Empirical Significance, Predictive Power, and Explication

Criteria of empirical significance are supposed to state conditions under which (putative) reference to an unobservable object or property is “empirically meaningful.” The intended kind of empirical meaningfulness should be necessary for admissibility into the selective contexts of scientific inquiry. I defend Justus’s recent argument that the reasons generally given for rejecting the project of defining a significance criterion are unpersuasive. However, as I show, this project remains wedded to an overly narrow conception of its subject matter. Even the most cutting edge significance criteria identify empirical significance with predictive power, and thereby rule out vocabulary with legitimate scientific functions. In a nutshell, the problem is that there are (“shortcut”) terms that reduce the computational burden of extracting predictions from theory, and that may therefore be scientifically useful, but that do not add to the theory’s observational consequences, and so are ruled scientifically inadmissibility by existing significance criteria. I spell out this objection by specifying shortcut terms that are ruled inadmissible by Creath’s and Schurz’s criteria. Having objected in this way to extant criteria, and to the equation of empirical significance with predictive power in general, I discuss an approach to defining empirical significance that is capable of avoiding my objection and, more ambitiously, that may break the cycle of “punctures and patches” that has plagued the project from the beginning. I gloss Goldfarb and Ricketts’s idea of “case-by-case” delineations of empirically significant terms as the provision of special rather than general explications of the informal concept of empirical significance

Carnap's Pragmatism

Carnap is widely seen as a founding father of the view that metaphysical debates do not concern any substantive issue. My dissertation argues against this line of interpretation. I propose a reading on which Carnap’s views on metaphysics and language, and in particular, his Principle of Tolerance and verificationism, derive from his pragmatism, i.e., from the thesis that scientific language is an instrument whose function is to aid in the derivation of observational knowledge. I argue that, so understood, various controversial aspects of Carnap’s philosophy are plausible

Stance Empiricism and Epistemic Reason

Some versions of empiricism have been accused of being neither empirically confirmable nor analytically true and therefore meaningless or unknowable by their own lights. Carnap, and more recently van Fraassen, have responded to this objection by construing empiricism as a stance containing non-cognitive attitudes. The resulting stance empiricism is not subject to the norms of knowledge, and so does not selfdefeat as per the objection. In response to this proposal, several philosophers have argued that if empiricism is a stance, then there can be no distinctively epistemic reasons in favor of adopting it, but only prudential or moral reasons. I defend stance empiricism against this objection by showing that stance empiricism furthers many plausibly epistemic goals, such as false belief avoidance, wisdom, and justification. I respond to three objections to my argument: that I assume a conception of epistemic reason that leads to problematic tradeoffs (I do not), that to have epistemic reason is just to be epistemically justified (it is not), and that my premise that experience is the only source of information has no empirical content (it does)

The Bradleyan Regress, Non-Relational Realism, and the Quinean Semantic Strategy

Non-Relational Realism is a popular solution to the Bradleyan regress of facts or truths. It denies that there is a relational universal of exemplification; for an object a to exemplify a universal F-ness, on this view, is not for a relation to subsist between a and F-ness. An influential objection to Non-Relational Realism is that it is unacceptably obscure. The author argues that Non-Relational Realism can be understood as a selective application of satisfaction semantics to predicates like ‘exemplify’, and that so understood, it is not obscure. This kind of selective use of satisfaction semantics may be feasible in other contexts as a means of making theories more parsimonious

Carnap's Response to the Charge that Verificationism is Self-Undermining

The classic “self-undermining objection” to the verificationist criterion of meaning states that the criterion does not meet its own standard: since verificationism is not empirically confirmable, analytic, or contradictory, verificationism implies its own meaninglessness. This essay reconstructs and motivates Carnap’s response to this objection. The interpretation presented is contrasted with those of Putnam and Ricketts. I argue that Carnap’s basic move in response to the self-undermining objection is to construe his verificationism as an analytic definition of “meaningfulness” that is meaningful by its own lights. I then discuss possible motivations for this definition. I argue, against Reichenbach, Ayer, and Hempel, that it is not an analysis of the everyday concept of meaning. Instead, I claim, the definition is motivated _pragmatically_: verificationism replaces the ordinary conception of meaning with one that purports to capture all and only the expressions that are pragmatically useful to the scientist. Finally, I consider whether pragmatism faces a self-undermining objection to of its own. I argue that pragmatism is a preference concerning formal languages, and that, since preferences need not apply to themselves, pragmatism is not self- undermining

Socioecology shapes child and adolescent time allocation in twelve hunter-gatherer and mixed-subsistence forager societies

A key issue distinguishing prominent evolutionary models of human life history is whether prolonged childhood evolved to facilitate learning in a skill- and strength-intensive foraging niche requiring high levels of cooperation. Considering the diversity of environments humans inhabit, children’s activities should also reflect local social and ecological opportunities and constraints. To better understand our species’ developmental plasticity, the present paper compiled a time allocation dataset for children and adolescents from twelve hunter-gatherer and mixed-subsistence forager societies (n = 690; 3–18 years; 52% girls). We investigated how environmental factors, local ecological risk, and men and women’s relative energetic contributions were associated with cross-cultural variation in child and adolescent time allocation to childcare, food production, domestic work, and play. Annual precipitation, annual mean temperature, and net primary productivity were not strongly associated with child and adolescent activity budgets. Increased risk of encounters with dangerous animals and dehydration negatively predicted time allocation to childcare and domestic work, but not food production. Gender differences in child and adolescent activity budgets were stronger in societies where men made greater direct contributions to food production than women. We interpret these findings as suggesting that children and their caregivers adjust their activities to facilitate the early acquisition of knowledge which helps children safely cooperate with adults in a range of social and ecological environments. These findings compel us to consider how childhood may have also evolved to facilitate flexible participation in productive activities in early life