I argue against the tendency in the philosophy of science literature to link abduction to the inference to the best explanation (IBE), and in particular, to claim that Peireean abduction is a conceptual predecessor to IBE. This is not to discount either abduction or IBE. Rather the purpose of this paper is to clarify the relation between Peireean abduction and IBE in accounting for ampliative inference in science. This paper aims at a proper classification—not justification—of types of scientific reasoning. In (...) particular, I claim that Peireean abduction is an in-depth account of the process of generating explanatory hypotheses, while IBE, at least in Peter Lipton's thorough treatment, is a more encompassing account of the processes both of generating and of evaluating scientific hypotheses. There is then a two-fold problem with the claim that abduction is IBE. On the one hand, it conflates abduction and induction, which are two distinct forms of logical inference, with two distinct aims, as shown by Charles S. Peirce; on the other hand it lacks a clear sense of the full scope of IBE as an account of scientific inference. (shrink)

"Charles Taylor presents a fundamental challenge to neoliberal apologists for the new world order--but not only to them.

"How do we go about weighing evidence, testing hypotheses and making inferences? According to the model of 'inference to the Best explanation', we work out what to inter from the evidence by thinking about what would actually explain that evidence, and we take the ability of a hypothesis to explain the evidence as a sign that the hypothesis is correct. In inference to the Best Explanation, Peter Lipton gives this important and influential idea the development and assessment it deserves." (...) "The second edition has been substantially enlarged and reworked, with a new chapter on the relationship between explanation and Bayesianism, and an extension and defence of the account of contractive explanation. It also includes an expanded defence of the claims that our inferences really are guided by diverse explanatory considerations, and that this pattern of inference can take us towards the truth. This edition of Inference to the Best Explanation has also been updated throughout and incudes a new bibliography."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

This book provides a novel interpretation of the ideas about language in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Travis places the "private language argument" in the context of wider themes in the Investigations, and thereby develops a picture of what it is for words to bear the meaning they do. He elaborates two versions of a private language argument, and shows the consequences of these for current trends in the philosophical theory of meaning.

In this book Taylor brings together some of his best essays, including "Overcoming Epistemology," "The Validity of Transcendental Argument," "Irreducibly Social ...

Iris Murdoch and moral philosophy -- Understanding the other: a Gadamerian view on conceptual schemes -- Language not mysterious? -- Celan and the recovery of language -- Nationalism and modernity -- Conditions of an unforced consensus on human rights -- Democratic exclusion (and its remedies?) -- Religious mobilizations -- Themes from a secular age -- The immanent counter-enlightenment -- Notes on the sources of violence: perennial and modern -- The future of the religious past -- Disenchantment-re-enchantment -- What does secularism (...) mean? -- Die blosse Vernunft ("reason alone") -- Perils of moralism -- What was the Axial revolution? (shrink)

At the very beginning of L’Homme-Machine, La Mettrie claims that Leibnizians with their monads have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul”; a few years later Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of ‘genetic’ information, conceived of living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence,” in his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés. This text first (...) appeared in Latin in 1751 under the title Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturae systemate, with the pseudonym Dr Baumann; it was translated by Maupertuis in 1754 as Essai sur la formation des corps organisés and was later included in his 1756 Œuvres under the title Système de la nature. Now, it is clear that Maupertuis was a kind of Leibnizian; and that his molecule possessed higher-level, ‘mental’ properties. In that sense he falls under the first category described by La Mettrie. But he was also involved in a debate on this issue with Diderot, who put forth a sustained critique of Maupertuis’ theory of the molecule in the additions to his 1753 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living minima, Diderot argues that these properties are ‘organizational’, i.e., they can only be properties of the whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism. (shrink)

In his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a ‘volitional determinism’. Some decades later, (...) Diderot articulates a very similar determinism, which seeks to recognize the existence of “causes proper to man” (as he says in the Réfutation d’Helvétius). The difference with Collins is that now biological factors are being taken into account. Obviously both the ‘volitional’ and the ‘biological’ forms of determinism are noteworthy inasmuch as they change our picture of the nature of determinism itself, but my interest here is to compare these two determinist arguments, both of which are broadly Spinozist in nature – and as such belong to what Jonathan Israel called in his recent book “the radical Enlightenment,” i.e. a kind of underground Enlightenment constituted by Spinozism – and to see how Collins’ specifically psychological vision and Diderot’s specifically biological vision correspond to their two separate national contexts: determinism in France in the mid-1750s was a much more medico-biological affair than English determinism, which appears to be on a ‘path’ leading to Mill and associationist psychology. (shrink)

