We are grateful to the commentators for taking the time to respond to our article. Too many interesting and important points have been raised for us to tackle them all in this response, and so in the below we have sought to draw out the major themes. These include problems with both the term ‘ultimate causation’ and the proximate-ultimate causation dichotomy more generally, clarification of the meaning of reciprocal causation, discussion of issues related to the nature of development and phenotypic (...) plasticity and their roles in evolution, and consideration of the need for an extended evolutionary synthesis. (shrink)

Bayesian reasoning has been applied formally to statistical inference, machine learning and analysing scientific method. Here I apply it informally to more common forms of inference, namely natural language arguments. I analyse a variety of traditional fallacies, deductive, inductive and causal, and find more merit in them than is generally acknowledged. Bayesian principles provide a framework for understanding ordinary arguments which is well worth developing.

What Is Scientific Knowledge? is a much-needed collection of introductory-level chapters on the epistemology of science. Renowned historians, philosophers, science educators, and cognitive scientists have authored 19 original contributions specifically for this volume. The chapters, accessible for students in both philosophy and the sciences, serve as helpful introductions to the primary debates surrounding scientific knowledge.First-year undergraduates can readily understand the variety of discussions in the volume, and yet advanced students and scholars will encounter chapters rich enough to engage their many (...) interests. The variety and coverage in this volume make it the perfect choice for the primary text in courses on scientific knowledge. It can also be used as a supplemental book in classes in epistemology, philosophy of science, and other related areas. (shrink)

Theoretical Computer Science, 383: 270-289, 2007.

: Bioethics has focused on the areas of individual ethical choices--patient care--or public policy and law. There are, however, important arenas for ethical choices that have been overlooked. Health care is populated with intermediate arenas such as hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, and health care systems. This essay argues that bioethics needs to develop a language and concepts for institutional ethics. A first step in this direction is to think about institutional conscience.

The Lottery Paradox has been thought to provide a reductio argument against probabilistic accounts of inductive inference. As a result, much work in artificial intelligence has concentrated on qualitative methods of inference, including default logics, which are intended to model some varieties of inductive inference. It has recently been shown that the paradox can be generated within qualitative default logics. However, John Pollock's qualitative system of defeasible inference, does avoid the Lottery Paradox by incorporating a rule designed specifically for that (...) purpose. I shall argue that Pollock's system instead succumbs to a worse disease: it fails to allow for induction at all. (shrink)

This volume presents 15 studies occasioned by the 500th anniversary of the European discovery of America. It covers both the initial encounters between the Europeans and native Americans and the golden age of Hispanic philosophy that followed the discovery - specifically between 1500 and 1650.

Explanation and evidence are related in one way that is uncontroversial: evidence can confirm or disconfirm explanations. One explanation of Sally’s cold is that she has a virus; another is that she has a bacterial infection. The available evidence confirms the virus explanation because the evidence supports that colds are caused by viruses, not bacteria. A more interesting question concerns whether explanatory facts themselves provide evidence. That is to say, do we get evidence for p simply by realizing that p, (...) if true, would explain some data? Explanationists answer this question affirmatively, maintaining that explanatoriness is evidence of truth. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a series of papers read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society through the 1820s, the Cambridge mathematician George Peacock laid the foundation for a natural history of arithmetic that would tell a story of human progress from counting to modern arithmetic. The trajectory of that history, Peacock argued, established algebraic analysis as a form of universal reasoning that used empirically warranted operations of mind to think with symbols on paper. The science of counting would suggest arithmetic, arithmetic would suggest (...) arithmetical algebra, and, finally, arithmetical algebra would suggest symbolic algebra. This philosophy of suggestion provided the foundation for Peacock's “principle of equivalent forms,” which justified the practice of nineteenth-century English symbolic algebra. Peacock's philosophy of suggestion owed a considerable debt to the early Cambridge Philosophical Society culture of natural history. The aim of this essay is to show how that culture of natural history was constitutively significant to the practice of nineteenth-century English algebra. (shrink)

I have applied a fairly general, learning theoretic perspective to some questions raised by Reichenbach's positions on induction and discovery. This is appropriate in an examination of the significance of Reichenbach's work, since the learning-theoretic perspective is to some degree part of Reichenbach's reliabilist legacy. I have argued that Reichenbach's positivism and his infatuation with probabilities are both irrelevant to his views on induction, which are principally grounded in the notion of limiting reliability. I have suggested that limiting reliability is (...) still a formidable basis for the formulation of methodological norms, particularly when reliability cannot possibly be had in the short run, so that refined judgments about evidential support must depend upon measure-theoretic choices having nothing to do in the short run with the truth of the hypothesis under investigation. To illustrate the generality of Reichenbach's program, I showed how it can be applied to methods that aim to solve arbitrary assessment and discovery problems in various senses. In this generalized Reichenbachian setting, we can characterize the intrinsic complexity of reliable inductive inference in terms of topological complexity. Finally, I let Reichenbach's theory of induction have the last say about hypothetico-deductive method. (shrink)

