The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science articles from December 1995

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science archives from December 1995

Are empirical evidence claims a priori?
December 1, 1995... 1 The a priori thesis 2 Evidential flaws 3 The requirement of total evidence 4 `A priori confirmation systems are primitive' 5 The unexpected flaw 6 Is an empirical concept ever employed? 7 Is an a priori concept preferable? 8 Conclusions ...

On explanation in the cognitive sciences: competence, idealization, and the failure of the classical cascade.
December 1, 1995... 1 Introduction 2 Levels and the Classical Cascade 2.1 Levels of Description and their Relations 2.2 The `Classical Cascade' 3 Competence, Abstraction, and Idealizations 4 Idealizations and Levels of Description 4.1 Types of...

Spearman's Principle.
December 1, 1995... 1 Introduction 2 Two examples 3 Cartwright's objection 4 The justification of Spearman's Principle 5 Open questions 1 Introduction On what grounds should scientists believe one linear model rather than another to depict the causal...

Redundant causation.
December 1, 1995... 1 Counterexamples to Lewis's analysis 1.1 Overdetermination 1.2 Late preemption 1.3 Preempting direct cause 1.4 Counterexamples to transitivity 2 The alternative analysis 2.1 Direct causation 2.2 Causal processes 2.3 Causing...

A closer look at the 'new' principle.
December 1, 1995... 1 Introduction 1.1 Revolution? 1.2 The Principal Principle 1.3 The structure of the argument 2 2 Round one 2.1 Problems of consistency 2.2 Admissibility reconsidered 3 3 Round two 3.1 A problem of utility 3.2 The...

A semantic approach to comparative verisimilitude.
December 1, 1995... 1 Realism and verisimilitude 2 Preliminaries 3 The definition 4 Comments 5 Conclusion 1 Realism and verisimilitude The relevance of the notion of verisimilitude, or truthlikeness, for a realist conception of knowledge was first...

Explaining complex adaptations: a reply to Sober's 'Reply to Neander.' (response to Elliott Sober, The Nature of Selection, 1984)
December 1, 1995... Elliott Sober [1984] has argued that natural selection cannot explain why you or I have the traits we do. For example, he says it cannot explain why you or I have opposable thumbs, for while it can explain why individuals with that trait exist...

Vagueness, ignorance, and margin for error.
December 1, 1995... This is a beautiful book. It traces the history of philosophical work on vagueness, evaluates the main contemporary treatments of the subject, and advances the view that vagueness is ignorance, supporting this position by a detailed account of...

Vagueness.
December 1, 1995... This is a beautiful book. It traces the history of philosophical work on vagueness, evaluates the main contemporary treatments of the subject, and advances the view that vagueness is ignorance, supporting this position by a detailed account of...

Laws of Nature.
December 1, 1995... Most philosophers agree that there is a fundamental difference between laws of nature, on the one hand, and accidental regularities, on the other. In this interesting and important book, John Carroll concurs with a number of recent philosophers...

Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defence.
December 1, 1995... This volume is really two books stitched together, one on critical rationalism, the other on questions to do with probability theory and verisimilitude. The join occurs on p. 125, when the discussion switches to Bayesianism; after that it never...

Logic, Language, and the Structure of Scientific Theories.
December 1, 1995... Reports of the demise of logical empiricism appear to have been greatly exaggerated. This is certainly the feeling one gets in reading the essays of this volume. The occasion for the papers was a joint Pittsburgh-Konstanz Colloquium in honour...

Discovery and Explanation in Biology and Medicine.
December 1, 1995... The conclusions arrived at by post-war philosophy of science were, it is widely believed, significantly biased by an overconcentration on the history of, and examples from, physics. Jumping over chemistry (what did chemistry do wrong?) and only...

QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga.
December 1, 1995... The years 1946-51 were a golden age for theoretical physics. The heroic labours of a small number of men overcame seemingly intractable hurdles to create a theory, Lorentz-invariant quantum electrodynamics (QED), which to this day forms the...

Taking Chances: Essays on Rational Choice.
December 1, 1995... Taking Chances is one of the latest additions to the Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction, and Decision Theory series. It is a collection of sixteen previously published articles selected from Sobel's work over the last twenty years....