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Much of what David Hume said about a wide range of subjects
remains of great importance today. In the first volume of his first
work, A Treatise of Human Nature, a work in which he articulated
a new “science of human nature,” Hume focused on an interrelated
set of issues in theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and philosophical
psychology. More particularly, he explained how it is that we form
such important conceptions as space and time, cause and effect,
external objects, and personal identity. At the same time, he offered
an equally important account of how or why we believe in the objects
of these conceptions – an account of why we believe that causes are
necessarily connected to effects, that there are enduring external
objects, and that there are enduring selves – even though the human
mind is unable to provide a satisfactory proof that these phenomena
exist. In the second volume of the Treatise Hume expanded his
account of human psychology, focusing on the origin and role of the
passions and the nature of human freedom. In the third and final
volume of this work he explored the origins and nature of morality.
In later works he returned to many of these philosophical issues,
but he also made substantial contributions to our understanding of
political theory, aesthetics, economics, and philosophy of religion.
In addition, he wrote an influential, six-volume History of England,
a work published in over 175 editions in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, and still in print. +
Each Cambridge Companion to a philosophical figure is made up of specially commissioned essays by an international team of scholars, providing students and nonspecialists with an introduction
to a major philosopher. The series aims to dispel the intimidation that readers may feel when faced with the work of a challenging thinker. David Hume is now considered one of the most important philosophers of the Western world. Although best known for his contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion, Hume also influenced developments in the philosophy of mind, psychology, ethics, political and economic theory, political and social history, and aesthetic theory. The fifteen essays in this volume address all aspects of Hume’s thought. The picture of him that emerges is that of a thinker who, though often critical to the point of skepticism, was nonetheless able to build on that skepticism a constructive, viable, and profoundly important view of the world. Also included in this volume are Hume’s two brief autobiographies and a bibliography suited to those beginning their study of Hume. This second edition of one of our most popular Companions
includes six new essays and a new introduction; the remaining essays have all been revised and updated. +
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Emergence is a notorious philosophical term of art. A variety of theorists have appropriated it for their purposes ever since George Henry Lewes gave it a philosophical sense in his 1875 Problems of Life and Mind. We might roughly characterize the shared meaning thus: emergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them. (For example, it is sometimes said that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.) Each of the quoted terms is slippery in its own right, and their specifications yield the varied notions of emergence that we discuss below. There has been renewed interest in emergence within discussions of the behavior of complex systems and debates over the reconcilability of mental causation, intentionality, or consciousness with physicalism. +
This paper attempts to establish the existence of ''element decay'' by making an historical case for the existence of ''theory decay'', a phenomenon where theories leave an agent’s mosaic without any re-evaluation or decision on the agent’s part. The phenomenon of theory decay is to be theoretically distinguished from ''rejection without replacement''; while the latter is a result of an agent’s deliberation, the former is a result of an agent’s inaction. To locate historical instances of theory decay, there should be evidence that the agent under study existed continuously throughout the period under study, that the theory was accepted at some point and unaccepted at some later point, and that the theory left the mosaic without any decision on the part of the agent. With these indicators at hand, I discuss five potentially promising historical cases: Poisson distribution, the Aharonov-Bohm effect, Damascus steel, Greek fire, and Cremonese violins. I argue that there is solid historical evidence to interpret the latter as an instance of element decay, which is sufficient to establish the existence of the phenomenon. I show that element decay is best seen as a ''non-scientonomic'' phenomenon; its existence highlights that individual and communal agents have limited capacities of knowledge retention and transmission and, when these limits are reached, element decay often takes place. This suggests that sufficient epistemic capacity to retain and transmit knowledge is a necessary precondition for the existence of scientonomic patterns, which emerge and hold only when the agent has measures in place to counteract potential element decay. +
There seems to be a widespread conviction - evidenced, for example, in the work of