This article develops Frege's conception of answerability, and his correlative views on psychologism of the first sort. Compared to prior philosophers, such as British empiricists, Frege is a minimalist in the demands he sets on answerability. If he is ever less than minimalist, that is something that flows out of his particular conception of logic. The article then turns to Wittgenstein's conception of answerability, by which Frege is not quite minimalist enough. That allows us to see how the pursuit of (...) answerability might lead to psychologism of the second kind. (shrink)

This paper considers a central objection to evolutionary epistemology. The objection is that biological and epistemic development are not analogous, since while biological variation is blind, epistemic variation is not. The generation of hypotheses, unlike the generation of genotypes, is not random. We argue that this objection is misguided and show how the central analogy of evolutionary epistemology can be preserved. The core of our reply is that much epistemic variation is indeed directed by heuristics, but these heuristics are analogous (...) to biological preadaptations which account for the evolution of complex organs. We also argue that many of these heuristics or epistemic preadaptations are not innate but were themselves generatedby a process of blind variation and selective retention. (shrink)

How do we go about weighing evidence, testing hypotheses, and making inferences? The model of " inference to the best explanation " -- that we infer the hypothesis that would, if correct, provide the best explanation of the available evidence--offers a compelling account of inferences both in science and in ordinary life. Widely cited by epistemologists and philosophers of science, IBE has nonetheless remained little more than a slogan. Now this influential work has been thoroughly revised and updated, and features (...) a new introduction and two new chapters. Inference to the Best Explanation is an unrivaled exposition of a theory of particular interest in the fields both of epistemology and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

How do we go about weighing evidence, testing hypotheses, and making inferences? According to the model of _Inference to the Best Explanation_, we work out what to infer from the evidence by thinking about what would actually explain that evidence, and we take the ability of a hypothesis to explain the evidence as a sign that the hypothesis is correct. In _Inference to the Best Explanation_, Peter Lipton gives this important and influential idea the development and assessment it deserves. (...) The second edition has been substantially enlarged and reworked, with a new chapter on the relationship between explanation and Bayesianism, and an extension and defence of the account of contrastive explanation. It also includes an expanded defence of the claims that our inferences really are guided by diverse explanatory considerations, and that this pattern of inference can take us towards the truth. This edition of _Inference to the Best Explanation_ has also been updated throughout and includes a new bibliography. (shrink)

An indispensable and comprehensive resource for students and scholars of philosophy of religion.

Inspired by recent breakthroughs in predictive modeling, practitioners in both industry and government have turned to machine learning with hopes of operationalizing predictions to drive automated decisions. Unfortunately, many social desiderata concerning consequential decisions, such as justice or fairness, have no natural formulation within a purely predictive framework. In efforts to mitigate these problems, researchers have proposed a variety of metrics for quantifying deviations from various statistical parities that we might expect to observe in a fair world and offered a (...) variety of algorithms in attempts to satisfy subsets of these parities or to trade o the degree to which they are satised against utility. In this paper, we connect this approach to fair machine learning to the literature on ideal and non-ideal methodological approaches in political philosophy. The ideal approach requires positing the principles according to which a just world would operate. In the most straightforward application of ideal theory, one supports a proposed policy by arguing that it closes a discrepancy between the real and the perfectly just world. However, by failing to account for the mechanisms by which our non-ideal world arose, the responsibilities of various decision-makers, and the impacts of proposed policies, naive applications of ideal thinking can lead to misguided interventions. In this paper, we demonstrate a connection between the fair machine learning literature and the ideal approach in political philosophy, and argue that the increasingly apparent shortcomings of proposed fair machine learning algorithms reflect broader troubles faced by the ideal approach. We conclude with a critical discussion of the harms of misguided solutions, a reinterpretation of impossibility results, and directions for future research. (shrink)

