This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to give readers (...) new to the field of judgment aggregation a sense of this rapidly growing research area. (shrink)

Science provides us with representations of atoms, elementary particles, polymers, populations, genetic trees, economies, rational decisions, aeroplanes, earthquakes, forest fires, irrigation systems, and the world’s climate. It's through these representations that we learn about the world. This entry explores various different accounts of scientific representation, with a particular focus on how scientific models represent their target systems. As philosophers of science are increasingly acknowledging the importance, if not the primacy, of scientific models as representational units of science, it's important to (...) stress that how they represent plays a fundamental role in how we are to answer other questions in the philosophy of science (e.g. the scientific realism debate). This entry begins by disentangling ‘the’ problem of scientific representation, before critically evaluating the current options available in the literature. (shrink)

The image of man’s dominion over nature is deeply rooted in Western thought. It first appears, in different forms, in the Book of Genesis. It also reappears as one of the leading images of the emerging ‘new science’ in the 16th century. Francis Bacon puts particular emphasis on this image, which he takes to be the guiding principle of his new vision of science and practical knowledge. It is this vision which, as is widely acknowledged, will open the path to (...) modern science. In what follows I will first sketch some relevant background for the emergence of this image. I will then analyse how the image takes shape in the context of Bacon’s philosophical project, paying attention to the novelties of his project but also to its continuities with tradition (especially Christian thought). It is indeed this mixture of past and future which suggests how natural order and human rule come to speak as one voice in the vision of the new science. (shrink)

The so-called ergodic hierarchy (EH) is a central part of ergodic theory. It is a hierarchy of properties that dynamical systems can possess. Its five levels are egrodicity, weak mixing, strong mixing, Kolomogorov, and Bernoulli. Although EH is a mathematical theory, its concepts have been widely used in the foundations of statistical physics, accounts of randomness, and discussions about the nature of chaos. We introduce EH and discuss its applications in these fields.

This encyclopedia is the first of its kind in bringing together philosophy and the social sciences. It is not only about the philosophy of the social sciences but, going beyond that, it is also about the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences. The subject of this encyclopedia is purposefully multi- and inter-disciplinary. Knowledge boundaries are both delineated and crossed over. The goal is to convey a clear sense of how philosophy looks at the social sciences and to mark out (...) a detailed picture of how the two are interrelated: interwoven at certain times but also differentiated and contrasted at others. The Entries cover topics of central significance but also those that are both controversial and on the cutting-edge, underlining the unique mark of this Encyclopedia: the interrelationship between philosophy and the social sciences, especially as it is found in fresh ideas and unprecedented hybrid disciplinary areas. The Encyclopedia serves a further dual purpose: it contributes to the renewal of the philosophy of the social sciences and helps to promote novel modes of thinking about some of its classic problems. (shrink)

On the face of it both aggregation and deliberation represent alternative ways of producing a consensus. I argue, however, that the adequacy of aggregation mechanisms should be evaluated with an eye to the effects, both possible and actual, of public deliberation. Such an evaluation is undertaken by sketching a Bayesian model of deliberation as learning from others.

The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy" employs a wide construal of 'philosophy' that was common in former centuries. Its biographical entries include writers on mainstream philosophical topics whose individual contribution was small (for example, writers of textbooks or minor critics of major figures). But the encyclopedia also includes celebrated figures from other intellectual domains (e.g. poets, mathematicians, scientists and clergymen), who had something to say on topics that count as broadly philosophical. This interdisciplinary approach, coupled with sophisticated indexing and cross-referencing, (...) makes "CEBP" easily accessible to students and specialists across a huge range of subjects. It will become a highly important resource to support teaching and research in literature, history, classics, cultural studies, politics, economics, language, aesthetics, psychology and science, as well as in mainstream philosophy itself. (shrink)

The book is drawn from the Tarner lectures, delivered in Cambridge in 1993. It is concerned with the ultimate nature of reality, and how this is revealed by modern physical theories such as relativity and quantum theory. The objectivity and rationality of science are defended against the views of relativists and social constructionists. It is claimed that modern physics gives us a tentative and fallible, but nevertheless rational, approach to the nature of physical reality. The role of subjectivity in science (...) is examined in the fields of relativity theory, statistical mechanics and quantum theory, and recent claims of an essential role for human consciousness in physics are rejected. Prospects for a 'Theory of Everything' are considered, and the related question of how to assess scientific progress is carefully examined. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories (e.g., the reflective-equilibrium method), for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks (...) at a recent debate on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Books from Oxford Scholarship Online, Oxford Handbooks Online, Oxford Medicine Online, Oxford Clinical Psychology, and Very Short Introductions, as well as the.

