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

A simulation of the Neolithic transition in the Indus valley

The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was one of the first great civilizations in prehistory. This bronze age civilization flourished from the end of the fourth millennium BC. It disintegrated during the second millennium BC; despite much research effort, this decline is not well understood. Less research has been devoted to the emergence of the IVC, which shows continuous cultural precursors since at least the seventh millennium BC. To understand the decline, we believe it is necessary to investigate the rise of the IVC, i.e., the establishment of agriculture and livestock, dense populations and technological developments 7000--3000 BC. Although much archaeological information is available, our capability to investigate the system is hindered by poorly resolved chronology, and by a lack of field work in the intermediate areas between the Indus valley and Mesopotamia. We thus employ a complementary numerical simulation to develop a consistent picture of technology, agropastoralism and population developments in the IVC domain. Results from this Global Land Use and technological Evolution Simulator show that there is (1) fair agreement between the simulated timing of the agricultural transition and radiocarbon dates from early agricultural sites, but the transition is simulated first in India then Pakistan; (2) an independent agropastoralism developing on the Indian subcontinent; and (3) a positive relationship between archeological artifact richness and simulated population density which remains to be quantified.Comment: Chapter manuscript revision submitted to AGU monograph "Climates, landscapes and civilizations", 6 pages, 2 figure

The La Prele Mammoth Site, Converse County, Wyoming, USA

The La Prele Mammoth site is a Clovis archaeolog- ical site in Converse County, Wyoming (U.S.A.) that preserves chipped stone artifacts in spatial as- sociation with the remains of a subadult Columbi- an mammoth (Mammuthus columbi). The site was discovered in 1986 and initially tested by George Frison in 1987, but work ceased there until 2014 due to a disagreement with the landowner. In the intervening years, questions arose as to whether the artifacts and mammoth remains were truly associated, and the site was largely dismissed by American archaeologists. Recent excavations have not only demonstrated that La Prele was the loca- tion of a mammoth kill by Clovis hunters around 12,850 years ago, but it also preserves a campsite in close proximity to the kill. The camp includes multiple hearth-centered activity areas that appear to represent domestic spaces, reflected by the pres- ence of a diversity of stone tool forms, bone nee- dles, a bone bead, a large area of hematite-stained matrix, and the butchered and cooked remains of at least one other large mammal species. The site has the potential to inform us about aspects of the social organization of Clovis bands, particularly with respect to mammoth hunting and butchery.The symposium and the volume "Human-elephant interactions: from past to present" were funded by the Volkswagen Foundation

Widespread platinum anomaly documented at theYounger Dryas onset in North American sedimentary sequences

Previously, a large platinum (Pt) anomaly was reported in the Greenland ice sheet at the Younger Dryas boundary (YDB) (12,800 Cal B.P.). In order to evaluate its geographic extent, fire-assay and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (FA and ICP-MS) elemental analyses were performed on 11 widely separated archaeological bulk sedimentary sequences. We document discovery of a distinct Pt anomaly spread widely across North America and dating to the Younger Dryas (YD) onset. The apparent synchroneity of this widespread YDB Pt anomaly is consistent with Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) data that indicated atmospheric input of platinum-rich dust. We expect the Pt anomaly to serve as a widely-distributed time marker horizon (datum) for identification and correlation of the onset of the YD climatic episode at 12,800 Cal B.P. This Pt datum will facilitate the dating and correlating of archaeological, paleontological, and paleoenvironmental data between sequences, especially those with limited age control

Catch Per Unit Research Effort: Sampling Intensity, Chronological Uncertainty, and the Onset of Marine Fish Consumption in Historic London

As the cumulative volume of ecofactual data from archaeological sites mounts, the analytical tools required for its synthesis have not always kept pace. While recent attention has been devoted to spatial aspects of meta-analysis, the methodological challenges of chronological synthesis have been somewhat neglected. Nowhere is this issue more acute than for urban sites, where complex, well-dated stratigraphy; rich organic remains; and multiple small- to medium-scale excavations often lead to an abundance of small datasets with cross-cutting phasing and varied chronological resolution. Individually these may be of limited value, but together they can represent the environmental and socioeconomic history of a city. The challenge lies in developing tools for effective synthesis. This paper demonstrates a new approach to chronological meta-analysis of ecofactual data, based upon (a) use of simulation to deal with dating uncertainty, and (b) calibration of results for variable research intensity. We apply this approach to a large body of historic-period fish bone data from London, revealing otherwise undetectable detail regarding one of the most profound shifts in medieval English economic and environmental history: the sudden onset of marine fishing commonly known as the Fish Event Horizon. Most importantly, we show that this phenomenon predates any visible decline in deposition of freshwater fish, and hence cannot have been driven by depletion of inland fisheries as has sometimes been suggested. The R package developed for this research, archSeries, is freely available

New insights from old bones: DNA preservation and degradation in permafrost preserved mammoth remains

Despite being plagued by heavily degraded DNA in palaeontological remains, most studies addressing the state of DNA degradation have been limited to types of damage which do not pose a hindrance to Taq polymerase during PCR. Application of serial qPCR to the two fractions obtained during extraction (demineralization and protein digest) from six permafrost mammoth bones and one partially degraded modern elephant bone has enabled further insight into the changes which endogenous DNA is subjected to during diagenesis. We show here that both fractions exhibit individual qualities in terms of the prevailing type of DNA (i.e. mitochondrial versus nuclear DNA) as well as the extent of damage, and in addition observed a highly variable ratio of mitochondrial to nuclear DNA among the six mammoth samples. While there is evidence suggesting that mitochondrial DNA is better preserved than nuclear DNA in ancient permafrost samples, we find the initial DNA concentration in the bone tissue to be as relevant for the total accessible mitochondrial DNA as the extent of DNA degradation post-mortem. We also evaluate the general applicability of indirect measures of preservation such as amino-acid racemization, bone crystallinity index and thermal age to these exceptionally well-preserved samples

Dates as data revisited: A statistical examination of the Peruvian preceramic radiocarbon record

This paper adopts a formal model-testing approach to the Peruvian radiocarbon (14C) record, the site of the first aggregate analysis of this type of archaeological data. Using a large and improved regional dataset of radiometric determinations (n = 1180) from the period 14000–3000 14C years before present, the study performs a comparative analysis of the demographic trajectories of two sub-regions, the desert coast and Andean highlands. Against the backdrop of theoretical models of population growth, and controlling for taphonomic factors and sampling biases, the study performs global significance and permutation tests on the data. These provide a necessary measure of statistical confidence that have hereto been absent from the discussion of pre-Columbian demography. Contrary to the findings of prior work, this study of radiocarbon data in Peru reveals that regional trends in the data are statistically indistinguishable. Further testing and comparison to climate archives is able to illustrate sustained population growth over the entire Holocene epoch in this region, with only a few notable exceptions at the end of the mid-Holocene (5000 cal BP). The findings of the analysis are viewed in relation to the cultural and technological changes that indigenous societies experienced in the timeframe in question, and some directions for methodological advances are suggested