Evolutionary game-theoretic (EGT) models of morality face powerful under-addressed objections. Critics claim the simulations fail to specify their explanandum, muddying their explanatory value. Additionally, morality is suggested to be not computationally representable, jeopardising the method's general applicability. This paper explicates and addresses the objections. I argue at least one concrete explication of morality, emotionism coupled with functionally understood emotions, can be a plausible subject of EGT explanations. I demonstrate how fixing this explanandum assuages the methodological objections and provide a computational model as proof of concept. If successful, the contribution placates serious long-standing criticisms of evolutionary game theory as a meta-ethical tool.
The standard Bayesian solution to the paradox of the ravens maintains that the degree of confirmation provided by seeing a nonblack nonraven is positive but negligible compared to that provided by seeing a black raven. I show that, unless we impose severe and unmotivated restrictions on the subject's priors, this has the consequence that the cumulative confirmation provided by all the nonblack nonravens the subject expects to see is nonnegligible compared to the cumulative confirmation provided by all the black ravens the subject expects to see. If this is so, however, then the paradox retains its full force.
This article distinguishes and critically evaluates a distinctive class of objection to the Argument from Inductive Risk. "Expertise-objections" question the fitness of scientists to engage in moral decision making during research, on grounds of deficiencies in scientists' relative expertise. Such critiques bring considerations of inductive risk into important dialogue with wider literature from moral philosophy; but, once contextualized therein, it becomes apparent that expertise-objections fail to decisively prohibit the articulation of moral duties for scientists.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is diagnosed more often in males than females. Recently, this gap has narrowed, a development often framed as overcoming gender bias. This framing rests on two problematic assumptions: (1) more equal diagnostic rates approximate truth and (2) there is such a truth in the first place. Option (1) is questionable because male populations are set as standard but potentially reflect overdiagnosis. Option (2) presumes ADHD to be a stable, discrete disease entity, which is epistemically and ontologically problematic. I argue that understanding (gender) bias here should focus on deviations from best practices and deliberative norms rather than a relation to truth.
Is it permissible to implicate non-epistemic values in the ‘core’ of scientific reasoning? This paper offers an appraisal of Parker’s (2024) Epistemic Projection Approach (EPA) prescribing acceptable relations between epistemic and non-epistemic values in research conduct. Non-epistemic values are granted a role in determining epistemic characteristics for a research project but are meant to be ‘screened off’ from core research decisions via epistemic projection . This discussion takes the EPA for a test drive. We identify three challenges to its conceptual and practical viability and show how EPA currently lacks resources to address them, indicating a need for further development.
The probabilistic no-miracle argument (NMA) for scientific realism has faced significant criticism from Colin Howson's base-rate fallacy objection, which claims the argument violates Bayesian reasoning principles. This paper argues that such criticisms are premature. Through systematic mathematical analysis, I show that, for theories with high predictive precision, NMA would be inferentially fallacious only if opponents assume prior probabilities of approximate truth that are either "miraculously low" or "super-miraculously low." These assumptions are implausible, question-begging against realism, and unsupported by standard anti-realist arguments. The burden of proof thus shifts to critics to justify these extraordinary claims about prior probabilities.
This paper examines how incorporating theoretical virtues in belief updating affects the long-term success of epistemic communities. Drawing on NK landscape models of the type used by Lazer and Friedman (2007), simulation results are used to show that when epistemic agents in a connected community factor in virtues like conservatism, modesty, and familiarity in theory selection, agents hold differing beliefs for longer periods of time. This increase in transient diversity typically leads to greater long-term communal epistemic success, a benefit that becomes more pronounced as interconnectedness between community members increases.
Rerandomization is a new technique employed in randomized field experiments to enhance the balance of covariates across experimental groups. Rerandomization is recommended because it reduces imbalances in known covariates, thereby enhancing the precision of the average treatment effect estimates. However, employing rerandomization necessitates adjusting observed p-values, using regression-based inference, and selecting predictive covariates. All these amendments increase the number of researcher degrees of freedom, that is, methodological decisions involved in designing and analyzing experiments. I argue that this increased analytical flexibility may be misused to p-hack for statistically significant or preferred results, thereby reducing the credibility of the results.
The literature on theoretical equivalence in the philosophy of physics is replete with physical theories that look quite different but are purportedly equivalent. Plausibly, there might exist a pair of equivalent theories that look different insofar as they existentially quantify over different entities. However, given the preeminence of the quantificational theory of ontological commitment, which tells us to look to quantified entities to inform ontology, such a pair of theories seems to be a problem. In this article, I argue that there is no good way out of the problem, and I reject the quantificational theory of ontological commitment.
Newton famously rejected the use of hypotheses in natural philosophy, in stark contrast to many of his contemporaries, such as Descartes, Huygens, and Leibniz, who employed hypothetical methods. This disagreement is often framed as one concerning the Hypothetico-Deductive (HD) method, but I argue that this is mistaken. The relevant hypothesis-based methods at issue were what I call inference to the best hypothesis and its stronger version, inference to the only plausible hypothesis. These methods were far more nuanced and plausible than HD, and they enjoyed widespread popularity among early modern thinkers, even among prominent experimental philosophers. Newton rejected them, nonetheless.
