My thesis is that there are good reasons for a philosophical account of measurement to deal prima... more My thesis is that there are good reasons for a philosophical account of measurement to deal primarily with the properties or magnitudes of objects measured, rather than with the objects themselves. The account I present here embodies both a realism about measurement and a realism about the existence of the properties involved in measurement. It thus provides an alternative to most current treatments of measurement, many of which are operationalistic or conventionalistic, and nearly all of which are nominalistic.1 This enables the present account to give better explanations of a number of features of measurement and other aspects of science than competing accounts of measurement can, and to be more readily integrated into a realist account of natural laws and causation. It also illustrates a general strategy for combining a familiar and powerful approach to representation with intensional entities like properties, which I think can be useful for dealing with a number of philosophical problems.
In this paper I present a formal language in which complex predicates stand for properties and re... more In this paper I present a formal language in which complex predicates stand for properties and relations, and assignments of denotations to complex predicates and assignments of extensions to the properties and relations they denote are both homomorphisms. This system affords a fresh perspective on several important philosophical topics, highlighting the algebraic features of properties and clarifying the sense in which properties can be represented by their extensions. It also suggests a natural modification of current logics of properties, one in which some complex predicates stand for properties while others do not.
Page 1. Leibnizian Expression CHRIS SWOYER "I HAVE SAID NOTHING," Leibniz wrote... more Page 1. Leibnizian Expression CHRIS SWOYER "I HAVE SAID NOTHING," Leibniz wrote de Voider in 1703, "that does not follow from my doctrine that every body expresses all other things, that every soul expresses its own ...
Thirty years ago the reputation of properties had hit rock bottom. Their stock has risen sharply ... more Thirty years ago the reputation of properties had hit rock bottom. Their stock has risen sharply since, however, and although nominalists remain, most philosophers can now invoke properties without guilt or anxi-ety. Indeed, in the last few years realists about properties (realists, for ...
E ven people who like philosophy often don't like metaphysics. Ontology in particular, with its a... more E ven people who like philosophy often don't like metaphysics. Ontology in particular, with its arcane discussions of universals and particulars, is frequently cited as a paradigm of desiccated Scholasticism. I don't foresee the day when works on universals top the bestseller list, but I do think that updated versions of many traditional views in ontology can be more responsive to the real world and more interesting than is often supposed. To keep the discussion manageable, I will focus on properties or universals. My proposal is that we need a reorientation in ontology, one in which we construe arguments for the existence of properties or universals as inferences to the best explanation. I think that many traditional and current arguments for the existence of properties are quite plausibly construed in this way, so the proposed reorientation wouldn't send us back to square one. But the proposal is not simply to attach a fashionable new label to venerable practices; it has three practical consequences. First, we should acknowledge that there will virtually never be knockdown, demonstrative arguments for (or against) any theory of properties. But this doesn't mean that such theories are empty. They can, if successful, receive cumulative confirmation by helping to explain a variety of phenomena. On this picture, the goal is to make one's ontological case by piling up pieces of evidence in its favor. This means that the unit of evaluation in ontology should be a research program (rather than a paper or book or even someone's collected works) involving a number of explanations, independent tests, and refinements. Such programs are more likely to prosper if they are pursued by a number of philosophers working toward a common end, rather than by a solitary thinker. Second, instead of beginning with a detailed picture of the nature of properties, we would gradually come to learn what properties are like by examining the roles Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXIII (1999) How Ontology Might Be Possible
People who make or implement public policy must often estimate probabilities, predict outcomes, a... more People who make or implement public policy must often estimate probabilities, predict outcomes, and make decisions that affect the welfare, values, and lives of many others. Until recently many of the disciplines that study policy employed a model of individuals and organizations as rational agents whose predictions conform to the prescriptions of probability theory and whose actions maximize their expected gains in conformity with classical decision theory. Such theories lead a double life. They are sometimes viewed as normative models that tell us what we should do in order to be rational (even if we rarely manage to pull it off). Construed this way, they offer advice: we should have logically consistent beliefs, coherent probability assignments, consistent preferences, and maximize expected utilities. But these same theories have also been viewed as descriptive models; construed this way, they are meant to provide an approximate characterization of the behavior of real people. It is this interpretation that has played a central role in economics, management science, and parts of political science, sociology, and the law. Since the early 1970s this descriptive picture of judgment and decision making has come under increasing attack from scientists working in behavioral decision theory, the field concerned with the ways in which people actually judge, predict, and decide. Much of the criticism derives from the work of Tversky, Kahneman, and others working in the heuristics and biases tradition. Scientists in this tradition argue that people often
Although Kant's attempts in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to derive stateme... more Although Kant's attempts in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to derive statements of specific duties from the categorical imperative have received much attention, there is still disagreement over the strategies of particular derivations, the status of the auxiliary assumptions employed therein, and the principles at work in the derivations generally. Yet an understanding of these matters is indispensable for a proper understanding of the Groundwork and bears on a much wider class of ethical theories as well. My aim here is to provide an account of the derivations and their auxiliary premises that explains both the strategy behind the derivations generally and the details of Kant's specific examples. In particular, I shall argue that the widespread view that the premises of the derivations are empirical is mistaken and that their conclusions are thus more general than is often supposed.
