According to best systems accounts, laws of nature are generalizations in the best systematization of particular matters of fact. Metrics such as simplicity and strength determine which ...systematization is best, but these are notoriously language relative. For this reason, David Lewis proposed a constraint on languages of inquiry: all predicates must be natural. This constraint is sometimes interpreted as requiring us to know which natural properties are instantiated in our world prior to scientific theorizing. I argue that this interpretation is incorrect. I provide a better interpretation and show how it undercuts an influential epistemological objection to Lewis's best systems account of laws due to Bas van Fraassen.
This paper deals with those time travels mostly considered by physics, namely those in the form of the so-called closed timelike curves. Some authoritative scholars have raised doubts about the ...status of these journeys as proper time travels. By using David Lewis’ famous definition of time travels proposed in 1976, we show that this proper status may actually be recovered, at least in some cosmological contexts containing spacetime regions, such as those concerning black holes described by the Kerr–Newman metric, that allow the formation of local closed curves. But, the mathematical incompatibility between ordinary black hole solutions to Einstein field equations and the cosmological solutions induces us to take into consideration the more general issue pertaining to the slippery interplay between models related to local and global aspects of the world, highlighting, in particular, the different notions of time that these domains inevitably imply. This leads us to think that time is not a univocal entity of the world, but is a scale-related characteristic which claims the adoption, when investigating its ontological status, of a sort of regional approach. We also briefly dwell upon the most appropriate form of realism that such a kind of dispute between local and global models may involve.
Lewis’s Principal Principle is widely recognized as a rationality constraint that our credences should satisfy throughout our epistemic life. In practice, however, our credences often fail to satisfy ...this principle because of our various epistemic limitations. Facing such violations, we should correct our credences in accordance with this principle. In this paper, I will formulate a way of correcting our credences, which will be called the Adams Correcting Rules and then show that such a rule yields non-commutativity between conditionalizing and correcting. With the help of the notion of ‘accuracy’, then, I attempt to provide a vindication of the Adams Correcting Rule and show how we can respond to the non-commutativity in question.
My thanks to our Peer Reviewers Bortolussi, Robert
Clinical and investigative medicine,
2019-Dec-29, Letnik:
42, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this age of "fake news" and "predatory journals", the peer review process could never be more important. A knowledgeable reviewer plays a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the scientific ...process. In fact, without adequate peer review, academic excellence would falter. So my hat is off to the 84 people who provided their time and expertise in formulating their reviews for the journal of Clinical and Investigative Medicine (CIM).
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
According to David Lewis, the predicate ‘knows’ is context-sensitive in the sense that its truth conditions vary across conversational contexts, which stretch or compress the domain of error ...possibilities to be eliminated by the subject’s evidence (Lewis, Aust J Philos 74:549–567,
1996
; Lewis, J Philos Log 8:339–359,
1979
). Our concern in this paper is to thematize, assess, and overcome within a neo-Lewisian contextualist project two important mismatches between our use of ‘know’ in ordinary life and the use of ‘know’ by ‘Lewisian’ ordinary speakers. The first mismatch is that Lewisian contextualism still
overgenerates
the error possibilities which cannot be ignored in a given context, since it is oblivious to the distinction between ‘invented’ and ‘discovered’ possibilities. The second mismatch is a full-scale one: an adequate account of knowledge attribution is not exhausted by the subject’s
negative
capacity of pruning branches off the tree of counterpossibilities. We therefore introduce a new vector of value, which explains how ‘know’ comes in degrees: the satisfaction of ‘know better’ is made to depend on the capacity of
imagining
(actualized) possibilities connected in a relevant way with the subject’s (true) beliefs.
According to Lewis, mereology is the general and exhaustive theory of ontological composition (mereological monism), and every contingent feature of the world supervenes upon some fundamental ...properties instantiated by minimal entities (Humean supervenience). A profound analogy can be drawn between these two basic contentions of his metaphysics, namely that both can be intended as a denial of emergentism. In this essay, we study the relationships between Humean supervenience and two philosophical spin-offs of mereological monism: the possibility of gunk and the thesis of composition as identity. In a gunky scenario, there are no atoms and, thus, some criteria alternative to mereological atomicity must be introduced in order to identify the bearers of fundamental properties; this introduction creates a precedent, which renders the restriction of the additional criteria to gunky scenarios arbitrary. On the other hand, composition as identity either extends the principle of indiscernibility of identicals to composition or is forced to replace indiscernibility with a surrogate; both alternatives lead to the postulation of a symmetric kind of supervenience which, in contrast to Humean supervenience, does not countenance a privileged level. Both gunk and composition as identity, thus, display a tension with Humean supervenience.
If David Lewis's modal realism (MR) is true, then there are many, many people. According to Mark Heller, this is bad news. He takes MR to imply that "there are at least some cases in which it is ...permissible to let drowning children drown when it would be easy to save them." But since he holds the reasonable view that this is never permissible, he thinks that MR is false. Here, I argue that Lewis needn't be troubled by this objection: it provides no reason to reject MR for those who share Lewis's moral outlook. Moreover, I argue that disagreement with common sense needn't be severe if we can show both (a) that there's a sense in which common sense is correct and (b) we have little reason to care about the sense in which common sense is mistaken.
Jim Joyce has argued that David Lewis’s formulation of causal decision theory is inadequate because it fails to apply to the “small world” decisions that people face in real life. Meanwhile, several ...authors have argued that causal decision theory should be developed such that it integrates the interventionist approach to causal modeling because of the expressive power afforded by the language of causal models, but, as of now, there has been little work towards this end. In this paper, I propose a variant of Lewis’s causal decision theory that is intended to meet both of these demands. Specifically, I argue that Lewis’s causal decision theory can be rendered applicable to small world decisions if one analyzes his dependency hypotheses as causal hypotheses that depend on the interventionist causal modeling framework for their semantics. I then argue that this interventionist variant of Lewis’s causal decision theory is preferable to interventionist causal decision theories that purportedly generalize Lewis’s through the use of conditional probabilities. This is because Lewisian interventionist decision theory captures the causal decision theorist’s conviction that any correlation between what the agent does and cannot cause should be irrelevant to the agent’s choice, while purported generalizations do not.
In most penal systems, success is punished more than failure. For example, murder is punished more severely than attempted murder. But success or failure is often determined by luck. It thus appears ...that punishment is allotted on the basis of arbitrary factors. The problem of criminal attempts is the question of how to best resolve this apparent tension. One particularly sophisticated attempt at resolution, first developed by David Lewis, holds that such differential punishment is not unjust when understood as a natural penal lottery. What is most interesting about this view is that it does not appear to involve a commitment to resultant moral luck. I argue that the natural penal lottery fails to deliver justice. Upon analysis, it carries the same implication that it sought to avoid-namely, a commitment to resultant moral luck. I then argue that there can be, in principle, no penal lottery that delivers justice, natural or otherwise.
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