15 found
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  1. Science, assertion, and the common ground.Corey Dethier - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-19.
    I argue that the appropriateness of an assertion is sensitive to context—or, really, the “common ground”—in a way that hasn’t previously been emphasized by philosophers. This kind of context-sensitivity explains why some scientific conclusions seem to be appropriately asserted even though they are not known, believed, or justified on the available evidence. I then consider other recent attempts to account for this phenomenon and argue that if they are to be successful, they need to recognize the kind of context-sensitivity that (...)
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  2. When is an Ensemble like a Sample?Corey Dethier - 2022 - Synthese 200 (52):1-22.
    Climate scientists often apply statistical tools to a set of different estimates generated by an “ensemble” of models. In this paper, I argue that the resulting inferences are justified in the same way as any other statistical inference: what must be demonstrated is that the statistical model that licenses the inferences accurately represents the probabilistic relationship between data and target. This view of statistical practice is appropriately termed “model-based,” and I examine the use of statistics in climate fingerprinting to show (...)
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  3.  28
    The Unity of Robustness: Why Agreement Across Model Reports is Just as Valuable as Agreement Among Experiments.Corey Dethier - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (7):2733-2752.
    A number of philosophers of science have argued that there are important differences between robustness in modeling and experimental contexts, and—in particular—many of them have claimed that the former is non-confirmatory. In this paper, I argue for the opposite conclusion: robust hypotheses are confirmed under conditions that do not depend on the differences between and models and experiments—that is, the degree to which the robust hypothesis is confirmed depends on precisely the same factors in both situations. The positive argument turns (...)
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  4.  36
    Calibrating statistical tools: Improving the measure of Humanity's influence on the climate.Corey Dethier - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 94 (C):158-166.
    Over the last twenty-five years, climate scientists working on the attribution of climate change to humans have developed increasingly sophisticated statistical models in a process that can be understood as a kind of calibration: the gradual changes to the statistical models employed in attribution studies served as iterative revisions to a measurement(-like) procedure motivated primarily by the aim of neutralizing particularly troublesome sources of error or uncertainty. This practice is in keeping with recent work on the evaluation of models more (...)
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  5. How to Do Things with Theory: The Instrumental Role of Auxiliary Hypotheses in Testing.Corey Dethier - 2019 - Erkenntnis 86 (6):1453-1468.
    Pierre Duhem’s influential argument for holism relies on a view of the role that background theory plays in testing: according to this still common account of “auxiliary hypotheses,” elements of background theory serve as truth-apt premises in arguments for or against a hypothesis. I argue that this view is mistaken. Rather than serving as truth-apt premises in arguments, auxiliary hypotheses are employed as “epistemic tools”: instruments that perform specific tasks in connecting our theoretical questions with the world but that are (...)
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  6.  19
    Against “Possibilist” Interpretations of Climate Models.Corey Dethier - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science:1-13.
    Climate scientists frequently employ heavily idealized models. How should these models be interpreted? Some philosophers have advanced a possibilist interpretation: climate models stand in for possible scenarios that could occur, but do not provide information about how probable those scenarios are. The present paper argues that possibilism is (a) undermotivated, (b) incompatible with successful practices in the science, and (c) unable to correct for known biases. The upshot is that the models should be interpreted probabilistically in at least some cases.
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  7. Forces in a true and physical sense: from mathematical models to metaphysical conclusions.Corey Dethier - 2019 - Synthese 198 (2):1109-1122.
    Wilson [Dialectica 63:525–554, 2009], Moore [Int Stud Philos Sci 26:359–380, 2012], and Massin [Br J Philos Sci 68:805–846, 2017] identify an overdetermination problem arising from the principle of composition in Newtonian physics. I argue that the principle of composition is a red herring: what’s really at issue are contrasting metaphysical views about how to interpret the science. One of these views—that real forces are to be tied to physical interactions like pushes and pulls—is a superior guide to real forces than (...)
