Theoretical Virtues Research Articles

Re-orienting discussions of scientific explanation: A functional perspective

Philosophy of science offers a rich lineage of analysis concerning the nature of scientific explanation, but the vast majority of this work, aiming to provide an analysis of the relation that binds a given explanans to its corresponding explanandum, presumes the proper analytic focus rests at the level of individual explanations. There are, however, other questions we could ask about explanation in science, such as: What role(s) does explanatory practice play in science? Shifting focus away from explanations, as achievements, toward explaining, as a coordinated activity of communities, the functional perspective aims to reveal how the practice of explanatory discourse functions within scientific communities given their more comprehensive aims and practices. In this paper, I outline the functional perspective, argue that taking the functional perspective can reveal important methodological roles for explanation in science, and consequently, that beginning here provides resources for developing more adequate responses to traditional concerns. In particular, through an examination of the ideal gas law, I emphasize the normative status of explanations within scientific communities and discuss how such status underwrites a compelling rationale for explanatory power as a theoretical virtue.

Property Reductive Emergent Dualism

This paper sketches and motivates a metaphysics of mind that is both substance dualist and, to a large extent, property reductive. Call it “property reductive emergent dualism”. Section “Emergent Dualism” gives the broad outlines of the view. Sections “Problems of Mental Causation” and “Theoretical Virtues” argue that it can claim several advantages over non-reductive physicalist theories of mind. Section “Problems of Mental Causation” considers metaphysical challenges to mental causation in detail. Section “Theoretical Virtues” considers overall theoretical virtues: ontological and ideological economy, unification with physical sciences, the promise of explanatory gain. On these grounds, I propose that the view coupling substance dualism with property reductivism deserves further philosophical attention.

A Matter of Kuhnian Theory-Choice? The GWS Model and the Neutral Current

In the Kuhnian view of theory choice, theories, as a matter of empirical fact, often score differently with regard to the standard theoretical virtues. The case I discuss in this paper, however, is a case in which there was one theory which was more virtuous than all its competitors. In such cases practitioners' disparate weighting preferences, which Kuhn is so keen to emphasize, make no difference to theory choice: practitioners' choices will converge on one theory despite their different weighting preferences. The case I discuss in this paper concerns the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam (GWS) model of electroweak interactions in the early 1970s. After considering the contemporary experimental evidence in its favor in detail, I argue that the GWS model was chosen not because the evidence in its favor was compelling, but rather because its virtues exceeded those of its competitors.

The Dangers of Pragmatic Virtue

Many people want to hold that some theoretical virtues—simplicity, elegance, familiarity or others—are only pragmatic virtues. That is, these features do not give us any more reason to think a theory is true, or close to true, but they justify choosing one theoretical option over another because they are desirable for some other, practical purpose. Using pragmatic virtues in theory choice apparently brings with it a dilemma: if we are deciding what to accept on the basis of considerations that are not truth-conducive, it looks like we should either refrain from believing what we accept, and adopt some sort of instrumentalist attitude to the theories we cherish; or alternatively, we stand charged with engaging in theoretical irrationality in our belief formation. This paper discusses the appropriate response to this dilemma.

The A Posteriori Armchair

A lot of good philosophy is done in the armchair, but is nevertheless a posteriori. This paper clarifies and then defends that claim. Among the a posteriori activities done in the armchair are assembling and evaluating commonplaces; formulating theoretical alternatives; and integrating well-known past a posteriori discoveries. The activity that receives the most discussion, however, is the application of theoretical virtues to choose philosophical theories: the paper argues that much of this is properly seen as a posteriori.

Quantitative Parsimony, Explanatory Power and Dark Matter

Baker (Br J Philos Sci 54:245–259, 2003) argues that quantitative parsimony—the principle that hypotheses requiring fewer entities are to be preferred over their empirically equivalent rivals—is a rational methodological criterion because it maximizes explanatory power. Baker lends plausibility to his account by confronting it with the example of postulating of the neutrino in order to resolve a discrepancy in Beta decay experiments. Baker’s account is initially attractive, but I argue that its details are problematic and that it yields undesirable consequences when applied to the case of astrophysical dark matter. Baker has not succeeded in showing why quantitative parsimony is a theoretical virtue.

Scientific understanding: truth or dare?

