Response to Michael Sells

In an era when lies and misrepresentations about historical events easily become firmly rooted, Michael Sells's discussion illustrates the importance of careful historical research as a moral enterprise. In addition to the skills of the historian, however, there is also room in this enterprise for those of the ethicist. In particular, I warn against confusing the truth or falsity of claims about one narrow historical period with larger questions about the moral meaning and significance of those claims. Illustrating this, I argue one cannot assess the legitimacy of competing nationhood claims solely on the basis of the deeds of specific actors. Nor should the actions of a single individual like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem be converted into a totalizing claim about the rights of the Palestinian people.     

The Epistemic Criterion: A Response to Michael Hand

This article is a response to Michael Hand’s critique in this issue of my response to his use of the epistemic criterion as the sole means for identifying whether or not an issue should be identified as controversial. I argue that he has misunderstood my intention in suggesting that I was seeking to replace the epistemic criterion. Rather my purpose was to challenge his over-confidence in the decisiveness of reason and to temper his use of the epistemic criterion by suggesting it needed to embrace ethical concerns.     

Reflection and conditionalization: Comments on Michael Rescorla

Rescorla explores the relation between Reflection, Conditionalization, and Dutch book arguments in the presence of a weakened concept of sure loss and weakened conditions of self-transparency for doxastic agents. The literature about Reflection and about Dutch Book arguments, though overlapping, are distinct, and its history illuminates the import of Rescorla's investigation. With examples from a previous debate in the 70s and results about Reflection and Conditionalization in the 80s, I propose a way of seeing the epistemic enterprise in the light of practical requirements to be met by demands for synchronic coherence and probability updating policies. This includes a defense of principles rejected by Rescorla, while allowing for the value of his results in the borderland between theories of cognition and formal epistemology.     

Natural Selection and Design: Comments on Michael Ruse's New Book

Is the adaptive complexity of living organisms the result of evolutionary processes alone? or does it give evidence of intentional design? Michael Ruse appears to argue that we can have it either way. As a scientist I find the argument from design unnecessary. Yet it has great appeal to humans, whose behavior is largely intentional and who look for patterns in events and for the intentions that may have produced them.     

Reply to Comments

We will respond to our commentators individually, but the order of our responses follows naturally from the issues they bring up. Judea Pearl describes SEM's unfortunate retreat from the clear causal semantics articulated by Sewall Wright (1921) and later by Haavelmo (1943) to the algebraic interpretation preferred more recently by econometricians. We agree with Pearl about the history and also the problem, namely that the algebraic interpretation is suitable for estimation but expressively too weak to even distinguish among competing causal claims. Here we try to elaborate on the distinction between the semantics of a causal SEM and the epistemological connections between statistical data, background knowledge, and causal structure. We argue that many modern critics of SEM make their hay by conflating this distinction. Having tried to make it clear, we then turn to the assumptions that give the epistemological issues their structure, namely the Causal Independence and Faithfulness assumptions. Jim Woodward questions these assumptions at length, especially the Causal Independence assumption, and we spend the second part of our response defending it. Phil Wood seems to accept the fundamental assumptions upon which TETRAD rests, and even the utility of tools like it, but he brings out a wide array of subtle difficulties that we have not had time to discuss, some of which we now cover. Kwok-fai Ting questions the utility of any specification search done by computer, and we attempt to address his concerns last.