Barry Ward

Simple random sampling resolutions of the raven paradox relevantly diverge from scientific practice. We develop a stratified random sampling model, yielding a better fit and apparently rehabilitating simple random sampling as a legitimate idealization. However, neither accommodates a second concern, the objection from potential bias. We develop a third model that crucially invokes causal considerations, yielding a novel resolution that handles both concerns. This approach resembles Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) and relates the generalization’s confirmation to confirmation of an associated law. We give it an objective Bayesian formalization and discuss the compatibility of Bayesianism and IBE.

We argue that a modified version of Mill’s method of agreement can strongly confirm causal generalizations. This mode of causal inference implicates the explanatory virtues of mechanism, analogy, consilience, and simplicity, and we identify it as a species of Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE). Since rational causal inference provides normative guidance, IBE is not a heuristic for Bayesian rationality. We give it an objective Bayesian formalization, one that has no need of principles of indifference and yields responses to the Voltaire objection, van Fraassen’s Bad Lot objection, and John Norton’s recent objection to IBE.

Advocates and opponents of Humean Supervenience (HS) have neglected a crucial feature of nomic explanation: laws can explain by generating descriptions of possibilities. Dretske and Armstrong have opposed HS by arguing that laws construed as Humean regularities cannot explain, but their arguments fail precisely because they neglect to consider this generating role of laws. Humeans have dismissed the intuitive violations of HS manifested by John Carroll's Mirror Worlds as erroneous, but distinguishing the laws' generating role from the non-Humean notion that laws govern undermines such responses, and renews the force of Carroll's critique of HS. However, it also undermines the assumption that HS is constitutive of Humeanism. The generating role of laws readily motivates a non-reductive Humeanism that violates HS. An account is sketched, and is seen to provide a novel explanation of the governing intuition.

This paper proposes a novel response to Nancy Cartwright’s famous argument that fundamental physical laws, such as Newton’s law of gravitation, are ceteris paribus: construing forces instrumentally allows such laws to apply generally, eliminating the need for ceteris paribus clauses. The instrumental construal of forces is motivated, and defended against prominent recent objections. Further, it is argued that such instrumentalism in no way undermines the role of force-laws in scientific practise, and indeed, is compatible with a robust realism about force-laws

Frank Cabrera argues that informational explanatory virtues—specifically, mechanism, precision, and explanatory scope—cannot be confirmational virtues, since hypotheses that possess them must have a lower probability than less virtuous, entailed hypotheses. We argue against Cabrera’s characterization of confirmational virtue and for an alternative on which the informational virtues clearly are confirmational virtues. Our illustration of their confirmational virtuousness appeals to aspects of causal inference, suggesting that causal inference has a role for the explanatory virtues. We briefly explore this possibility, delineating a path from Mill’s method of agreement to Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE).

A novel analysis of Ceteris Paribus (CP) law statements is constructed. It explains how such statements can have determinate, testable content by relating their semantics to the semantics of natural kind terms. Objections are discussed, and the analysis is compared with others. Many philosophers think of the CP clause as a ‘no interference’ clause. However, many non-strict scientific generalizations are clearly not subsumed under this construal. While this analysis accounts interference cases as violating the CP clause, it is applicable to a broader class of non-strict scientific generalizations than its ‘no interference’ rivals

Acceptance of Humean Supervenience and thereductive Humean analyses that entail it leadsto a litany of inadequately explained conflictswith our intuitions regarding laws andpossibilities. However, the non-reductiveHumeanism developed here, on which law claimsare understood as normative rather than factstating, can accommodate those intuitions. Rational constraints on such norms provide aset of consistency relations that ground asemantics formulated in terms offactual-normative worlds, solving theFrege-Geach problem of construing unassertedcontexts. This set of factual-normative worldsincludes exactly the intuitive sets ofnomologically possible worlds associated witheach possible set of laws. The extension ofthe semantics to counterfactual and subjunctiveconditionals is sketched. Potential objectionsinvolving subjectivity, mind-dependence, andnon-factuality are discussed.

