Christopher Pincock

Should the scientific realist admit that their realism involves what Chakravartty has called an epistemic stance? I argue that the realist should accept the need for a realist stance that licenses the use of inference to the best explanation. However, unlike Chakravartty, I maintain that the realist should insist that their realist stance is rationally obligatory. This requires an anti-voluntarism about stances that involves theoretical reasons for adopting one stance rather than another. I present one account of what these reasons might be that is tied to principles that identify some strong connections between evidence, knowledge and genuine explanation.

This paper illustrates how an experimental discovery can prompt the search for a theoretical explanation and also how obtaining such an explanation can provide heuristic benefits for further experimental discoveries. The case considered begins with the discovery of Poiseuille’s law for steady fluid flow through pipes. The law was originally supported by careful experiments, and was only later explained through a derivation from the more basic Navier–Stokes equations. However, this derivation employed a controversial boundary condition and also relied on a contentious approach to viscosity. By comparing two editions of Lamb’s famous Hydrodynamics textbook, I argue that explanatory considerations were central to Lamb’s claims about this sort of fluid flow. In addition, I argue that this treatment of Poiseuille’s law played a heuristic role in Reynolds’ treatment of turbulent flows, where Poiseuille’s law fails to apply.

This paper considers how to best relate the competing accounts of scientific knowledge that Russell and Reichenbach proposed in the 1930s and 1940s. At the heart of their disagreements are two different accounts of how to best combine a theory of knowledge with scientific realism. Reichenbach argued that a broadly empiricist epistemology should be based on decisions. These decisions or “posits” informed Reichenbach’s defense of induction and a corresponding conception of what knowledge required. Russell maintained that a scientific realist must abandon empiricism in favor of knowledge of some non-demonstrative principles with a non-empirical basis. After identifying the best versions of realism offered by Reichenbach and Russell, the paper concludes with a brief discussion of the limitations of these two approaches.

How can a reflective scientist put forward an explanation using a model when they are aware that many of the assumptions used to specify that model are false? This paper addresses this challenge by making two substantial assumptions about explanatory practice. First, many of the propositions deployed in the course of explaining have a non-representational function. In particular, a proposition that a scientist uses and also believes to be false, i.e. an “idealization”, typically has some non-representational function in the practice, such as the interpretation of some model or the specification of the target of the explanation. Second, when an agent puts forward an explanation using a model, they usually aim to remain agnostic about various features of the phenomenon being explained. In this sense, explanations are intended to be autonomous from many of the more fundamental features of such systems. I support these two assumptions by showing how they allow one to address a number of recent concerns raised by Bokulich, Potochnik and Rice. In addition, these assumptions lead to a defense of the view that explanations are wholly true that improves on the accounts developed by Craver, Mäki and Strevens.

This paper defends three claims about concrete or physical models: these models remain important in science and engineering, they are often essentially idealized, in a sense to be made precise, and despite these essential idealizations, some of these models may be reliably used for the purpose of causal explanation. This discussion of concrete models is pursued using a detailed case study of some recent models of landslide generated impulse waves. Practitioners show a clear awareness of the idealized character of these models, and yet address these concerns through a number of methods. This paper focuses on experimental arguments that show how certain failures to accurately represent feature X are consistent with accurately representing some causes of feature Y, even when X is causally relevant to Y. To analyse these arguments, the claims generated by a model must be carefully examined and grouped into types. Only some of these types can be endorsed by practitioners, but I argue that these endorsed claims are sufficient for limited forms of causal explanation.

A pluralist about explanation posits many explanatory relevance relations, while an invariantist denies any substantial role for context in fixing genuine explanation. This article summarizes one approach to combining pluralism and invariantism that emphasizes the contrastive nature of explanation. If explanations always take contrasts as their objects and contrasts come in types, then the role for the context in which an explanation is given can be minimized. This approach is illustrated using a classic debate between natural theology and natural selection about the structure of bees’ honeycombs.

