HPS
2682 Theories of Confirmation Spring 2010
Phil 2690
This list contains far more material than we can cover in one term. When we have decided which topics we will cover, I will add more readings as needed.
| Introductory topics | |
| "A Little Survey of Induction" Source: John D. Norton, "A Little Survey of Induction," in P. Achinstein, ed., Scientific Evidence: Philosophical Theories and Applications. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1905. pp. 9-34. |
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| Warm Up Case Studies | |
| Evidence for the theory of evolution | "Lines
of Evidence: The Science of Evolution" http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/lines_01 |
| Evidence and string theory | Peter Woit, "Is String Theory Even Wrong?" American Scientist,
March-April, 2002. Richard Dawid, "Underdetermination and Theory Succession from the Perspective of String Theory." Philosophy of Science 73 No.3 (2006), pp. 298-322. |
| Principal Accounts of Induction | |
| Inductive Generalization | |
| Enumerative Induction | |
| Hempel's Satisfaction Criterion | |
| Mill's Methods | |
| Glymour's bootstrap | |
| Demonstrative Induction (Newtonian deduction from the phenomena) |
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| Hypothetical Induction | |
| Exclusionary accounts. Error statistical methods. | |
| Simplicity (Akaike, BIC) |
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| Abduction: Inference to the best explanation | |
| Inference to a common cause | Michel Janssen, "COI Stories: Explanation and Evidence in the History of Science," Perspectives on Science. 10 (2002): 457-522. |
| Reliabilism | |
| Probabilistic Induction | |
| A Bayes' primer | |
| Bayesian success stories | |
| Subjective Bayesianism (big topic) |
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| Objective Bayesianism (big topic) |
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| Probability disassembled | John D. Norton, "Probability Disassembled," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 58 (2007), pp. 141-171. |
| Extended Bayesianism (convex sets, interval valued probabilities, improper priors, Jeffrey's conditionalization) | |
| Arguing for Bayesianism | |
| Dutch book arguments | |
| Function theoretic representation theorems | |
| Decision theoretic representation theorems | |
| Loss functions | |
| Arguing against Bayesianism | |
| Not the universal theory | John D. Norton, “Challenges to Bayesian Confirmation
Theory,” Prepared for Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay and Malcolm
Forster (eds.), Philosophy of Statistics: Vol. 7 Handbook of the
Philosophy of Science. Elsevier. John D. Norton, "Cosmic Confusions: Not Supporting versus Supporting Not-". Philosophy of Science. Forthcoming. John D. Norton, "Ignorance and Indifference." Philosophy of Science, 75 (2008), pp. 45-68. |
| Problem of old evidence | |
| Problems of Induction | |
| The Problem of induction (aka Hume's problem) |
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| Grue | |
| Underdetermination | |
| Hempel's Raven | |
| Observationally indistinguishable spacetimes | John D. Norton, "Observationally Indistinguishable Spacetimes: A Challenge for Any Inductivist." In G. Morgan, ed., Philosophy of Science Matters: The Philosophy of Peter Achinstein. Oxford University Press. |
| More Bayesian Topics | |
| Likelihoodism (Bayes without priors) |
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| Limit theorems | Hawthorne, James, "Inductive Logic", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/logic-inductive/>. |
| Measures of coherence (Bovens and Hartmann) |
Wheeler, Gregory and Scheines, Richard (2010) Causation, Association, and Confirmation. philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00005525/ |
| Measures of incremental support | |
| The conjunction fallacy (Linda the bank teller) |
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| Measures of explanatory power | Schupbach, Jonah N. (2010) Comparing Probabilistic Measures of
Explanatory Power. philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00005227 Schupbach, Jonah N. and Sprenger, Jan (2010) The Logic of Explanatory Power. philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00005521 |
| Gotcha's in Probability | |
| The exchange paradox | |
| The doomsday argument | |
| Sleeping beauty | |
| De Finetti's lottery | |
| Evidential Case Studies | |
| Evidence for evolution | Elliott Sober, Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science. Cambridge UP, 2008. |
| Newton's argument for universal gravitation | |
| The electron | John D. Norton, "How We Know About Electrons," pp. 67- 97 in R. Nola and H. Sankey, eds., After Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend; Recent Issues in Theories of Scientific Method. Dordrecht Kluwer. |
| ___Your suggestions? | |
| More | |
| Material Theory of Induction | |
| Ranking theory | Wolfgang Spohn (2009). A Survey of Ranking Theory. In Franz Huber & Christoph Schmidt-Petri (eds.), Degrees of Belief. Springer. |
| Hume's argument against miracles | John Earman, Hume's abject failure: the argument against miracles. |
| Confirmation theory and the learning theoretic paradigm |