4,054 research outputs found
Inference to the Best Explanation and the Screening-Off Challenge
We argue in Roche and Sober (2013) that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant in that Pr(H | O&EXPL) = Pr(H | O), where H is a hypothesis, O is an observation, and EXPL is the proposition that if H and O were true, then H would explain O. This is a âscreening-offâ thesis. Here we clarify that thesis, reply to criticisms advanced by Lange (2017), consider alternative formulations of Inference to the Best Explanation, discuss a strengthened screening-off thesis, and consider how it bears on the claim that unification is evidentially relevant
Is Explanatoriness a Guide to Confirmation? A Reply to Climenhaga
We argued that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant in the following sense: Let H be a hypothesis, O an observation, and E the proposition that H would explain O if H and O were true. Then our claim is that Pr = Pr. We defended this screening-off thesis by discussing an example concerning smoking and cancer. Climenhaga argues that SOT is mistaken because it delivers the wrong verdict about a slightly different smoking-and-cancer case. He also considers a variant of SOT, called âSOT*â, and contends that it too gives the wrong result. We here reply to Climenhagaâs arguments and suggest that SOT provides a criticism of the widely held theory of inference called âinference to the best explanationâ
Explanation = Unification? A New Criticism of Friedmanâs Theory and a Reply to an Old One
According to Michael Friedmanâs theory of explanation, a law X explains laws Y1, Y2, âŠ, Yn precisely when X unifies the Yâs, where unification is understood in terms of reducing the number of independently acceptable laws. Philip Kitcher criticized Friedmanâs theory but did not analyze the concept of independent acceptability. Here we show that Kitcherâs objection can be met by modifying an element in Friedmanâs account. In addition, we argue that there are serious objections to the use that Friedman makes of the concept of independent acceptability
Hypotheses that attribute false beliefs: A twoâpart epistemology
Is there some general reason to expect organisms that have beliefs to have false beliefs? And after you observe that an organism occasionally occupies a given neural state that you think encodes a perceptual belief, how do you evaluate hypotheses about the semantic content that that state has, where some of those hypotheses attribute beliefs that are sometimes false while others attribute beliefs that are always true? To address the first of these questions, we discuss evolution by natural selection and show how organisms that are risk-prone in the beliefs they form can be fitter than organisms that are risk-free. To address the second question, we discuss a problem that is widely recognized in statistics â the problem of over-fitting â and one influential device for addressing that problem, the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). We then use AIC to solve epistemological versions of the disjunction and distality problems, which are two key problems concerning what it is for a belief state to have one semantic content rather than another
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