Probabilities, Laws, and Structures

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Formal Methods

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

      PDF

   2. Dutch Book Arguments and Imprecise Probabilities

      • Seamus Bradley

      Pages 3-17

   3. Objectifying Subjective Probabilities: Dutch Book Arguments for Principles of Direct Inference

      • Timothy Childers

      Pages 19-28

   4. The Foundations of Statistics: Inference vs. Decision

      • Ilkka Niiniluoto

      Pages 29-41

   5. On the Verisimilitude of Tendency Hypotheses

      • Roberto Festa

      Pages 43-55

   6. Tweety, or Why Probabilism and even Bayesianism Need Objective and Evidential Probabilities

      • Gerhard Schurz

      Pages 57-74

   7. Pluralism in Probabilistic Justification

      • David Atkinson, Jeanne Peijnenburg

      Pages 75-86

   8. One Size Does Not Fit All: Proposal for a Prior-adapted BIC

      • Jan-Willem Romeijn, Rens van de Schoot, Herbert Hoijtink

      Pages 87-106

3. Philosophy of the Natural and Life Sciences

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 107-107

      PDF

   2. Mathematical Biology and the Existence of Biological Laws

      • Mauro Dorato

      Pages 109-121

   3. On Empirical Generalisations

      • Federica Russo

      Pages 123-139

   4. The Limits of Interventionism – Causality in the Social Sciences

      • Sebastian Mateiescu

      Pages 141-156

   5. Causal Realism

      • Michael Esfeld

      Pages 157-168

   6. Structural Invariants, Structural Kinds, Structural Laws

      • Holger Lyre

      Pages 169-181

   7. Santa’s Gift of Structural Realism

      • Paul Hoyningen-Huene

      Pages 183-186

   8. The Resilience of Laws and the Ephemerality of Objects: Can a Form of Structuralism be Extended to Biology?

      • Steven French

      Pages 187-199

   9. Natural Kinds, Conceptual Change, and the Duck-Bill Platypus: LaPorte on Incommensurability

      • Michela Massimi

      Pages 201-215

   10. Essentialism About Kinds: An Undead Issue in the Philosophies of Physics and Biology?

       • Thomas A. C. Reydon

       Pages 217-230

   11. Biological Laws and Kinds Within a Conservative Reductionist Framework

       • Christian Sachse

       Pages 231-244

This volume, the third in this Springer series, contains selected papers from the four workshops organized by the ESF Research Networking Programme "The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective" (PSE) in 2010: Pluralism in the Foundations of Statistics Points of Contact between the Philosophy of Physics and the Philosophy of Biology The Debate on Mathematical Modeling in the Social Sciences Historical Debates about Logic, Probability and Statistics The volume is accordingly divided in four sections, each of them containing papers coming from the workshop focussing on one of these themes. While the programme's core topic for the year 2010 was probability and statistics, the organizers of the workshops embraced the opportunity of building bridges to more or less closely connected issues in general philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and philosophy of the special sciences. However, papers that analyze the concept of probability for various philosophical purposes are clearly a major theme in this volume, as it was in the previous volumes of the same series. This reflects the impressive productivity of probabilistic approaches in the philosophy of science, which form an important part of what has become known as formal epistemology - although, of course, there are non-probabilistic approaches in formal epistemology as well. It is probably fair to say that Europe has been particularly strong in this area of philosophy in recent years.​

• ESF Research Networking Programme
• Mathematical Modeling
• PSEP
• Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective
• Pluralism in the Foundations of Statistics
• probabilistic approaches in the philosophy of science

• Utrecht, Netherlands

  Dennis Dieks

• , Faculty of Humanities, University of A Coruña, Ferrol, Spain

  Wenceslao J. Gonzalez

• Tilburg, Netherlands

  Stephan Hartmann

• University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA

  Michael Stöltzner

• University of Geneva, Geneva, Germany

  Marcel Weber

Policies and ethics