Conversations about art often include broad statements about the stature of artists. Such statements raise questions about the best way to look at the bodies of work of artists. Like individual works of art, bodies of work are artistic objects worthy of appreciation. Through the body of work, we are better able to engage the aspects of creativity that require a long-term perspective. This long-term perspective allows us to look for a range of aesthetic qualities not readily evident in individual (...) works of art. Looking at bodies of work also helps us to appreciate artistic accomplishments unfolding over a lifetime. (shrink)

Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain that war is a vast and reciprocal swearing on the body, with corporeality key not only to its brutal prosecution but also to the eventual ending of the political ‘crisis of substantiation’ that war entails. However, her work has not been extensively explored with reference to significant transformations in the embodied experiences of contemporary warfare. This article thus analyses a particular articulation of late modern warfare that I term predatory war, whose current (...) signature motif is the drone strike, through the lens of Scarry’s work. Here, the associated modes of embodiment are radically non-reciprocal, the woundscapes of conflict are profoundly asymmetric, and the affective mediation of bodily injury does not substantiate any ending to the conflict. As such, I argue that the ontology and phenomenology of predatory war increasingly resembles what Scarry identifies as the underlying structure of torture. (shrink)

Was David Hume radically sceptical about our attempts to understand the world or was he merely approaching philosophical problems from a scientific perspective? Most philosophers today believe that Hume's outlook was more scientific than radically sceptical and that his scepticism was more limited than previously supposed. If these philosophers are correct, then Hume's approach to philosophy mirrors the approach of many contemporary philosophers. This similarity between Hume and many aspects of contemporary philosophy suggests that we should try to understand Hume (...) not as an historical relic but as a partner in a continuing philosophical dialogue. When we look closely at Hume's thoughts about human understanding, we find that Hume's scepticism emerges very insistently in the context of Hume's scientific approach. This book tries to come to terms with Hume's scepticism in a way that sheds light on contemporary philosophy and its relationship to science. (shrink)

Wittgenstein was centrally concerned with the puzzling nature of the mind, mathematics, morality and modality. He also developed innovative views about the status and methodology of philosophy and was explicitly opposed to crudely "scientistic" worldviews. His later thought has thus often been understood as elaborating a nuanced form of naturalism appealing to such notions as "form of life", "primitive reactions", "natural history", "general facts of nature" and "common behaviour of mankind". And yet, Wittgenstein is strangely absent from much of the (...) contemporary literature on naturalism and naturalising projects. This is the first collection of essays to focus explicitly on the relationship between Wittgenstein and naturalism. The volume is divided into four sections, each of which addresses a different aspect of naturalism and its relation to Wittgenstein's thought. The first section considers how naturalism could or should be understood. The second section deals with some of the main problematic domains—consciousness, meaning, mathematics—that philosophers have typically sought to naturalise. The third section explores ways in which the conceptual nature of human life might be continuous in important respects with animals. The final section is concerned with the naturalistic status and methodology of philosophy itself. This book thus casts a fresh light on many classical philosophical issues and brings Wittgensteinian ideas to bear on a number of current debates-for example experimental philosophy, neo-pragmatism and animal cognition/ethics-in which naturalism is playing a central role. (shrink)

We further develop the mathematical theory of causal interventions, extending earlier results of Korb, Twardy, Handfield, & Oppy, (2005) and Spirtes, Glymour, Scheines (2000). Some of the skepticism surrounding causal discovery has concerned the fact that using only observational data can radically underdetermine the best explanatory causal model, with the true causal model appearing inferior to a simpler, faithful model (cf. Cartwright, (2001). Our results show that experimental data, together with some plausible assumptions, can reduce the space of viable explanatory (...) causal models to one. (shrink)

My point of departure is the idea that Wittgenstein's work, especially his later work with its explicit emphasis on practices, seeks to engage a reader who is likely to come to philosophy with a certain cast of mind that includes unexamined commitments from a particular cultural context. I show how a substantial number of remarks by Wittgenstein in which he addresses cultural topics bring out the importance of the quite specific connections he saw between the philosophical problems with which he (...) grappled and the historical cultural context in which those problems have arisen. Not only is a grasp of this aspect of his writing integral to a proper understanding of Wittgenstein as a thinker, bringing out these connections serves to put these remarks into a coherent conceptual framework. In assessing the relation of Wittgenstein's cultural concerns to his engagement with metaphysics, I show how his development of Spengler's thought is an important connecting link. Particularly important for this analysis will be my discussion of Wittgenstein's understanding and employment of the concept of a Betrachtungsform , as well as a few closely related concepts. I then offer an interpretation of what I believe to be the significance of the connection in his later thought between his philosophical activity and his views about the modern West. (shrink)

The selection from Capreolus's work represented in this translation shows him defending Aquinas's conclusions on faith, hope, charity, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the virtues against such adversaries.