It is often claimed—especially by scientific realists—that science provides understanding of the world only if its theories are (at least approximately) true descriptions of reality, in its observable as well as unobservable aspects. This paper critically examines this ‘realist thesis’ concerning understanding. A crucial problem for the realist thesis is that (as study of the history and practice of science reveals) understanding is frequently obtained via theories and models that appear to be highly unrealistic or even completely fictional. So we face the dilemma of either giving up the realist thesis that understanding requires truth, or allowing for the possibility that in many if not all practical cases we do not have scientific understanding. I will argue that the first horn is preferable: the link between understanding and truth can be severed. This becomes a live option if we abandon the traditional view that scientific understanding is a special type of knowledge. While this view implies that understanding must be factive, I avoid this implication by identifying understanding with a skill rather than with knowledge. I will develop the idea that understanding phenomena consists in the ability to use a theory to generate predictions of the target system’s behavior. This implies that the crucial condition for understanding is not truth but intelligibility of the theory, where intelligibility is defined as the value that scientists attribute to the theoretical virtues that facilitate the construction of models of the phenomena. I will show, first, that my account accords with the way practicing scientists conceive of understanding, and second, that it allows for the use of idealized or fictional models and theories in achieving understanding.

Modalism and theoretical virtues: toward an epistemology of modality

According to modalism, modality is primitive. In this paper, we examine the implications of this view for modal epistemology, and articulate a modalist account of modal knowledge. First, we discuss a theoretical utility argument used by David Lewis in support of his claim that there is a plurality of concrete worlds. We reject this argument, and show how to dispense with possible worlds altogether. We proceed to account for modal knowledge in modalist terms.

The Hypothesis That Anorexia Nervosa Is a Passion: Clarifications and Elaborations

The Hypothesis That Anorexia Nervosa Is a Passion:Clarifications and Elaborations Louis C. Charland (bio), Tony Hope (bio), Anne Stewart (bio), and Jacinta Tan (bio) Keywords Anorexia nervosa, passion, emotion, feeling, mood, authenticity, identity We are grateful for these two insightful commentaries, which both see novelty and value in the manner in which we invoke the hypothesis that anorexia nervosa is a passion, to help explain data from the Anorexia Experiences Study, which provides the basis of our inquiry. In this response, we wish to clarify and elaborate on our hypothesis; in particular, the difference between passions and moods, the manner in which our hypothesis touches on issues of authenticity and identity, and the compelling parallel with addiction. We also wish to emphasize that, in proposing the hypothesis that anorexia nervosa is a passion, our primary aim is not so much to exclude or replace alternative theoretical approaches. Our focus, really, is to argue that the hypothesis that anorexia nervosa is a passion adds something rich and unique to our current understanding of that condition, which is not fully or adequately captured by alternative accounts. Passions and Moods Hannah Bowden asks whether the descriptive theoretical virtues we attribute to ‘passion’ might also be accomplished by referring to “Heideggerian mood,” or “a form of Heideggerian mood in combination with certain beliefs” (Bowden 2013, 368). She explicitly asks how passions differ from moods. These are important questions. To begin, note that in her remarks Bowden is inquiring about the descriptive capabilities of the theoretical constructs ‘passion’ and ‘mood.’ Her concern is largely with phenomenological description. Now it is indeed true that we argue that ‘passion’ plays a pivotal role in the description of the clinical course and nature of anorexia nervosa, although admittedly we do not engage in phenomenology per se. However, what must be emphasized is that we also wish to argue that, properly understood, the construct ‘passion’ plays a theoretically irreducible and ineliminable role in the explanation of the clinical course of anorexia nervosa; in particular, the manner in which many of the feelings and emotions in anorexia nervosa [End Page 375] succeed one another in apparently rule-governed and even law-like ways. Our contention is that neither the concepts ‘emotion,’ ‘feeling,’ ‘mood,’ ‘belief,’ or any combination of these, can adequately describe or explain the complex progressive syndrome that is anorexia nervosa. Something like the concept of passion we invoke from Ribot is required. Although much work remains to be done, this at least is the essence of our case. We believe that it is an especially important theoretical virtue of the concept of passion that we employ that it helps to describe and explain, both how and why the anorexic syndrome can sometimes take the tragic, progressive, worsening, course it does. Indeed, at one point Ribot likens passions where there is a loss of control of this sort to an ‘avalanche.’ This compelling metaphor suggests a tightly bound, progressive, worsening, affective–intellectual–motivational syndrome that, in our view, cannot credibly be labeled or identified, described or explained, with moods, or simply moods plus certain beliefs. Furthermore, ‘passion’ in our view cannot be accounted for using other preexisting theoretical concepts, or any combination of these. Our claim is that the concept ‘passion’—and not simply the term—must be added (reinstated, to be precise) to our current existing theoretical framework. None of this is to say that moods might not play an important part in the phenomenological and clinical description of the anorexic syndrome, or its explanation. But that is an independent empirical question that we did not attempt to answer in our article. To further clarify, there are in fact quite a few important differences between moods and passions on our account. First, passions may initially be voluntarily chosen, whereas moods, normally, are not. Second, passions are tied to an ‘intentional object’ or fixed idea, whereas moods, normally, are not. Third, passions require the intellectual resources of reason and cognition, whereas moods, normally, do not. Fourth, passions are often tied to specific stereotypical action tendencies, whereas moods, normally, are not. Fifth, passions are stable and may endure for years, whereas moods tend to be more fleeting and temporary...

