“The Ravens Paradox” is a misnomer

I argue that the standard Bayesian solution to the ravens paradox— generally accepted as the most successful solution to the paradox—is insufficiently general. I give an instance of the paradox which is not solved by the standard Bayesian solution. I defend a new, more general solution, which is compatible with the Bayesian account of confirmation. As a solution to the paradox, I argue that the ravens hypothesis ought not to be held equivalent to its contrapositive; more interestingly, I argue that how we formally represent hypotheses ought to vary with the context of inquiry. This explains why the paradox is compelling, while dealing with standard objections to holding hypotheses inequivalent to their contrapositives.     

亨佩尔确证悖论及其解决方案探析

To solve the highly counterintuitive paradox of confirmation represented by the statement, “A pair of red shoes confirms that all ravens are black,” Hempel employed a strategy that retained the equivalence condition but abandoned Nicod’s irrelevance condition. However, his use of the equivalence condition is fairly ad hoc, raising doubts about its applicability to this problem. Furthermore, applying the irrelevance condition from Nicod’s criterion does not necessarily lead to paradoxes, nor does discarding it prevent the emergence of paradoxes. Hempel’s approach fails to adequately resolve the paradox. __________ Translated from Ziran Bianzhengfa Yanjiu 自然辩证法研究 (Studies in Dialectics of Nature), 2005, (8): 33–37     

Why Bayesians Needn’t Be Afraid of Observing Many Non-black Non-ravens

According to Hempel??s raven paradox, the observation of one non-black non-raven confirms the hypothesis that all ravens are black. Bayesians such as Howson and Urbach (Scientific reasoning: the Bayesian approach, 2nd edn. Open Court, Chicago, 1993) claim that the raven paradox can be solved by spelling out the concept of confirmation in the sense of the relevance criterion. Siebel (J Gen Philos Sci 35:313?C329, 2004) disputes the adequacy of this Bayesian solution. He claims that spelling out the concept of confirmation in the relevance sense lets the raven paradox reappear as soon as numerous non-black non-ravens are observed. It is shown in this paper that Siebel??s objection to the Bayesian solution is flawed. Nevertheless, the objection made by Siebel may give us an idea of how Bayesians can successfully handle situations in which we observe more than one non-black non-raven.     

Good News for the Logical Autonomy of Ethics

Toomas Karmo claims that his taxonomy of ethical sentences has the result that there does not exist a sound argument with all non-ethical premises and an ethical conclusion. In a recent paper, Mark T. Nelson argues against this claim. Nelson presents a sound argument that he takes to be such that (i) Karmo’s taxonomy classifies that argument’s single premise as non-ethical and (ii) Karmo’s taxonomy classifies that argument’s conclusion as ethical. I attempt to show that Nelson is mistaken about (ii). For any possible world at which the premise of Nelson’s argument is true, Karmo’s taxonomy classifies the conclusion of Nelson’s argument as non-ethical.

Moore’s Paradox is not just another pragmatic paradox

One version of Moore’s Paradox is the challenge to account for the absurdity of beliefs purportedly expressed by someone who asserts sentences of the form ‘p & I do not believe that p’ (‘Moorean sentences’). The absurdity of these beliefs is philosophically puzzling, given that Moorean sentences (i) are contingent and often true; and (ii) express contents that are unproblematic when presented in the third-person. In this paper I critically examine the most popular proposed solution to these two puzzles, according to which Moorean beliefs are absurd because Moorean sentences are instances of pragmatic paradox; that is to say, the propositions they express are necessarily false-when-believed. My conclusion is that while a Moorean belief is a pragmatic paradox, it is not just another pragmatic paradox, because this diagnosis does not explain all the puzzling features of Moorean beliefs. In particularly, while this analysis is plausible in relation to the puzzle posed by characteristic (i) of Moorean sentences, I argue that it fails to account for (ii). I do so in the course of an attempt to formulate the definition of a pragmatic paradox in more precise formal terms, in order to see whether the definition is satisfied by Moorean sentences, but not by their third-person transpositions. For only an account which can do so could address (ii) adequately. After rejecting a number of attempted formalizations, I arrive at a definition which delivers the right results. The problem with this definition, however, is that it has to be couched in first-person terms, making an essential use of ‘I’. Thus the problem of accounting for first-/third-person asymmetry recurs at a higher order, which shows that the Pragmatic Paradox Resolution fails to identify the source of such asymmetry highlighted by Moore’s Paradox.     

