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Powers, capacities and dispositions (in what follows I will use these terms synonymously) have become prominent in recent debates in metaphysics, philosophy of science and other areas of philosophy. In this paper I will analyse in some detail a well-known argument from scientific practice to the existence of powers/capacities/dispositions. According to this argument the practice of extrapolating scientific knowledge from one kind of situation to a different kind of situation requires a specific interpretation of laws of nature, namely as attributing (...) |
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Psychotherapy research is known for its pursuit of evidence-based treatment. Psychotherapeutic efficacy is assessed by calculation of aggregated differences between pre treatment- and post treatment symptom levels. As this ‘gold standard methodology’ is regarded as ‘procedurally objective’, the efficacy number that results from the procedure is taken as a valid indicator of treatment efficacy. However, I argue that the assumption of procedural objectivity is not justified, as the methodology is build upon a problematic numerical basis. I use an empirical case (...) No categories |
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Over the last decade, philosophers of science have extensively criticized the epistemic superiority of randomized controlled trials for testing safety and effectiveness of new drugs, defending instead various forms of evidential pluralism. We argue that scientific methods in regulatory decision-making cannot be assessed in epistemic terms only: there are costs involved. Drawing on the legal distinction between rules and standards, we show that drug regulation based on evidential pluralism has much higher costs than our current RCT-based system. We analyze these (...) |
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Courts play a key role in deciding on public health controversies, but the legitimacy of judicial intervention remains highly controversial. In this article I suggest that we need to carefully distinguish between different reasons for persistent disagreement in the domain of public health. Adjudicating between public health controversies rooted in factual disagreements allows us to investigate more closely the epistemic capacities of the judicial process. While the critics typically point out the lack of appropriate expertise of judges—in particular with respect (...) |
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How does science enter policy making, and for what purpose? Surely consulting scientific facts in making policy is done with a view to making policy decisions more reliable, and ultimately more objective. In this paper I address the way/s by which science contributes to achieving objectivity in policy making and social debate, and argue that objectivity is not exhausted by what scientific evidence contributes to either. In policy making and social debates, scientific evidence is taken into account alongside other relevant (...) |
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In this paper a critique to philosophical approaches that presuppose invariant knowledge for policy purposes is carried out. It is shown that socioeconomic processes do not fit to the logic of stable causal factors, but they are more suited to the logic of "open-ended results". On the basis of this ontological variation it is argued that ex-ante interventions are not appropriate in the socioeconomic realm. On the contrary, they must be understood in a “dynamic” sense. Finally, derivational robustness analysis is (...) No categories |
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There are some philosophical questions that can be answered without attention to the social context in which evidence is produced and distributed.ing away from social context is an excellent way to ignore messy details and lay bare the underlying structure of the limits of inference. Idealization is entirely appropriate when one is essentially asking: In the best of all possible worlds, what am I entitled to infer? Yet, philosophers’ concerns often go beyond this domain. As an example I examine the (...) No categories |
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We analyse insufficient epistemic pluralism and associated problems in science-based policy advice during the COVID-19 pandemic drawing on specific arguments in Paul Feyerabend’s philosophy. Our goal is twofold: to deepen our understanding of the epistemic shortcomings in science-based policy during the pandemic, and to assess the merits and problems of Feyerabend’s arguments for epistemic pluralism as well as their relevance for policy-making. We discuss opportunities and challenges of integrating a plurality of viewpoints from within and outside science into policy advice (...) |
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Some contemporary paternalists argue in favor of government interventions based on how experimental psychologists and behavioral economists have found that our behavior often diverges from what would be predicted by rational-choice models. In this article it is argued that these findings can, more specifically, be used to identify decisional trouble spots where paternalist interventions may be legitimate. It is further argued that since the epistemic legitimacy of government paternalism ultimately rests on centralized decision-making having a comparative advantage, it also depends (...) |
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Mechanisms have become much-discussed, yet there is still no consensus on how to characterise them. In this paper, we start with something everyone is agreed on – that mechanisms explain – and investigate what constraints this imposes on our metaphysics of mechanisms. We examine two widely shared premises about how to understand mechanistic explanation: (1) that mechanistic explanation offers a welcome alternative to traditional laws-based explanation and (2) that there are two senses of mechanistic explanation that we call ‘epistemic explanation’ (...) |
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The context for this paper is evidence-based practice. EBP is about production of desirable change. The evidence should come from randomized controlled trials. To make sense of RCT evidence it must be placed in an argument structure. I compare two different models, Toulmin and Cartwright, and investigate whether the two models can be merged into one. I shall argue that such merging is not feasible. No categories |
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This paper analyzes a corpus of political rhetoric to identify the rationale for Ontario’s financial literacy education policy decisions that came about in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. The complex politics of FLE were shaped and legitimized by special-interest coalitions’ mobilization of power, characterized by unsubstantiated claims about its efficacy. The rhetoric amounted to ‘truthiness’ over argumentation through the neglect of empirical evidence. No categories |
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