The Rhetorical Unconscious of Argumentation Theory:

ABSTRACT The contemporary study of argumentation has produced sophisticated new theories that attempt to capture norms for evaluating arguments that are much more complex and more suited to actual argumentation than the traditional logical standards. The most prominent theories also make explicit attempts to distinguish themselves from rhetorical approaches. Yet, in the case of at least three major systematic theories of argumentation, a reliance on rhetorical theory persists. Despite denials, each account ultimately grounds its norms in considerations of reception and audience. There are good reasons why these theories are attracted to rhetoric, and there are understandable factors that produce their concern about it. Ultimately, though, the rhetorical dimension of these theories is one of their major theoretical virtues and a clear sign of their staying close to the realities of argumentation.

Los valores del indianismo.

El estudio de los valores del indianismo permite conocer los fundamentos del modo de vida de los pueblos originarios. Los valores que regulan su vida cotidiana son el humanismo, comunitarismo, respeto a la dignidad, amor a la naturaleza y a sus saberes, rectitud, cumplimiento y respeto a la palabra comprometida, promoción de la espiritualidad, justicia, libertad y paz. El interés por exponer las virtudes teóricas del indianismo tiene como cometido trascender su interpretación sólo ideológica al situarlo como un tipo de filosofía que racionaliza un proyecto societario alternativo al occidental, identificado con el nombre del Buen Vivir o Vivir Bien.

Evils, Wrongs and Dignity: How to Test a Theory of Evil

Evil acts are not merely wrong; they belong to a different moral category. For example, telling a minor lie might be wrong but it is not evil, whereas the worst act of gratuitous torture that you can imagine is evil and not merely wrong. But how do wrongs and evils differ? A theory or conception of evil should, among other things, answer that question. But once a theory of evil has been developed, how do we defend or refute it? The most commonly used method for doing this in the literature has been to, respectively, provide pro-examples or counter-examples. While this method might be sufficient for establishing that a theory is at least a prima facie plausible theory of evil, it is often insufficient for making fine-grained distinctions between otherwise plausible theories of evil. To supplement this insufficiency I propose that we also focus on five theoretical virtues that a theory of evil should have. These virtues are: 1) meshing well with important theories of moral wrongdoing; 2) being based on a plausible moral psychology; 3) explaining the basis of our judgments about evil; 4) being able to alter, revise and expand our judgments about evil; and 5) being pitched at the right level of generality. The outline of this paper is as follows. First we shall contrast the concept of evil with a conception of evil, before emphasizing the important role that theoretical virtues should play in the process of reflective equilibrium. Next, we shall examine what sort of theories of evil mesh well with three major theories of wrongdoing (actutilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and virtue theory). Having done that, we shall be in a position to examine directly the five theoretical virtues that a theory of evil should have by looking at a modified version of a theory of evil that I have previously defended and which I further elaborate here. The main result of this paper will be to show that these five theoretical virtues provide a useful analytical tool for interrogating plausible theories of evil. The secondary result will be to show that my theory of evil has these five virtues. As such, the aim of this paper is not to examine