Lakatos’s Challenge? Auxiliary Hypotheses and Non-Monotonous Inference

Summary  Gerhard Schurz [2001, Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 32, 65–107] has proposed to reconstruct auxiliary hypothesis addition, e.g., postulation of Neptune to immunize Newtonian mechanics, with concepts from non-monotonous inference to avoid the retention of false predictions that are among the consequence-set of the deductive model. However, the non-monotonous reconstruction retains the observational premise that is indeed rejected in the deductive model. Hence, his proposal fails to do justice to Lakatos’ core-belt model, therefore fails to meet what Schurz coined “Lakatos’ challenge”. It is argued that Lakatos’s distinction between core and belt of a research program is not mapable onto premise-set and consequence-set and that Schurz’s understanding of a ceteris paribus clause as a transfinite list of (absent) interfering factors is problematic. I propose a simple reading of Lakatos’s use of the term ceteris paribus clause and motivate why the term hypothesis addition, despite not being interpretable literally, came to be entrenched.

It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO; rather we propose a maze of theories and Nature may shout INCONSISTENT. Lakatos (1978, p. 45)

     

Grelling’s Paradox

Grelling’s Paradox is the paradox which results from considering whether heterologicality, the word-property which a designator has when and only when the designator does not bear the word-property it designates, is had by ‘ ȁ8heterologicality’. Although there has been some philosophical debate over its solution, Grelling’s Paradox is nearly uniformly treated as a variant of either the Liar Paradox or Russell’s Paradox, a paradox which does not present any philosophical challenges not already presented by the two better known paradoxes. The aims of this paper are, first, to offer a precise formulation of Grelling’s Paradox which is clearly distinguished from both the Liar Paradox and Russell’s Paradox; second, to offer a solution to Grelling’s Paradox which both resolves the paradoxical reasoning and accounts for unproblematic predications of heterologicality; and, third, to argue that there are two lessons to be drawn from Grelling’s Paradox which have not yet been drawn from the Liar or Russell’s Paradox. The first lesson is that it is possible for the semantic content of a predicate to be sensitive to the semantic context; i.e., it is possible for a predicate to be an indexical expression. The second lesson is that the semantic content of an indexical predicate, though unproblematic for many cases, can nevertheless be problematic in some cases.     

Belief merging and the discursive dilemma: an argument-based account to paradoxes of judgment aggregation

The aggregation of individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective decision on the same propositions is called judgment aggregation. Literature in social choice and political theory has claimed that judgment aggregation raises serious concerns. For example, consider a set of premises and a conclusion where the latter is logically equivalent to the former. When majority voting is applied to some propositions (the premises) it may give a different outcome than majority voting applied to another set of propositions (the conclusion). This problem is known as the discursive dilemma (or paradox). The discursive dilemma is a serious problem since it is not clear whether a collective outcome exists in these cases, and if it does, what it is like. Moreover, the two suggested escape-routes from the paradox—the so-called premise-based procedure and the conclusion-based procedure—are not, as I will show, satisfactory methods for group decision-making. In this paper I introduce a new aggregation procedure inspired by an operator defined in artificial intelligence in order to merge belief bases. The result is that we do not need to worry about paradoxical outcomes, since these arise only when inconsistent collective judgments are not ruled out from the set of possible solutions.     

Do common ravens (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Corvus corax</Emphasis>) rely on human or conspecific gaze cues to detect hidden food?

