Criteria of empirical significance are supposed to state conditions under which reference to an unobservable object or property is “empirically meaningful”. The intended kind of empirical meaningfulness should be necessary for admissibility into the selective contexts of scientific inquiry. I defend Justus’s recent argument that the reasons generally given for rejecting the project of defining a significance criterion are unpersuasive. However, as I show, this project remains wedded to an overly narrow conception of its subject matter. (...) Even the most cutting edge significance criteria identify empirical significance with predictive power, and thereby rule out vocabulary with legitimate scientific functions. In a nutshell, the problem is that there are terms that reduce the computational burden of extracting predictions from theory, and that may therefore be scientifically useful, but that do not produce any additional predictions, and so are ruled scientifically inadmissibility by existing significance criteria. I spell out this objection by specifying terms of this kind that are ruled inadmissible by Creath’s and Schurz’s criteria. Having objected in this way to extant criteria, and to the equation of empirical significance with predictive power in general, I discuss an approach to defining empirical significance that is capable of avoiding my objection and, more ambitiously, that may break the cycle of “punctures and patches” that has plagued the project from the beginning: I gloss Goldfarb and Ricketts’s idea of “case-by-case” delineations of empirically significant terms as the provision of special rather than general explications of the informal concept of empirical significance. (shrink)

Carnap’s search for a criterion of empirical significance is usually considered a failure. I argue that the results from two out of his three different approaches are at the very least problematic, but that one approach led to success. Carnap’s criterion of translatability into logical syntax is too vague to allow for definite results. His criteria for terms—introducibility by chains of reduction sentences and his criterion from “The Methodological Character of Theoretical Concepts”—are almost trivial and have no clear (...) relation to the empirical significance of sentences. However, his criteria for sentences—translatability, verifiability, falsifiability, confirmability—are usable, and under the assumptions needed for the Carnap sentence approach, verifiability, falsifiability, and translatability become equivalent. As a result of the Carnap sentence approach, metaphysics is rendered analytic. (shrink)

This dissertation consists of three parts. Part I is a defense of an artificial language methodology in philosophy and a historical and systematic defense of the logical empiricists' application of an artificial language methodology to scientific theories. These defenses provide a justification for the presumptions of a host of criteria of empirical significance, which I analyze, compare, and develop in part II. On the basis of this analysis, in part III I use a variety of criteria to evaluate (...) the scientific status of intelligent design, and further discuss confirmation, reduction, and concept formation. (shrink)

Criteria of empirical significance are supposed to state conditions under which reference to an unobservable object or property is “empirically meaningful.” The intended kind of empirical meaningfulness should be necessary for admissibility into the selective contexts of scientific inquiry. I defend Justus’s recent argument that the reasons generally given for rejecting the project of defining a significance criterion are unpersuasive. However, as I show, this project remains wedded to an overly narrow conception of its subject matter. (...) Even the most cutting edge significance criteria identify empirical significance with predictive power, and thereby rule out vocabulary with legitimate scientific functions. In a nutshell, the problem is that there are terms that reduce the computational burden of extracting predictions from theory, and that may therefore be scientifically useful, but that do not add to the theory’s observational consequences, and so are ruled scientifically inadmissibility by existing significance criteria. I spell out this objection by specifying shortcut terms that are ruled inadmissible by Creath’s and Schurz’s criteria. Having objected in this way to extant criteria, and to the equation of empirical significance with predictive power in general, I discuss an approach to defining empirical significance that is capable of avoiding my objection and, more ambitiously, that may break the cycle of “punctures and patches” that has plagued the project from the beginning. I gloss Goldfarb and Ricketts’s idea of “case-by-case” delineations of empirically significant terms as the provision of special rather than general explications of the informal concept of empirical significance. (shrink)

The sheer multitude of criteria of empirical significance has been taken as evidence that the pre-analytic notion being explicated is too vague to be useful. I show instead that a significant number of these criteria—by Ayer, Popper, Przełęcki, Suppes, and David Lewis, among others—not only form a coherent whole, but also connect directly to the theory of definition, the notion of empirical content as explicated by Ramsey sentences, and the theory of measurement; two criteria by Carnap and (...) Sober are trivial, but can be saved and connected to the other criteria by slight modifications. A corollary is that the ordinary language defense of Lewis, the conceptual arguments by Ayer and Popper, the theoretical considerations by Przełęcki, and the practical considerations by Suppes all apply to the same criterion or closely related criteria. Furthermore, the equivalence of some criteria allows for their individual justifications to be taken cumulatively and, together with the entailment relations between nonequivalent criteria, suggest criteria for general auxiliary assumptions, comparative criteria, and more liberal conceptions of observation. (shrink)