It is commonly agreed that there is a genuine distinction between relational, or de re, belief, o... more It is commonly agreed that there is a genuine distinction between relational, or de re, belief, on the one hand, and notional, or de dicto, belief on the other. In one way or another, treatments of this distinction have usually been concerned with problems involving modes of specification of objects, with the paradigm objects being concrete, spatio-temporal particulars. It is less frequently realized that something analogous to the distinction between de re and de dicto belief arises when we turn from objects to attributes, and not merely in those cases in which someone believes one attribute to exemplify a higher-order attribute, but, more importantly, in those cases in which someone believes a concrete particular to exemplify a given attribute. My aim here is to clarify and defend this claim, to show that any adequate treatment of belief sentences should account for it, and to sketch a means for doing so. To this end, I shall begin by rehearsingjust enough of the standard material concerning belief to provide a background for subsequent discussion. In the second section I defend the above claim concerning attributes and belief, and in the third I argue that standard accounts of belief sentences cannot easily be expanded to handle it. In the fourth section I propose an account that can, in the fifth extending it to more complicated cases and briefly examining some of its implications.
Causation and Identity CHRIS SWOYER ausal accounts of the transtemporal identity of physical obje... more Causation and Identity CHRIS SWOYER ausal accounts of the transtemporal identity of physical objects and of persons are not completely new. Passages in Hume can be read as suggesting causal accounts of the identity of physical objects and of the self, as can Kant's arguments that the successive states of an objective substance must be causally connected; and in this century, a variety of causal accounts of the identity conditions for persons and for physical objects have been proposed. Such accounts, especially for physical objects, have not been very fully developed, however, and here I want to provide a more detailed motivation for, and development of, a causal account of identity through time and to examine some of its implications. I think that my general line of argument applies both to persons and to physical objects, though to keep the discussion manageable I shall concentrate on the latter.'
In [13], Meehl drew attention to what he saw as a substantive problem involved in attempts to con... more In [13], Meehl drew attention to what he saw as a substantive problem involved in attempts to confirm theories in psychological research, suggesting that there is a radical asymmetry between the manner in which theories in physics and theories in psychology are confirmed. In the physical sciences, improvement in experimental design, instrumentation, or amount of data-in short, increased power-typically makes it more difficult to confirm a theory; in current psychological research the situation is just the opposite. Recently, however, Herbert Keuth has responded that at least one of Meehl's central contentions is without foundation ([9], p. 546). As a result of Keuth's paper, philosophers unacquainted with current work in psychology may be left with the mistaken impression that all is well in that domain, or at least, that there exist no substantive problems concerning theory confirmation in the social sciences over and above the well-known infirmities besetting theory confirmation in hard sciences such as physics. We will examine Keuth's criticisms and show why they fail. We will then attempt to clarify the problem of null hypothesis testing and its role in theory confirmation in psychological research and, finally, conclude by suggesting some possible remedial actions. We plan to take up Keuth's points in order, but a brief restatement of the logic behind the use of significance testing may make what follows clearer to those unacquainted with the contemporary psychological scene. (There is not space here to present anything like a comprehensve discussion of the topic; for that the reader should consult almost any text on statistics, e.g., [6].)1 One of the major assumptions made by Meehl is that substantive theories in the physical sciences tend to imply or predict absolute point values whereas substantive theories in psychology tend only to predict directional differences on some variable between two groups of subjects. Of course, theories in physics do not by necessity make point predictions nor do those in psychology necessarily make directional predictions. However, due to less sophisticated
Page 1. NOUS 29:1 (1995) 96-114 Leibniz on Intension and Extension CHRIS SWOYER University of Okl... more Page 1. NOUS 29:1 (1995) 96-114 Leibniz on Intension and Extension CHRIS SWOYER University of Oklahoma ... The central notions of this logic are the two-place relations, oo (identity) and inesse (inclusion), and a binary, conjunction-like operation, ED. ...