Novel Predictions and the No Miracle Argument

Predictivists use the no miracle argument to argue that “novel” predictions are decisive evidence for theories, while mere accommodation of “old” data cannot confirm to a significant degree. But deductivists claim that since confirmation is a logical theory-data relationship, predicted data cannot confirm more than merely deduced data, and cite historical cases in which known data confirmed theories quite strongly. On the other hand, the advantage of prediction over accommodation is needed by scientific realists to resist Laudan’s criticisms of the no miracle argument. So, if the deductivists are right, the most powerful argument for realism collapses. There seems to be an inescapable contradiction between these prima facie plausible arguments of predictivists and deductivists; but this puzzle can be solved by understanding what exactly counts as novelty, if novel predictions must support the no miracle argument, i.e., if they must be explainable only by the truth of theories. Taking my cues from the use-novelty tradition, I argue that (1) the predicted data must not be used essentially in building the theory or choosing the auxiliary assumptions. This is possible if the theory and its auxiliary assumptions are plausible independently of the predicted data, and I analyze the consequences of this requirement in terms of best explanation of diverse bodies of data. Moreover, the predicted data must be (2) a priori improbable, and (3) heterogeneous to the essentially used data. My proposed notion of novelty, therefore, is not historical, but functional. Hence, deductivists are right that confirmation is independent of time and of historical contingencies such as if the theorist knew a datum, used it, or intended to accommodate it. Predictivists, however, are right that not all consequences confirm equally, and confirmation is not purely a logical theory-data relation, as it crucially involves background epistemic conditions and the notion of best explanation. Conditions (1)–(3) make the difference between prediction and accommodation, and account for the confirming power of theoretical virtues such as non ad-hocness, non-fudging, non-overfitting, independence and consilience. I thus show that functional novelty (a) avoids the deductivist objections to predictivism, (b) is a gradual notion, in accordance with the common intuition that confirmation comes in degrees, and (c) supports the no miracle argument, so vindicating scientific realism.

Data driven Langevin modeling of biomolecular dynamics

Based on a given time series, the data-driven Langevin equation proposed by Hegger and Stock [J. Chem. Phys. 130, 034106 (2009)] aims to construct a low-dimensional dynamical model of the system. Adopting various simple model problems of biomolecular dynamics, this work presents a systematic study of the theoretical virtues and limitations as well as of the practical applicability and performance of the method. As the method requires only local information, the input data need not to be Boltzmann weighted in order to warrant that the Langevin model yields correct Boltzmann-distributed results. Moreover, a delay embedding of the state vector allows for the treatment of memory effects. The robustness of the modeling with respect to wrongly chosen model parameters or low sampling is discussed, as well as the treatment of inertial effects. Given sufficiently sampled input data, the Langevin modeling is shown to successfully recover the correct statistics (such as the probability distribution) and the dynamics (such as the position autocorrelation function) of all considered problems.

Cancer and the goals of integration

Cancer is not one, but many diseases, and each is a product of a variety of causes acting (and interacting) at distinct temporal and spatial scales, or “levels” in the biological hierarchy. In part because of this diversity of cancer types and causes, there has been a diversity of models, hypotheses, and explanations of carcinogenesis. However, there is one model of carcinogenesis that seems to have survived the diversification of cancer types: the multi-stage model of carcinogenesis. This paper examines the history of the multistage theory, and uses the theory as a case study in the limits and goals of unification as a theoretical virtue, comparing and contrasting it with “integrative” research.

Do We Need Two Notions of Constitution?

Traditionally, constitutionalists have offered just one notion of constitution to analyse the relation that an object, such as a statue or a chain, bears to the object/s from which it is made: let us say, a piece of marble in the first case or a piece of metal in the second. Robert Wilson proposes to differentiate two notions of constitution and, in this way, to offer constitutionalists a more varied range of metaphysical tools. To justify the introduction of the difference, he presents several phenomena and problems, the explanation of which would justify the distinction he makes. In this paper I argue that Wilson’s proposal would not increase the explanatory power of a theory of constitution as it has traditionally been understood, only its complexity. Increasing the complexity without increasing the explanatory power of a theory, I defend, goes against one, at least prima facie, basic theoretical virtue: parsimony. In my argumentation I crucially use, for the case of Wilson’s first three arguments, the existence of principles of existence−persistence, which constitutionalists, Wilson among them, usually accept. In arguing against Wilson’s fourth argument I use a slightly modified version of Lynne Rudder Baker’s theory of constitution.