Not all symmetries are on a par. For instance, within Newtonian mechanics, we seem to have a good grasp on the empirical significance of boosts, by applying it to subsystems. This is exemplified by the thought experiment known as Galileo’s ship: the inertial state of motion of a ship is immaterial to how events unfold in the cabin, but is registered in the values of relational quantities such as the distance and velocity of the ship relative to the (...) shore. But the significance of gauge symmetries seems less clear. For example, can gauge transformations in Yang-Mills theory—taken as mere descriptive redundancy—exhibit a similar relational empirical significance as the boosts of Galileo’s ship? This question has been debated in the last fifteen years in philosophy of physics. I will argue that the answer is ‘yes’, but only for a finite subset of gauge transformations, and under special conditions. Under those conditions, we can mathematically identify empirical significance with a failure of supervenience: the state of the Universe is not uniquely determined by the intrinsic state of its isolated subsystems. Empirical significance is therefore encoded in those relations between subsystems that stand apart from their intrinsic states. (shrink)

The waning popularity of logical empiricism and the supposed discovery of insurmountable technical difficulties led most philosophers to abandon the project to formulate a formal criterion of empirical significance. Such a criterion would delineate claims that observation can confirm or disconfirm from those it cannot. Although early criteria were clearly inadequate, criticisms made of later, more sophisticated criteria were often indefensible or easily answered. Most importantly, Carnap’s last criterion was seriously misinterpreted and an amended version of it remains (...) tenable. (shrink)

In the last 5 years, the controversy about whether or not gauge transformations can be empirically significant has intensified. On the one hand, Greaves and Wallace developed a framework according to which, under some circumstances, gauge transformations can be empirically significant—and Teh further supported this result by using the constrained Hamiltonian formalism. On the other hand, Friederich claims to have proved that gauge transformation can never be empirically significant. In this article, I accomplish two tasks. First, I argue that there (...) are strong reasons to resist Friederich’s proof because one of its assumptions is, at the very least, highly controversial. Second, I argue that despite criticism by Brading and Brown and Friederich, ‘t Hooft’s beam-splitter experiment is indeed a concrete example of a case where a local gauge symmetry has empirical significance. By shedding light on these two points, this article shows that recent arguments that claim gauge transformations cannot be empirically significant are not satisfactory. (shrink)

It is a characteristic of neopositivism that the pursuit of its effort in theoretical cognition, the attempt to discover the "given" content of knowledge, the "empirical significance" of its elements — concepts and assertions — is associated, with the employment of the method of logical analysis of knowledge. On the one hand, this gives logical analysis a distinctly philosophical, epistemological emphasis, while on the other it converts the theory of knowledge of neopositivism into "applied logic," engaged in establishing (...) the relations between the elements of knowledge by means of the procedures of contemporary formal logic — mathematical or symbolic logic. (shrink)

In this paper I will investigate the possibility of completing a Positivist style account of demarcation. One reason for pursuing this project is that standard criticisms of Positivism do not have the bite against the demarcation project that they are often assumed to have. To argue this will be the burden of the first part of this paper. The other reason is that new research in logic has provided machinery not available to the Positivists; machinery that shows promise for solving (...) some of the technical problems faced by Positivists' account of demarcation. To argue this will be the burden of the second part of this paper. (shrink)

In response to the growing number of paradoxes relating to the hypothesis of universal predictability, Sellars has written: … conceptual difficulties do arise about universal predictability if we fail to distinguish between what I shall call epistemic predictability and logical predictability. By epistemic predictability, I mean predictability by a predictor in the system. The concept of universal epistemic predictability does seem to be bound up with difficulties of the type explored by Gödel. By logical predictability, on the other hand, is (...) meant that property of the process laws governing a physical system which involves the derivability of a description of the state of the system at a later time from a description of its state at an earlier time, without stipulating that the latter description be obtained by operations within the system. It can be argued, I believe, with considerable force that the latter is a misuse of the term ‘predictability’, but it does seem to me that this is what philosophers concerned with the free will and determinism issue have had in mind, and it simply muddies up the waters to harass these philosophers with Gödel problems about epistemic predictability. (shrink)

