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)

     

What’s Really at Issue with Novel Predictions?

In this paper I distinguish two kinds of predictivism, ‘timeless’ and ‘historicized’. The former is the conventional understanding of predictivism. However, I argue that its defense in the works of John Worrall (Scerri and Worrall 2001, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 32, 407–452; Worrall 2002, In the Scope of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, 1, 191–209) and Patrick Maher (Maher 1988, PSA 1988, 1, pp. 273) is wanting. Alternatively, I promote an historicized predictivism, and briefly defend such a predictivism at the end of the paper.     

AI,ME AND LEWIS (ABELIAN IMPLICATION,MATERIAL EQUIVALENCE AND C I LEWIS 1920)

C I Lewis showed up Down Under in 2005, in e-mails initiated by Allen Hazen of Melbourne. Their topic was the system Hazen called FL (a Funny Logic), axiomatized in passing in Lewis 1921. I show that FL is the system MEN of material equivalence with negation. But negation plays no special role in MEN. Symbolizing equivalence with → and defining ∼A inferentially as A→f, the theorems of MEN are just those of the underlying theory ME of pure material equivalence. This accords with the treatment of negation in the Abelian l-group logic A of Meyer and Slaney (Abelian logic. Abstract, Journal of Symbolic Logic 46, 425–426, 1981), which also defines ∼A inferentially with no special conditions on f. The paper then concentrates on the pure implicational part AI of A, the simple logic of Abelian groups. The integers Z were known to be characteristic for AI, with every non-theorem B refutable mod some Zn for finite n. Noted here is that AI is pre-tabular, having the Scroggs property that every proper extension SI of AI, closed under substitution and detachment, has some finite Zn as its characteristic matrix. In particular FL is the extension for which n = 2 (Lewis, The structure of logic and its relation to other systems. The Journal of Philosophy 18, 505–516, 1921; Meyer and Slaney, Abelian logic. Abstract. Journal of Symbolic Logic 46, 425–426, 1981; This is an abstract of the much longer paper finally published in 1989 in G. G. Priest, R. Routley and J. Norman, eds., Paraconsistent logic: essays on the inconsistent, Philosophica Verlag, Munich, pp. 245–288, 1989). Meyer was supported in this work as a Visiting Fellow in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, ANU.     

Are There Algorithms That Discover Causal Structure?

There have been many efforts to infer causation from association byusing statistical models. Algorithms for automating this processare a more recent innovation. In Humphreys and Freedman[(1996) British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47, 113–123] we showed that one such approach, by Spirtes et al., was fatally flawed. Here we put our arguments in a broader context and reply to Korb and Wallace [(1997) British Journal for thePhilosophy of Science 48, 543–553] and to Spirtes et al.[(1997) British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48, 555–568]. Their arguments leave our position unchanged: claims to have developed a rigorous engine for inferring causation from association are premature at best, the theorems have no implications for samples of any realistic size, and the examples used to illustrate the algorithms are indicative of failure rather than success. The gap between association and causation has yet to be bridged.     

Uncommon Schools: Stanley Cavell and the Teaching of Walden

Thoreau’s Walden is a text that has been misinterpreted in various ways, one consequence of which is a failure to appreciate its significance as a perfectionist and visionary text for education. This paper explores aspects of what might be called its teaching, especially via the kind of teaching that is offered by Stanley Cavell’s commentary, The Senses of Walden. Walden is considered especially in the light of its conception of language as the “father-tongue” and of the ideas of continual rebirth and departure that are associated with this. References to teaching and learning abound in the book, but it is Thoreau’s specific reference to the need for “uncommon schools” that provides a focus for the present discussion. Paul Standish is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Sheffield. His recent books include The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Education (2003), co-edited with Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers and Richard Smith. He is Editor of the Journal of Philosophy of Education and Co-editor of the online Encyclopaedia of Philosophy of Education.     

Philosophie und Geometrie. Zur jüngeren Protophysik-Kritik

The critique of my protophysical approaches to operational foundation of geometry by Lucas Amiras (Journal for General Philosophy of Science Vol. 34 (2003)) concerns my first publication from 1976 but not the further 30 years of work. It does not offer any argument leading from the (erroneous) judgement “lacking success” to the conclusion “impossible”. And it is, in general, based on a philosophical defect: it ignores the principle of methodical order as leading for constructivist protophysics.     

