Search

According to Goldman and Olsson's so‐called conditional probability solution to the extra‐value‐of‐knowledge problem, knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief because having the former makes the acquisition of further similar true beliefs in the future more likely than having the latter does. Unfortunately, however, several philosophers have rejected the comparative probability claim Goldman and Olsson's solution is based on. In this paper, I present a new argument in defence of this claim. More precisely, I point out a highly plausible necessary and sufficient condition for the latter and argue for its truth by bringing together confirmation‐theoretic and reliabilist considerations. I also explain where a number of objections against Goldman and Olsson's probabilistic claim seem to go wrong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The notion of more truth, or of more truth and less falsehood, is central to epistemology. Yet, I argue, we have no idea what this consists in, as the most natural or obvious thing to say—that more truth is a matter of a greater number of truths, and less falsehood is a matter of a lesser number of falsehoods—is ultimately implausible. The issue is important not merely because the notion of more truth and less falsehood is central to epistemology, but because an implicit, false picture of what this consists in underpins and gives shape to much contemporary epistemology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agent-based simulations have become increasingly prominent in various disciplines. This trend is positive, but it comes with challenges: while there are more and more standards for design, verification, validation, and presentation of the models, the various meta-theoretical strategies of how the models should be related to reality often remain implicit. Differences in the epistemological foundations of models make it however, difficult to relate distinct models to each other and to ensure a cumulative expansion of knowledge. Concepts and the analytic language developed by philosophers of science can help to overcome these obstacles. This paper introduces some of these concepts to the modelling community. It also presents an epistemological framework that helps to clarify how one wishes to generate knowledge about reality by the means of one's model and that helps to relate models to each other. Since the interpretation of a model is strongly connected to the activities of model verification and validation, these two activities will be embedded into the framework and their respective epistemological roles will be clarified. The resulting meta-theoretical framework aligns well with recently proposed frameworks for model presentation and evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores possibilities for more democratic approaches to researching learning in and through everyday workplace practices. This links with a concern with who is able to speak in representations of learning at work, what is able to be spoken about and how knowing, learning and experience are inscribed in theories of workplace learning. I propose that Rancière's notion of 'the distribution of the sensible', which draws attention to an aesthetic dimension of experience, knowledge and politics, provides a useful way of exploring learning in and through everyday workplace practices. The approach points to the possibility of knowledge without hierarchies and a shift from a knowledge - ignorance binary. An understanding of experience as aesthetic enables accounts of learning which counter the story of destiny in literature on learning in and through everyday practice. It also points to a very different way of doing academic research. The presupposition of equality is the point of departure in this approach and the purpose of research is the verification of equality (rather than the verification of oppression). The paper makes a significant contribution to literature on learning in and through everyday workplace practices by disrupting a prevailing view that knowledge is necessarily tied to identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eighteenth-century radical Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809) devoted himself to communicating truth in all his writings. But to what extent is this dedication to truth-telling undermined by Holcrofts use of deceit and duplicity to test the omnipotence of truth, especially when deceit threatens to overpower truth? In this article, I examine a series of scenes in Holcrofts plays and novels wherein truth is not always adequately expressed in language. As a result, performance gains importance. Holcroft develops an increasingly subtle understanding of the relation between truth and the modes of its communication. Performance, even as it may seem to destabilize speech, can be used to intensify it and ultimately to clarify the transmission of truth, which is Holcrofts great aim. By the end of his career, in his final novel Memoirs of Bryan Perdue (1805) Holcrofts understanding of the efficacy of clear speech and performance is strengthened and developed by a new appreciation of what the body of the truth-teller, silent or speaking, can convey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Doomsday argument and anthropic reasoning are two puzzling examples of probabilistic confirmation. In both cases, a lack of knowledge apparently yields surprising conclusions. Since they are formulated within a Bayesian framework, they constitute a challenge to Bayesianism. Several attempts, some successful, have been made in a Bayesian framework that represents credal states by single credence functions to avoid these conclusions, but none of them can do so for all versions of the Doomsday argument. I show that adopting an imprecise framework of probabilistic reasoning allows for a more adequate representation of ignorance and explains away these puzzles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some theorists have developed formal approaches to truth that depend on counterexamples to the structural rules of contraction. Here, we study such approaches, with an eye to helping them respond to a certain kind of objection. We define a contractive relative of each noncontractive relation, for use in responding to the objection in question, and we explore one