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8VorwortIn Gregor Betz, Dirk Koppelberg, David Lüwenstein & Anna Wehofsits (eds.), Weiter Denken - Über Philosophie, Wissenschaft Und Religion, De Gruyter. 2015.
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38Making Reflective Equlibrium Precise: A Formal ModelErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8. 2021.Reflective equilibrium (RE) is often regarded as a powerful method in ethics, logic, and even philosophy in general. Despite this popularity, characterizations of the method have been fairly vague and unspecific so far. It thus may be doubted whether RE is more than a jumble of appealing but ultimately sketchy ideas that cannot be spelled out consistently. In this paper, we dispel such doubts by devising a formal model of RE. The model contains as components the agent’s commitments and a theory …Read more
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9Chaos, Plurality, and Model Metrics in Climate ScienceIn Ulrich Gähde, Stephan Hartmann & Jörn Henning Wolf (eds.), Models, Simulations, and the Reduction of Complexity, De Gruyter. pp. 255-264. 2013.
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15There are different varieties of conservatism concerning belief formation and revision. We assesses the veritistic effects of a particular kind of conservatism commonly attributed to Quine: the so-called maxim of minimum mutiliation, which states that agents should give up as few beliefs as possible when facing recalcitrant evidence. Based on a formal bounded rationality model of belief revision, which parametrizes degree of conservatism, and corresponding multi-agent simulations, we eventually …Read more
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12“Führer befiehl, wir folgen dir!” Charismatic Leaders in Extremist GroupsIn Thomas Christiano, Ingrid Creppell & Jack Knight (eds.), Morality, Governance, and Social Institutions: Reflections on Russell Hardin, Springer Verlag. pp. 259-287. 2017.If we want to understand how extremist group ideologies are established, we have to comprehend the social processes which form the basis of the emergence and distribution of such beliefs. In our chapter, we present an innovative approach to examining these processes and explaining how they function: with the method of computer-based simulation of opinion formation, we develop heuristic explanatory models which help to generate new and interesting hypotheses. The focus is thereby not on individua…Read more
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86Philosophy of science for science communication in twenty-two questionsIn Annette Leßmöllmann, Marcelo Dascal & Thomas Gloning (eds.), Science Communication. pp. 3-28. 2020.Philosophy of science attempts to reconstruct science as a rational cognitive enterprise. In doing so, it depicts a normative ideal of knowledge acquisition and does not primarily seek to describe actual scientific practice in an empirically adequate way. A comprehensive picture of what good science consists in may serve as a standard against which we evaluate and criticize actual scientific practices. Such a normative picture may also explain why it is reasonable for us to trust scientists – to…Read more
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Accounting for Possibilities in Decision MakingIn Gertrude Hirsch Hadorn & Sven Hansson (eds.), The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis: Reasoning About Uncertainty, Springer Verlag. 2016.
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28Applying argumentation to structure and visualize multi-dimensional opinion spacesArgument and Computation 10 (1): 23-40. 2018.
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5Ethical Aspects of Climate EngineeringKIT Scientific Publishing,. 2012.This study investigates the ethical aspects of deploying and researching into so-called climate engineering methods, i.e. large-scale technical interventions in the climate system with the objective of offsetting anthropogenic climate change. The moral reasons in favour of and against R&D into and deployment of CE methods are analysed by means of argument maps. These argument maps provide an overview of the CE controversy and help to structure the complex debate.
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130Descartes' "Meditationen" sind vielleicht 'der' Klassiker der Philosophie. Sie behandeln grundlegende Fragen: Welche Arten von Gegenständen kommen in der Welt vor? Was für eine Art von Ding bin ich? Bin ich frei? Was ist Wahrheit? Welchen Status haben logische Wahrheiten oder mathematische Theoreme? Was kann ich wissen? Gregor Betz' systematischer Kommentar rekonstruiert die entsprechenden Gedankengänge und Begründungen und versucht Antworten auf Descartes' Fragen zu geben. Auch andere Philosoph…Read more
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14Spohns Theorie des induktiven Schließens und ihre erkenntnistheoretischen, wissenschaftsphilosophischen und metaphysischen AnwendungenDeutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 63 (2). 2015.
