How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the “science wars” over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring patterns divided into two main sets of disciplines. Genetic influences were emphasized (...) in the evolutionary social sciences, evolutionary humanities, psychology, empirical study of the arts, philosophy, economics, and political science. Environmental influences were emphasized in most of the humanities disciplines and in anthropology, sociology, education, and women's or gender studies. Confidence in scientific explanation correlated positively with emphasizing genetic influences on behavior, and negatively with emphasizing environmental influences. Knowing the current actual landscape of belief should help scholars avoid sterile debates and ease the way toward fruitful collaborations with neighboring disciplines. (shrink)

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick Ferré. These essays, informed by the insights of Ferré and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick FerrZ. These essays, informed by the insights of FerrZ and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

Since the publication of Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim's ground-breaking work "Studies in the Logic of Explanation," the theory of explanation has remained a major topic in the philosophy of science. This valuable collection provides readers with the opportunity to study some of the classic essays on the theory of explanation along with the best examples of the most recent work being done on the topic. In addition to the original Hempel and Oppenheim paper, the volume includes Scriven's critical reaction (...) to it, Wilfrid Sellars's discussion of the problem of theoretical explanation, and pieces by Salmon, Railton, van Fraassen, Friedman, Kitcher, and Achinstein in which they demonstrate the vitality of the subject by extending the scope of the inquiry. (shrink)

In his famous essentialist account of identity, Kripke holds that it is necessary to the identity of individual people that they have the parents they do in fact have. Some have disputed this requirement, treating it either as a reason to reject essentialism or as something that should be eliminated in order to make essentialism stronger. I examine the reasoning behind some of these claims and argue that it fails to acknowledge the complex and multi-faceted importance of biological process in (...) determining identity and distinguishing significant differences between biological and non-biological cases. In fact, this failure derives from an inherent tendency to treat the biological case in just the same way as the non-biological case at least at one important point in its history—the point of formation. This analysis offers a way of salvaging Kripke’s original claims. I focus in particular on the views of Graeme Forbes and Teresa Robertson, but also discuss the views of Nathan Salmon, M. S. Price and E. J. Lowe. (shrink)

There has been much discussion of whether there could be objects A and B that are “individuatively vague” in the following way: object A and object B neither determinately stand in the relation of identity to one another, nor do they determinately fail to stand in this relation. If there are objects of this type, then we would have a genuine case of metaphysical vagueness, or “vagueness-in-the-world.” The possibility of vague objects in this sense strikes many as incoherent. The possibility’s (...) very description not only seems to talk of two objects but, much worse, it seems to point to a feature that distinguishes them: unlike object A, object B is not determinately identical to object A. This suspicion of incoherence is voiced in the famous arguments given against the possibility by Gareth Evans and Nathan Salmon. But the status of those arguments and others is uncertain. Here I present a new argument against vague objects — or more precisely, against the possibility of individuatively vague objects that satisfy an important and common additional condition that I will call “Democracy.” Since my argument turns on a connection between what is indeterminate and what is possible, I call it “the modal argument.”. (shrink)

Raynal and his collaborator, Diderot, offer views on the history and nature of the British Constitution in various parts of their encyclopedic account of Western expansion, The History of the Two Indies (1770, revised versions 1780 and 1784). These opinions are analysed in comparison with the judgments of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Bolingbroke, De Lolme and others. The evolution of Raynal's ideas on the subject is discussed in the light of his earlier anglophobic History of the Parliament of England (1748) and (...) the mutually contrasting French historians he used for that work, the Jesuit Pierre-Joseph d'Orleans and the Huguenot Paul de Rapin-Thoyras. Raynal's conversion to a liberal admiration for British institutions is seen both in the context of the American Revolution and his relationship with Diderot. His insistence on a historical approach clashes with Diderot's more radical and philosophical rhetoric, and the stress between their attitudes becomes apparent in the compromises they attain. Notable among their conclusions are the rejection of English appeals to antiquity, and the fortuitous development of liberty through a series of well defined stages. (shrink)