As the poet T.S. Eliot said, 'Where is the wisdom lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge lost in information?' Our postmodern 'information culture' forces us to be over-cerebral, but it doesn't teach us to think; consequently it becomes nearly impossible for us to imagine a knowledge that is beyond information, much less a Wisdom that is beyond knowledge. We all know what it is to uselessly 'spin our wheels' in barren thought and fantasy; certain valid contemplative disciplines even have (...) as their main goal the pacification of the 'monkey mind', the over-heated brain that prevents us from genuinely living our lives, from being fully present to the world, to each other, and to ourselves. But such pacification can also have a nihilistic side to it. It can subtly fool us into believing that the pursuit of meaning, the attainment of intellectual stability and certainty, is neither possible or desirable - a belief that is of great use to the political and economic Powers That Be in the emerging global society, who are always delighted to hear people express the opinion that there is no such thing as objective Truth, that we can't really know what is real, or if anything is real, beyond our own subjective experience. To the degree that the people start to believe that nothing can be known (our hidden masters reason), they will stop asking embarrassing and inconvenient questions. The notion of objective truth - not to mention Absolute truth - immediately suggests oppression, tyranny and fanaticism to the postmodern mind. Why? Because we have been systematically taught to see things this way by those Social Engineers who construct and impose the terms by which Reality is to be viewed. In order to break free from this socially-imposed subjectivism, we need to remember that Reality is not something determined by belief, but rather that belief is only true when it conforms itself to Reality. If we see nothing beyond this material/social world, we will be forced to take our own subjectivity as the only way to awaken from the social trance, and so fall even more deeply into that very trance, which is precisely a collective subjectivity. But if we know Objective Truth as metaphysical, beyond material nature and human society, then we have begun to catch a glimpse of the One Way Out. The traditional notion of Knowledge maintains that, 1) Truth can be known with certainty, and, 2) that the reason for knowing Truth is to transform our lives from a state of chaotic uncertainty, vulnerable to all the suffering that illusion and impermanence can produce, into one of eternal certainty and stability, where the knower becomes one with the Thing known - a state that goes by the name of bliss. To begin the path toward this bliss, however, we will need to know how to know; and this requires, as the necessary first step, that we know how to take knowledge seriously. As metaphysician Frithjof Schuon put it: 'Knowledge only saves us on condition that it enlists all that we are, only when it is a way and when it works and transforms and wounds our nature, even as the plough wounds the soil'. The shifting illusions of individual and collective subjectivity cannot protect us, and will always betray us. But if we are firmly rooted in that Truth which, in the words of Lew Welch, 'goes on whether we look at it or not', then we have a Protector - one Who is always there, upon Whom we can always rely, and to Whom we can always turn, when we can no longer remedy or deny or escape from the suffering and insecurity of conditional life. So let's begin. (shrink)

The volume contains studies by eleven distinguished scholars, concerning changes in ethical and religious consciousness during this important era of Western ...

This book is an examination of the inattention of business schools to moral education, addressing lessons learned from the most recent business corruption scandals and financial crises, and also questioning what we're teaching now and what should be considering in educating future business leaders to cope with the challenges of leading with integrity in the global environment"--Provided by publisher.

In this paper I argue in favour of a new definition of presentism that I call ‘existence presentism’ (EP). Typically, presentism is defined as the thesis that ‘only present objects exist’, or ‘nothing exists that is non-present’.1 I assume these statements to be equivalent. I call these statements of presentism ‘conventional presentism’ (CP). First, in §2, I rehearse arguments due to Ulrich Meyer that purport to show that presentism is not adequately defined as CP. In §§2.1–2.4 I show that considerations (...) of the sort raised by Meyer infect attempts to define presentism, due to Thomas Crisp, Tom Stoneham, and Theodore Sider. Thus the first half of the paper is constituted by a negative project that looks to show how extant definitions of presentism fail. In the second half of the paper, I continue in the negative theme in §3, before laying out EP and demonstrating that it solves the problems faced by CP and offering explanations of how to make sense of certain key notions that lie at the heart of EP. I conclude that EP is preferable to CP. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms are increasingly used to shape high-stake allocations, sparking research efforts to orient algorithm design towards ideals of justice and fairness. In this research on algorithmic fairness, normative theorizing has primarily focused on identification of “ideally fair” target states. In this paper, we argue that this preoccupation with target states in abstraction from the situated dynamics of deployment is misguided. We propose a framework that takes dynamic trajectories as direct objects of moral appraisal, highlighting three respects in which (...) such trajectories can be subject to evaluation in relation to their temporal dynamics, robustness, and representation. (shrink)

Ce livre étudie, à travers une série d'épisodes allant de la philosophie des Lumières à notre époque, le problème du matérialisme dans l'histoire de la philosophie et l’histoire des sciences. Comment comprendre les spécificités de l’histoire du matérialisme, des Lumières à nos jours, au sein de la grande histoire de la philosophie et de l’histoire des sciences ? Quelle est l’actualité de l’opposition classique entre le corps et l’esprit ? Qu’est-ce que le rire ou le rêve peuvent nous apprendre du (...) matérialisme ? En traversant l’histoire de ce concept jusqu’à l’émergence d’un « nouveau matérialisme » contemporain, l’ouvrage vise à revitaliser le matérialisme et sa lecture. -/- . (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Postmodernism, globalism & the New Age -- Who are the traditionalists? -- What is the New Age? -- New Age authorities : a divided house -- The shadows of God -- The war against love -- Ufos & traditional metaphysics : a postmodern demonology -- Vigilance at the eleventh hour : a refutation of The only tradition -- Comparative eschatology -- Facing apocalypse.