The recent debate about whether gauge symmetries can be empirically significant has focused on the possibility of 'Galileo's ship' types of scenarios, where the symmetries effect relational differences between a subsystem and the environment. However, it has gone largely unremarked that apart from such Galileo's ship scenarios, Greaves and Wallace (2014) proposed that gauge transformations can also be empirically significant in a 'non-relational' manner that is analogous to a Faraday-cage scenario, where the subsystem symmetry is related to a change in (...) a charged boundary state. In this paper, we investigate the question of whether such non-relational scenarios are possible for gauge theories. Remarkably, the answer to this question turns out to be closely related to a foundational puzzle that has driven a host of recent developments at the frontiers of theoretical physics. By drawing on these recent developments, we show that a very natural way of elaborating on Greaves and Wallace's claim of non-relational empirical significance for gauge symmetry is incoherent. However, we also argue that much of what they suggest is correct in spirit: one can indeed construct non-relational models of the kind they sketch, albeit ones where the empirical significance is not witnessed by a gauge symmetry but instead by a superficially similar boundary symmetry. Furthermore, the latter casts doubt on whether one really abandons Galileo's ship in such scenarios. (shrink)

: Any precise version of H-D needs to handle various problems, most notably, the problem of selective confirmation: Precise formulations of H-D should not have the consequence that where S confirms T, for any T', S confirms T&T'. It is the perceived failure of H-D to solve such problems that has lead John Earman to recently conclude that H-D is "very nearly a dead horse". This suggests the following state of play: H-D is an intuitively plausible idea that breaks down (...) in the attempt to give it a precise formulation. Indeed I think that fairly captures the view among specialists in the field of confirmation theory. Here I argue that the truth about H-D is largely the reverse: H-D can be given a precise formulation that avoids the longstanding technical problems, however, it relies on a fundamentally unsound philosophical intuition. The bulk of this paper involves reviewing the problems affecting previous attempts at giving precise formulations of H-D and displaying some recent versions that can handle these problems. It then briefly explains why the basic intuition behind H-D is itself unsound, namely, because H-D involves a tacit assumption of inductive scepticism. Finally, the historical relation between H-D and the positivists' quest for a criterion of empirical significance will be reconsidered with the surprising result that having glossed H-D as fundamentally unsound it is concluded that a sound version of the criterion of empirical significance is now available. The demarcation criterion, the positivists' philosopher's stone that serves to separate claims with empirical significance from claims lacking empirical significance having finally been found, it is argued that we should regard empirical significance as just one among a variety of virtues and not follow the positivists in taking it to be a sin qua non for all meaningful statements. (shrink)

This article investigates and resolves the question whether gauge symmetry can display analogs of the famous Galileo’s ship scenario. In doing so, it builds on and clarifies the work of Greaves and Wallace on this subject.

In the absence of empirical confirmation, scientists may judge a theory's chances of being viable based on a wide range of arguments. The paper argues that such arguments can differ substantially with regard to their structural similarly to empirical confirmation. Arguments that resemble empirical confirmation in a number of crucial respects provide a better basis for reliable judgement and can, in a Bayesian sense, amount to significant \textit{non-empirical} confirmation. It is shown that three kinds of non- (...) class='Hi'>empirical confirmation that have been specified in earlier work do satisfy those conditions. (shrink)

Many psychologists have tried to reveal the formation and processing of moral judgments by using a variety of empirical methods: behavioral data, tests of statistical significance, and brain imaging. Meanwhile, some scholars maintain that the new empirical findings of the ways we make moral judgments question the trustworthiness and authority of many intuitive ethical responses. The aim of this special issue is to encourage scholars to rethink how, if at all, it is possible to draw any normative (...) conclusions by discovering the psychological processes underlying moral judgments. (shrink)

