Gordon Brittan

Montana State University | MSU · history and philosophy

Empirical Bayes-based Methods (EBM) is an increasingly popular form of Objective Bayesianism (OB). It is identified in particular with the statistician Bradley Efron. The main aims of this paper are, first, to describe and illustrate its main features and, second, to locate its role by comparing it with two other statistical paradigms, Subjective B...

There is as much lack of clarity concerning what “critical thinking” involves, even among those charged with teaching it, as there is consensus that we need more emphasis on it in both academia and society. There is an apparent need to think critically about critical thinking, an exercise that might be called meta-critical thinking. It involves emp...

For at least the past 25 years or so, there has been a twofold sense of “crisis” in ecology. One indication of this is the spate of articles and books calling for a reformation of the discipline and bearing such titles as “The New Ecology.” On the part of practitioners, the unease concerns its theories, concepts, and methods. On the part of the gen...

There is a debate in Bayesian confirmation theory between subjective and non-subjective accounts of evidence. Colin Howson has provided a counterexample to our non-subjective account of evidence: the counterexample refers to a case in which there is strong evidence for a hypothesis, but the hypothesis is highly implausible. In this article, we cont...

The first step is to distinguish two questions: 1. Given the data, what should we believe, and to what degree? 2. What kind of evidence do the data provide for a hypothesis H 1 as against an alternative hypothesis H 2 , and how much? We call the first the “confirmation”, the second the “evidence” question. Many different answers to each have been g...

Our object in this monograph has been to offer analyses of confirmation and evidence that will set the bar for what is to count as each and at the same time provide guidance for working scientists and statisticians. Philosophy does not sit in judgment on other disciplines nor can it dictate methodology. Instead, it forces reflection on the aims and...

Clark Glymour’s “bootstrap” account of confirmation rightly stresses the importance of selective confirmation of individual hypotheses, on the one hand, and the determination of theoretical constants, on the other. But in our view it is marred by a failure to deal with the problem of confounding, illustrated by the demonstration of a causal link be...

Most of the claims we make, nowhere more so than in the empirical sciences, outrun the information enlisted to support them. Such claims are never more than probable/likely. Intuitively, even obviously, some claims are more probable/likely than others. Everyone agrees that scientific claims in particular are probable/likely to the extent that they...

In our view, data confirm a hypothesis just in case they increase its probability; they constitute evidence for one hypothesis vis-à-vis others just in case they are more probable on it than on its available rivals. In subsequent chapters, we go on to clarify and amplify the confirmation/evidence distinction. Before doing so, however, we need to co...

Very possibly the most famously intractable epistemological conundrum in the history of modern western philosophy is Descartes’ argument from dreaming. It seems to support in an irrefutable way a radical scepticism about the existence of a physical world existing independent of our sense-experience. But this argument as well as those we discussed i...

Several non-Bayesian and non-Likelihood accounts of evidence have been worked out in interesting detail. One such account has been championed by the philosopher Deborah Mayo and the statistician Ari Spanos. Following Popper, it assumes from the outset that to test a hypothesis is to submit it to a severe test. Unlike Popper it relies on the notion...

It can be demonstrated in a very straightforward way that confirmation and evidence as spelled out by us can vary from one case to the next, that is, a hypothesis may be weakly confirmed and yet the evidence for it can be strong, and conversely, the evidence may be weak and the confirmation strong. At first glance, this seems puzzling; the puzzleme...

Like the error-statisticians, Glymour, and us, Peter Achinstein rejects an account of evidence in traditional Bayesian terms. Like the error-statisticians and Glymour, but unlike us, his own account of evidence incorporates what we have called the “true-model” assumption, that there is a conceptual connection between the existence of evidence for a...

It is easy to resolve a contradiction. All you have to do is reject or reconfigure one of the premises of the argument that leads to it. What makes paradoxes so difficult to resolve is that the assumptions that generate them are so intuitive that they resist rejection or reconfiguration. The “paradoxes of confirmation” have been especially difficul...

We contend that Bayesian accounts of evidence are inadequate, and that in this sense a complete theory of hypothesis testing must go beyond belief adjustment. Some prominent Bayesians disagree. To make our case, we will discuss and then provide reasons for rejecting the accounts of David Christensen, James Joyce, and Alan Hàjek. The main theme and...

This work breaks new ground by carefully distinguishing the concepts of belief, confirmation, and evidence and then integrating them into a better understanding of personal and scientific epistemologies. It outlines a probabilistic framework in which subjective features of personal knowledge and objective features of public knowledge have their tru...