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  8.  23
    Contrast Classes and Agreement in Climate Modeling.Corey Dethier - 2024 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (14):1-19.
    In an influential paper, Wendy Parker argues that agreement across climate models isn’t a reliable marker of confirmation in the context of cutting-edge climate science. In this paper, I argue that while Parker’s conclusion is generally correct, there is an important class of exceptions. Broadly speaking, agreement is not a reliable marker of confirmation when the hypotheses under consideration are mutually consistent—when, e.g., we’re concerned with overlapping ranges. Since many cutting-edge questions in climate modeling require making distinctions between mutually consistent (...)
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  9. Accuracy, probabilism, and the insufficiency of the alethic.Corey Dethier - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (7):2285-2301.
    The best and most popular argument for probabilism is the accuracy-dominance argument, which purports to show that alethic considerations alone support the view that an agent’s degrees of belief should always obey the axioms of probability. I argue that extant versions of the accuracy-dominance argument face a problem. In order for the mathematics of the argument to function as advertised, we must assume that every omniscient credence function is classically consistent; there can be no worlds in the set of dominance-relevant (...)
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  10. Climate Models and the Irrelevance of Chaos.Corey Dethier - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (5):997-1007.
    Philosophy of science has witnessed substantial recent debate over the existence of a structural analogue of chaos, which is alleged to spell trouble for certain uses of climate models. The debate over the analogy can and should be separated from its alleged epistemic implications: chaos-like behavior is neither necessary nor sufficient for small dynamical misrepresentations to generate erroneous results. The kind of sensitivity that matters in epistemology is one that induces unsafe beliefs, and the existence of a structural analogue to (...)
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  11.  11
    Interpreting the Probabilistic Language in IPCC Reports.Corey Dethier - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10.
    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) often qualifies its statements by use of probabilistic “likelihood” language. In this paper, I show that this language is not properly interpreted in either frequentist or Bayesian terms—simply put, the IPCC uses both kinds of statistics to calculate these likelihoods. I then offer a deflationist interpretation: the probabilistic language expresses nothing more than how compatible the evidence is with the given hypothesis according to some method that generates normalized scores. I end by drawing (...)
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  12.  44
    The Cooperative Origins of Epistemic Rationality?Corey Dethier - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (3):1269-1288.
    Recently, both evolutionary anthropologists and some philosophers have argued that cooperative social settings unique to humans play an important role in the development of both our cognitive capacities and what Michael Tomasello terms the “construction” of “normative rationality” or “a normative point of view as a self-regulating mechanism.” In this article, I use evolutionary game theory to evaluate the plausibility of the claim that cooperation fosters epistemic rationality. Employing an extension of signal-receiver games that I term “telephone games,” I show (...)
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  13.  16
    Supposition and (Statistical) Models.Corey Dethier - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science:1-12.
    In a recent paper, Sprenger (2019) advances what he calls a “suppositional” answer to the question of why a Bayesian agent’s degrees of belief should align with the probabilities found in statistical models. We show that Sprenger’s account trades on an ambiguity between hypothetical and subjunctive suppositions and cannot succeed once we distinguish between the two.
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  14.  78
    William Whewell’s Semantic Account of Induction.Corey Dethier - 2018 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (1):141-156.
    William Whewell’s account of induction differs dramatically from the one familiar from twentieth-century debates. I argue that Whewell’s induction can be usefully understood by comparing the difference between his views and more standard accounts to contemporary debates between semantic and syntactic views of theories: rather than understanding inductive inference as capturing a relationship between sentences or propositions, Whewell understands it as a method for constructing a model of the world. The difference between this (“semantic”) view and the more familiar (“syntactic”) (...)
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  15.  22
    Responses to holism, but no arguments against: Milena Ivanova: Duhem and Holism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, 70 pp, £15.00 PB. [REVIEW]Corey Dethier - 2021 - Metascience 31 (1):81-83.
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