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The disjunction problem and the distality problem each presents a challenge that any theory of mental content must address. Here we consider their bearing on purely probabilistic causal (ppc) theories. In addition to considering these problems separately, we consider a third challenge—that a theory must solve both. We call this “the hard problem.” We consider 8 basic ppc theories along with 240 hybrids of them, and show that some can handle the disjunction problem and some can handle the distality problem, but none can handle the hard problem. This is our main result. We then discuss three possible responses to that result, and argue that though the first two fail, the third has some promise.

Carl Hempel (1965) argued that probabilistic hypotheses are limited in what they can explain. He contended that a hypothesis cannot explain why E is true if the hypothesis says that E has a probability less than 0.5. Wesley Salmon (1971, 1984, 1990, 1998) and Richard Jeffrey (1969) argued to the contrary, contending that P can explain why E is true even when P says that E’s probability is very low. This debate concerned noncontrastive explananda. Here, a view of contrastive causal explanation is described and defended. It provides a new limit on what probabilistic hypotheses can explain; the limitation is that P cannot explain why E is true rather than A if P assign E a probability that is less than or equal to the probability that P assigns to A. The view entails that a true deterministic theory and a true probabilistic theory that apply to the same explanandum partition are such that the deterministic theory explains all the true contrastive propositions constructable from that partition, whereas the probabilistic theory often fails to do so.

We (2013, 2014) 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(H | O & E) = Pr(H | O). We defended this screening-off thesis (SOT) by discussing an example concerning smoking and cancer. Climenhaga (Philos Sci, forthcoming) 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 “SOT*”, and contends that it too gives the wrong result. We here reply to Climenhaga’s arguments and suggest that SOT provides a criticism of the widely held theory of inference called “inference to the best explanation”.

Charles Stein discovered a paradox in 1955 that many statisticians think is of fundamental importance. Here we explore its philosophical implications. We outline the nature of Stein’s result and of subsequent work on shrinkage estimators; then we describe how these results are related to Bayesianism and to model selection criteria like AIC. We also discuss their bearing on scientific realism and instrumentalism. We argue that results concerning shrinkage estimators underwrite a surprising form of holistic pragmatism.

In the world of philosophy of science, the dominant theory of confirmation is Bayesian. In the wider philosophical world, the idea of inference to the best explanation exerts a considerable influence. Here we place the two worlds in collision, using Bayesian confirmation theory to argue that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant.

This paper is a sympathetic critique of the argument that Reichenbach develops in Chap. 2 of Experience and Prediction for the thesis that sense experience justifies belief in the existence of an external world. After discussing his attack on the positivist theory of meaning, I describe the probability ideas that Reichenbach presents. I argue that Reichenbach begins with an argument grounded in the Law of Likelihood but that he then endorses a different argument that involves prior probabilities. I try to show how this second step in Reichenbach’s approach can be strengthened by using ideas that have been developed recently for understanding causation in terms of the idea of intervention.

I discuss two versions of the doomsday argument. According to ``Gott's Line'',the fact that the human race has existed for 200,000 years licences the predictionthat it will last between 5100 and 7.8 million more years. According to ``Leslie'sWedge'', the fact that I currently exist is evidence that increases the plausibilityof the hypothesis that the human race will come to an end sooner rather than later.Both arguments rest on substantive assumptions about the sampling process thatunderlies our observations. These sampling assumptions have testable consequences,and so the sampling assumptions themselves must be regarded as empirical claims.The result of testing some of these consequences is that both doomsday argumentsare empirically disconfirmed.

Traditional analyses of the curve fitting problem maintain that the data do not indicate what form the fitted curve should take. Rather, this issue is said to be settled by prior probabilities, by simplicity, or by a background theory. In this paper, we describe a result due to Akaike [1973], which shows how the data can underwrite an inference concerning the curve’s form based on an estimate of how predictively accurate it will be. We argue that this approach throws light on the theoretical virtues of parsimoniousness, unification, and non ad hocness, on the dispute about Bayesianism, and on empiricism and scientific realism.

A system whose expected state changes with time cannot have both a forward-directed translationally invariant probabilistic law and a backward-directed translationally invariant law. When faced with this choice, science seems to favor the former. An asymmetry between cause and effect may help to explain why temporally oriented laws are usually forward-directed.

Dans le debat scientifique entre realisme et empirisme, l'A. explique la position de Van Fraassen quant a son empirisme constructif. Il souleve differents problemes epistemologiques concernant le role des hypotheses et leur utilisation dans les sciences

This article reviews two standard criticisms of creationism/intelligent design (ID): it is unfalsifiable, and it is refuted by the many imperfect adaptations found in nature. Problems with both criticisms are discussed. A conception of testability is described that avoids the defects in Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion. Although ID comes in multiple forms, which call for different criticisms, it emerges that ID fails to constitute a serious alternative to evolutionary theory.

When two causally independent processes each have a quantity that increases monotonically (either deterministically or in probabilistic expectation), the two quantities will be correlated, thus providing a counterexample to Reichenbach's principle of the common cause. Several philosophers have denied this, but I argue that their efforts to save the principle are unsuccessful. Still, one salvage attempt does suggest a weaker principle that avoids the initial counterexample. However, even this weakened principle is mistaken, as can be seen by exploring the concepts of homology and homoplasy used in evolutionary biology. I argue that the kernel of truth in the principle of the common cause is to be found by separating metaphysical and epistemological issues; as far as the epistemology is concerned, the Likelihood Principle is central.