Mackie, Dawkins and Sober - that it is Darwinian rather than Humean considerations which deal the fatal logical blow to arguments for intelligent design. I argue that this conviction cannot be well-founded. If there are current logically decisive objections to design arguments, they must be Humean - for Darwinian considerations count not at all against design arguments based upon apparent cosmological fine-tuning. I argue, further, that there are good Humean reasons for atheists and agnostics to resist the suggestion that apparent design - apparent biological design and/or apparent cosmological fine-tuning - establishes (or even strongly supports) the hypothesis of intelligent design. +
How John Locke's views on scientific knowledge was shaped by theorists who came before him, specifically Boyle and Newton. +
Although we accept that a scientific mosaic is a set of theories and methods accepted and employed by a scientific community, ''scientific community'' currently lacks a proper definition in scientonomy. In this paper, I will outline a basic taxonomy for the bearers of a mosaic, i.e. the social agents of scientific change. I begin by differentiating between ''accidental group'' and ''community'' through the respective absence and presence of a collective intentionality. I then identify two subtypes of community: the ''epistemic community'' that has a collective intentionality to know the world, and the ''non-epistemic community'' that does not have such a collective intentionality. I note that both epistemic and non-epistemic communities might bear mosaics, but that epistemic communities are the intended social agents of scientific change because their main collective intentionality is to know the world and, in effect, to change their mosaics. I conclude my paper by arguing we are not currently in a position to properly define ''scientific community'' per se because of the risk of confusing ''pseudoscientific communities'' with scientific communities. However, I propose that we can for now rely on the definition of epistemic community as the proper social agent of scientific change. +
In this paper, we introduce a new concept to the field of scientonomy, that of ''authority delegation''. ''Authority delegation'' is, in essence, a type of relation between distinct scientific communities whereby one community both recognizes another as an expert on a particular topic and will accept the theories it is told by the expert community over the same topic. Importantly, authority delegation is not a new fundamental ontological category along with ''theory'' and ''method''. We show that authority delegation is ''reducible'' to the more basic concepts of ''theory'' and ''method''. Furthermore, we suggest that authority delegation comes in two forms: ''one-sided'' authority delegation and ''mutual'' authority delegation. +
By the time Hume started to work on his Treatise, the notion of an idea as the primary, most general sort of mental item dominated European philosophy. Although Descartes noted that, strictly speaking, only those “thoughts that are as it were images of things” were appropriately described as ideas, in practice he used “the word ‘idea’ to refer to whatever is immediately perceived by the mind.” Not only do we have ideas of trees and the sun, but we also have ideas of our own activities of thinking and willing. Locke characterizes “idea” as “being that Term, which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding when a Man thinks.” Locke also thinks that we not only have ideas that derive from things or objects in the world (ideas of sensation), but also of the activities and operations of our own minds (ideas of reflection). Ideas of sensation are acquired through the operation of external objects on our sense organs, while ideas of reflection come from introspection, from thinking about what happens within our own minds. He also thinks that these ideas of reflection are of two basic sorts of mental activity, perception and willing, that correspond to two faculties of mind: the understanding (or the power of thinking) and the will (or the power of volition). +
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The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the postulation of irreducible,
distributed cognitive systems (or group minds as they are also known in the literature)
is necessary for the successful explanatory practice of cognitive science and
sociology. Towards this end, and with an eye specifically on the phenomenon of
distributed cognition, the debate over reductionism versus emergence is examined
from the perspective of Dynamical Systems Theory (DST). The motivation for this
novel approach is threefold. Firstly, DST is particularly popular amongst cognitive
scientists who work on modelling collective behaviors. Secondly, DST can deliver
two distinct arguments in support of the claim that the presence of mutual interactions
between group members necessitates the postulation of the corresponding
group entity. Thirdly, DST can also provide a succinct understanding of the way
group entities exert downward causation on their individual members. The outcome
is a naturalist account of the emergent, and thereby irreducible, nature of distributed
cognitive systems that avoids the reductionists’ threat of epiphenomenalism, while
being well in line with materialism +
In this volume, Sanford Goldberg (chapter 1) defines his socio-epistemological
research programme by noting that “social epistemology is the
systematic study of the epistemic significance of other minds” (section
3).1 But what can those minds be and how do they differ from the world
around us?