Philosophy of Science and History3 of Science: A Non Troubling Interaction

Cassandra Pinnick and George Gale (Journal for General Phisophy of Science 31, 109–125) examined the post-Lakatos period of historical cum philosophical case studies and concluded that a new methodology is required. Lakatos' proposed ‘history₂’ (the theory- and value-laden reconstruction of history₁, the set of historical events) was criticised. Recently a group of scholars have been pursuing a methodology which could be described as history ₃, a history₁ account of the interaction between the significant scientific papers published during the time period in question and their scientific audience. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Education and conspiracy beliefs: A replication of van Prooijen (2017)

The main aim of the study was to replicate and extend van Prooijen's findings on how education and its outcomes (cognitive complexity, subjective social standing, self-esteem, a feeling of control and powerlessness, cognitive reflection, epistemic curiosity and scientific reasoning) predict conspiracy beliefs. In two studies (Study 1: N = 497, M_age = 49.06, SD_age = 14.92; Study 2: N = 482, M_age = 47.45, SD_age = 15.87), subjective socioeconomic status and cognitive reflection (Study 1) and a feeling of powerlessness and scientific reasoning (Study 2) contributed to the negative relationship between education level and belief in conspiracy theories. These results showed the connection of education to socioeconomic status, a feeling of control and analytic thinking (cognitive reflection, scientific reasoning) and their power to reduce conspiracy beliefs.     

Discussions

Summary  In their paper, ‘When are thought experiments poor ones?’ (Peijnenburg and David Atkinson, 2003, Journal of General Philosophy of Science 34, 305-322.), Jeanne Peijnenburg and David Atkinson argue that most, if not all, philosophical thought experiments are “poor” ones with “disastrous consequences” and that they share the property of being poor with some (but not all) scientific thought experiments. Noting that unlike philosophy, the sciences have the resources to avoid the disastrous consequences, Peijnenburg and Atkinson come to the conclusion that the use of thought experiments in science is in general more successful than in philosophy and that instead of concocting more “recherché” thought experiments, philosophy should try to be more empirical. In this comment I will argue that Peijnenburg’s and Atkinson’s view on thought experiments is based on a misleading characterization of both, the dialectical situation in philosophy as well as the history of physics. By giving an adequate account of what the discussion in contemporary philosophy is about, we will arrive at a considerably different evaluation of philosophical thought experiments.

For I am convinced that we now find ourselves at an altogether decisive turning point in philosophy, and that we are objectively justified in considering that an end has come to the fruitless conflict of systems. We are already at the present time, in my opinion, in possession of methods which make any such conflict in principle unnecessary. What is now required is their resolute application. (Schlick, ‘The Turning Point in Philosophy’, 1930/1959, p. 54).

     

Reciprocity and Reasonable Disagreement: From Liberal to Democratic Legitimacy

At the center of Rawls’s work post-1980 is the question of how legitimate coercive state action is possible in a liberal democracy under conditions of reasonable disagreement. And at the heart of Rawls’s answer to this question is his liberal principle of legitimacy. In this paper I argue that once we attend carefully to the depth and range of reasonable disagreement, Rawls’s liberal principle of legitimacy turns out to be either wildly utopian or simply toothless, depending on how one reads the ideal of reciprocity it is meant to embody. To remedy this defect in Rawls’s theory, I␣undertake to develop the outlines of a democratic conception of legitimacy, drawing first on Rawls’s generic conception of legitimacy in The Law of Peoples and second on a revised understanding of reciprocity between free and equal citizens. On this revised understanding, what free and equal citizens owe one another is not reciprocity in judgment, but reciprocity of interests. David A. Reidy, J.D. (Indiana University-Bloomington), Ph.D. (Philosophy, University of Kansas) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee. He works in political philosophy and philosophy of law. He has published essays in journals such as Political Theory, Journal of Social Philosophy, Res Publica, Southern Journal of Philosophy, Public Affairs Quarterly, Polis, Journal of Value Inquiry, Kantian Review, Economics and Philosophy, Legal Studies Forum, as well as in various anthologies. He is the co-editor (with Mortimer Sellers) of Universal Human Rights: Moral Order in a Divided World (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005) and (with Rex Martin) of A Realistic Utopia: Essays on Rawls’s ‘The Law of Peoples’ (Blackwell, forthcoming 2005).     