Russell’s study of the biologist and psychologist Richard Semon is traced to contact with the experimental psychologist Adolf Wohlgemuth and dated to the summer of 1919. This allows a new interpretation of when Russell embraced neutral monism and presents a case-study in Russell’s use of scientific results for philosophical purposes. Semon’s distinctive notion of mnemic causation was used by Russell to clarify both how images referred to things and how the existence of images could be reconciled with a neutral monist metaphysics

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2601\PINCREPL.261 : 2006-06-05 11:54 iscussion REJOINDER TO SOAMES C P Philosophy / Purdue U. West Lafayette,  ,  @. y goal in reviewing Soames’ book was to help readers of this journal evalMuate his contribution to the history of analytic philosophy, with a special focus on his discussion of Russell. Soames charges both that I misrepresent the contents of his book and that I make mistakes in the interpretation of various aspects of Russell’s philosophy. If I had committed any errors of the former sort, I would certainly apologize and thank Soames for bringing such mistakes to my attention. After explaining why I do not believe I have misrepresented the contents of his book, I will turn to the one substantive issue that he raises in his reply, namely the need for unperceived sense-data in Russell’s external world program. While disagreement here is more understandable, nothing Soames says in his book or in his reply has led me to revise my original remarks. My review began with a one-page summary of Soames’ -page book. I said that “Moore, and nearly every other figure that Soames discusses, is [said to be] guilty of confusing necessity, analyticity and apriority” and in the next paragraph mentioned “Moore’s views on ethics” and “Russell’s conception of analysis ” (“Reply”, p. ). Soames replies: “Not so. Although I do show that such conflation had negative consequences for the views of several philosophers, Moore and Russell are not among them” (p. ). I could have added more page references to my discussion. On Moore, after a long list of twelve “fundamental methodological notions” which include analysis, analyticity and necessity, Soames claims that “unclarity about these fundamental methodological notions eviscerated his most important meta-ethical conclusions” (: ). For  Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century,  vols. (Princeton: Princeton U. P., ). Christopher Pincock, “History of Philosophical Analysis”, Russell, n.s.  (winter – ): –. Scott Soames, “Reply to Pincock”, Russell, n.s.  (winter –): –. References preceded by “:” or “:” refer to the volumes of Soames’ book. Other unlabelled references in the text will be either to my review or to Soames’ reply. russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s.  (summer ): – The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U.  - _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2601\PINCREPL.261 : 2006-06-05 11:54  Discussion Russell, Soames notes that Russell’s “view that ordinary proper names mean the same as descriptions associated with them by speakers … was ultimately shown to be deeply problematic by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity” (: ). A reference is then made to Soames’ discussion of Kripke in Volume  where Soames explains how Kripke’s “modal argument” undermined Russell’s approach (: ). Soames also complains that I object to his “characterization of Russellian propositions as complexes of properties and objects whose structure mirrors the logical forms of sentences that express them” (p. ). What I said was that it was “extremely misleading” to say that (quoting Soames again) “propositions constitute the information encoded by sentences … [and of] the information encoded by a sentence (in a logically perfect language) as a complex entity the structure of which mirrors the structure of sentences” (p.  and : –). So, Soames did not say that propositions are “complexes of properties and objects” and if he had said this I would not have objected. Soames goes on to use a settheoretic construction to explain exactly what propositions are. But there is a big difference between a set-theoretic construction and a complex of the sort Russell had in mind, and a reader of Soames would have no awareness of the gap. That is, she is likely to be misled. Finally, Soames says that “Pincock foolishly speculates” (p. ) in ascribing confusion to him about the relevance of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems to Principia Mathematica. Now, when a philosopher gives an argument described as the “final nail in the coffin” (: ), and this argument depends on a tacit assumption, I submit that it is far from foolish to think that the philosopher believes that this assumption is correct. This is, after all, just the methodology that Soames employs when he reconstructs the commitments of the philosophers that he talks about. And, in this case...