Recent empirical work on folk moral objectivism has attempted to examine the extent to which folk morality presumes that moral judgments are objectively true or false. Some researchers report findings that they take to indicate folk commitment to objectivism (Goodwin & Darley, 2008, 2010, 2012; Nichols & Folds-Bennett, 2003; Wainryb et al., 2004), while others report findings that may reveal a more variable commitment to objectivism (Beebe, 2014; Beebe et al., 2015; Beebe & Sackris, 2016; Sarkissian, et al., 2011; (...) Wright, 2018; Wright, Grandjean, & McWhite, 2013; Wright, McWhite, & Grandjean, 2014). However, the various probes that have been used to examine folk moral objectivism almost always fail to be good direct measures of objectivism. Some critics (Beebe, 2015; Pölzler, 2017, 2018) have suggested that the problems with existing probes are serious enough that they should be viewed as largely incapable of shedding any light on folk metaethical commitments. Building upon the work of Justin Khoo and Joshua Knobe (2018), I argue that many of the existing probes can be seen as good measures of the extent to which people think that the truth of one moral judgment excludes the possibility that a judgment made by a disagreeing party is also true and that the best explanation of the findings obtained using these measures is significant folk support for indexical moral relativism—the view that the content of moral judgments is context-sensitive. If my thesis is correct, many contemporary moral philosophers are deeply mistaken about the metaethical contours of folk morality in one very important respect. (shrink)

The turn of the century saw a significant increase in the amount of attention being paid by philosophers to empirical issues about moral character. Dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle in the West, and Confucius in the East, philosophers have traditionally drawn on empirical data to some extent in their theorizing about character. One of the main differences in recent years has been the source of this empirical data, namely the work of social and personality (...) psychologists on morally relevant thought and action. -/- This entry briefly examines four recent empirical approaches to moral character. It will draw on the psychology literature where appropriate, but the main focus will be on the significance of that work for philosophers interested in better understanding moral character. The four areas are situationism, the CAPS model, the Big Five model, and the VIA. The remainder of this entry devotes a section to each of them. (shrink)

A foundationalist account of our empirical thinking divides propositions we accept into two classes, basic and derivative, and sees the warrant of derivative propositions as accruing to them through their derivation from basic propositions. Such an account needs to answer two questions: which propositions are basic, and whence do basic propositions acquire their warrant? A natural and ancient answer to these questions is that basic propositions are observational and that these propositions gain their warrant from perceptions. I critically examine (...) this view and also a variant view offered by Wilfrid Sellars. I put forward an alternative conception, dialectical foundationalism, that sees the distinction between the basic and the derivative as issuing from a distinction between two kinds of reasoning, derivational and dialectical. This type of foundationalism provides a more accurate account of our empirical thinking, I argue, than its traditional and Sellarsian counterparts. (shrink)

Simple or "standard" empirical judgments--as expressed in such statements as "The rose is red" or "Socrates is mortal"--are logically basic for theoretical rationality. All the more complex forms of judgment presuppose the existence and tenability of judgments of the "standard" type. The overall aim of this study is twofold: to show how the traditional theory of standard empirical judgments--as represented by Kant's doctrine of judgment--is subject to a through-going form of skepticism that I entitle "judgmental skepticism" and to (...) attempt to develop a more adequate account of the standard empirical judgment which circumvents the central difficulties in the traditional theory. ;Part I of the study develops, and then criticizes, Kant's theory of empirical judgment. Part II of the study then attempts to develop an accurate description of the standard empirical judgment, using the critical results of part I as working clues and foils. In the last chapter of part II, what may be called a "common sense" approach to judgmental skepticism is deployed: it is claimed that the judgmental skeptic cannot challenge the tenability of all standard judgments without rational self-stultification. Accepting this auxiom, it then becomes possible simple to describe several ways in which a paradigmatic, successful, standard judgment presupposes certain instinctive or "commonsensical" cognitive abilities. The careful description of these abilities in turn provides a commonsensical or non-transcendental foundation for theoretical rationality itself. (shrink)

In this paper we propose that cosmological fine-tuning arguments, when levied in support of the existence of Intelligent Designers or Multiverses, are much less interesting than they are thought to be. Our skepticism results from tracking the distinction between merely epistemic or logical possibilities on one hand and nonepistemic possibilities, such as either nomological or metaphysical possibilities, on the other. We find that fine-tuning arguments readily conflate epistemic or logical possibilities with nonepistemic possibilities and we think that this leads to (...) treating the search for an explanation of fine-tuning as analogous to standard empirical theorizing about first-order nomological matters, when in fact the two investigational enterprises are profoundly different. Similar conflation occurs when fine-tuning arguments do not carefully distinguish between different interpretations of probabilities within the arguments. Finally, these arguments often rely on spatial analogies, which are often misleading precisely in that they encourage the conflation of epistemic and nonepistemic possibility. When we pay attention to the distinctions between merely epistemic versus nonepistemic modalities and probabilities, the extant arguments in favor of intelligent designers or multiverses, or even for the nonepistemic improbability of fine-tuning, consist of empirically unconstrained speculation concerning relevant nonepistemic modal facts. (shrink)