This paper contrasts two information-theoretic approaches to statistical explanation: namely, (1) an analysis, which originated in my earlier research on problems of testing stochastic models of learning, based on an entropy-like measure of expected transmitted-information (and here referred to as the Expected-Information Model), and (2) the analysis, which was proposed by James Greeno (and which is closely related to Wesley Salmon's Statistical Relevance Model), based on the information-transmitted-by-a-system. The substantial differences between these analyses can be traced to the following basic (...) difference. On Greeno's view, the essence of explanation lies in the relevance relations expressed by the conditional probabilities that relate the explanans variables to the explanandum variables; on my view, in contrast, the essence of explanation lies in theories viewed as hypothetical structures which deductively entail conditional probability distributions linking the explanans variables and the explanandum variables. The explanatory power of a stochastic theory is identified with information (regarding the values of explanandum variables) which is "absorbed from" the explanans variables. While other information which is "absorbed from" the explanandum variables (through the process of parameter estimation, for example) reflects descriptive power of the theory. I prove that Greeno's measure of transmitted information is a limiting special case of the E-I model, but that the former, unlike the latter, makes no distinction between explanatory power and descriptive power. (shrink)

In his recent book Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World Wesley Salmon provides a detailed explanation of objective homogeneity, a concept which is central to his S-R model of explanation. 1 propose a modification of Salmon's definition which both simplifies and (in minor ways) corrects it, while at the same time generalizes it by including an important temporal factor that is missing from the original. I argue that if the world is irreducibly stochastic, then objective probabilities (determined (...) by objective homogeneous reference classes) must be temporally relativized. We can speak coherently of the objective probability of a particular event relative to a given point in time, but not of the objective probability of the event simpliciter. I briefly explore the consequences, of the temporal relativity of objective homogeneity for Salmon's attempt to secure an objective (nonepistemic, nonpraagmatic) S-R basis for causal explanation. (shrink)

In his recent book Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World Wesley Salmon provides a detailed explication of objective homogeneity, a concept which is central to his Statistical-Relevance (S-R) model of explanation. One of the purposes of Salmon’s explication is to refute Hempel’s thesis of the epistemic relativity of statistical explanation. According to this thesis “the concept of statistical explanation for particular events is essentially relative to a given knowledge situation” (Hempel 1965, pp. 402-403, quoted in Salmon 1984, (...) p. 48). Salmon introduces (1984, p. 55) the concept that forms the basis for his S-R model as follows: “A reference class A is homogeneous with respect to an attribute B provided there is no set of properties Ci (1 ≤i ≤ k; k ≥ 2) in terms of which A can be relevantly partitioned. (shrink)

This paper argues that if the world is irreducibly stochastic, then both Salmon's S-R model of explanation and Fetzer's C-R model of explanation have the following undesirable consequence: the objective probability (associated with the model's relevance condition) of any actual macro-event is either undefined or else, if defined, it equals one--so that the event is not even a candidate for a probabilistic explanation. This result follows from the temporal ambiguity of ontic probability in an irreducibly stochastic world. It is argued (...) further that an analogous difficulty faces those theories of probabilistic causality which depend upon the notions of contributing and counteracting causes. Because of the problem of temporal ambiguity, it is not possible to objectively label a particular event as a contributing (or a counteracting) cause of some subsequent event. The argument is carried through in detail for a recent theory of probabilistic causality proposed by Paul Humphreys. (shrink)

The influence of historiography on aspects of political thought in France, Italy and Germany. In recent years the overlap between political thought and historiography has changed the boundaries of intellectual history. Donald Kelley, the longtime editor of The Journal of the History of Ideas has played a leading part in this process. These essays by his friends and former students follow in his footsteps. The collection is divided into three parts: France, England [six essays], and Italy and Germany [four essays]. (...) Anthony Grafton and John Salmon provide an introduction, and the volume concludes with a bibliography of Donald Kelley's many works. Historians and Ideologues is designed for those with an interest in the contribution of historiography to political thought, and will be a timely addition to the growing reaction against the postmodern scepticism in historiographical research in this field. Contributors include Ann Blair, Julian Franklin, Kathleen Parrow, David Harris Sacks, Sarah Hanley, Daniel Woolf, Gordon Schochet, Joseph Levine, John Pocock, Perez Zagorin, William Connell, Donald Phillip Verene, and Michael Carhart. Anthony Grafton is a Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. John Salmon is the Marjorie Walter Goodheart Emeritus Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College. (shrink)