The ability of non-human animals to use experimenter-given cues in object-choice tasks has recently gained interest. In such experiments, the location of hidden food is indicated by an experimenter, e.g. by gazing, pointing or touching. Whereas dogs apparently outperform all other species so far tested, apes and monkeys have problems in using such cues. Since only mammalian species have been tested, information is lacking about the evolutionary origin of these abilities. We here present the first data on object-choice tasks conducted with an avian species, the common raven. Ravens are highly competitive scavengers, possessing sophisticated cognitive skills in protecting their food caches and pilfering others’ caches. We conducted three experiments, exploring (i) which kind of cues ravens use for choosing a certain object, (ii) whether ravens use humans’ gaze for detecting hidden food and (iii) whether ravens would find hidden food in the presence of an informed conspecific who potentially provides gaze cues. Our results indicate that ravens reliably respond to humans’ touching of an object, but they hardly use point and gaze cues for their choices. Likewise, they do not perform above chance level in the presence of an informed conspecific. These findings mirror those obtained for primates and suggest that, although ravens may be aware of the gaze direction of humans and conspecifics, they apparently do not rely on this information to detect hidden food.     

‘Is’–‘Ought’ Derivations and Ethical Taxonomies

Hume seems to claim that there does not exist a valid argument that has all non-ethical sentences as premises and an ethical sentence as its conclusion. Starting with Prior, a number of counterexamples to this claim have been proposed. Unfortunately, all of these proposals are controversial. Even the most plausible have a premise that seems like it might be an ethical sentence or a conclusion that seems like it might be non-ethical. Since it is difficult to tell whether any of these counterexamples are genuine, we need a taxonomy that sorts out ethical sentences from non-ethical ones. We need to know the difference between an ‘Is’ and an ‘Ought’. In the first part of the paper, I establish the need for a taxonomy. I consider some of the most influential ‘Is’–‘Ought’ derivations. These include proposals by Prior and Searle. I argue that each proposal has a premise whose status as ethical or non-ethical is difficult to determine. In the second part of the paper, I consider taxonomies proposed by Karmo and Maitzen. I argue against both taxonomies. I end with the claim that we need a taxonomy of ethical sentences and that none of the current proposals are adequate.

The ‘Gray’s Elegy’ Argument, and The Prospects for the Theory of Denoting Concepts

Russell’s new theory of denoting phrases introduced in “On Denoting” in Mind 1905 is now a paradigm of analytic philosophy. The main argument for Russell’s new theory is the so-called ‘Gray’s Elegy’ argument, which purports to show that the theory of denoting concepts (analogous to Frege’s theory of senses) promoted by Russell in the 1903 Principles of Mathematics is incoherent. The ‘Gray’s Elegy’ argument rests on the premise that if a denoting concept occurs in a proposition, then the proposition is not about the concept. I argue that the premise is false. The ‘Gray’s Elegy’ argument does not exhaust Russell’s ammunition against the theory of denoting concepts. Another reason Russell rejects the theory is, as he says, that it cannot provide an adequate account of non-uniquely denoting concepts. In the last section of the paper, I argue that even though Russell was right in thinking that the theory of denoting concepts cannot provide an adequate account of non-uniquely denoting concepts, Russell’s new theory does not succeed in eliminating the occurrence of all denoting concepts, as it requires a commitment to the existence of variables that indirectly denote their values. However, the view that variables are denoting concepts is unproblematic once the ‘Gray’s Elegy’ argument is blocked.     

Zur logikabh?ngigkeit wissenschafts-theoretischer Paradoxien

Investigations in meta-theoretical topics such as the definability of disposition terms or the explication of qualitative and quantitative concepts of confirmation, as well as discussions of various systems of modal logic, e.g., deontic logic, often deal with a number of well known paradoxes. In general, classical logic is used in deriving the paradox of the ravens, Goodman's paradox, the paradoxes of derived obligation, etc. The questions whether these paradoxes depend essentially on the use of classical logic and whether they can be avoided by using intuitionistic or minimal logic are considered.     