My thesis is that there are good reasons for a philosophical account of measurement to deal prima... more My thesis is that there are good reasons for a philosophical account of measurement to deal primarily with the properties or magnitudes of objects measured, rather than with the objects themselves. The account I present here embodies both a realism about measurement and a realism about the existence of the properties involved in measurement. It thus provides an alternative to most current treatments of measurement, many of which are operationalistic or conventionalistic, and nearly all of which are nominalistic.1 This enables the present account to give better explanations of a number of features of measurement and other aspects of science than competing accounts of measurement can, and to be more readily integrated into a realist account of natural laws and causation. It also illustrates a general strategy for combining a familiar and powerful approach to representation with intensional entities like properties, which I think can be useful for dealing with a number of philosophical problems.
In this paper I present a formal language in which complex predicates stand for properties and re... more In this paper I present a formal language in which complex predicates stand for properties and relations, and assignments of denotations to complex predicates and assignments of extensions to the properties and relations they denote are both homomorphisms. This system affords a fresh perspective on several important philosophical topics, highlighting the algebraic features of properties and clarifying the sense in which properties can be represented by their extensions. It also suggests a natural modification of current logics of properties, one in which some complex predicates stand for properties while others do not.
Page 1. Leibnizian Expression CHRIS SWOYER "I HAVE SAID NOTHING," Leibniz wrote... more Page 1. Leibnizian Expression CHRIS SWOYER "I HAVE SAID NOTHING," Leibniz wrote de Voider in 1703, "that does not follow from my doctrine that every body expresses all other things, that every soul expresses its own ...
Thirty years ago the reputation of properties had hit rock bottom. Their stock has risen sharply ... more Thirty years ago the reputation of properties had hit rock bottom. Their stock has risen sharply since, however, and although nominalists remain, most philosophers can now invoke properties without guilt or anxi-ety. Indeed, in the last few years realists about properties (realists, for ...