This essay revisits the significance of Kaufmann's Toledot ha-emunah ha-yisre'elit in Jewish intellectual history, as its reception has hitherto been somewhat reductive. His work is generally viewed as an anti-Christian polemic with a Zionist agenda that sought to glorify the formative period of his people. A closer look at his intellectual background, as well as his theoretical framework, leads us to a different understanding of his work in general and of its alleged nationalistic features in particular. The essay shows, (...) inter alia, that Kaufmann was already making a Diltheyan hermeneutic turn decades before others in his field. (shrink)

The problem of evil is broadly considered to be one of the greatest intellectual threats to traditional brands of theism. And William Rowe’s 1979 formulation of the problem in “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” is the most cited formulation in the contemporary philosophical literature. In this paper, we explore how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be brought to bear on Rowe’s seminal formulation, arguing that our empirical findings raise significant questions regarding the (...) ultimate success of Rowe’s argument. Such a result would be quite notable within philosophy of religion, since this is considered one of the most formidable arguments against theism. However, further testing is needed before any firm conclusions can be drawn. -/- In section 1, we elucidate Rowe’s formulation of the problem of evil and the intuitions that seem to underwrite it. In section 2, we explore how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be brought to bear on Rowe’s formulation, outlining our hypotheses and our methods for testing them before showcasing our results. In section 3, we discuss the philosophical import of our results–arguing that our results, when taken together, pose an initial challenge to Rowe’s seminal argument. (shrink)

Broadly speaking, this is a book about truth and the criteria thereof. Thus it is, in a sense, a book about justification and rationality. But it does not purport to be about the notion of justification or the notion of rationality. For the assumption that there is just one notion of justification, or just one notion of rationality, is, as the book explains, very misleading. Justification and rationality come in various kinds. And to that extent, at least, we should recognize (...) a variety of notions of justification and rationality. This, at any rate, is one of the morals of Chapter VI. This book, in Chapters I-V, is mainly concerned with the kind of justification and rationality characteristic of a truth-seeker, specifically a seeker of truth about the world impinging upon the senses: the so-called empirical world. Hence the book's title. But since the prominent contemporary approaches to empirical justification are many and varied, so also are the epistemological issues taken up in the following chapters. For instance, there will be questions about so-called coherence and its role, if any, in empirical justification. And there will be questions about social consensus (whatever it is) and its significance, or the lack thereof, to empirical justification. Furthermore, the perennial question of whether, and if so how, empirical knowledge has so-called founda­ tions will be given special attention. (shrink)

It is frequently argued that research findings in empirical moral psychology spell trouble for Kantian ethics. Sometimes the charge is merely that Kantianism is mistaken about the role of emotions in human action, but it has also been argued that empirical moral psychology ‘debunks’ Kantian ethics as the product of precisely the emotion-driven processes it fails to acknowledge. In this essay I argue for a negative and a positive thesis. The negative thesis is that the ‘debunking’ argument against (...) Kantian ethics is invalid because it begs the central question. The positive thesis is that, because the empirical facts about human moral psychology are morally significant, Kantians can and should wholeheartedly embrace the current interest in this area of empirical research. As Kant himself emphasized, it is an indirect, imperfect duty to use available knowledge of morally relevant empirical psychological conditions and to put this in the service of moral agency. (shrink)

How can we acquire a grasp of cardinal numbers, even the first very small positive cardinal numbers, given that they are abstract mathematical entities? That problem of cognitive access is the main focus of this paper. All the major rival views about the nature and existence of cardinal numbers face difficulties; and the view most consonant with our normal thought and talk about numbers, the view that cardinal numbers are sizes of sets, runs into the cognitive access problem. The source (...) of the problem is the plausible assumption that cognitive access to something requires causal contact with it. It is argued that this assumption is in fact wrong, and that in this and similar cases we should accept that a certain recognise-and-distinguish capacity is sufficient for cognitive access. We can then go on to solve the cognitive access problem, and thereby support the set-size view of cardinal numbers, by paying attention to empirical findings about basic number abilities. To this end some selected studies of infants, pre-school children and a trained chimpanzee are briefly discussed. (shrink)