example: the contractive relative of multiplicative-additive affine logic with transparent truth, or maalt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Truthmaking without truthmakers ( TWT, for short) is the thesis that although every true proposition is made true by reality, there need not be particular entities (like facts, states of affairs, or tropes) that make these propositions true. The first substantial part of this paper (section 2) is devoted to developing a particular version of TWT and at the same time defending TWT in general from arguments against it that have been advanced by orthodox truthmaker theorists. In the second part of the paper (section 3) I argue that talk about truthmakers within the theory can be understood as metaphoric and as conveying valuable information about something other than the supposed truthmakers: about truthmak ing. The aim of this paper is therefore twofold. On the one hand, I intend to present the view on truthmaking, a version of TWT, that I find most plausible in the light of the arguments for and against truthmaker theory. On the other hand, I argue that friends of TWT have good reason to adopt a figuralist approach to truthmaker theory, rather than rejecting it outright. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes issue with a recent proposal due to Shogenji (Synthese 184:29–48, 2012 ). In his paper, Shogenji introduces J, a normatively motivated formal measure of justification (and of confirmation), and then proceeds to recruit it descriptively in an explanation of the conjunction fallacy. We argue that this explanation is undermined by the fact that it cannot be extended in any natural way to the inverse conjunction fallacy, a more recently discovered, closely related fallacy. We point out that since the inverse conjunction fallacy occurs in the absence of any form of explicit evidence, formal measures of confirmation such as J, are hard pressed to apply to it at all. We then proceed to argue that this problem with Shogenji’s measure is actually quite difficult to come to terms with; even if the situations where people commit the inverse conjunction fallacy are understood in such a way that the measure is applicable, it doesn’t seem possible to reasonably interpret these situations in such a way that the measure can explain the found response pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among Bayesian confirmation theorists, several quantitative measures of the degree to which an evidential proposition E confirms a hypothesis H have been proposed. According to one popular recent measure, s, the degree to which E confirms H is a function of the equation P(H|E) − P(H|~E). A consequence of s is that when we have two evidential propositions, E1 and E2, such that P(H|E1) = P(H|E2), and P(H|~E1) ≠ P(H|~E2), the confirmation afforded to H by E1 does not equal the confirmation afforded to H by E2. I present several examples that demonstrate the unacceptability of this result, and conclude that we should reject s (and other measures that share this feature) as a measure of confirmation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to a much discussed argument, reliabilism is defective for making knowledge too easy to come by. In a recent paper, Weisberg aims to show that this argument relies on a type of reasoning that is rejectable on independent grounds. We argue that the blanket rejection that Weisberg recommends of this type of reasoning is both unwarranted and unwelcome. Drawing on an older discussion in the philosophy of science, we show that placing some relatively modest restrictions on the said type of reasoning suffices to block the anti-reliabilist argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I will discuss those epistemic accounts of truth that say, roughly and at least, that the truth is what all ideally rational people, with maximum evidence, would in the long run come to believe. They have been defended on the grounds that they can solve sceptical problems that traditional accounts cannot surmount, and that they explain the value of truth in ways that traditional (and particularly, minimal) accounts cannot; they have been attacked on the grounds that they collapse into idealism. I show that all these claims are mistaken. The system of statements accepted by an adherent of an epistemic account who also accepts the equivalence scheme is the same as that accepted by an adherent of a traditional account who also accepts a remarkably strong thesis of epistemic optimism. The singling out of one rather than another claim within this system as defining 'true' cannot make as much difference as to imply idealism or refute scepticism. However, it can make all the difference when it is a matter of explaining the value of truth. For a crucial point in such explanation depends on what can be soundly substituted for what in intensional contexts; above all those governed by such verbs as 'know', 'hope', 'believe', 'value'. That is, it depends on what expressions are intensionally equivalent. And one point of singling out one formulation as definitional can be to settle just this. But though some epistemic theorists have deemed ability to explain the value of truth a merit of their account (and lack of this ability a fatal defect of traditional accounts, of minimal accounts in particular), it turns out that minimal accounts of 'true' fit a sound account of our valuing of truth in a way that epistemic accounts do not. In the course of this argument I rebut related positions: e.g. Dummett's, that minimal definitions fail because they cannot account for the point of having a notion of truth, and that an account of the practice of assertion is what would fill this lacuna. I argue to the contrary that if the point of the notion could not be explained on the basis of a traditional definition, it could not be explained at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo discurre acerca de la teorización de la verdad en las ciencias y en las humanidades. Presenta la concepción científica de la verdad y los métodos para su aceptación y comprobación, comenta el aporte de las doctrinas clásicas a partir de E. Kant, y comenta las diferencias entre verdades naturales y del mundo social. El autor también esquematiza las teorías de la verdad a partir de sus enfoques epistémicos y de verificación.