The essays in this volume grew out of a seminar examining the possibility of the emergence of a new consensus in the philosophy of science. While that issue is not resolved, we are presented with the most thorough examination of problems associated with the deductive-nomological model of explanation and its variants since the publication of Hempel's Aspects of Scientific Explanation and other Essays in the Philosophy of Science. The discussion begins with Wesley Salmon's monograph-length review of the past forty years (...) of work in the tradition initiated by Hempel and Oppenheim in their groundbreaking article "Studies in the Logic of Explanation". As one of the major players in the debates, Salmon's personal account is informative; it provides a useful introduction to the topic and covers the recent history of work on explanation in a manner that allows the uninitiated to follow the arguments and intricacies of the essays that follow. A main theme in Salmon's essay, as in much of his work, is the relation between the theory of explanation and the concept of causation. Given that the notion of causal laws plays a dominant role in DN explanations, this discussion is most welcome. Causation is also a clear concern of many of the other papers. The resolution of some of the tensions between Salmon's approach to causation, and the various roles of explanation in the philosophy of science, is, in fact, one of the main objectives of the extended concluding piece by Philip Kitcher. For Kitcher, explanations serve as unifying mechanisms for theories within different disciplines. Unification in turn also serves as a criterion for choosing between competing theories. The interplay between, on the one hand, Salmon's attention to the problems deriving from Hempel's initial formulation of DN and, on the other hand, Kitcher's concerns with Salmon's conceptualization of causation, produces one of the more fascinating dialectics of the volume. By attending to their dialogue, we see just how far the theory of explanation has come in the last forty years and yet how slow progress can be when fundamental problems are deeply entrenched. Causation continues to bedevil us. With one exception, the remaining contributors to this volume seem to confirm that judgment. Matti Sintonen, Paul Humphreys, David Papineau, Nancy Cartwright, James Woodward, and Merilee Salmon explore the many facets of causation as it applies to clarifying our explanatory objectives. Peter Railton is an exception. In his paper Railton reminds us that behind the epistemological and pragmatic concerns of most of the other contributors, Wesley Salmon included, there lies a set of metaphysical concerns. A thorough analysis of causation and, hence, a resolution to many of the DN model's problems requires a logically prior assessment of the relation between the epistemology of causation and the metaphysics of necessity. How one decides that issue or cluster of issues, Railton reminds us, will play heavily in the controversies between realists and nonrealists over the proper use of the principle of inference to the best explanation. (shrink)

This book brings together several strands of Salmon's important philosophical investigations, spanning two decades, into a comprehensive theory of scientific explanation. The fundamental tenet of Salmon's ontic conception of explanation is that "to explain an event is to exhibit it as occupying its... place in the discernible [causal] patterns of the world". Thus an adequate theory of explanation presupposes an account of the causal structure of the world, and one of the principal objectives of the book is to outline a (...) theory of causal processes that will provide the requisite foundation for a theory of objective scientific explanation. (shrink)

Wesley Salmon's account of induction in terms of Bayesian priors and account of Popper is criticized in terms of Joseph Agassi's account.

The philosophical theory of scientific explanation proposed here involves a radically new treatment of causality that accords with the pervasively statistical character of contemporary science. Wesley C. Salmon describes three fundamental conceptions of scientific explanation--the epistemic, modal, and ontic. He argues that the prevailing view (a version of the epistemic conception) is untenable and that the modal conception is scientifically out-dated. Significantly revising aspects of his earlier work, he defends a causal/mechanical theory that is a version of the ontic conception. (...) Professor Salmon's theory furnishes a robust argument for scientific realism akin to the argument that convinced twentieth-century physical scientists of the existence of atoms and molecules. To do justice to such notions as irreducibly statistical laws and statistical explanation, he offers a novel account of physical randomness. The transition from the "reviewed view" of scientific explanation (that explanations are arguments) to the causal/mechanical model requires fundamental rethinking of basic explanatory concepts. (shrink)

An introduction to the life and work of the philosopher Jacques Derrida.

The concept of a proposition is important in several areas of philosophy and central to the philosophy of language. This collection of readings investigates many different philosophical issues concerning the nature of propositions and the ways they have been regarded through the years. Reflecting both the history of the topic and the range of contemporary views, the book includes articles from Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, the Russell-Frege Correspondence, Alonzo Church, David Kaplan, John Perry, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, Mark Richard, Scott (...) Soames, and Nathan Salmon. (shrink)

A thesis (“weak BCP”) nearly universally held among philosophers of probability connects the concepts of objective chance and metaphysical modality: Any prospect (outcome) that has a positive chance of obtaining is metaphysically possible—(nearly) equivalently, any metaphysically impossible prospect has zero chance. Particular counterexamples are provided utilizing the monotonicity of chance, one of them related to the four world paradox. Explanations are offered for the persistent feeling that there cannot be chancy metaphysical necessities or chancy metaphysical impossibilities. Chance is objective but (...) contrary to popular opinion it is also largely epistemic. Chancy necessities are analogous to necessary a posteriori truths. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 99, Issue 3, Page 644-662, November 2019. (shrink)

