its fitting into a structure of explanations. There are two structural approaches I shall examine. One is holistic – it proposes that we consider explanation hand-in-hand with the concept of law. This account of explanation inherits its holistic nature from the holistic (or sys- tematic) character of laws of nature. The second supervenience view I shall consider is not global as the holistic approach is. Instead it concentrates on the ‘vertical’ structure of explanations, whereby the existence of a nomic explanation at one level reflects explanations on lower levels on which it supervenes. These structural approaches were first proposed in Bird Synthese 120: 1–18, 1999. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers..

I argue for the claim that if Lewis’s regularity theory of laws were true, we could not know any positive law statement to be true. Premise 1: According to that theory, for any law statement true of the actual world, there is always a nearby world where the law statement is false (a world that differs with respect to one matter of particular fact). Premise 2: One cannot know a proposition to be true if it is false in a nearby world (the epistemological safety principle). The conclusion that no law statement can be known to be true follows immediately from the two premises.

It is widely agreed that many causal relations can be regarded as dependent upon causal relations that are in some way more basic. For example, knocking down the first domino in a row of one hundred dominoes will be the cause of the hundredth domino falling. But this causal relation exists in virtue of the knocking of the first domino causing the falling of the second domino, and so forth. In such a case, A causes B in virtue of there being intermediate events I1... In such that A causes I1, I1 causes I2,..., In−1 causes In, and In causes B. Cases of this sort include my putting my foot on the brake causing the car to slow, the smoke from a fire causing the fire brigade to be alerted, and so forth. In other cases the more basic causal relations may not be intermediate (or at least it is controversial that they are). My seeing that it is raining may cause me to want to stay inside, and this causal relation depends upon more basic causal relations among various components of my brain. But it does not seem possible to analyze this in terms of my perception causing certain brain events, which cause other brain events, which eventually cause my desire. Rather it seems as if the principle causal relation, between perception and desire, is constituted, rather than mediated, by the more basic causal relations in the brain. The same is true of the operation of the dynamo causing the current to flow. Again there are not intermediate events, but rather the causal relation between them is constituted by the motion of the charged particles in the wires moving though a magnetic field, which causes an electric field, which causes the charges to move in the wire. There are thus at least two kinds of complex causal relation: the chain kind and the constitution kind. If we wish to understand causation, we need to understand the basic causal relations, at least as found in the chain kind. That is, to understand what it is for A to cause B when the latter is a causal relation of the chain kind, requires understanding what it is for the intermediate, basic causal relations to hold. In the case of a complex causal relation of the constitution kind, it is may be that understanding what it is for A and B to be causally related does not require understanding what it is for the constituting causal relations to hold..

Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis seems to challenge scientific realism. One response to that challenge is to focus on the continuity of reference. The causal theory of reference in particular seems to offer the possibility of continuity of reference that would provide a basis for the sort of comparability between theories that the realist requires. In “Dubbing and Redubbing: The Vulnerability of Rigid Designation” Kuhn attacks the causal theory and the essentialism to which it is related. Kuhn’s view is defended by Rupert Read and Wes Sharrock [Read & Sharrok 2002b]. In this paper I examine the arguments presented by Kuhn, Read, and Sharrock and show that they provide no reason to doubt either the causal theory or essentialism.

Arguing About Science is an outstanding, engaging introduction to the essential topics in philosophy of science, edited by two leading experts in the field. This exciting and innovative anthology contains a selection of classic and contemporary readings that examine a broad range of issues, from classic problems such as scientific reasoning; causation; and scientific realism, to more recent topics such as science and race; forensic science; and the scientific status of medicine. The editors bring together some of the most influential contributions of famous philosophers in the field, including John Stuart Mill and Karl Popper, as well as more recent extracts from philosophers and scientists such as Ian Hacking, Stephen Jay Gould, Bas van Fraassen, Nancy Cartwright, and John Worrall. The anthology is organised into nine clear sections: science, non science and pseudo-science race, gender and science scientific reasoning scientific explanation laws and causation science and medicine probability and forensic science risk, uncertainty and science policy scientific realism and anti-realism. The articles chosen are clear, interesting, and free from unnecessary jargon. The editors provide lucid introductions to each section in which they provide an overview of the debate, as well as suggestions for further reading.

When is a belief or judgment justified? One might be forgiven for thinking the search for single answer to this question to be hopeless. The concept of justification is required to fulfil several tasks: to evaluate beliefs epistemically, to fill in the gap between truth and knowledge, to describe the virtuous organization of one’s beliefs, to describe the relationship between evidence and theory (and thus relate to confirmation and probabilification). While some of these may be held to overlap, the prospects for fulfilling all may well seem poor. Furthermore the internalist requires that justification be an introspectible property of beliefs and a fundamental epistemic concept, while the externalist is often happy to ignore the concept altogether or at best regard it as an embarrassing add-on to their epistemology. In the light of this one might reasonably give up on justification altogether or adopt pluralist approach, denying that justification is any single property of beliefs of judgments.

Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited books of the twentieth century. Its iconic and controversial nature has obscured its message. What did Kuhn really intend with Structure and what is its real significance? 1 Introduction 2 The Central Ideas of Structure 3 The Philosophical Targets of Structure 4 Interpreting and Misinterpreting Structure 4.1 Naturalism 4.2 World-change 4.3 Incommensurability 4.4 Progress and the nature of revolutionary change 4.5 Relativism, rationality, and realism 4.6 History and sociology of science 4.7 Wittgenstein 5 After Structure.