The article proposes a novel approach to the much discussed question of which symmetries have ‘direct empirical significance’ and which do not. The approach is based on a development of a recently proposed framework by Hilary Greaves and David Wallace, who claim that, contrary to the standard folklore among philosophers of physics, ‘local’ symmetries may have direct empirical significance no less than ‘global’ ones. Partly vindicating the standard folklore, a result is derived here from a number (...) of plausible assumptions, that states that local symmetries can indeed have no direct empirical significance. Ways to interpret the result are considered and possible morals are outlined. 1 Introduction2 Greaves and Wallace on Interior versus Non-interior Symmetries3 Elaborating on the Greaves/Wallace Framework4 The Result5 Problems with ’t Hooft’s Beam Splitter6 Summary and Conclusion. (shrink)

I argue that Isaac Newton's De Gravitatione should not be considered an authoritative expression of his thought about the metaphysics of space and its relation to physical inquiry. I establish the following narrative: In De Gravitatione (circa 1668–84), Newton claimed he had direct experimental evidence for the work's central thesis: that space had "its own manner of existing" as an affection or emanative effect. In the 1710s, however, through the prodding of Roger Cotes and G. W. Leibniz, he came to (...) see that this evidence relied on assumptions that his own Principia rendered unjustifiable. Consequently, he (i) revised the conclusions he explicitly drew from the experimental evidence, (ii) rejected the idea that his spatial metaphysics was grounded in experimental evidence, and (iii) reassessed the epistemic status of key concepts in his metaphysics and natural philosophy. The narrative I explore shows not only that De Gravitatione did not constitute the metaphysical backdrop of the Principia as Newton ultimately understood it, but that it was the Principia itself that ultimately lead to the demise of key elements of De Gravitatione. I explore the implications of this narrative for Andrew Janiak's and Howards Stein's interpretations of Newton's metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper empirically investigates one aspect of the folk concept of time by testing how the presence or absence of directedness impacts judgements about whether there is time in a world. Experiment 1 found that dynamists, showed significantly higher levels of agreement that there is time in dynamically directed worlds than in non-dynamical non-directed worlds. Comparing our results to those we describe in Latham et al., we report that while ~ 70% of dynamists say there is time in B-theory worlds, (...) only ~ 45% say there is time in C-theory worlds. Thus, while the presence of directedness makes dynamists more inclined to say there is time in a world, a substantial subpopulation of dynamists judge that there is time in non-directed worlds. By contrast, a majority of non-dynamists judged that there was time in both growing block worlds and C-theory worlds, with no significant differences between the means. Experiment 2 found that when participants are only presented with non-dynamical worlds—namely, a directed world and a non-directed world—they report significantly higher levels of agreement that there is time in B-theory worlds. However, the majority of participants still judge that there is time in C-theory worlds. We conclude that while the presence of directedness bolsters judgements that there is time, most people do not judge it to be necessary for time. (shrink)

Eliminative reasoning is a method that has been employed in many significant episodes in the history of science. It has also been advocated by some philosophers as an important means for justifying well-established scientific theories. Arguments for how eliminative reasoning is able to do so, however, have generally relied on a too narrow conception of evidence, and have therefore tended to lapse into merely heuristic or pragmatic justifications for their conclusions. This paper shows how a broader conception of evidence not (...) only can supply the needed justification but also illuminates the methodological significance of eliminative reasoning in a variety of contexts. (shrink)

Empirical research has recently emerged as a key method for understanding the nature of causation, and our concept of causation. One thread of research aims to test intuitions about the nature of causation in a variety of classic cases. These experiments have principally been used to try to resolve certain debates within analytic philosophy, most notably that between proponents of transference and dependence views of causation. The other major thread of empirical research on our concept of causation has (...) investigated the role that normative considerations play in causal judgments. These experimental results suggest that philosophical accounts of our concept of causation should take a broader view of what might be relevant. For both lines of research, we describe some of the significant experiments and outline key philosophical morals that have been drawn, all while pointing out various limitations. We conclude by considering other kinds of empirical research that should be philosophically interesting for those studying the nature of causation and our concept of causation. In particular, we point towards the need for philosophical research about causal perception, causal reasoning, and causal learning, as well as ways in which this research could play a role in prescriptive metaphysics. (shrink)