A correct observation to the effect that a does not exist, where ‘a’ is a singular term, could be true on any of a variety of grounds. Typically, a true, singular negative existential is true on the unproblematic ground that the subject term ‘a’ designates something that does not presently exist. More interesting philosophically is a singular, negative existential statement in which the subject term ‘a’ designates nothing at all. Both of these contrast sharply with a singular, negative existential in (...) which the subject term is a name from fiction. I argue that such singular, negative existential statements are false. My account of fictional characters differs significantly from Kripke’s. It is shown that an objection to my account rests on a serious misunderstanding. Finally, a crucial aspect of the account is emphasized. (shrink)

A new philosophical analysis is provided of the notorious Sleeping Beauty Problem. It is argued that the correct solution is one-third, but not in the way previous philosophers have typically meant this. A modified version of the Problem demonstrates that neither self-locating information nor amnesia is relevant to the core Problem, which is simply to evaluate the conditional chance of heads given an undated Monday-or-Tuesday awakening. Previous commentators have failed to appreciate the significance of the information that Beauty gains upon (...) waking, and which is relevant to the conditional chance of heads: de re acquaintance with the awakening itself and the non-locating knowledge that it is an experimental awakening. David Lewis and company are committed to several unjustifiable and unacceptable probability assessments. Previous commentators have in effect confused the information that Beauty undergoes this particular experimental awakening for the information that she undergoes some experimental awakening or other. Lewis in particular thereby illegitimately tips the scales both in favor of heads and in favor of Monday. The Sleeping Beauty Problem is equivalent to a ball-in-urn word problem in elementary probability theory. (shrink)

Alonzo Church famously provided three principal competing criteria for “strict synonymy,” i.e., sameness of semantic content. These are his Alternatives (0), (1), and (2)—numbered in order of increasing course-grainedness of content. On Alternative (2), expressions are deemed strictly synonymous iff they are logically equivalent. This criterion seems hopeless as an account of the objects of propositional attitude. On Alternative (1), expressions are deemed synonymous iff they are λ-convertible. Alternative (1) also evidently conflicts with discourse about the attitudes. On Alternative (0), (...) expressions are deemed strictly synonymous iff they are “synonymously isomorphic” in Church’s sense. On Alternative (0), semantic content is so fine-grained that not even “Romeo loves Juliet” and “Juliet is loved by Romeo” qualify as strictly synonymous. A fourth alternative, here called “Alternative (3),” deems expressions strictly synonymous iff they are co-intensional, i.e., they have the same semantic extension with respect to the same possible worlds. This criterion’s notion of content is even more course grained than that of Alternative (2). Several objections to Alternative (3) are considered. (shrink)

Considered a classic in the philosophy of language movement known variously as the New Theory of Reference or the Direct-Reference Theory, as well as in the metaphysics of modal essentialism that is related to this philosophy of language. This award-winning book is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation.

Designed for students with no prior training in logic, INTRODUCTION TO LOGIC AND CRITICAL THINKING offers an accessible treatment of logic that enhances understanding of reasoning in everyday life. The text begins with an introduction to arguments. After some linguistic preliminaries, the text presents a detailed analysis of inductive reasoning and associated fallacies. This order of presentation helps to motivate the use of formal methods in the subsequent sections on deductive logic and fallacies. Lively and straightforward prose assists students in (...) gaining facility with the sometimes challenging concepts of logic. By combining a sensitive treatment of ordinary language arguments with a simple but rigorous exposition of basic principles of logic, the text develops students' understanding of the relationships between logic and language, and strengthens their skills in critical thinking. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version. (shrink)

Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning brings together Nathan Salmon's influential papers on topics in the metaphysics of existence, non-existence, and fiction; modality and its logic; strict identity, including personal identity; numbers and numerical quantifiers; the philosophical significance of Godel's Incompleteness theorems; and semantic content and designation. Including a previously unpublished essay and a helpful new introduction to orient the reader, the volume offers rich and varied sustenance for philosophers and logicians.

Nathan Salmon presents a selection of nineteen of his essays from the early 1980s to 2006, on a set of closely connected topics central to analytic philosophy. The book is divided into four thematic sections, on direct reference, apriority, belief, and the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. The volume concludes with four essays about the distinction between meaning and use, or more generally, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics.