Fleeing from the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Hans Reichenbach resigned his post at the University of Berlin and accepted a five-year position at the University of Istanbul. It was there that he wrote his first book in English, Experience and Prediction, which the University of Chicago Press published in 1938. Reichenbach left Istanbul in 1938 to take up a position at University of California, Los Angeles, where he taught until his death in 1953. The papers collected in this Synthese special issue are the result of a conference that one of us (ES) casually suggested and the other (GI) organized, which took place at Bogazici University in Istanbul, in May 2008, to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Experience and Prediction. The lectures presented at that conference are all represented here, with the exception of Alan Richardson’s, and one of the paper included here, that of Frederick Eberhardt, was not presented at the conference. These papers are historical and philosophical in varying degrees. Some seek to situate Reichenbach in the political upheavals that drove him from Germany and the social transformations that led him to be welcomed to Turkey. Others connect Reichenbach’s work to the historical development of scientific philosophy, linking Reichenbach’s ideas to those of other scientists and philosophers who worked on induction, probability, and scientific realism. And still other essays are not historical in their fundamental orientation at all, in that they seek to draw from Reichenbach ideas that are of enduring importance in the attempt to solve philosophical problems in a scientific spirit.

TWO CONCEPTS The concept of altruism has led a double life. In ordinary discourse, as well as in psychology and the social sciences, altruism refers to behaviors that are produced because people have certain sorts of motives. In evolutionary biology, on the other hand, the concept is applied to behaviors that enhance the fitness of others at expense to self. A behavior can be altruistic in the evolutionary sense without being an example of psychological altruism. A plant that leeches insecticide into the soil may be an altruist, if the insecticide benefits its neighbors and imposes an energetic cost on the producer. In saying this, I am not attributing a mind to the plant. Evolutionary altruism has to do with the fitness consequences of the behavior, not with the mechanisms inside the plant (mental or otherwise) that cause the plant to behave as it does. Symmetrically, a behavior can be altruistic in the psychological sense without being an example of evolutionary altruism. If I give you a volume of Beethoven piano sonatas (or a package of contraceptives) out of the goodness of my heart, my behavior may be psychologically altruistic. However, the gift giving will not be an example of evolutionary altruism, if the present fails to augment your prospects for survival and reproductive success.

In The Direction of Time, Hans Reichenbach (1956) stated a principle that he thought helps guide nondeductive inference from an observed correlation to an unobserved cause. He called it the principle of the common cause. Wesley Salmon (1975, 1978, 1984) subsequently elaborated and refined this idea.

THE QUESTION Solipsism poses a familiar epistemological problem. Each of us has beliefs about a world that allegedly exists outside our own minds. The problem is to justify these nonsolipsistic convictions. One standard approach is to argue that the existence of things outside our own sensations may reasonably be inferred from regularities that obtain within our sensations. Certain experiences, which I will call tiger sounds and tiger visual images, exhibit a striking correlation. We can explain the existence of this correlation by postulating an entity that is a cause of both. If there were tigers, it would be no surprise that certain sights and certain sounds tend to co-occur. Our rejection of solipsism can thus be justified by appeal to an abductive argument; we advance an inference to the best explanation conforming to the pattern that Reichenbach (1956) called the principle of the common cause (Salmon 1984; Sober 1988). The epistemological problem posed by solipsism is an old chestnut. A quite different problem – one less often noticed, let alone addressed – is the problem of explanation. Why do we have beliefs about the world outside our own minds? To reply that it is in our nature to “reify” may be true enough, but it merely postpones the question at hand.

Several evolutionary biologists have used a parsimony argument to argue that the single gene is the unit of selection. Since all evolution by natural selection can be represented in terms of selection coefficients attaching to single genes, it is, they say, “more parsimonious” to think that all selection is selection for or against single genes. We examine the limitations of this genic point of view, and then relate our criticisms to a broader view of the role of causal concepts and the dangers of reification in science.

Developing a definition of group selection, and applying that definition to the dispute in the social sciences between methodological holists and methodological individualists, are the two goals of this paper. The definition proposed distinguishes between changes in groups that are due to group selection and changes in groups that are artefacts of selection processes occurring at lower levels of organization. It also explains why the existence of group selection is not implied by the mere fact that fitness values of organisms are sensitive to the composition of groups. And, lastly, the definition explains why group selection need not involve selection for altruism. Group selection is thereby seen as an evolutionary force which is objectively distinct from other evolutionary forces. Applying the distinction between group and individual selection to the holism/individualism dispute has the desirable result that the dispute is not decidable a priori. This way of looking at the dispute yields a conception of ...

Van Fraassen's (1980) constructive empiricism asserts that it is not for science to reach a verdict on whether a theory is true or false, if the theory is about unobservable entities; scien...

That a given piece of copper conducts electricity increases the credibility of statements asserting that other pieces of copper conduct electricity, and thus confirms the hypothesis that all copper conducts electricity. But the fact that a given man now in this room is a third son does not increase the credibility of statements asserting that other men now in this room are third sons, and so does not confirm the hypothesis that all men now in this room are third sons.... The difference is that in the former case the hypothesis is a lawlike statement; while in the latter case, the hypothesis is a merely contingent or accidental generality. Only a statement that is lawlike-regardless of its truth or falsity or its scientific importance-is capable of receiving confirmation from an instance of it; accidental statements are not (Goodman 1965, p. 73).