Democratic theorists and social epistemologists often celebrate the epistemic benefits of diversity. One of the cornerstones is the "diversity trumps ability" result by Hong and Page (2004). Ironically, the interplay between diversity and ability is rarely studied in radically different frameworks. In particular, the diversity-expertise trade-off has not been studied systematically for small, deliberative groups facing binary classification problems. To fill this gap, I will introduce a new evidential sources framework and study whether, when, and (if so) why diversity trumps expertise in binary classification problems. The newly gained insights are used to revisit the epistemic credentials of deliberative democracy.
This paper explores the inductive logic associated with exponential smoothing, the most widely used predictive rule that manifests the idea that more recent observations have a stronger influence on predictive probabilities than more remote ones. The main result shows that exponential smoothing can be derived from a set of plausible qualitative invariance assumptions about conditional probabilities. I discuss various aspects of the resulting inductive logic, including its connections to exchangeable processes, to Bayesian predictive inference and kernel methods in machine learning, as well as the philosophy of probabilistic invariance conditions and symmetries.
Theories of bounded rationality join process reliabilists in holding that rationality is ecological, or environment-relative. Most theories of ecological rationality, like most versions of reliabilism, have been externalist. In this paper, I develop a de-externalized account of ecological rationality. I show how the account retains many advantages of externalist accounts while avoiding key challenges. I conclude with an application to the psychology of poverty, focusing on the rationality of agents caught in poverty traps.
I argue that the epistemic aim of scientific theorizing (EAST) is producing theories with the highest possible number and degree of theoretical virtues (call this “TV-EAST”). I trace TV-EAST’s logical empiricist origins and discuss its close connections to Kuhn’s and Laudan’s problem-solving accounts of the aim of science. Despite TV-EAST’s antirealist roots, I argue that if one adopts the realist view that EAST is finding true theories, one should also endorse TV-EAST. I then defend TV-EAST by showing that it addresses the challenges raised against using the “aim of science” metaphor and offers significant advantages over the realist account.
Philosophers have claimed that: (a) Born-Oppenheimer approximation methods for solving molecular Schr & ouml;dinger equations violate the Heisenberg uncertainty relations; therefore, (b) 'quantum chemistry' is not fully quantum; and (c) therefore chemistry does not reduce to physics. This paper analyses the reasoning behind Born-Oppenheimer methods and shows that they are internally consistent and fully quantum mechanical, contrary to (a)-(c). Our analysis addresses important issues of mathematical rigour, physical idealization, reduction, and classicality in the quantum theory of molecules, and we propose an agenda for the philosophy of quantum chemistry more grounded in scientific practice.
Vitamins are important scientific categories in different contexts. This article argues that vitamins are investigative kinds in middle-range ontologies: Categories subject to open-ended investigation and that track features of the world. Section 2 presents the history of vitamin discovery to illustrate how the introduction of the "vitamin" category and subsequent research led to the identification of many different vitamins. Section 3 explores whether vitamins can be considered natural or conventional kinds. Section 4 argues that vitamins are investigative kinds. Section 5 considers the ontology of vitamins as investigative kinds in a middle-range ontology.
Human computers and micro-observers were scientific workers who performed calculations or reduced and analysed data before the advent of electronic computers. They were a staple of big science during the nineteenth and early to mid twentieth century. Despite their prevalence within big science, their epistemic roles remain unexamined by philosophy of science. This paper investigates the epistemic roles of the human computers at the Harvard College Observatory 1880-1920 and of micro-observers at the Bristol Nuclear Research Group 1935-1955; it argues that the instrumentalisation of human computers and micro-observers has negative epistemic consequences for the methodology of science.
Comparativists (about mass) eliminate absolute masses from the fundamental ontological picture by virtue of a principle of economy, the "Comparative Razor," which requires that only mass-relations, which are invariant under (metrical) symmetries, be considered fundamental. I show how this weapon backfires. If mass-relations are endowed with a standard (multiplicative) concatenation structure, power-transformations become (metrical) symmetries, leaving comparativists prima facie unable to distinguish a possible world and its duplicate where mass-relations are uniformly squared. Then, I considered possible exit strategies, which unfortunately either rely on hidden absolutist assumptions, or leave comparativists and absolutists on equal footing.
Recently, several philosophers and physicists have increasingly noticed the hegemony of unitarity in the discourse on black hole information loss and are challenging its legitimacy in the face of the measurement problem. They proclaim that embracing non-unitarity solves two paradoxes for the price of one. Although I share their distaste regarding the philosophical bias, I disagree with their strategy of still privileging certain interpretations of quantum theory. I argue that information-restoring solutions can be interpretation-neutral because the manifestation of non-unitarity in Hawking's original derivation is unrelated to what's found in collapse theories or generalized stochastic approaches, thereby decoupling the two puzzles.
This paper presents a new problem for the inference rule commonly known as "inference to the best explanation" (IBE). The problem is that uncertainty about parts of one's evidence may undermine the inferrability of a hypothesis that would provide the best explanation of that evidence, especially in cases where there is an alternative hypothesis that would provide a better explanation of only the more certain pieces of evidence. A potential solution to the problem is sketched, in which IBE is generalized to handle uncertain evidence by invoking a notion of evidential robustness.