An alternative to the classical Stalnaker-Lewis account of subjunctive conditionals is outlined. A distinction is drawn between a basic notion of “wouldness” and a more full-bloodedly modal variant, each with its own logic. Previous philosophers have challenged the alleged vacuity of counterpossibles using logico-mathematically impossible worlds. Here the vacuity thesis as well as other orthodox alleged logical principles are challenged instead through consideration of a logico-mathematically possible world. The impossible-world theorist’s Strangeness of Impossibility Condition is also challenged using the same (...) logico-mathematically possible world. The dogma that the truth-condition of a subjunctive invokes the antecedent worlds sufficiently “closest” to (most like) the actual world is also challenged through consideration of the same logico-mathematically possible world. The dogma is a variation on Lewis’s counterpart theory. (shrink)

In Frege’s Puzzle (1986), Salmon analyzed ‘a withholds believing p’ in terms of a ternary relation BEL of x believing a proposition p under a guise g. The proposed analysis is the following: There is a proposition guise g such that a grasps p by means of g but a does not stand in BEL to p and g. Sean Crawford has made a proposal for Millians to evade propositional guises through second-order belief. Specifically, in effect, Crawford’s proposes to analyze (...) the crucial notion of withheld belief instead as believing that one does not believe: a believes that a does not believe p. Crawford’s clever proposal thus avoids explicit quantification over guises. However, it is shown that the proposal is inadequate to avoid guises. The resulting notion is too weak to capture the relevant notion of withheld belief. (shrink)

Four accounts, three of them Kantian, of true sentences of the form “ exists” are contrasted. Russell’s theory that such sentences are meaningless is contrasted with two other Kantian theories that are analogous to one another: Frege’s semantic-ascent theory and the Frege-inspired ungerade (indirect, “oblique”) theory. Frege’s objection to the semantic-ascent account of identity is applied, ironically with equal force, against his account of existence. A second argument favoring the ungerade theory is offered. The argument is then refuted through an (...) application of a general strategy suggested by Kripke. A fourth theory, the deeply anti-Kantian existence-as-predicate theory, fully accommodates these results. (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

The object of this article is to present, through the example of the birth of the cult of Saint Adalbert, Bishop of Prague, the means by which his hagiographic myth evolved within the ideological and cultural fabric of Poland around the year 1000. By highlighting the various symbolic events marking the official recognition of sainthood of the martyr, beheaded in Prussia in 997, the evolution of the religious conceptions of that period of Christian cultism will be studied in order to (...) understand the dynastic and patriotic influence which has been attributed to Saint Adalbert in Medieval Poland. (shrink)

The dogma that the propositional logic of metaphysical modality is S5 is rebutted in related installments (previously published and unpublished essays).

"A rich collection. Since it holds a number of introductory pieces along with advanced essays and review articles, the volume will be accessible to a broad audience and will work well in philosophy of science courses....Essential."--Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan.

Deals with the whole complex of relations between the land of Israel, the Jewish Torah and the people of Israel from the Pre-Zionist period until the establishment of the State of Israel. The book examines the dynamics of those relations through the modernization of Jewish society, and the problem of Jewish identity vis-a-vis modernity. The discussion follows historical events in both philosophy and everyday life. It explores the anti-Zionist sphere and also discusses the attitudes towards the conflict of religion and (...) nationalism in the world of religious Zionism. The dispute between advocates of a religious concept of the community and proponents of a secular nation revolved primarily around perceptions of the ideal relationship between the religious and national entities. One group sought to make religion a tool of the nation; the other sought to make the nation a tool of religion." --Publisher provided. (shrink)

The topic is time travel of the sort depicted in H. G. Wells’ classic novel, The Time Machine—Wellsian time travel. The range of proper applicability of the concept of Wellsian time travel is investigated. The results of this investigation are applied to provide a new argument against the metaphysical possibility of time travel in absolute time. Alternatively, the argument is against the possibility of Wellsian time travel relative to a single temporal frame of reference. The argument leaves open the prospect (...) that an object nontrivially moves relative to one temporal reference frame from one time to another relative to another temporal reference frame. The argument does not turn on closed timelike curves or “causal loops” of any kind. It does however invoke the prospect of backward causation—a consequence of backward time travel in conjunction with common sense—but it invokes this possibility only in the weak sense of mere logical consistency. (shrink)