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44Accuracy-First Epistemology and Scientific ProgressErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11. 2024.The accuracy-first program attempts to ground epistemology in the norm that one’s beliefs should be as accurate as possible, where accuracy is measured using a scoring rule. We argue that considerations of scientific progress suggest that such a monism about epistemic value is untenable. In particular, we argue that counterexamples to the standard scoring rules are ubiquitous in the history of science, and hence that these scoring rules cannot be regarded as a precisification of our intuitive co…Read more
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37Remarks on Ángel Pinillos’s Why We DoubtInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 1-9. forthcoming.In these brief remarks, I describe the author’s Bayesian explication of the narrow function of the meta-cognitive, heuristic algorithm (pbs) that is at the heart of his psychological explanation of why we entertain skeptical doubts. I provide some critical remarks, and an alternative Bayesian approach that is (to my mind) somewhat more elegant than the author’s.
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Symmetries and asymmetries in evidential supportIn Antony Eagle (ed.), Philosophy of Probability: Contemporary Readings, Routledge. 2010.
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Closure, Counter-Closure, and Inferential KnowledgeIn Rodrigo Borges, Claudio de Almeida & Peter David Klein (eds.), Explaining Knowledge: New Essays on the Gettier Problem, Oxford University Press. pp. 312-324. 2017.The chapter begins with some general remarks about closure and counter-closure, and is followed with a discussion of the following: I (a) review some (alleged) counterexamples to counter-closure, I then continue by (b) discussing a popular strategy for responding to such counterexamples to counter-closure, and finally I (c) pose a dilemma for this popular strategy. Once I have discussed these three points I conclude the chapter by proposing that we reject counter-closure, but at the same time th…Read more
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879Deference Done BetterPhilosophical Perspectives 35 (1): 99-150. 2021.There are many things—call them ‘experts’—that you should defer to in forming your opinions. The trouble is, many experts are modest: they’re less than certain that they are worthy of deference. When this happens, the standard theories of deference break down: the most popular (“Reflection”-style) principles collapse to inconsistency, while their most popular (“New-Reflection”-style) variants allow you to defer to someone while regarding them as an anti-expert. We propose a middle way: deferring…Read more
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Part IV. Collective entities and formal epistemology. Individual coherence and group coherenceIn Jennifer Lackey (ed.), Essays in Collective Epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2014.
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67A Problem for Confirmation Measure ZPhilosophy of Science 88 (4): 726-730. 2021.In this article, I present a serious problem for confirmation measure Z.
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1236Four Approaches to SuppositionErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (26): 58-98. 2022.Suppositions can be introduced in either the indicative or subjunctive mood. The introduction of either type of supposition initiates judgments that may be either qualitative, binary judgments about whether a given proposition is acceptable or quantitative, numerical ones about how acceptable it is. As such, accounts of qualitative/quantitative judgment under indicative/subjunctive supposition have been developed in the literature. We explore these four different types of theories by systematica…Read more
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206Two Approaches to Belief RevisionErkenntnis 84 (3): 487-518. 2019.In this paper, we compare and contrast two methods for the revision of qualitative beliefs. The first method is generated by a simplistic diachronic Lockean thesis requiring coherence with the agent’s posterior credences after conditionalization. The second method is the orthodox AGM approach to belief revision. Our primary aim is to determine when the two methods may disagree in their recommendations and when they must agree. We establish a number of novel results about their relative behavior.…Read more
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41Confirmation, causation, and Simpson's paradoxEpisteme 14 (3): 297-309. 2017.ABSTRACTIn this paper, I review some recent treatments of Simpson's Paradox, and I propose a new rationalizing explanation of its paradoxicality.
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IntroductionIn Rodrigo Borges, Branden Fitelson & Cherie Braden (eds.), Knowledge, Scepticism, and Defeat: Themes from Klein, Springer Verlag. 2019.
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128How Not to Detect DesignThe Design Inference. William A. DembskiPhilosophy of Science 66 (3): 472-488. 1999.As every philosopher knows, “the design argument” concludes that God exists from premisses that cite the adaptive complexity of organisms or the lawfulness and orderliness of the whole universe. Since 1859, it has formed the intellectual heart of creationist opposition to the Darwinian hypothesis that organisms evolved their adaptive features by the mindless process of natural selection. Although the design argument developed as a defense of theism, the logic of the argument in fact encompasses …Read more
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92Probability, confirmation, and the conjunction fallacyThinking and Reasoning 14 (2): 182-199. 2008.The conjunction fallacy has been a key topic in debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. Despite extensive inquiry, however, the attempt of providing a satisfactory account of the phenomenon has proven challenging. Here, we elaborate the suggestion (first discussed by Sides et al., 2001) that in standard conjunction problems the fallacious probability judgments experimentally observed are typically guided by sound assessments of confirmation relations, meant in terms of…Read more
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191Logical Foundations of Evidential SupportPhilosophy of Science 73 (5): 500-512. 2006.Carnap's inductive logic (or confirmation) project is revisited from an "increase in firmness" (or probabilistic relevance) point of view. It is argued that Carnap's main desiderata can be satisfied in this setting, without the need for a theory of "logical probability." The emphasis here will be on explaining how Carnap's epistemological desiderata for inductive logic will need to be modified in this new setting. The key move is to abandon Carnap's goal of bridging confirmation and credence, in…Read more
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50Overview Setting the Stage Consistency Redundancy Goodbye ? Conclusion & References Overview Setting the Stage Consistency Redundancy Goodbye ? Conclusion & References..
