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The Formal Equivalence of Grue and Green and How It Undoes the New Riddle of Induction
No full textThe hidden strength of Goodman's ingenious "new riddle of induction" lies in the perfect symmetry of grue/bleen and green/blue. The very same sentence forms used to define grue/bleen in terms of green/blue can be used to define green/blue in terms of grue/bleen by permutation of terms. Therein lies its undoing. In the artificially restricted case in which there are no additional facts that can break the symmetry, grue/bleen and green/blue are merely notational variants of the same facts; or, if they represent different facts, the differences are ineffable, and no account of induction should be expected to pick between them. This still obtains in the more interesting case in which we embed grue/bleen in a grue-ified total science; the grue-ified and regular total sciences are merely equivalent descriptions of the same facts. In the most realistic case, we allow additional facts that break the symmetry and then we can also evade Goodman's new riddle by employing an account of induction rich enough to exploit these facts. Unaugmented enumerative induction is not such an account and it is the primary casualty of Goodman's new riddle
A Little Survey of Induction
No full textMy purpose in this chapter is to survey some of the principal approaches to inductive inference in the philosophy of science literature. My first concern will be the general principles that underlie the many accounts of induction in this literature. When these accounts are considered in isolation, as is more commonly the case, it is easy to overlook that virtually all accounts depend on one of very few basic principles and that the proliferation of accounts can be understood as efforts to ameliorate the weaknesses of those few principles. In the earlier sections, I will lay out three inductive principles and the families of accounts of induction they engender. In later sections I will review standard problems in the philosophical literature that have supported some pessimism about induction and suggest that their import has been greatly overrated. In the final sections I will return to the proliferation of accounts of induction that frustrates efforts at a final codification. I will suggest that this proliferation appears troublesome only as long as we expect inductive inference to be subsumed under a single formal theory. If we adopt a material theory of induction in which individual inductions are licensed by particular facts that prevail only in local domains, then the proliferation is expected and not problematic
Must Evidence Underdetermine Theory?
No full textAccording to the underdetermination thesis, all evidence necessarily underdetermines any scientific theory. Thus it is often argued that our agreement on the content of mature scientific theories must be due to social and other factors. Drawing on a long standing tradition of criticism, I shall argue that the underdetermination thesis is little more than speculation based on an impoverished account of induction. A more careful look at accounts of induction does not support an assured underdetermination or the holism usually associated with it. I also urge that the display of observationally equivalent theories is a self-defeating strategy for supporting the underdetermination thesis. The very fact that observational equivalence can be demonstrated by arguments brief enough to be included in a journal article means that we cannot preclude the possibility that the theories are merely variant formulations of the same theory
DYNAMITE: ANARCHISM, MODERNISM, AESTHETICS
No full textThis book argues for the intersection of anarchist theory, modernist writers, and aesthetic innovations under the sign of "the bomb." Individual chapters concern such figures as Joseph Conrad, Richard Wagner, Henry Adams, Andrei Bely, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, and Katherine Ann Porter, as well as collectivities like the Surrealists and the Dadaists. Anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Michael Bakunin are also important to the text. The original version of this text was produced as a dissertation at the University of California Berkeley. Committee members were Carolyn Porter, Ann Banfield, and the late Michael Rogin. Three chapters--those on Conrad, Wagner, and the Sacco-Vanzetti case--were published in refereed academic journals. A synopsis of the argument was published in The Turn of the Century, Walter Pape, editor (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter) 1995. Dynamite had been approved for publication in the Atopia series of Stanford University Press when major changes at the press resulted in the abolition of the series
Why Thought Experiments Do Not Transcend Empiricism
No full textThought experiments are ordinary argumentation disguised in a vivid pictorial or narrative form. This account of their nature will allow me to show that empiricism has nothing to fear from thought experiments. They perform no epistemic magic. In so far as they tell us about the world, thought experiments draw upon what we already know of it, either explicitly or tacitly; they then transform that knowledge by disguised argumentation. They can do nothing more epistemically than can argumentation. I defend my account of thought experiments in Section 3 by urging that the epistemic reach of thought experiments turns out to coincide with that of argumentation and that this coincidence is best explained by the simple view that thought experiments just are arguments. Thought experiments can err—-a fact to be displayed by the thought experiment - anti thought experiment pairs of Section 2. Nonetheless thought experiments can be used reliably and, I urge in Section 4., this is only possible if they are governed by some very generalized logic. I will suggest on evolutionary considerations that their logics are most likely the familiar logics of induction and deduction, recovering the view that thought experiment is argumentation. Finally in Section 5 I defend this argument based epistemology of thought experiments against competing accounts. I suggest that these other accounts can offer a viable epistemology only insofar as they already incorporate the notion that thought experimentation is governed by a logic, possibly of very generalized form
Don't Fold Up: Responding to Nicholson Baker's Double Fold
No full textResponse, from an archival perspective, to Nicholson Baker's book-length critique of library and archival preservation approaches
Einstein's Triumph over the Spacetime Coordinate System
No full textEinstein insisted throughout his life that the signal achievement of his general theory of relativity was its general covariance. How are we to reconcile this with the now common view that general covariance merely expresses a definition, our freedom to label events with any set of numbers we like? There is, I believe, a natural reading for Einstein's claims that does make perfect sense. It requires us to adopt a physical interpretation of relativity theory that is now no longer popular, so the natural reading will no longer have intrinsic interest. It will, however, allow us to make sense of Einstein's claims and his program
What Can We Learn about the Ontology of Space and Time from the Theory of Relativity?
No full textIn the exuberance that followed Einstein’s discoveries, philosophers at one time or another have proposed that his theories support virtually every conceivable moral in ontology. I present an opinionated assessment, designed to avoid this overabundance. We learn from Einstein’s theories of novel entanglements of categories once held distinct: space with time; space and time with matter; and space and time with causality. We do not learn that all is relative, that time in the fourth dimension in any non-trivial sense, that coordinate systems and even geometry are conventional or that spacetime should be reduced ontologically to causal, spatio-temporal or other relations
General Covariance, Gauge Theories and the Kretschmann Objection
No full textHow can we reconcile two claims that are now both widely accepted: Kretschmann's claim that a requirement of general covariance is physically vacuous and the standard view that the general covariance of general relativity expresses the physically important diffeomorphism gauge freedom of general relativity? I urge that both claims can be held without contradiction if we attend to the context in which each is made