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817In defence of the value free idealEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 3 (2): 207-220. 2013.The ideal of value free science states that the justification of scientific findings should not be based on non-epistemic (e.g. moral or political) values. It has been criticized on the grounds that scientists have to employ moral judgements in managing inductive risks. The paper seeks to defuse this methodological critique. Allegedly value-laden decisions can be systematically avoided, it argues, by making uncertainties explicit and articulating findings carefully. Such careful uncertainty arti…Read more
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105What’s the worst case? The Methodology of Possibilistic PredictionAnalyse & Kritik 32 (1): 87-106. 2010.Frank Knight (1921) famously distinguished the epistemic modes of certainty, risk, and uncertainty in order to characterize situations where deterministic, probabilistic or possibilistic foreknowledge is available. Because our probabilistic knowledge is limited, i.e. because many systems, e.g. the global climate, cannot be described and predicted probabilistically in a reliable way, Knight's third category, possibilistic foreknowledge, is not simply swept by the probabilistic mode. This raises t…Read more
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38Pascals WetteIn Georg W. Bertram (ed.), Philosophische Gedankenexperimente – ein Lese- und Studienbuch, Reclam. 2012.
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53Ethical Aspects of Climate Engineering. KarlsruheKIT Scientific Publishing. 2012.This study investigates the ethical aspects of deploying and researching into so-called climate engineering methods, i.e. large-scale technical interventions in the climate system with the objective of offsetting anthropogenic climate change. The moral reasons in favour of and against R&D into and deployment of CE methods are analysed by means of argument maps. These argument maps provide an overview of the CE controversy and help to structure the complex debate.
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26Warum erfolgreiche Prognosen neuartiger Phänomene methodologisch wertvoll sindDeutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 58 (2): 329-332. 2010.
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1Argunet. A virtual argumentation platform for rule-guided reasoningIn Frans H. van Eemeren, Bart Garssen, David Godden & Gordon Mitchell (eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, Rozenberg / Sic Sat. 2011.
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191On Degrees of JustificationErkenntnis 77 (2): 237-272. 2012.This paper gives an explication of our intuitive notion of strength of justification in a controversial debate. It defines a thesis' degree of justification within the bipolar argumentation framework of the theory of dialectical structures as the ratio of coherently adoptable positions according to which that thesis is true over all coherently adoptable positions. Broadening this definition, the notion of conditional degree of justification, i.e.\ degree of partial entailment, is introduced. Thu…Read more
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84Evaluating Dialectical StructuresJournal of Philosophical Logic 38 (3): 283-312. 2009.This paper develops concepts and procedures for the evaluation of complex debates. They provide means for answering such questions as whether a thesis has to be considered as proven or disproven in a debate or who carries a burden of proof. While being based on classical logic, this framework represents an (argument-based) approach to non-monotonic, or defeasible reasoning. Debates are analysed as dialectical structures, i.e. argumentation systems with an attack- as well as a support-relationshi…Read more
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32Wie ist das 2-Grad-Ziel der internationalen Klimapolitik begründet?In Geert Keil & Ralf Poscher (eds.), Unscharfe Grenzen im Umwelt- und Technikrecht, Nomos. 2012.In diesem Beitrag möchte ich begründen, warum das 2-Grad-Ziel der internatio- nalen Klimapolitik einen vernünftigen Umgang mit unscharfen Grenzen darstellt. Ich werde zunächst skizzieren, aus welchen Überlegungen das 2-Grad-Ziel ent- standen ist und wie es Eingang fand in die internationale Klimapolitik. Daraufhin werde ich darlegen, dass sich traditionelle Entscheidungsanalyseverfahren (Kos- tennutzenanalyse, kurz: KNA) nicht problemlos auf klimapolitische Fragestel- lungen anwenden lassen…Read more
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20PredictionIn Ian Jarvie & Jesus Zamora-Bonilla (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science, Sage Publications. 2011.Predictive success as an aim of science -- On the very possibility of prediction in the social sciences -- Empirical facts about social prediction: its mode, object and performance -- Understanding poor forecast performance
