An amended bootstrapping can avoid Christensen's counterexamples. Earman and Edidin argue that Christensen's examples to bootstrapping rely on his failure to analyze background knowledge. I add an additional condition to bootstrapping that is motivated by Glymour's remarks on variety of evidence. I argue that it avoids the problems that the examples raise. I defend the modification against the charge that it is holistic, and that it collapses into Bayesianism.

Van Fraassen's constructive empiricism is presently the most influential and well-developed alternative to scientific realism. In this paper I argue that a reasonable condition on the distinction between belief and agnosticism prevents van Fraassen from claiming that we can be agnostic about what a theory says about unobservable entities while simultaneously accepting that theory. The upshot is that we must find some other way to do justice both to the argument for constructive empiricism and to van Fraassen's cogent criticisms of (...) scientific realism. I suggest that a highly attractive alternative is founded upon semantic anti-realism, and that empiricists should develop this alternative. (shrink)

Van Fraassen stresses two distinct but interrelated themes in The Scientific Image: the semantic view of theories and the epistemic status of unobservables. The first of these could easily be accepted by a scientific realist, and indeed realists like Giere have already adapted it to their purposes. So the specifically empiricist thread in van Fraassen’s philosophy stems from the second.Van Fraassen breaks from tradition in founding his empiricism not on the ontological status of unobservable entities but on the epistemic attitude (...) we take to them. The main points of his position are these:1)The claims of scientific theories, including claims about unobservable entities, are to be taken literally. Theories are not reconstructed so as to remove claims of the existence of unobservable objects.2)Observation is a matter of direct observation by accepted participants in the human scientific community. (shrink)

In this work, the views of thinkers in education who have been concerned with expertise are scanned. In the introduction, the importance of the subject is established. The point is made that the ratio of administrators has gone from one supervisor to 32 teachers in 1920 to one administrator for everey 12 teachers in 1985. As well, specialists in teaching have increased 1, 000 percent in the sixteen years before 1980. In their plans for career stages the current reform efforts (...) of the Holmes group and the Carnegie Forum have emphasized an increase in both steps of the hierarchy of education and the type of specialization that might occur. It is crusial to consider “our most prominent educations thinkers” for their “insights about the effects of educations expertise”. (shrink)

This article argues against Nina Emery’s view that there are compelling reasons to believe in nomological probabilities. To the degree that we can see no other way to detect the occurrence of the explanans apart from the bare fact that the explanandum happened, we may be skeptical that the proposed explanation is correct and open to the possibility that there is none. This provides us with a way to distinguish physical entities from mathematical ones, illuminating interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Michael Dummett's anti-realism is founded on the semantics of natural language which, he argues, can only be satisfactorily given in mathematics by intuitionism. It has been objected that an analog of Dummett's argument will collapse intuitionism into strict finitism. My purpose in this paper is to refute this objection, which I argue Dummett does not successfully do. I link the coherence of strict finitism to a view of confirmation — that our actual practical abilities cannot confirm we know what would (...) happen if we could compute impracticably vast problems. But to state his case, the strict finitists have to suppose that we grasp the truth conditions of sentences we can't actually decide. This comprehension must be practically demonstrable, or the analogy with Dummett's argument fails. So, our actual abilities must be capable of confirming that we know what would be the case if actually undecidable sentences were true, contradicting the view of confirmation. I end by considering objections. (shrink)

This Dissertation expands the work of Michael Dummett to issues in the philosophy of science. ;Chapter One relates the issue of realism to that of truth and meaning. ;Dummett's view is subject to the same attacks that doomed logical positivism. In Chapter Two I defend him against these attacks and articulate his view further. In particular, Dummett's view of sense is articulated, and the attacks of Kripke and Hempel are addressed. ;Chapter Three is devoted to applying Dummett's view to Mach's (...) criticisms of absolute space. I argue that the usual reading of Mach is incorrect, and strains the text. I then argue that Mach is best read as arguing that absolute space is a senseless concept. ;Chapter Four argues that van Fraassen's view that we may be agnostic about what a theory says about unobservable objects while believing its edicts about observable ones erases the distinction between belief and agnosticism. I also argue that empirically equivalent theories must have the same truth value. ;The fifth chapter replies to the objection that my position must collapse into something more radical, strict finitism in the case of mathematics. I reply that the objection depends on a view of counterfactuals I am not bound to adopt. ;Finally I apply the apparatus developed to the articulation of an anti-realist theme in the work of Thomas Kuhn. (shrink)

The Quine-Duhem thesis states that we always have a choice about how praise or blame are distributed in cases of scientific justification. But in many scientific examples, there is simply no room to doubt that a particular hypothesis is responsible for a refutation or established by the observations. Fault Tracing gives a theory of independent justification from different sets of evidence. Using both real and artificial examples, it shows how to play independently established hypotheses against each other to determine whether (...) an arbitrary hypothesis needs to be altered in the light of (apparently) refuting evidence. This is a theory of the functioning of background knowledge in scientific justification, which allows for justification from the evidence independently of values. The book ends by briefly discussing the significance of these results in metaphysics and philosophy. (shrink)