I propose a novel solution to Goodman's new riddle of induction, one on which aspects of scientific methodology preclude significant confirmation of the Grue Hypothesis. The solution appeals to intuitive constraints on the confirmation of explanatory hypotheses, and can be construed as a fragment of a theory of Inference to the Best Explanation. I give it an objective Bayesian formalisation, and contrast it with Goodman's and Sober's solutions, which make appeal to both methodological and non-methodological considerations, and those of Jackson, Godfrey-Smith, and White, on which explanatory considerations play a very different role

This innovative text is psychologically informed, both in its diagnosis of inferential errors, and in teaching students how to watch out for and work around their natural intellectual blind spots. It also incorporates insights from epistemology and philosophy of science that are indispensable for learning how to evaluate premises. The result is a hands-on primer for real world critical thinking. The authors bring a fresh approach to the traditional challenges of a critical thinking course: effectively explaining the nature of validity, assessing deductive arguments, reconstructing, identifying and diagramming arguments, and causal and probabilistic inference. Additionally, they discuss in detail, important, frequently neglected topics, including testimony, including the evaluation of news and other information sources, the nature and credibility of science, rhetoric, and dialectical argumentation. The treatment of probability uses frequency trees and a frequency approach more generally, and argument reconstruction is taught using argument maps; these methods have been shown to improve students’ reasoning and argument evaluation.

Faced with the paradox of undermining futures, Humeans have resigned themselves to accounts of chance that severely conflict with our intuitions. However, such resignation is premature: The problem is Humean supervenience (HS), not Humeanism. This paper develops a projectivist Humeanism on which chance claims are understood as normative, rather than fact stating. Rationality constraints on the cotenability of norms and factual claims ground a factual-normative worlds semantics that, in addition to solving the Frege-Geach problem, delivers the intuitive set of possibilia for each chance law. Hence, the account does not entail HS, and the paradox does not arise. A confirmation theory is developed, and the 'principal principle' is justified.

We argue that a particular approach to satisfying the broad predictive ambitions of the sciences demands law confirmation. On this approach we confirm non-nomic generalizations by confirming there are no actually realized ways of causing disconfirming cases. This gives causal generalizations a crucial role in prediction. We then show how rational judgements of relevant causal similarity can be used to confirm that causal generalizations themselves have no actual disconfirmers, providing a distinctive and clearly viable methodology for inductively confirming them. Finally, we argue that for agents in our epistemic position using this methodology to confirm causal generalizations of adequate breadth will commonly demand law confirmation. We make a prima facie assessment of the methodology’s fit with scientific practice and briefly consider the prospects for an associated analysis of laws.

Reductive Humeanism with regard to laws and chances, the view that law and chance claims are reducible to claims about Humean states of affairs, is a highly problematic doctrine. Even its most sophisticated contemporary version, espoused by David Lewis, leads to a litany of inadequately explained conflicts with our intuitions regarding laws, chances, and counterfactuals. The non-Humean alternative permits analyses that are adequate to the intuitive data. However, such analyses are insufficiently explanatory to be satisfactory. ;This dissertation motivates, elaborates, and defends a third type of view, a non-reductive Humean projectivism on which law and chance claims are analysed in terms of an expressivist semantics. The benefit of this strategy is that it provides detailed explanations of the intuitions that are problematic for reductive Humeanism without relying on murky non-Humean explanations. However, there are numerous prima facie worries. Many philosophers surmise that the non-factual character of such an analysis must render law claims subjective or mind-dependent, or indeed, must lead to the denial of all law claims and, plausibly, all claims with nomic commitments of any kind. Further, there are technical worries, as represented by the Frege-Geach problem. The dissertation is responsive to such concerns, including the following features: A novel motivation of Humean projectivism is provided with reference to the explanatory goals of science. Detailed explanations of the intuitions that confound reductive Humeanism are provided. Notably, the analysis of chance laws is not susceptible to the problem of undermining futures, and further, the Principal Principle is both vindicated and justified. The Frege-Geach problem is solved using semantical tools of the kind developed by Allan Gibbard and Simon Blackburn.