There have long been controversies about how it is that minds can fit into a physical universe. Emergence in Mind presents new essays by a distinguished group of philosophers investigating whether mental properties can be said to 'emerge' from the physical processes in the universe. Such emergence requires mental properties to be different from physical properties, and much of the discussion relates to what the consequences of such a difference might be in areas such as freedom of the will, and (...) the possibility of scientific explanations of non-physical (for example, social) phenomena. The volume also extends the debate about emergence by considering the independence of chemical properties from physical properties, and investigating what would need to be the case for there to be groups that could be said to exercise rationality. (shrink)

One of the major attempts to avoid this problem is to claim that the subject matter of laws are ascriptions of dispositions, powers, capacities etc., and not the regular behaviour we find in nature. 'Causal capacities can be measured as surely or unsurely as anything else that science deals with. Sometimes we measure capacities in a physics laboratory'. Many philosophers of science think that many laws of nature are so called ceteris paribus laws. Take the following statements for examples: 'All (...) laws are ceteris paribus laws. Although many think that there are ceteris paribus laws not only in the proviso ridden social sciences but even all the way down to fundamental physics the ceteris paribus clause in law statements is problematic. Real objects nearly never display the laws which are supposed to hold for them. If taken as statements about regularities laws are either all false or they are ceteris paribus laws because there are hardly ever regularities. (shrink)

The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy" employs a wide construal of 'philosophy' that was common in former centuries. Its biographical entries include writers on mainstream philosophical topics whose individual contribution was small. But the encyclopedia also includes celebrated figures from other intellectual domains, who had something to say on topics that count as broadly philosophical. This interdisciplinary approach, coupled with sophisticated indexing and cross-referencing, makes "CEBP" easily accessible to students and specialists across a huge range of subjects. It will become (...) a highly important resource to support teaching and research in literature, history, classics, cultural studies, politics, economics, language, aesthetics, psychology and science, as well as in mainstream philosophy itself. (shrink)

This volume showcases the best of recent research in the philosophy of science. A compilation of papers presented at the EPSA 13, it explores a broad distribution of topics such as causation, truthlikeness, scientific representation, gender-specific medicine, laws of nature, science funding and the wisdom of crowds. Papers are organised into headings which form the structure of the book. Readers will find that it covers several major fields within the philosophy of science, from general philosophy of science to the more (...) specific philosophy of physics, philosophy of chemistry, philosophy of the life sciences, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of the social sciences and humanities, amongst others. This volume provides an excellent overview of the state of the art in the philosophy of science, as practiced in different European countries and beyond. ​It will appeal to researchers with an interest in the philosophical underpinnings of their own discipline, and to philosophers who wish to explore the latest work on the themes explored. (shrink)

This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to give readers (...) new to the field of judgment aggregation a sense of this rapidly growing research area. (shrink)

The image of man’s dominion over nature is deeply rooted in Western thought. It first appears, in different forms, in the Book of Genesis. It also reappears as one of the leading images of the emerging ‘new science’ in the 16th century. Francis Bacon puts particular emphasis on this image, which he takes to be the guiding principle of his new vision of science and practical knowledge. It is this vision which, as is widely acknowledged, will open the path to (...) modern science. In what follows I will first sketch some relevant background for the emergence of this image. I will then analyse how the image takes shape in the context of Bacon’s philosophical project, paying attention to the novelties of his project but also to its continuities with tradition. It is indeed this mixture of past and future which suggests how natural order and human rule come to speak as one voice in the vision of the new science. (shrink)

This volume defends a novel approach to the philosophy of physics: it is the first book devoted to a comparative study of probability, causality, and propensity, and their various interrelations, within the context of contemporary physics -- particularly quantum and statistical physics. The philosophical debates and distinctions are firmly grounded upon examples from actual physics, thus exemplifying a robustly empiricist approach. The essays, by both prominent scholars in the field and promising young researchers, constitute a pioneer effort in bringing out (...) the connections between probabilistic, causal and dispositional aspects of the quantum domain. The book will appeal to specialists in philosophy and foundations of physics, philosophy of science in general, metaphysics, ontology of physics theories, and philosophy of probability. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate (...) on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