Internal realism and the problem of ontological autonomy: a critical note on Lombardi and Labarca

This paper discusses the proposal made by Lombardi and Labarca (Found Chem 7:125–148, 2005) that internal realism can secure the ontological autonomy of chemistry. I argue that internal realism is not, by itself, sufficient to accomplish this task. The fact that conceptual schemes may differ with respect to their theoretical virtues, and the possibility that the relations between them may be reductive undermine the premise that each conceptual scheme has an equal right to define its own ontology, which is a key premise in Lombardi and Labarca’s proposal.

Stimmung: exploring the aesthetics of mood

Contemporary cognitivist theories of emotion, narrative, and genre tend to focus on character engagement, narrative content, and the cognitivist bases of film understanding. Noel Carroll argues, for example, that we can explain the puzzle of emotional convergence in film—that viewers typically respond in similar ways to particular movie scenes—by the “criterial prefocusing” of narrative cues that elicit and direct cinematically appropriate affective and emotional responses. Carl Plantinga, who emphasizes more than Carroll the interplay of cognitive, emotional, and generic factors, also foregrounds the role of character, action, and narrative content in his analyses of our affective and emotional engagement with film. One could object, however, that such approaches overlook the broader aesthetic and cinematic setting of narrative drama. It is not just character action and narrative content that elicit emotion but the whole repertoire of cinematic-aesthetic devices (lighting, composition, montage, rhythm, tempo, colour, texture, gesture, performance, music, and sound). Films do not simply present characters in discrete emotional states in order to convey narrative information. Rather, their aesthetic effect depends on the sensuous-affective background or encompassing “mood” against which our complex flow of emotional responsiveness becomes manifest; the background against which we are able to recognise, align, and ally ourselves with particular characters within specific narrative scenarios. To explore different variations in the aesthetics of mood I shall consider selected scenes from three generically distinctive films, Almodovar’s All About My Mother (1999), Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), and Gus van Sant’s Elephant (2003). My aim is to suggest the theoretical virtues of a phenomenologically richer perspective on the aesthetics of mood.

Science, metaphysics and method

While there are many examples of metaphysical theorising being heuristically and intellectually important in the progress of scientific knowledge, many people wonder how metaphysics not closely informed and inspired by empirical science could lead to rival or even supplementary knowledge about the world. This paper assesses the merits of a popular defence of the a priori methodology of metaphysics that goes as follows. The first task of the metaphysician, like the scientist, is to construct a hypothesis that accounts for the phenomena in question. It is then argued that among the possible metaphysical theories, the empirical evidence underdetermines the right one, just as the empirical evidence underdetermines the right scientific theory. In the latter case it is widely agreed that we must break the underdetermination by appeal to theoretical virtues, and this is just what should be and largely is done in metaphysics. This is part of a more general line of argument that defends metaphysics on the basis of its alleged continuity with highly theoretical science. In what follows metaphysics and theoretical science are compared in order to see whether the above style of defence of a priori metaphysics is successful.

Bayesian Dynamic Pricing Policies: Learning and Earning Under a Binary Prior Distribution

Motivated by applications in financial services, we consider a seller who offers prices sequentially to a stream of potential customers, observing either success or failure in each sales attempt. The parameters of the underlying demand model are initially unknown, so each price decision involves a trade-off between learning and earning. Attention is restricted to the simplest kind of model uncertainty, where one of two demand models is known to apply, and we focus initially on performance of the myopic Bayesian policy (MBP), variants of which are commonly used in practice. Because learning is passive under the MBP (that is, learning only takes place as a by-product of actions that have a different purpose), it can lead to incomplete learning and poor profit performance. However, under one additional assumption, a constrained variant of the myopic policy is shown to have the following strong theoretical virtue: the expected performance gap relative to a clairvoyant who knows the underlying demand model is bounded by a constant as the number of sales attempts becomes large. This paper was accepted by Gérard P. Cachon, stochastic models and simulation.