Does Roush show that evidence should be probable?

This paper critically analyzes Sherrilyn Roush’s (Tracking truth: knowledge, evidence and science, 2005) definition of evidence and especially her powerful defence that in the ideal, a claim should be probable to be evidence for anything. We suggest that Roush treats not one sense of ‘evidence’ but three: relevance, leveraging and grounds for knowledge; and that different parts of her argument fare differently with respect to different senses. For relevance, we argue that probable evidence is sufficient but not necessary for Roush’s own two criteria of evidence to be met. With respect to grounds for knowledge, we agree that high probability evidence is indeed ideal for the central reason Roush gives: When believing a hypothesis on the basis of e it is desirable that e be probable. But we maintain that her further argument that Bayesians need probable evidence to warrant the method they recommend for belief revision rests on a mistaken interpretation of Bayesian conditionalization. Moreover, we argue that attempts to reconcile Roush’s arguments with Bayesianism fail. For leveraging, which we agree is a matter of great importance, the requirement that evidence be probable suffices for leveraging to the probability of the hypothesis if either one of Roush’s two criteria for evidence are met. Insisting on both then seems excessive. To finish, we show how evidence, as Roush defines it, can fail to track the hypothesis. This can remedied by adding a requirement that evidence be probable, suggesting another rationale for taking probable evidence as ideal—but only for a grounds-for-knowledge sense of evidence.     

What wealth-happiness paradox? A short note on the American case

Happiness scholars have tried to resolve the seeming paradox that as Americans’ wealth increased substantially over the last few decades, their happiness did not. This article questions whether the paradox is real. Demonstrations of the paradox almost always rely on GDP per capita as the measure of wealth, but that is a poor measure of a people’s well-being. It is heavily and increasingly skewed; it does not account for effort. Using instead measures of household income, male income, and average wages eliminates the paradox; these indicators of affluence have grown only slowly or declined in the same period, paralleling the changes in happiness scores. Moreover, using these indicators reveals a modest but real correlation between material well-being and national happiness.     

On inconsistent entities. A reply to Colyvan

In a recent article M. Colyvan has argued that Quinean forms of scientific realism are faced with an unexpected upshot. Realism concerning a given class of entities, along with this route to realism, can be vindicated by running an indispensability argument to the effect that the entities postulated by our best scientific theories exist. Colyvan observes that among our best scientific theories some are inconsistent, and so concludes that, by resorting to the very same argument, we may incur a commitment to inconsistent entities. Colyvan’s argument could be interpreted, and in part is presented, as a reductio of Quinean scientific realism; yet, Colyvan in the end manifests some willingness to bite the bullet, and provides some reasons why we shouldn’t feel too uncomfortable with those entities. In this paper we wish to indicate a way out to the scientific realist, by arguing that no indispensability argument of the kind suggested by Colyvan is actually available. To begin with, in order to run such an indispensability argument we should be justified in believing that an inconsistent theory is true; yet, in so far as the logic we accept is a consistent one it is arguable that our epistemic predicament could not be possibly one in which we are justified in so believing. Moreover, also if our logic admitted true contradictions, as Dialetheism does, it is arguable that Colyvan’s indispensability argument could not rest on a true premise. As we will try to show, dialetheists do not admit true contradictions for cheap: they do so just as a way out of paradox, namely whenever we are second-level ignorant as to the metaphysical possibility of evidence breaking the parity among two or more inconsistent claims; Colyvan’s examples, however, are not of this nature. So, even under the generous assumption that Dialetheism is true, we will conclude that Colyvan’s argument doesn’t achieve its surprising conclusion.     