This paper critically reviews Philip Kitcher's most recent epistemology of science, real realism. I argue that this view is unstable under different understandings of the term 'representation', and that the arguments offered for the position are either unsound or invalid depending on the understanding employed. Suitably modified those arguments are however convincing in favor of a deflationary version of real realism, which I refer to as the bare view. The bare view accepts Kitcher's Galilean strategy, and the ensuing commitment to (...) the existence of unobservables; but it does not trade on a correspondence or copy theory of representation. So the bare view, unlike real realism, does not entail that our representations match reality even approximately. (shrink)

This volume is a serious attempt to open up the subject of European philosophy of science to real thought, and provide the structural basis for the interdisciplinary development of its specialist fields, but also to provoke reflection on the idea of ‘European philosophy of science’. This efforts should foster a contemporaneous reflection on what might be meant by philosophy of science in Europe and European philosophy of science, and how in fact awareness of it could assist philosophers interpret and motivate (...) their research through a stronger collective identity. The overarching aim is to set the background for a collaborative project organising, systematising, and ultimately forging an identity for, European philosophy of science by creating research structures and developing research networks across Europe to promote its development. (shrink)

Condorcet's jury theorem shows that when the members of a group have noisy but independent information about what is best for the group as a whole, majority decisions tend to outperform dictatorial ones. When voting is supplemented by communication, however, the resulting interdependencies between decision makers can strengthen or undermine this effect: they can facilitate information pooling, but also amplify errors. We consider an intriguing non-human case of independent information pooling combined with communication: the case of nest-site choice by honeybee (...) (Apis mellifera) swarms. It is empirically well documented that when there are different nest sites that vary in quality, the bees usually choose the best one. We develop a new agent-based model of the bees' decision process and show that its remarkable reliability stems from a particular interplay of independence and interdependence between the bees. (shrink)

This article provides a state-of-the-art review of the philosophical literature on scientific representation. It first argues that the topic emerges historically mainly out of what may be called the modelling tradition. It then introduces a number of helpful analytical distinctions and goes on to divide contemporary approaches to scientific representation into two distinct kinds, substantive and deflationary. Analogies with related discussions of artistic representation in aesthetics and the nature of truth in metaphysics are pursued. It is finally urged that the (...) most promising approaches—and the ones most likely to feature prominently in future developments—are deflationary. In particular, a defense is provided of a genuinely inferential conception of representation. (shrink)

Daniel Hausman and James Woodward claim to prove that the causal Markov condition, so important to Bayes-nets methods for causal inference, is the ‘flip side’ of an important metaphysical fact about causation—that causes can be used to manipulate their effects. This paper disagrees. First, the premise of their proof does not demand that causes can be used to manipulate their effects but rather that if a relation passes a certain specific kind of test, it is causal. Second, the proof is (...) invalid. Third, the kind of testability they require can easily be had without the causal Markov condition. (shrink)

A good many models used in physics and economics offer descriptions of imaginary situations, using a combination of mathematics and natural language. The descriptions are both thin - not much about the situation is filled in - and unrealistic - what is filled in is not true of many real situations. Yet we want to use the results of these models to inform our conclusions about a range of actually occurring situations. I propose we interpret many of these models as (...) fables. The actual happenings in the model are only one concrete instantiation of a lesson that is more widely applicable ‘when expressed in more abstract language.' A fable generally comes with the abstract lesson attached; parables, by contrast, usually require an interpretation from outside. Models, then, tend to be more like parables than fables. The right abstract interpretation is not supplied by the model itself. The central problem, then, is where shall it come from? (shrink)

Why do systems prepared in a non-equilibrium state approach, and eventually reach, equilibrium? An important contemporary version of the Boltzmannian approach to statistical mechanics answers this question by an appeal to the notion of typicality. The problem with this approach is that it comes in different versions, which are, however, not recognised as such, much less clearly distinguished, and we often find different arguments pursued side by side. The aim of this paper is to disentangle different versions of typicality-based explanations (...) of thermodynamic behaviour and evaluate their respective success. My conclusion will be that the boldest version fails for technical reasons, while more prudent versions leave unanswered essential questions. (shrink)

This paper provides an introductory review of the theory of judgment aggregation. It introduces the paradoxes of majority voting that originally motivated the field, explains several key results on the impossibility of propositionwise judgment aggregation, presents a pedagogical proof of one of those results, discusses escape routes from the impossibility and relates judgment aggregation to some other salient aggregation problems, such as preference aggregation, abstract aggregation and probability aggregation. The present illustrative rather than exhaustive review is intended to give readers (...) new to the field of judgment aggregation a sense of this rapidly growing research area. (shrink)