The article presents a perspective on the works of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It has been noted by the author that Nietzsche was ironical and skeptical on the topic about "truth." However, the author indicated that Nietzsche was never merely nihilistic about the topic or any subject in particular. According to the author, Nietzche believed that understanding the value of truth does not make metaphysical assumptions about its nature. Furthermore, the author narrated Nietzche's distinction between truthful and truthless speech that should be understood entirely in terms of what he indicated as the herd.

Explaining the connection, if any, between simplicity and truth is among the deepest problems facing the philosophy of science, statistics, and machine learning. Say that an efficient truth finding method minimizes worst case costs en route to converging to the true answer to a theory choice problem. Let the costs considered include the number of times a false answer is selected, the number of times opinion is reversed, and the times at which the reversals occur. It is demonstrated that (1) always choosing the simplest theory compatible with experience, and (2) hanging onto it while it remains simplest, is both necessary and sufficient for efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author criticizes U.S. philosopher C. I. Lewis's notion of sense meaning from the standpoint of logical positivist meaning and verification criteria. The author is interested in how Lewis's epistemology can be understood as his realism and idealism appear, after the demise of logical positivism and the instability of the linguistic turn. He believes that one can learn something profound from Lewis about the connection between language and the world.

In spite of several attempts to explicate the relationship between a scientific hypothesis and evidence, the issue still cries for a satisfactory solution. Logical approaches to confirmation, such as the hypothetico-deductive method and the positive instance account of confirmation, are problematic because of their neglect of the semantic dimension of hypothesis confirmation. Probabilistic accounts of confirmation are no better than logical approaches in this regard. An outstanding probabilistic account of confirmation, the Bayesian approach, for instance, is found to be defective in that it treats evidence as a formal entity and this creates the problem of relevance of evidence to the hypothesis at issue, in addition to the difficulties arising from the subjective interpretation of probabilities. This essay purports to satisfy the need for a successful account of hypothesis confirmation by offering an original formulation based on the notion of instantiation of the relation urged by an hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We look at ways to enrich Alternating-time Temporal Logic (ATL) – a logic for specification and verification of multi-agent systems – with a notion of knowledge. Starting point of our study is a recent proposal for a system called Alternating-time Temporal Epistemic Logic (ATEL). We show that, assuming that agents act under uncertainty in some states of the system, the notion of allowable strategy should be defined with some caution. Moreover, we demonstrate a subtle difference between an agent knowing that he has a suitable strategy and knowing the strategy itself. We also point out that the agents should be assumed similar epistemic capabilities in the semantics of both strategic and epistemic operators. Trying to implement these ideas, we propose two different modifications of ATEL. The first one, dubbed Alternating-time Temporal Observational Logic (ATOL), is a logic for agents with bounded recall of the past. With the second, ATEL-R*, we present a framework to reason about both perfect and imperfect recall, in which we also incorporate operators for reasoning about the past. We identify some feasible subsystems of this expressive system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issue that only truth has the disquotational property. It is of course perfectly clear that verification is not the same as truth, on pain of denying unverifiable truths--just as knowledge is not the same as truth. But the question is whether the notion of truth is built into verification and proof as a necessary condition, and hence is what powers disquotation. Something counts as a proof only when it shows that the conclusion of the proof is true. If people adopt a weaker notion of verification, as that a proposition is shown probable by what verifies it, then they cannot deduce the proposition, but only that they have non-conclusive reason to assert it.

Discusses various concept related to logic. Discussion about verificationism and the Fitch paradox; Logic of learning; Puzzle of knowledge and ignorance.

The article discusses the logical positivism theory of Willard Van Orman Quine and its association to verificationism. It mentions that Roger Gibson considers Quine as a verificationist in which Gibson cites evidence regarding the verificationism of Quine from Quine's article entitled "Epistemology Naturalized." It explores the issue on whether Quine should be considered as a verificationist which depends on his understandings on the term "verificationism."

The article discusses the link between knowledge and verification in institutional settings. The author says that the success of institution relies on its legitimacy, which rests on its ability to verify the truths, underwriting its functioning. It is said that business corporations are especially fertile sites for understanding the formation of new wholes, through knowledge incorporation and verification.

Argues on the use of naturalized epistemology to confirm the reliability of self-dependent justification without circularity. Problems and legitimacy of self-dependent justification; Correlation of self-dependent justification with the Bayesian confirmation; Details on hypothectico-deductive and hypothectico-inductive confirmations.