The paper assumes for its starting point the basic correctness of the so-called “resolute” reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, a reading first developed by Cora Diamond and James Conant. The main part of the paper concerns the consequences this interpretation will have for our understanding of Wittgenstein's well-known remark in a letter to a prospective publisher that the point or aim of his book was an ethical one. I first give a sketch of what, given the committments of the resolute reading, (...) the ethical point of the book will be, and then argue that given these committments and Wittgenstein's own philosophical biases at the time he wrote the Tractatus, the book cannot serve the ethical purpose for which it was written. (shrink)

This paper concerns the widely discussed exchange between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell that took place a few years back. The author first provides a brief sketch of how McDowell’s practice of philosophy for the last twenty or so years is best described as “quietist” in the spirit of the later Wittgenstein. Next, he shows that this exchange with Dreyfus is best understood as carried on largely in this spirit as well, even though McDowell somewhat inexplicably fails to acknowledge this (...) point in the course of the dispute. Finally and most importantly, the author shows how, somewhat ironically, the dispute takes a turn that suggests a remaining tension in McDowell’s own thought about the nature of philosophy. This tension comes out in his unwillingness to relinquish, or at least set aside temporarily, important parts of the traditional philosophical vocabulary that seem to be getting in the way in his dispute with Dreyfus. At the broadest level, the paper concerns difficulties with attempts to overcome the metaphysical tradition, and the role of the tradition’s vocabulary in such attempts, even in a discussion between two skilled philosophers who both have great sympathy for such a project. (shrink)

A finite data set is consistent with infinitely many alternative theories. Scientific realists recommend that we prefer the simplest one. Anti-realists ask how a fixed simplicity bias could track the truth when the truth might be complex. It is no solution to impose a prior probability distribution biased toward simplicity, for such a distribution merely embodies the bias at issue without explaining its efficacy. In this note, I argue, on the basis of computational learning theory, that a fixed simplicity bias (...) is necessary if inquiry is to converge to the right answer efficiently, whatever the right answer might be. Efficiency is understood in the sense of minimizing the least fixed bound on retractions or errors prior to convergence. (shrink)

This article suggests that a parallel exists between the practice of tattooing and the injection of heroin as both activities are represented in a body of literature here called `Junk Narratives'. These texts include William Burroughs' Junky, Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. In these books, act and meaning, as in life, are inseparable: tattoos can be interpreted, but that they are tattoos, that they have been indelibly inscribed into the flesh, is also (...) stressed. In these books tattoos are represented as, in addition to whatever specific interpretive significance can be attached to them, visible markers of the hatred junkies feel for their own bodies. It will be suggested throughout the article that the body in these texts is always a source of shame and horror. Tattoos in these books do not decorate a body, rather they visibly emphasize its pathetic corporeality: no flesh, no image. The central dynamic of these texts is toward the transcendence of the body by the injection of heroin, a use of the needle which mimics the practice of tattooing and stresses the subservient, inessential nature of the body. (shrink)

Stephen Gardiner and Augustin Fragnière offer a thorough critique of the Oxford Principles meant to govern geoenegineering in their paper ‘The tollgate principles for the governance...

From Harry and Louise through the McCaughey septuplets, this book explains stories and issues in health care ethics that have appeared in the news media.

Studies of education and careers in science, technology, engineering, and math commonly use a pipeline metaphor to conceptualize forward movement and persistence. However, the “STEM pipeline” carries implicit assumptions regarding length, contents, and perceived purpose. Using the National Survey of College Graduates, we empirically measure each of these dimensions. First, we show that a majority of STEM workers report skills training throughout their careers, suggesting no clear demarcation between education and work. Second, we show that using on-the-job expertise requirements paints (...) a very different portrait of the STEM workforce—and persistence in it. Third, we show that STEM-educated workers are well-prepared for but dissatisfied with non-STEM jobs, complicating our understanding of leaving. Collectively, these results recommend expanded conceptions of STEM education and careers and contribute to studies of science and engineering workforce transitions and diversity. (shrink)

Commissioned by the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University to create an artwork reflecting on the importance of freshwater, Milwaukee-based photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki embarked on a two-week, 1,800-mile drive around Lake Michigan. He traveled its perimeter, through Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, to produce what he calls “a contemporary portrait of Lake Michigan.” Miyazaki set up his portable studio on beaches, in parks, on boat docks, and in backyards, photographing those he met along the way. From residents, (...) environmental scientists, and artists to a Native American water rights advocate, surfers, and commercial fishermen, Lake Michigan holds a powerful place in the life of each. Many shared their thoughts with him on why this body of water is important to all. Miyazaki also photographed the water as he went, creating waterscapes of the ever-changing lake affected by weather and time. Perimeter gathers these images together, creating a diverse portrait of both people and a place, encapsulating Lake Michigan’s significance to those who are drawn to it. (shrink)

Toward an integrative theory of morality -- The origins of morality -- Perceptual partitioning in human history -- The cognitive and interactional structure of morality -- Subjective morality as an area of social scientific inquiry -- Reiterations.