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321The paradox of confirmationPhilosophy Compass 1 (1). 2006.Hempel first introduced the paradox of confirmation in (Hempel 1937). Since then, a very extensive literature on the paradox has evolved (Vranas 2004). Much of this literature can be seen as responding to Hempel’s subsequent discussions and analyses of the paradox in (Hempel 1945). Recently, it was noted that Hempel’s intuitive (and plausible) resolution of the paradox was inconsistent with his official theory of confirmation (Fitelson & Hawthorne 2006). In this article, we will try to explain h…Read more
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33By and large, we think Strevens’s [6] is a useful reply to our original critique [2] of his paper on the Quine–Duhem (QD) problem [5]. But, we remain unsatisfied with several aspects of his reply (and his original paper). Ultimately, we do not think he properly addresses our most important worries. In this brief rejoinder, we explain our remaining worries, and we issue a revised challenge for Strevens’s approach to QD.
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19The consideration of careful reasoning can be traced to Aristotle and earlier authors. The possibility of rigorous rules for drawing conclusions can certainly be traced to the Middle Ages when types o f syllogism were studied. Shortly after the introduction of computers, the audacious scientist naturally envisioned the automation of sound reasoning—reasoning in which conclusions that are drawn follow l ogically and inevitably from the given hypotheses. Did the idea spring from the intent to emul…Read more
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8Solutions to Some Open Problems from SlaneyAustralasian Journal of Logic 13 (4). 2016.In response to a paper by Harris & Fitelson, Slaney states several open questions concerning possible strategies for proving distributivity in a wide class of positive sentential logics. In this note, I provide answers to all of Slaney's open questions. The result is a better understanding of the class of positive logics in which distributivity holds.
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114A decision procedure for probability calculus with applicationsReview of Symbolic Logic 1 (1): 111-125. 2008.(new version: 10/30/07). Click here to download the companion Mathematica 6 notebook that goes along with this paper.
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159Studies in Bayesian Confirmation TheoryDissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison. 2001.According to Bayesian confirmation theory, evidence E (incrementally) confirms (or supports) a hypothesis H (roughly) just in case E and H are positively probabilistically correlated (under an appropriate probability function Pr). There are many logically equivalent ways of saying that E and H are correlated under Pr. Surprisingly, this leads to a plethora of non-equivalent quantitative measures of the degree to which E confirms H (under Pr). In fact, many non-equivalent Bayesian measures of the…Read more
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119A bayesian account of independent evidence with applicationsProceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2001 (3). 2001.outlined. This account is partly inspired by the work of C.S. Peirce. When we want to consider how degree of confirmation varies with changing I show that a large class of quantitative Bayesian measures of con-.
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82The philosophical significance of Stein’s paradoxEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 7 (3): 411-433. 2017.Charles Stein discovered a paradox in 1955 that many statisticians think is of fundamental importance. Here we explore its philosophical implications. We outline the nature of Stein’s result and of subsequent work on shrinkage estimators; then we describe how these results are related to Bayesianism and to model selection criteria like AIC. We also discuss their bearing on scientific realism and instrumentalism. We argue that results concerning shrinkage estimators underwrite a surprising form o…Read more
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701Evidence of evidence is not (necessarily) evidenceAnalysis 72 (1): 85-88. 2012.In this note, I consider various precisifications of the slogan ‘evidence of evidence is evidence’. I provide counter-examples to each of these precisifications (assuming an epistemic probabilistic relevance notion of ‘evidential support’)
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171Putting the irrelevance back into the problem of irrelevant conjunctionPhilosophy of Science 69 (4): 611-622. 2002.Naive deductive accounts of confirmation have the undesirable consequence that if E confirms H, then E also confirms the conjunction H & X, for any X—even if X is utterly irrelevant to H (and E). Bayesian accounts of confirmation also have this property (in the case of deductive evidence). Several Bayesians have attempted to soften the impact of this fact by arguing that—according to Bayesian accounts of confirmation— E will confirm the conjunction H & X less strongly than E confirms H (again, i…Read more
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295Probability, confirmation, and the conjunction fallacyThinking and Reasoning 14 (2). 2007.The conjunction fallacy has been a key topic in debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. Despite extensive inquiry, however, the attempt to provide a satisfactory account of the phenomenon has proved challenging. Here we elaborate the suggestion (first discussed by Sides, Osherson, Bonini, & Viale, 2002) that in standard conjunction problems the fallacious probability judgements observed experimentally are typically guided by sound assessments of _confirmation_ relation…Read more
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Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
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