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51Degrees of Justification, Bayes’ Rule, and RationalityIn Frank Zenker (ed.), Bayesian Argumentation – The Practical Side of Probability, Springer. 2012.Based on the theory of dialectical structures, I review the concept of degree of justification of a partial position a proponent may hold in a controversial debate. The formal concept of degree of justification dovetails with our pre-theoretic intuitions about a thesis' strength of justification. The central claim I'm going to defend in this paper maintains that degrees of justification, as defined within the theory of dialectical structures, correlate with a proponent position's verisimilitude.…Read more
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132Truth in Evidence and Truth in Arguments without Logical OmniscienceBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (4): 1117-1137. 2016.Science advances by means of argument and debate. Based on a formal model of complex argumentation, this article assesses the interplay between evidential and inferential drivers in scientific controversy, and explains, in particular, why both evidence accumulation and argumentation are veritistically valuable. By improving the conditions for applying veritistic indicators , novel evidence and arguments allow us to distinguish true from false hypotheses more reliably. Because such veritistic ind…Read more
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70Is epistemic trust of veritistic value?Ethics and Politics 15 (2): 25-41. 2013.Epistemic trust figures prominently in our socio-cognitive practices. By assigning different degrees of competence to agents, we distinguish between experts and novices and determine the trustworthiness of testimony. This paper probes the claim that epistemic trust furthers our epistemic enterprise. More specifically, it assesses the veritistic value of competence attribution in an epistemic community, i.e., in a group of agents that collaboratively seek to track down the truth. The results, obt…Read more
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122Are climate models credible worlds? Prospects and limitations of possibilistic climate predictionEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 5 (2): 191-215. 2015.Climate models don’t give us probabilistic forecasts. To interpret their results, alternatively, as serious possibilities seems problematic inasmuch as climate models rely on contrary-to-fact assumptions: why should we consider their implications as possible if their assumptions are known to be false? The paper explores a way to address this possibilistic challenge. It introduces the concepts of a perfect and of an imperfect credible world, and discusses whether climate models can be interpreted…Read more
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52The case for climate engineering research: an analysis of the “arm the future” argumentClimatic Change 111 (2): 473-485. 2012.With the evidence for anthropogenic climate change piling up, suggesting that climate impacts of GHG emissions might have been underestimated in the past (Allison et al. 2009; WBGU 2009), and mitigation policies apparently lagging behind what many scientists consider as necessary reductions in order to prevent dangerous climate change, the debate about intentional climate change, or “climate engineering”, as we shall say in the following, has gained momentum in the past years. While efforts to t…Read more
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21VorwortIn Gregor Betz, Dirk Koppelberg, David Lüwenstein & Anna Wehofsits (eds.), Weiter Denken - Über Philosophie, Wissenschaft Und Religion, De Gruyter. 2015.
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Dieser Beitrag diskutiert Oskar Morgensterns These von der Unmöglichkeit von Wirtschaftsprognose. Nach einer kritischen Rekonstruktion Morgensterns Argumente wird diese These in ihrer starken, apriorischen Lesart zurückgewiesen. Demgegenüber gestatten es die Ergebnisse empirischer Prognoseevaluationen, Morgensterns Überlegungen als kontingente Erklärungen des Scheiterns makroökonomischer Vorhersagen umzuinterpretieren. Der Beitrag schließt deshalb mit einer provokanten Konklusion, die bereits Mo…Read more
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39Achilles und die SchildkröteIn Georg W. Bertram (ed.), Philosophische Gedankenexperimente – ein Lese- und Studienbuch, Reclam. 2012.
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137Petitio principii and circular argumentation as seen from a theory of dialectical structuresSynthese 175 (3): 327-349. 2010.This paper investigates in how far a theory of dialectical structures sheds new light on the old problem of giving a satisfying account of the fallacy of petitio principii, or begging the question. It defends that (i) circular argumentation on the one hand and petitio principii on the other hand are two distinct features of complex argumentation, and that (ii) it is impossible to make general statements about the defectiveness of an argumentation that exhibits these features. Such an argumentati…Read more
Gregor Betz
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
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Karlsruhe Institute of TechnologyProfessor
Areas of Specialization
2 more
Formal Epistemology |
Social Epistemology |
General Philosophy of Science |
Philosophy of Social Science |
Philosophy of Earth Sciences |
Reasoning |
Inference |