Western élite groups’ moralities and actions can and should be studied empirically. Contrary to belief held in the 1980s in mainstream social anthropology that fieldwork in the classic anthropological fashion could not be done among the western élite, the findings of long-term research in this field have yielded key ethnographic insights leading to academic and public debate. In this article I draw on ethnographic research on legitimacy, power, and governance among key Neapolitan élite groups to offer reflections on a style (...) of governance that has at once engendered and thrived on the blurring of the dividing line between what is legitimate and what is not legitimate in public life. The discussion focuses on powerful, tightly networked groups that, inspired by an elitist philosophy of power, have been hard at work to gain and maintain power, while losing trust and authority. The analysis builds towards an understanding of their implosion and of the corresponding erosion of the relationship between citizenship and governance. (shrink)

The formal part of this chapter is concerned with measures of need-based justice. According to the measures we propose, a distribution is unjust (i) the more it deviates from absolute need satisfaction and equal degrees of need satisfaction, (ii) the more the given undersupply could have been mitigated by transfers, or (iii) the more resources are used for oversupply instead of need satisfaction. These measures are compared, i.e., as to the satisfaction of need-oriented relatives of axioms prominent in poverty measurement; (...) and we have a critical eye on the proposals of Jasso and Miller. The empirical part reports on three vignette studies conducted to find out how people evaluate the justice of given distributions and how they distribute goods when aiming at justice. The main goal was to measure the significance ascribed to need. This significance was compared with the significance ascribed to effort or equality; and it was shown that a need’s influence decreases when the corresponding person is accountable for having a higher amount of it. In the third study, we found out that needs that are not directed at bare survival, such as the need for participation in social life, are attributed lower degrees of importance. The chapter concludes with some implications of our research for a theory of need-based justice. (shrink)

Structural realism has been proposed as an epistemological position interpolating between realism and sceptical anti-realism about scientific theories. The structural realist who accepts a scientific theory thinks that is empirically correct, and furthermore is a realist about the ‘structural content’ of . But what exactly is ‘structural content’? One proposal is that the ‘structural content’ of a scientific theory may be associated with its Ramsey sentence (). However, Demopoulos and Friedman have argued, using ideas drawn from Newman's earlier criticism of (...) Russell's structuralism, that this move fails to achieve an interesting intermediate position between realism and anti-realism. Rather, () adds little content beyond the instrumentalistically acceptable claim that the theory is empirically adequate. Here, I formulate carefully the crucial claim of Demopoulos and Friedman, and show that the Ramsey sentence () is true just in case possesses a full model which is empirically correct and satisfies a certain cardinality condition on its theoretical domain. This suggests that structural realism is not a position significantly different from the anti-realism it attempts to distinguish itself from. Introduction Technical framework Ramsification Empirical adequacy Ramsification empirical adequacy + cardinality constraint Conclusion. (shrink)

Imaginative resistance refers to a phenomenon in which people resist engaging in particular prompted imaginative activities. Philosophers have primarily theorized about this phenomenon from the armchair. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of empirical methods for investigating imaginative resistance. We present two studies that help to establish the psychological reality of imaginative resistance, and to uncover one factor that is significant for explaining this phenomenon but low in psychological salience: genre. Furthermore, our studies have the methodological upshot of (...) showing how empirical tools can complement the predominant armchair approach to philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

The purpose of this dialogue between an ‘empirical realist’ and a ‘traditional ontologist’ is to clarify and evaluate the presuppositions of the kind of anti-ontological position exemplified by empirical realism. After ontology is defined and the empirical realist's position explained, the traditional ontologist pursues a series of dialectical developments and criticisms of the empirical realist's claim to have a coherently non-ontological position. The eventual conclusion is that the empirical realist's opposition to ontology just arbitrarily assumes (...) ontology to be associated with infallibilism and incompatible with fallibilism instead of conveying the illegitimacy of ontology itself or convincingly explaining the non-ontological standing of their position. The significance of this dialogue for critical realism is that it extends the case against anti-ontological epistemologies in general and empirical realism in particular by demonstrating the problems that result f.. (shrink)