Understanding, Truth, and Epistemic Goals

Several argue that truth cannot be science’s sole epistemic goal, for it would fail to do justice to several scientific practices that advance understanding. I challenge these arguments but only af..

Must Understanding Be Coherent?

Several authors suggest that understanding and epistemic coherence are tightly connected. Using an account of understanding that makes no appeal to coherence, I explain away the intuitions that motivate this position. I then show that the leading coherentist epistemologies only place plausible constraints on understanding insofar as they replicate my own account’s requirements. I conclude that understanding is only superficially coherent

Inversion Formulas for the Dunkl Intertwining Operator and Its Dual on Spaces of Functions and Distributions

In this paper we prove inversion formulas for the Dunkl intertwining operator $V_k$ and for its dual ${}^tV_k$ and we deduce the expression of the representing distributions of the inverse operators $V_k^{-1}$ and ${}^tV_k^{-1}$, and we give some applications.Comment: This is a contribution to the Special Issue on Dunkl Operators and Related Topics, published in SIGMA (Symmetry, Integrability and Geometry: Methods and Applications) at http://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA

Realism and Antirealism

Our best social scientific theories try to tell us something about the social world. But is talk of a “social world” a metaphor that we ought not take too seriously? In particular, do the denizens of the social world—cultural values like the Protestant work ethic, firms like ExxonMobil, norms like standards of dress and behavior, institutions like the legal system, teams like FC Barcelona, conventions like marriages—exist? The question is not merely academic. Social scientists use these different social entities to explain social phenomena such as the rise of capitalism, the decline in oil prices, or the effect of unions on the sports labor market. But how could these explanations possibly work if social entities don’t exist