Discusses heaven, the Creation, forgiveness, vanity, the theology of romantic love, responsibility, and the life of Jesus.

The living body appears like an endlessly renewable reservoir of authenticity, hope, and taboo. But, for the sake of conceptual clarity, we are often been told that the (mere) body should be distinguished from the flesh. That is, it’s undeniable that I have a body; that I notice yours; that we worry about their birth and death and upkeep. But the flesh is a more transcendentalized, loaded concept – not least given its frequently religious background (incarnation: the Word made Flesh). (...) It is the body ‘kicked upstairs’, ‘bumped up’ one ontological level. Flesh is like a mantra, an obsessive leitmotif. Is the difference just one of abstraction? Indeed, crucial to the narrative of phenomenology (most obviously in Merleau-Ponty but really, throughout, including in enactivism), to the story of ancestor worship and identity it tells itself and its acolytes around the campfire, is a basic distinction between the merely physical body and the flesh as something requiring ‘mineness’, namely, an understanding of it as uniquely ‘my own’, a feeling of ‘what it is like to be embodied’. This goes back to the Husserlian distinction between Körper, ‘body’ in the sense of one body among others in a vast mechanistic universe of bodies, and Leib, ‘flesh’ in the sense of a subjectivity which is the locus of experience. In this essay I reflect on this vision of the body’s authenticity and its costs, and contrast it with insights derived from Georges Canguilhem, whose critique of mechanism/mechanicism is not done in the name of a wholescale organicism and/or an unproblematized éloge of embodiment and privacy. (shrink)

Maude's excellent translation of Tolstoy's treatise on the emotionalist theory of art was the first unexpurgated version of the work to appear in any language. More than ninety years later this work remains, as Vincent Tomas observed, "one of the most rigorous attacks on formalism and on the doctrine of art for art's sake ever written". Tomas' Introduction makes this the edition of choice for students of aesthetics and anyone with philosophical interests.

Scientific articles exemplify standard functional units constraining argumentative structures. Severe space limitations demand every paragraph and illustration contribute to establishing the paper's claims. Philosophical testing and confirmation models should take into account each paragraph, table, and illustration. Hypothetico-Deductive, Bayesian Inductive, and Inference-to-the-Best-Explanation models do not, garbling the logic of papers. Micro-analysis of the fundamental paper in plate tectonics reveals an argumentative structure commonplace in science but ignored by standard philosophical accounts that cannot be dismissed as mere rhetorical embellishment. Papers with (...) illustrations often display a second argumentative structure differing from the text's. Constraints on adequate testing and confirmation analyses are adduced. “Experiments are about the assembly of persuasive arguments, ones that will stand up in court. … The task at hand is to capture the building-up of a persuasive argument about the world even in the absence of the logician's certainty.”—Galison, How Experiments End, 277. (shrink)

The present book is intended to help students overcome difficulties by presenting Jaspers' thoughts in comparatively clear and straightforward fashion. While it denies that philosophy is "practical" in any cheap and obvious sense, it follows Jaspers in attempting to avoid the otiose and emphasize the relevance of philosophy to matters of ultimate concern. Those who wish a more theoretical and systematic presentation may well call to mind that, as Heidegger's followers express it, Jaspers, like Kierkegaard- and to some extent Sartre- (...) quite deliberately spurned the "ontological" in favor of the "ontic.". (shrink)

Science depends on judgments of the bearing of evidence on theory. Scientists must judge whether an observation or the result of an experiment supports, disconfirms, or is simply irrelevant to a given hypothesis. Similarly, scientists may judge that, given all the available evidence, a hypothesis ought to be accepted as correct or nearly so, rejected as false, or neither. Occasionally, these evidential judgments can be made on deductive grounds. If an experimental result strictly contradicts a hypothesis, then the truth of (...) the data deductively entails the falsity of the hypothesis. In the great majority of cases, however, the connection between evidence and hypothesis is non-demonstrative, or inductive. In particular, this is so whenever a general hypothesis is inferred to be correct on the basis of the available data, since the truth of the data will not deductively entail the truth of the hypothesis. It always remains possible that the hypothesis is false even though the data are correct. (shrink)