Eric Johannesson

Stockholm University | SU · Department of Philosophy

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate various notions of empirical equivalence in relation to the two main arguments for realism in the philosophy of science, namely the no-miracles argument and the indispensability argument. According to realism, one should believe in the existence of the theoretical entities (such as numbers and electr...

In statistics, there are two main paradigms: classical and Bayesian statistics. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which classicists and Bayesians can (in some suitable sense of the word) agree. My conclusion is that, in certain situations, they can't. The upshot is that, if we assume that the classicist isn't allowed to have...

With his new riddle of induction, Goodman raised a problem for enumerative induction which many have taken to show that only some ‘natural’ properties can be used for making inductive inferences. Arguably, however, (i) enumerative induction is not a method that scientists use for making inductive inferences in the first place. Moreover, it seems at...

Some realists claim that theoretical entities like numbers and electrons are indispensable for describing the empirical world. Motivated by the meta-ontology of Quine, I take this claim to imply that, for some first-order theory T and formula δ(x) such that T ⊢ ∃xδ ∧ ∃x¬δ, where δ(x) is intended to apply to all and only empirical entities, there is...

In On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World from 1975, Quine formulated a thesis of underdetermination roughly to the effect that every scientific theory has an empirically equivalent but logically incompatible rival, one that cannot be discarded merely as a terminological variant of the former. For Quine, the truth of this thesis was an open...

In what sense, and to what extent, do rules of inference determine the meaning of logical constants? Motivated by the principle of charity, a natural constraint on the interpretation of logical constants is to make the rules of inference come out sound. But, as Carnap observed, although this constraint does rule out some non-standard interpretation...

Arguably, the proposition that Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens and the proposition that water is H2O are both a posteriori. Nevertheless, they both seem to be necessary. Ever since Davies and Humberstone (Philos Stud 38(1):1–31, 1980), it has been known that two-dimensional semantics can account for this fact. But two-dimensionalism isn’t the only the...

Arguably, the proposition that Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens and the proposition that water is H2O are both a posteriori. Nevertheless, they both seem to be necessary. Ever since Davies and Humberstone (1980), it has been known that two-dimensional semantics can account for this fact. But two-dimensionalism isn't the only theory on the market that p...

In statistics, there are two main paradigms: classical and Bayesian statistics. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which classicists and Bayesians can (in some suitable sense of the word) agree. My conclusion is that, in certain situations, they can't. The upshot is that, if we assume that the classicist isn't allowed to have...

When it comes to Kripke-style semantics for quantified modal logic, there’s a choice to be made concerning the interpretation of the quantifiers. The simple approach is to let quantifiers range over all possible objects, not just objects existing in the world of evaluation, and use a special predicate to make claims about existence (an existence pr...

A glass couldn't contain water unless it contained H2O-molecules. Likewise, a man couldn't be a bachelor unless he was unmarried. Now, the latter is what we would call a conceptual or analytical truth. It's also what we would call a priori. But it's hardly a conceptual or analytical truth that if a glass contains water, then it contains H2O-molecul...

Many expressions intuitively have different epistemic and modal profiles. For example, co-referring proper names are substitutable salva veritate in modal contexts but not in belief-contexts. Two-dimensional semantics, according to which terms have both a so-called primary and a secondary intension, is a framework that promises to accommodate and e...