There are three questions associated with Simpson’s paradox (SP): (i) Why is SP paradoxical? (ii) What conditions generate SP? and (iii) How to proceed when confronted with SP? An adequate analysis of the paradox starts by distinguishing these three questions. Then, by developing a formal account of SP, and substantiating it with a counterexample t...

While interest in Kant's philosophy has increased in recent years, very little of it has focused on his theory of science. This book gives a general account of that theory, of its motives and implications, and of the way it brought forth a new conception of the nature of philosophical thought. To reconstruct Kant's theory of science, the author ide...

Elliott Sober is both an empiricist and an instrumentalist. His empiricism rests on a principle called actualism, whereas his instrumentalism violates this. This violation generates a tension in his work. We argue that Sober is committed to a conflicting methodological imperative because of this tension. Our argument illuminates the contemporary de...

There are three distinct questions associated with Simpson's paradox, (i) Why or in what sense is Simpson's paradox a paradox? (ii) What is the proper analysis of the paradox? (iii) How one should proceed when confronted with a typical case of the paradox? We propose a "formar" answer to the first two questions which, among other things, includes d...

The interpretation of Kant's Critical philosophy as a version of traditional idealism has a long history. In spite of Kant's and his commentators’ various attempts to distinguish between traditional and transcendental idealism, his philosophy continues to be construed as committed (whether explicitly or implicitly and whether consistently or incons...

There are many approaches to the Critique of Pure Reason. The one I favor is to confront it with contemporary developments in mathematics and the physical sciences. Such an approach risks anachronisms. But it mirrors Kant’s own procedures and preoccupations. It also provides a way of underlining the continuing significance of his work.

Comparison of theories of the origin of life in the context of philosophy of science.

We introduce a distinction, unnoticed in the literature, between four varieties of objective Bayesianism. What we call 'strong objective Bayesianism' is characterized by two claims, that all scientific inference is 'logical' and that, given the same background information two agents will ascribe a unique probability to their priors. We think that n...

Kant's case for the objectivity of at least some of our experience is more threatened by the indeterminate than the indeterministic character of modern physics. Indeterminancy is a complex notion. It can be understood, ultimately, in terms of the failure of a “separability” principle, that objects can be individuated only with respect to non-vanish...

philosophy;mathematics;arithmetic;monadic quantification theory;ontology

The notion of a severe test has played an important methodological role in the history of science. But it has not until recently been analyzed in any detail. We develop a generally Bayesian analysis of the notion, compare it with Deborah Mayo’s error-statistical approach by way of sample diagnostic tests in the medical sciences, and consider variou...

Despite the fact that they are in most respects environmentally benign, electricity-generating wind turbines frequently encounter a great deal of resistance. Much of this resistance is aesthetic in character; wind turbines somehow do not "fit" in the landscape. On one (classical) view, landscapes are beautiful to the extent that they are "scenic,"...

It is a thesis traditional in Indian philosophy, advanced, for example, by D. M. Datta in Book VI of his The Six Ways of Knowing 1 and recently refurbished and redeployed by Arindam Chakravarti in this volume, that testimony (śabda) is an irreducible source and ground of knowledge. Western philosophers for the most part 2 have not so much refuted t...

A great deal of excellent work on Kant’s philosophy of mathematics has been done in the recent past, much of it facilitated by a deep knowledge of the traditional criticisms made of his philosophy and by contemporary developments in logic and set theory. In particular, I have in mind papers by Michael Friedman, Jaakko Hintikka, Charles Parsons, Car...

1. There is little to be gained, I believe, in trying to puzzle through the classic philosophical texts of the 17th and 18th centuries which have to do in important ways with on-going developments in mathematics and the various sciences without also having some knowledge of those developments. Lacking this sort of historical, although at times rath...

The problems in ontology and the philosophy of logic on which Karel Lambert works are not new. They date from the very beginnings of Western philosophy. But his work provides original solutions to several of them, and in the process illuminates the history of their development. Much of my own work, in fact, has simply involved applying Lambert’s re...

Science is made possible by the introduction of theoretical objects. Why this should be so has never been made clear. Indeed, it has never been made clear how theoretical objects are rightly to be understood, or in what ways they differ from more ordinary sorts of physical objects. What follows is a sketch of a new theory. In my view, this theory b...

The second chapter of MAN, “Metaphysical Foundations of Dynamics”, is both the longest and the most difficult in the book. It is difficult not so much because what Kant says there is obscure, which it is in places, as because it is the locus of certain tensions in his thinking. Some of these tensions resulted from an incomplete understanding of the...

One way of putting our Interpretive problem, as Professor Butts, does in his very interesting paper, is to characterize the relation (s) between Kant's transcendental and metaphysical principles, on the one hand, and between these principles and the presumptive laws of empirical science, on the other. Another way of putting the problem is to distin...