The Novelty of Nano and the Regulatory Challenge of Newness

A great deal has been made of the question of whether nano-materials provide a unique set of ethical challenges. Equally important is the question of whether they provide a unique set of regulatory challenges. In the last 18 months, the US Environmental Protection Agency has begun the process of trying to meet the regulatory challenge of nano using the Toxic Substances Control Act (1976)(TSCA). In this central piece of legislation, ‘newness’ is a critical concept. Current EPA policy, we argue, does not adequately (or ethically) deal with the novelty of nano. This paper is an exploration of how to do a better job of accounting for nanomaterials as ‘new.’ We explore three alternative ways that nanomaterials might be made to fall under the TSCA regulatory umbrella. Since nanomaterials are of interest precisely because of the exciting new properties that emerge at the nano-scale, each of these three alternatives must meet what we call the ‘novelty condition’ and avoid what we call the ‘central paradox’ of existing regulatory policy. Failure to meet either of these conditions is a moral failure. We examine both the strengths and weaknesses of each alternative in order to illuminate the conceptual, practical, and moral challenges of novelty.     

A neglected response to the paradoxes of confirmation

Hempel's paradox of the ravens, and his take on it, are meant to be understood as being restricted to situations where we have no additional background information. According to him, in the absence of any such information, observations of FGs confirm the hypothesis that all Fs are G. In this paper I argue against this principle by way of considering two other paradoxes of confirmation, Goodman’s “grue” paradox and the “tacking” (or “irrelevant conjunct”) paradox. What these paradoxes reveal, I argue, is that a presumption of causal realism is required to ground any confirmation; but once we grant causal realism, we have no reason to accept the central principles giving rise to the paradoxes.     

Hume’s Solution of the Goodman Paradox and the Reliability Riddle (Mill’s problem)

Many solutions of the Goodman paradox have been proposed but so far no agreement has been reached about which is the correct solution. However, I will not contribute here to the discussion with a new solution. Rather, I will argue that a solution has been in front of us for more than two hundred years because a careful reading of Hume’s account of inductive inferences shows that, contrary to Goodman’s opinion, it embodies a correct solution of the paradox. Moreover, the account even includes a correct answer to Mill’s question of why in some cases a single instance is sufficient for a complete induction, since Hume gives a well-supported explanation of this reliability phenomenon. The discussion also suggests that Bayesian theory by itself cannot explain this phenomenon. Finally, we will see that Hume’s explanation of the reliability phenomenon is surprisingly similar to the explanation given lately by a number of naturalistic philosophers in their discussion of the Goodman paradox.     

Knowability and the capacity to know

This paper presents a generalized form of Fitch’s paradox of knowability, with the aim of showing that the questions it raises are not peculiar to the topics of knowledge, belief, or other epistemic notions. Drawing lessons from the generalization, the paper offers a solution to Fitch’s paradox that exploits an understanding of modal talk about what could be known in terms of capacities to know. It is argued that, in rare cases, one might have the capacity to know that p even if it is metaphysically impossible for anyone to know that p, and that recognizing this fact provides the resources to solve Fitch’s paradox.     

Roger Swyneshed’s Obligationes: A Logical Game of Inference Recognition?

In [Dutilh Novaes, Medieval-obligations as logical Games of Consistency maintenance, synthese, (2004)], I proposed a reconstruction of Walter Burley’s theory of obligationes, based on the idea that Burley’s theory of obligationes could be seen as a logical game of consistency maintenance. In the present paper, I intend to test the game hypothesis on another important theory of obligationes, namely Roger Swyneshed’s theory. In his treatise on obligationes [edited by P.V. Spade, cf. Spade History and philosophy of Logic 3(1982) 1-32], Swyneshed introduced significant modifications to the general framework of obligationes. To compare the two theories, I apply the same formal apparatus used in the previous paper. It will become patent that Swyneshed’s theory is considerably different from Burley’s, among other reasons because the dynamic aspects that play a major role in the latter are simply not present in the former. My conclusion is that Swyneshed’s version of obligationes is not directed towards consistency maintenance, but rather towards inference recognition, and that it is, from a game-theoretical perspective, less interesting a theory than Burley’s.