Goldberg elaborates by noting that relying on others is not quite the
same as relying on the natural world for evidence—as we do, for instance,
when we come to know that it’s cold outside by seeing someone
reaching for their parka or when we discover that we have a mouse
problem by finding the droppings under the sink. The difference, explains
Goldberg, is that others manifest “the very results of their own epistemic
sensibility” (chapter 1, section 1). +
Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity is an 1802 work of Christian apologetics and philosophy of religion by the English clergyman William Paley (July 1743 – 25 May 1805). The book expounds his arguments from natural theology, making a teleological argument for the existence of God, notably beginning with the watchmaker analogy.
The book was written in the context of the natural theology tradition. In earlier centuries, theologians such as John Ray and William Derham, as well as philosophers of classical times such as Cicero, argued for the existence and goodness of God from the general well-being of living things and the physical world.
Paley's Natural Theology is an extended argument, constructed around a series of examples including finding a watch; comparing the eye to a telescope; and the existence of finely adapted mechanical structures in animals, such as joints which function like hinges or manmade ball and socket joints. Paley argues that these all lead to an intelligent Creator, and that a system is more than the sum of its parts. The last chapters are more theological in character, arguing that the attributes of God must be sufficient for the extent of his operations, and that God must be good because designs seen in nature are beneficial.
The book was many times republished and remains in print. It continues to be consulted by creationists. Charles Darwin took its arguments seriously and responded to them; evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins continue to discuss Paley's book to respond to modern proponents with similar ideas. +
The question of how we come to accept new theories is a central area of inquiry in scientonomic discourse. However, there has yet to be a formal discussion of the subjective ''reasons'' an agent may have for accepting theories. This paper explores these epistemic reasons and constructs a historically sensitive definition of ''reason''. This formulation takes an abstractionist stance towards the ontology of reasons and makes use of a composite basing relation. The descriptive and normative components of reasons are fully formulated in scientonomic terms through the application of the newly introduced notion of ''implication'', and its separation from the notion of ''inference''. In addition, the paper provides scientonomic definitions for ''sufficient reason'', ''support'', and ''normative inference''. The fruitfulness of this formulation of reasons is illustrated by a few examples. +
Philosophy of science and history of science have been unable to integrate in a meaningful fashion. The major difficulty has been the question of how the history of science can inform the philosophy of science. By making several distinctions to characterize the type of philosophy of science relevant for integrated HPS, I show how traditional approaches to integration failed. These include a top-down and a bottom-up philosophical approach to integrated HPS. I then present a more fruitful way of integrating the disciplines, that of iterations. +
This paper presents a diagrammatic notation for visualizing epistemic entities and relations. The notation was created during the ''Visualizing Worldviews'' project funded by the University of Toronto’s ''Jackman Humanities Institute'' and has been further developed by the scholars participating in the university’s ''Research Opportunity Program''. Since any systematic diagrammatic notation should be based on a solid ontology of the respective domain, we first outline the current state of the scientonomic ontology. We then proceed to providing diagrammatic tools for visualizing the epistemic entities and relations of this ontology. These basic diagramming techniques allow us to construct diagrams of various types for both ''synchronic'' and ''diachronic'' visualizations. The paper concludes by highlighting some future research directions. As the notation presented here is ''de facto'' accepted and used in scientonomy, the paper suggests no modifications. +
It is unclear whether the first law forbids any conceivable scenarios or whether it is a tautology. This paper examines the first law with the goal of clarifying which scenarios it allows and which ones it forbids. I begin by highlighting a number of problems with the current formulations of the first laws for theories, methods, and questions, as well as the respective rejection theorems. New formulations for these laws and theorems are suggested to ensure their uniformity and the validity of their deductions. Next, I discuss a series of scenarios of theory replacement allowed by the first laws, such as the replacement by negation, the replacement by an answer to a different question, the replacement that involves the rejection of the question, and the replacement by a higher-order proposition. I then consider scenarios that are forbidden by the first law and show that this class only includes cases of rejection without replacement such as instances of element decay. This creates a dilemma. On the one hand, if cases of rejection without replacement are classified as non-scientonomic phenomena, the first law is a tautology. On the other hand, if such cases are classified as scientonomic phenomena, then the first law is not a tautology, but these cases stand as violations of the first law. The paper resolves this dilemma by opting for the former option: cases of rejection without replacement such as element decay due to catastrophic loss of records or destroyed communities are non-scientonomic, and should be considered as outside the scope of our discipline. +