The other invisible hand: Jews and anarchists in London before the First World War

In the decades before the First World War, London worried about anarchist outrages, and particularly, about Jews said to instigate them. Jewish anarchists were rumoured to have been responsible for the ‘ripper’ murders in Whitechapel (1888), an attempt to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich Park (1894) and the Houndsditch murders (1910)/Sidney Street affair (1911). Jews were a visible population in the East End, and editors, MPs, and police authorities offered Jewishness to explain the ‘who’ and ‘why’ of anarchist violence. Jews were also thought to have the capacity to become invisible, ‘outsiders’ who could pass for ‘insiders’. In the radical press, and fictionalised accounts in novels such as Conrad’s The Secret Agent, the image of the Jewish anarchist became that of agent provocateur paid by police to infiltrate and undermine the movement. Jews were said to operate behind-the-scenes, manipulating the economy and political structure. The invisible hand of the market and the invisible hand of anarchism were attached to a Jewish body. About the author: Paul Knepper (Ph.D. Arizona State) is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, and Research Fellow, Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Manchester. Recent publications include ```Jewish Trafficking” and London Jews in the Age of Migration’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (2008); ‘British Jews and the Racialisation of Crime in the Age of Empire’ British Journal of Criminology (2007); ‘Michael Polanyi and Jewish Identity’ Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2005); ‘Polanyi, “Jewish Problems”, and Zionism’ Tradition and Discovery (2005).     

Selection and Predictive Success

By means of a citation analysis I aim to determine which scholarly journals are most important in the sub-field of philosophy of science. My analysis shows that the six most important journals in the sub-field are Philosophy of Science, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Journal of Philosophy, Synthese, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, and Erkenntnis. Given the data presented in this study, there is little evidence that there is such a field as the history and philosophy of science (HPS). Rather, philosophy of science is most properly conceived of as a sub-field of philosophy.     

When good theories make bad predictions

Chaos-related obstructions to predictability have been used to challenge accounts of theory validation based on the agreement between theoretical predictions and experimental data (Rueger & Sharp, 1996. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 47, 93–112; Koperski, 1998. Philosophy of Science, 40, 194–212). These challenges are incomplete in two respects: (a) they do not show that chaotic regimes are unpredictable in principle (i.e., with unbounded resources) and, as a result, that there is something conceptually wrong with idealized expectations of correct predictions from acceptable theories, and (b) they do not explore whether chaos-induced predictive failures of deterministic models can be remedied by stochastic modeling. In this paper we appeal to an asymptotic analysis of state space trajectories and their numerical approximations to show that chaotic regimes are deterministically unpredictable even with unbounded resources. Additionally, we explain why stochastic models of chaotic systems, while predictively successful in some cases, are in general predictively as limited as deterministic ones. We conclude by suggesting that the way in which scientists deal with such principled obstructions to predictability calls for a more comprehensive approach to theory validation, on which experimental testing is augmented by a multifaceted mathematical analysis of theoretical models, capable of identifying chaos-related predictive failures as due to principled limitations which the world itself imposes on any less-than-omniscient epistemic access to some natural systems. We give special thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments that have substantially contributed to the final version of this paper     

Measurement of cognitive functions in experts and elite athletes: A meta‐analytic review

An extraordinary physiological capacity combined with remarkable motor control, perception, and cognitive functioning is crucial for high performance in sports. Tests that assess the physical abilities are already well established. Moreover, a growing area of research evolved in the recent past that is particularly concerned with the basic cognitive functions by means of neurocognitive tests in experts and elite athletes. The aim of this meta‐analysis (k = 19) is to quantify differences among experts and nonexperts as well as elite athletes and non‐elite athletes. In addition, it aims to assemble and compare previous research and analyze possible differences in cognitive functions depending on age, skill level, and used cognitive tasks. Overall, the mean effect size was small to medium (r = 0.22), indicating superior cognitive functions in experts and elite athletes. The factor of skill definition significantly differentiates the cognition–expertise relationship. In contrast, differences in age groups and cognitive areas appeared but were not significant. Future research should prefer the elite rather than the expert definition and distinguish between high‐performance and amateur athletes. Furthermore, the findings suggest that it can be beneficial for coaches and sport clubs to integrate cognitive tests as an additional tool for scouting and for optimizing the athletic development of their players.     