The image of man’s dominion over nature is deeply rooted in Western thought. It first appears, in different forms, in the Book of Genesis. It also reappears as one of the leading images of the emerging ‘new science’ in the 16th century. Francis Bacon puts particular emphasis on this image, which he takes to be the guiding principle of his new vision of science and practical knowledge. It is this vision which, as is widely acknowledged, will open the path to (...) modern science. In what follows I will first sketch some relevant background for the emergence of this image. I will then analyse how the image takes shape in the context of Bacon’s philosophical project, paying attention to the novelties of his project but also to its continuities with tradition. It is indeed this mixture of past and future which suggests how natural order and human rule come to speak as one voice in the vision of the new science. (shrink)

The image of man’s dominion over nature is deeply rooted in Western thought. It first appears, in different forms, in the Book of Genesis. It also reappears as one of the leading images of the emerging ‘new science’ in the 16th century. Francis Bacon puts particular emphasis on this image, which he takes to be the guiding principle of his new vision of science and practical knowledge. It is this vision which, as is widely acknowledged, will open the path to (...) modern science. In what follows I will first sketch some relevant background for the emergence of this image. I will then analyse how the image takes shape in the context of Bacon’s philosophical project, paying attention to the novelties of his project but also to its continuities with tradition. It is indeed this mixture of past and future which suggests how natural order and human rule come to speak as one voice in the vision of the new science. (shrink)

The Common Cause Principle, stating that correlations are either consequences of a direct causal link between the correlated events or are due to a common cause, is assessed from the perspective of its viability and it is argued that at present we do not have strictly empirical evidence that could be interpreted as disconfirming the principle. In particular it is not known whether spacelike correlations predicted by quantum field theory can be explained by properly localized common causes, and EPR correlations (...) are known to be unexplainable only by common causes that are required to satisfy conditions that are empirically not tested. (shrink)

The state of science at any given time is characterized, in part at least, by the theories that are accepted at that time. Presently accepted theories include quantum theory, the general theory of relativity, and the modern synthesis of Darwin and Mendel, as well as lower‐level (but still clearly theoretical) assertions such as that DNA has a double‐helical structure, that the hydrogen atom contains a single electron, and so on. What precisely is involved in accepting a theory?

The claims of RCTs to be the gold standard rest on the fact that the ideal RCT is a deductive method: if the assumptions of the test are met, a positive result implies the appropriate causal conclusion. This is a feature that RCTs share with a variety of other methods, which thus have equal claim to being a gold standard. This paper describes some of these other deductive methods and also some useful non-deductive methods, including the hypothetico-deductive method. It argues (...) that with all deductive methods, the benefit that the conclusions follow deductively in the ideal case comes with a great cost: narrowness of scope. This is an instance of the familiar trade-off between internal and external validity. RCTs have high internal validity but the formal methodology puts severe constraints on the assumptions a target population must meet to justify exporting a conclusion from the test population to the target. The paper reviews one such set of assumptions to show the kind of knowledge required. The overall conclusion is that to draw causal inferences about a target population, which method is best depends case-by-case on what background knowledge we have or can come to obtain. There is no gold standard. (shrink)

On a purely epistemic understanding of experimental realism, manipulation affords a particularly robust kind of causal warrant, which is – like any other warrant – defeasible. I defend a version of Nancy Cartwright’s inference to the most likely cause, and I conclude that this minimally epistemic version of experimental realism is a coherent, adequate and plausible epistemology for science.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Background Why is Science Special from the Epistemic Point of View? Accumulation in Science, Despite “Revolutions”? Other Issues.

I review five explicit attempts throughout the history of quantum mechanics to invoke dispositional notions in order to solve the quantum paradoxes, namely: Margenau’s latencies, Heisenberg’s potentialities, Popper’s propensity interpretation of probability, Nick Maxwell’s propensitons, and the recent selective propensities interpretation of quantum mechanics. I raise difficulties and challenges for all of them, but conclude that the selective propensities approach nicely encompasses the virtues of its predecessors. I elaborate on some of the properties of the type of propensities that I (...) claim to be successful for quantum mechanics, and finish by briefly sketching out ways in which similar notions can be read into some of the other well-known interpretations of quantum mechanics. (shrink)