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166A Pragmatic Case against Pragmatic Scientific RealismJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 38 (2): 299-313. 2007.Pragmatic Scientific Realism (PSR) urges us to take up the realist aim or the goal of truth although we have good reason to think that the goal can neither be attained nor approximated. While Newton-Smith thinks that pursuing what we know we cannot achieve is clearly irrational, Rescher disagrees and contends that pursuing an unreachable goal can be rational on pragmatic grounds—if in pursuing the unreachable goal one can get indirect benefits. I have blocked this attempt at providing a pragmati…Read more
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77Akaike’s Theorem and weak predictivism in scienceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (4): 594-599. 2013.
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58Hitchcock and Sober on Weak PredictivismPhilosophia 40 (3): 553-562. 2012.According to Hitchcock and Sober’s argument from overfitting for weak predictivism, the fact that a theory accurately predicts a portion of its data is evidence that it has been formulated by balancing simplicity and goodness-of-fit rather than overfitting data. The core argument consists of two likelihood inequalities. In this paper I show that there is a surprising accommodation-friendly implication in their argument, and contend that it is beset by a substantial difficulty, namely, there is n…Read more
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55Should the No-Miracle Argument Add to Scientific Evidence?Philosophia 42 (4): 999-1004. 2014.Lipton contends that the no-miracle argument is illegitimate, because it fails to adduce new evidence beyond that cited by scientists for their theories. The debate on this issue between Lipton and Psillos has focussed on whether there is a construal of the no-miracle argument in relation to first-order scientific inferences that can yield new evidence. I move away from this focus without taking sides, and argue that the no-miracle argument, on its two popular interpretations, is as legitimate, …Read more
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23A pragmatic case against pragmatic theological realismHeythrop Journal 50 (3): 479-494. 2009.Pragmatic theological realism (PTR) urges us to take up the realist aim of theology or the goal of truth although we have good reason to think that the goal can neither be attained nor approximated. Rescher contends that pursuing an unreachable goal can be rational on pragmatic grounds so long as pursuing the unreachable goal yields indirect benefits. I have blocked this attempt at providing a pragmatic justification for the realist aim of PTR on precisely the same pragmatic grounds: since there…Read more