The only subtype of ''epistemic agent'' currently recognized within scientonomy is ''community''. The place of both ''individuals'' and ''epistemic tools'' in the scientonomic ontology is yet to be clarified. This paper extends the scientonomic ontology to include ''epistemic agents'' and ''epistemic tools'' as well as their relationship to one another. Epistemic agent is defined as an agent capable of taking epistemic stances towards epistemic elements. These stances must be taken intentionally, that is, based on a semantic understanding of the epistemic element in question and its available alternatives, with reason, and for the purpose of acquiring knowledge. I argue that there can be both ''communal'' and ''individual'' epistemic agents. Epistemic agents are linked by relationships of ''authority delegation'' based on their differing areas of expertise. Having established the role of epistemic agents in the process of scientific change, I then turn to the role of ''epistemic tools'', such as a thermometer, a text, or a particle accelerator in epistemic activities. I argue that epistemic tools play a different role in scientific change than do epistemic agents. This role is specified by an agent’s employed method. A physical object or system is an ''epistemic tool'' for some epistemic agent if there is a procedure by which the tool can provide an acceptable source of knowledge for answering some question under the employed method of the agent. An agent is said to ''rely'' on such a tool. +
The sociotechnical domain is the realm of scientists, the communities and institutions they form, and the tools and instruments they use to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge. This paper reviews current scientonomic theory concerning this domain. A core scientonomic concept is that of an epistemic agent. Generally, an agent is an entity capable of intentional action—action that has content or meaning due to its purposeful direction towards a goal. An epistemic agent is one whose actions are the taking of epistemic stances, such as acceptance or rejection, towards epistemic elements, like theories or questions. An epistemic agent must semantically understand the propositions in question, and their alternatives, and choose among them with reason, with the motive of acquiring knowledge. The most obvious example of an epistemic agent is an individual human being. Rejecting the network of practitioners view, current scientonomic theory argues that appropriately organized communities of scientists can also function as epistemic agents. Communal epistemic agents are of particular scientonomic importance. Whereas the methods of theory assessment of individual scientists can be idiosyncratic, scientonomic theory contends that the taking of epistemic stances by scientific communities is a lawful, rule-governed process. A second concept of central importance is that of an epistemic tool. A physical object or system is an epistemic tool for some epistemic agent if there is a procedure by which the tool can provide an acceptable source of knowledge under the method employed by that agent. The agent is then said to rely on the tool. +
The role of categories of knowledge, or ''disciplines'', in science has not previously been explored in scientonomy. While disciplinary communities devoted to the production of knowledge are a modern phenomenon, the practice of dividing knowledge into categories is a universal feature of science. Although at any moment of time, many questions and theories can be part of a given discipline, not all of these are essential to the discipline. We show that two components are essential to a discipline: the discipline’s ''core questions'' as well as the discipline’s ''delineating theory'', a second-order theory that identifies these questions as essential to the discipline. If the questions of one discipline are a proper subset of the questions of another discipline, the former discipline is a subdiscipline of the latter. Since a discipline is a complex entity consisting of questions and a theory, epistemic agents can take epistemic stances towards disciplines. A discipline is said to be ''accepted'' if its core questions and its delineating theory are all accepted. To illustrate the applicability of these new concepts, the transition from physical to biological anthropology is discussed. +
The current formulation of ''the second law'' is flawed since it does not specify the causal relations between the outcomes of theory assessment and the actual acceptance/unacceptance of a theory; it merely tells us that a theory was assessed by the method employed at the time. We propose a new formulation of the second law: “If a theory satisfies the acceptance criteria of the method actually employed at the time, then it becomes accepted into the mosaic; if it does not, it remains unaccepted; if it is inconclusive whether the theory satisfies the method, the theory can be accepted or not accepted.” This new formulation makes the causal connection between theory assessment outcomes and cases of theory acceptance/unacceptance explicit. Also, this new formulation is not a tautology because it forbids certain logically possible scenarios, such as a theory satisfying the method of the time yet remaining unaccepted. Finally, we outline what inferences an observational scientonomist can make regarding theory assessment outcomes from the record of accepted theories. +