The epistemic problem of assessing the support that some evidence confers on a hypothesis is considered using an extended example from the history of meteorology. In this case, and presumably in others, the problem is to develop techniques of data analysis that will link the sort of evidence that can be collected to hypotheses of interest. This problem is solved by applying mathematical tools to structure the data and connect them to the competing hypotheses. I conclude that mathematical innovations provide crucial epistemic links between evidence and theories precisely because the evidence and theories are mathematically described.Keywords: J. N. Lockyer; Gilbert T. Walker; ENSO; Models; Bayesianism.

This book offers new perspectives on the history of analytical philosophy, surveying recent scholarship on the philosophical study of mind, language, logic and reality over the course of the last 200 years. Each chapter contributes to a broader engagement with a wider range of figures, topics and disciplines outside of philosophy than has been traditionally associated with the history of analytical philosophy. The book acquaints readers with new aspects of analytical philosophy’s revolutionary past while engaging in a much needed methodological reflection. It questions the meaning associated with talk of 'analytic' philosophy and offers new perspective on its development. It offers original studies on a range of topics – including in the philosophy of language and mind, logic, metaphysics and the philosophy of mathematics – and figures whose relevance, when they is not already established as in the case of Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, are just now beginning to become the topic of mainstream literature: Franz Brentano, William James, Susan Langer as well as the German and British logicians of the nineteenth century.

This paper concerns the debate on the nature of Rudolf Carnap'sproject in his 1928 book The Logical Structure of the Worldor Aufbau. Michael Friedman and Alan Richardson haveinitiated much of this debate. They claim that the Aufbauis best understood as a work that is firmly grounded inneo-Kantian philosophy. They have made these claims in oppositionto Quine and Goodman's ``received view'' of the Aufbau. Thereceived view sees the Aufbau as an attempt to carry out indetail Russell's external world program. I argue that both sidesof this debate have made errors in their interpretation ofRussell. These errors have led these interpreters to misunderstandthe connection between Russell's project and Carnap's project.Russell in fact exerted a crucial influence on Carnap in the1920s. This influence is complicated, however, due to the factthat Russell and Carnap disagreed on many philosophical issues. Iconclude that interpretations of the Aufbau that ignoreRussell's influence are incomplete.

This paper begins by distinguishing intrinsic and extrinsic contributions of mathematics to scientific representation. This leads to two investigations into how these different sorts of contributions relate to confirmation. I present a way of accommodating both contributions that complicates the traditional assumptions of confirmation theory. In particular, I argue that subjective Bayesianism does best accounting for extrinsic contributions, while objective Bayesianism is more promising for intrinsic contributions.

The two most popular approaches to Carnap's 1928 Aufbau are the empiricist reading of Quine and the neo-Kantian readings of Michael Friedman and Alan Richardson. This paper presents a third "reserved" interpretation that emphasizes Carnap's opposition to traditional philosophy and consequent naturalism. The main consideration presented in favor of the reserved reading is Carnap's work on a physical construction system. I argue that Carnap's construction theory was an empirical scientific discipline and that the basic relations of its construction systems need not be eliminated.

Explanations of three different aspects of the rainbow are considered. The highly mathematical character of these explanations poses some interpretative questions concerning what the success of these explanations tells us about rainbows. I develop a proposal according to which mathematical explanations can highlight what is relevant about a given phenomenon while also indicating what is irrelevant to that phenomenon. This proposal is related to the extensive work by Batterman on asymptotic explanation with special reference to Batterman’s own discussion of the rainbow

Forthcoming, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science Abstract: The epistemic problem of assessing the support that some evidence confers on a hypothesis is considered using an extended example from the history of meteorology. In this case, and presumably in others, the problem is to develop techniques of data analysis that will link the sort of evidence that can be collected to hypotheses of interest. This problem is solved by applying mathematical tools to structure the data and connect it to the competing hypotheses. I conclude that mathematical innovations provide crucial epistemic links between evidence and theories precisely because the evidence and theories are mathematically described.