On the relation between models and hypotheses and the role of heuristic hypotheses in the construction of scientific models

In our understanding of model-based scientific practice, it has become unclear what the role of hypotheses is. Many take models and hypotheses to be more or less on the same footing; others take hypotheses to be claims about the intended representational features of models; some have even argued against the use of hypotheses in model-based science. In this paper, I argue that the first and third of these positions are untenable, while the second position applies only to a subclass of the many hypotheses actually employed in model-based scientific practice, which I call fully interpretable hypotheses. Next, I show, based on some case studies from astronomy, that many scientific hypotheses are in fact of a different type, which I call heuristic hypotheses. Therefore, I argue for a fourth position which complements the second position to provide an account of the role of these two kinds of hypotheses in model-based scientific practice

On theoretical and practical doxastic attitudes

In the literature on doxastic attitudes, the notion ‘belief’ is used in both a coarse-grained and a fine-grained manner. While the coarse-grained notion of ‘belief,’ as the doxastic attitude that expresses any form of assent to its content, is a useful technical concept, the fine-grained notion, which tries to capture the folk notion of ‘belief’ in contrast with other doxastic concepts such as ‘acceptance’ or ‘degrees of confidence,’ is utterly ambiguous. In order to dispel this ambiguity, I introduce first a new framework for describing doxastic attitudes that does not rely on a specific fine-grained primitive notion of ‘belief.’ This framework distinguishes two different doxastic attitudes, i.e. the theoretical and the practical, and explains how various doxastic concepts such as ‘accepting,’ ‘having a degree of confidence’ and the folk notion of ‘belief’ all describe a particular interpretation of one or both of the distinguished doxastic attitudes. Next, by focusing on ongoing debates over the difference between ‘acceptance’ and ‘belief’ on the one hand and between ‘degrees of confidence’ and ‘(plain) belief’ on the other, I argue that much precision can be gained in philosophical analysis by taking a reductionist stance concerning any specific fine-grained and primitive notion of ‘belief.

Abduction of Generalizations

Abduction of generalizations is the process in which explanatory hypotheses are formed for generalizations such as “pineapples taste sweet” or “rainbows appear when the sun breaks through the rain”. This phenomenon has received little attention in formal logic and philosophy of science. The current paper remedies this lacuna by first giving an overview of some general characteristics of this process, elaborating on its ubiquity in scientific and everyday reasoning. Second, the adaptive logic LA8 is presented to explicate this process formally. La abducción de generalizaciones es el proceso en el que se forman hipótesis explicativas para generalizaciones tales como "las piñas saben dulce" o "el arcoiris aparece cuando el sol sale a través de la lluvia". Este fenómeno ha recibido poca atención tanto en lógica formal como en filosofía de la ciencia. Este artículo viene a llenar este hueco. En primer lugar, ofrecemos una panorámica de algunas características generales de este proceso, analizando su ubicuidad en el razonamiento científico y cotidiano. En segundo lugar, se presenta la lógica adaptativa LA8 para dar una explicación formal de este proceso

Modelling abduction in science by means of a modal adaptive logic

Scientists confronted with multiple explanatory hypotheses as a result of their abductive inferences, generally want to reason further on the different hypotheses one by one. This paper presents a modal adaptive logic MLA (s) that enables us to model abduction in such a way that the different explanatory hypotheses can be derived individually. This modelling is illustrated with a case study on the different hypotheses on the origin of the Moon

Modeling hypothetical reasoning by formal logics

In this paper, it is discussed to which extent hypothetical reasoning can be modeled by formal logics. The paper starts by exploring this idea in general (Section 1 and 2), which leads to the conclusion that in order to model this kind of reasoning formally, a more ne-grained classica- tion of reasoning patterns is in order. After such a classication is provided in Section 3, a formal framework that has proven successful to capture some of these patterns is described (Sections 4 and 6) and some of the specic problems for this procedure are discussed (Section 5). The paper concludes by presenting two logics for hypothetical reasoning in an informal way (Sections 7 and 8) such that the non-technically skilled reader can get a flavour how formal methods can be used to describe hypothetical reasoning