Choosing the realist framework

There has been an empiricist tradition in the core of Logical Positivism/Empiricism, starting with Moritz Schlick and ending in Herbert Feigl (via Hans Reichenbach), according to which the world of empiricism need not be a barren place devoid of all the explanatory entities posited by scientific theories. The aim of this paper is to articulate this tradition and to explore ways in which its key elements can find a place in the contemporary debate over scientific realism. It presents a way empiricism can go for scientific realism without metaphysical anxiety, by developing an indispensability argument for the adoption of the realist framework. This argument, unlike current realist arguments, has a pragmatic ring to it: there is no ultimate argument for the adoption of the realist framework. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V

A new revisability paradox

In a recent article, Mark Colyvan has criticized Jerrold Katz's attempt to show that Quinean holism is self-refuting. Katz argued that a Quinean epistemology incorporating a principle of the universal revisability of beliefs would have to hold that that and other principles of the system were both revisable and unrevisable. Colyvan rejects Katz's argument for failing to take into account the logic of belief revision. But granting the terms of debate laid down by Colyvan, the universal revisability principle still commits Quineans to holding that one belief is both revisable and unrevisable: the belief that some beliefs are revisabl

The Wonder of Colors and the Principle of Ariadne

The Principle of Ariadne, formulated in 1988 ago by Walter Carnielli and Carlos Di Prisco and later published in 1993, is an infinitary principle that is independent of the Axiom of Choice in ZF, although it can be consistently added to the remaining ZF axioms. The present paper surveys, and motivates, the foundational importance of the Principle of Ariadne and proposes the Ariadne Game, showing that the Principle of Ariadne, corresponds precisely to a winning strategy for the Ariadne Game. Some relations to other alternative. set-theoretical principles are also briefly discussed

Functions and causes: reply to Meijering

In this reply, I begin by emphasizing the crucial distinction between ‘narrow’ and ‘wide’ functional explanations. Second, I question Meyering's (1997) focus on the metaphysical foundations of functional explanation and the notion of (multiple) supervenience which seems designed to provide such a foundation. More precisely, I doubt both the viability and the necessity of a causal underpinning of wide functional explanation. In my opinion, the notion of cause is as interest-relative as the notion of function, and not necessarily more fundamental. Also, the suggestion that explanations need an independent justification over and above empirical and pragmatic success is disputable. © 1997, Sage Publications. All rights reserved

Slim Epistemology with a Thick Skin

The distinction between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ value concepts, and its importance to ethical theory, has been an active topic in recent meta-ethics. This paper defends three claims regarding the parallel issue about thick and thin epistemic concepts. (1) Analogy with ethics offers no straightforward way to establish a good, clear distinction between thick and thin epistemic concepts. (2) Assuming there is such a distinction, there are no semantic grounds for assigning thick epistemic concepts priority over the thin. (3) Nor does the structure of substantive epistemological theory establish that thick epistemic concepts enjoy systematic theoretical priority over the thin. In sum, a good case has yet to be made for any radical theoretical turn to thicker epistemology

Quantifying Self-Organization with Optimal Predictors

Despite broad interest in self-organizing systems, there are few quantitative, experimentally-applicable criteria for self-organization. The existing criteria all give counter-intuitive results for important cases. In this Letter, we propose a new criterion, namely an internally-generated increase in the statistical complexity, the amount of information required for optimal prediction of the system's dynamics. We precisely define this complexity for spatially-extended dynamical systems, using the probabilistic ideas of mutual information and minimal sufficient statistics. This leads to a general method for predicting such systems, and a simple algorithm for estimating statistical complexity. The results of applying this algorithm to a class of models of excitable media (cyclic cellular automata) strongly support our proposal.Comment: Four pages, two color figure

Natural deduction and arbitrary objects

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43180/1/10992_2004_Article_BF00542649.pd

Stochastic Dynamics of Lexicon Learning in an Uncertain and Nonuniform World

We study the time taken by a language learner to correctly identify the meaning of all words in a lexicon under conditions where many plausible meanings can be inferred whenever a word is uttered. We show that the most basic form of cross-situational learning - whereby information from multiple episodes is combined to eliminate incorrect meanings - can perform badly when words are learned independently and meanings are drawn from a nonuniform distribution. If learners further assume that no two words share a common meaning, we find a phase transition between a maximally-efficient learning regime, where the learning time is reduced to the shortest it can possibly be, and a partially-efficient regime where incorrect candidate meanings for words persist at late times. We obtain exact results for the word-learning process through an equivalence to a statistical mechanical problem of enumerating loops in the space of word-meaning mappings.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures. Version 2 contains additional discussion and will appear in Phys. Rev. Let