A general proof of consistency of heuristic classification for cognitive diagnosis models

The Asymptotic Classification Theory of Cognitive Diagnosis (Chiu et al., 2009, Psychometrika, 74, 633–665) determined the conditions that cognitive diagnosis models must satisfy so that the correct assignment of examinees to proficiency classes is guaranteed when non‐parametric classification methods are used. These conditions have only been proven for the Deterministic Input Noisy Output AND gate model. For other cognitive diagnosis models, no theoretical legitimization exists for using non‐parametric classification techniques for assigning examinees to proficiency classes. The specific statistical properties of different cognitive diagnosis models require tailored proofs of the conditions of the Asymptotic Classification Theory of Cognitive Diagnosis for each individual model – a tedious undertaking in light of the numerous models presented in the literature. In this paper a different way is presented to address this task. The unified mathematical framework of general cognitive diagnosis models is used as a theoretical basis for a general proof that under mild regularity conditions any cognitive diagnosis model is covered by the Asymptotic Classification Theory of Cognitive Diagnosis.     

Propositional knowledge and know-how

This paper is roughly in two parts. The first deals with whether know-how is constituted by propositional knowledge, as discussed primarily by Gilbert Ryle (1949) The concept of mind. London: Hutchinson, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001). Knowing how. Journal of Philosophy, 98, pp. 411–444 as well as Stephen Hetherington (2006). How to know that knowledge-that is knowledge-how. In S. Hetherington (Ed.) Epistemology futures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The conclusion of this first part is that know-how sometimes does and sometimes does not consist in propositional knowledge. The second part defends an analysis of know-how inspired by Katherine Hawley’ (2003). Success and knowledge-how. American Philosophical Quarterly, 40, pp. 19–31, insightful proposal that know-how requires counterfactual success. I conclude by showing how this analysis helps to explain why know-how sometimes does and sometimes does not consist of propositional knowledge.     

Against Against Intuitionism

The main ideas behind Brouwer’s philosophy of Intuitionism are presented. Then some critical remarks against Intuitionism made by William Tait in “Against Intuitionism” [Journal of Philosophical Logic, 12, 173–195] are answered.     

Temporal Interaction of Information and Belief

The temporal updating of an agent’s beliefs in response to a flow of information is modeled in a simple modal logic that, for every date t, contains a normal belief operator B _t and a non-normal information operator I _t which is analogous to the ‘only knowing’ operator discussed in the computer science literature. Soundness and completeness of the logic are proved and the relationship between the proposed logic, the AGM theory of belief revision and the notion of plausibility is discussed. A first draft of this paper was presented at the Workshop on Belief Change in Rational Agents: Perspectives from Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy and Economics, Dagstuhl (Germany), August 2005. Special Issue Formal Epistemology II. Edited by Branden Fitelson     

Adverse Life Events and Emotional and Behavioral Problems in Adolescence: The Role of Non-verbal Cognitive Ability and Negative Cognitive Errors

The aim of this study was to test whether negative cognitive errors (overgeneralizing, catastrophizing, selective abstraction, and personalizing) mediate the moderator effect of non-verbal cognitive ability on the association between adverse life events (life stress) and emotional and behavioral problems in adolescence. The sample consisted of 430 children (aged 11–15 years) from three state secondary schools in disadvantaged areas in one county in the South East of England. Total difficulties (i.e., emotional symptoms, peer problems, hyperactivity, and conduct problems) were assessed with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Adjustment was made for gender, age, ethnicity, special educational needs, exclusion history, family structure, and family socio-economic disadvantage. Adverse life events were measured with Tiet et al.’s (Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 37, 1191–1200, 1998) Adverse Life Events Scale. Non-verbal cognitive ability was measured with Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices Plus. Non-verbal cognitive ability moderated the effect of adverse life events both on total difficulties and on emotional symptoms. Overgeneralizing mediated the moderator effect of non-verbal cognitive ability on the association between adverse life events and total difficulties. Adverse life events were related to a tendency to overgeneralize which was associated with emotional and behavioral problems, but particularly among those adolescents with lower non-verbal cognitive ability.