E ven people who like philosophy often don't like metaphysics. Ontology in particular, with its a... more E ven people who like philosophy often don't like metaphysics. Ontology in particular, with its arcane discussions of universals and particulars, is frequently cited as a paradigm of desiccated Scholasticism. I don't foresee the day when works on universals top the bestseller list, but I do think that updated versions of many traditional views in ontology can be more responsive to the real world and more interesting than is often supposed. To keep the discussion manageable, I will focus on properties or universals. My proposal is that we need a reorientation in ontology, one in which we construe arguments for the existence of properties or universals as inferences to the best explanation. I think that many traditional and current arguments for the existence of properties are quite plausibly construed in this way, so the proposed reorientation wouldn't send us back to square one. But the proposal is not simply to attach a fashionable new label to venerable practices; it has three practical consequences. First, we should acknowledge that there will virtually never be knockdown, demonstrative arguments for (or against) any theory of properties. But this doesn't mean that such theories are empty. They can, if successful, receive cumulative confirmation by helping to explain a variety of phenomena. On this picture, the goal is to make one's ontological case by piling up pieces of evidence in its favor. This means that the unit of evaluation in ontology should be a research program (rather than a paper or book or even someone's collected works) involving a number of explanations, independent tests, and refinements. Such programs are more likely to prosper if they are pursued by a number of philosophers working toward a common end, rather than by a solitary thinker. Second, instead of beginning with a detailed picture of the nature of properties, we would gradually come to learn what properties are like by examining the roles Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXIII (1999) How Ontology Might Be Possible
People who make or implement public policy must often estimate probabilities, predict outcomes, a... more People who make or implement public policy must often estimate probabilities, predict outcomes, and make decisions that affect the welfare, values, and lives of many others. Until recently many of the disciplines that study policy employed a model of individuals and organizations as rational agents whose predictions conform to the prescriptions of probability theory and whose actions maximize their expected gains in conformity with classical decision theory. Such theories lead a double life. They are sometimes viewed as normative models that tell us what we should do in order to be rational (even if we rarely manage to pull it off). Construed this way, they offer advice: we should have logically consistent beliefs, coherent probability assignments, consistent preferences, and maximize expected utilities. But these same theories have also been viewed as descriptive models; construed this way, they are meant to provide an approximate characterization of the behavior of real people. It is this interpretation that has played a central role in economics, management science, and parts of political science, sociology, and the law. Since the early 1970s this descriptive picture of judgment and decision making has come under increasing attack from scientists working in behavioral decision theory, the field concerned with the ways in which people actually judge, predict, and decide. Much of the criticism derives from the work of Tversky, Kahneman, and others working in the heuristics and biases tradition. Scientists in this tradition argue that people often
Although Kant's attempts in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to derive stateme... more Although Kant's attempts in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to derive statements of specific duties from the categorical imperative have received much attention, there is still disagreement over the strategies of particular derivations, the status of the auxiliary assumptions employed therein, and the principles at work in the derivations generally. Yet an understanding of these matters is indispensable for a proper understanding of the Groundwork and bears on a much wider class of ethical theories as well. My aim here is to provide an account of the derivations and their auxiliary premises that explains both the strategy behind the derivations generally and the details of Kant's specific examples. In particular, I shall argue that the widespread view that the premises of the derivations are empirical is mistaken and that their conclusions are thus more general than is often supposed.
It is commonly agreed that there is a genuine distinction between relational, or de re, belief, o... more It is commonly agreed that there is a genuine distinction between relational, or de re, belief, on the one hand, and notional, or de dicto, belief on the other. In one way or another, treatments of this distinction have usually been concerned with problems involving modes of specification of objects, with the paradigm objects being concrete, spatio-temporal particulars. It is less frequently realized that something analogous to the distinction between de re and de dicto belief arises when we turn from objects to attributes, and not merely in those cases in which someone believes one attribute to exemplify a higher-order attribute, but, more importantly, in those cases in which someone believes a concrete particular to exemplify a given attribute. My aim here is to clarify and defend this claim, to show that any adequate treatment of belief sentences should account for it, and to sketch a means for doing so. To this end, I shall begin by rehearsingjust enough of the standard material concerning belief to provide a background for subsequent discussion. In the second section I defend the above claim concerning attributes and belief, and in the third I argue that standard accounts of belief sentences cannot easily be expanded to handle it. In the fourth section I propose an account that can, in the fifth extending it to more complicated cases and briefly examining some of its implications.
Causation and Identity CHRIS SWOYER ausal accounts of the transtemporal identity of physical obje... more Causation and Identity CHRIS SWOYER ausal accounts of the transtemporal identity of physical objects and of persons are not completely new. Passages in Hume can be read as suggesting causal accounts of the identity of physical objects and of the self, as can Kant's arguments that the successive states of an objective substance must be causally connected; and in this century, a variety of causal accounts of the identity conditions for persons and for physical objects have been proposed. Such accounts, especially for physical objects, have not been very fully developed, however, and here I want to provide a more detailed motivation for, and development of, a causal account of identity through time and to examine some of its implications. I think that my general line of argument applies both to persons and to physical objects, though to keep the discussion manageable I shall concentrate on the latter.'
In [13], Meehl drew attention to what he saw as a substantive problem involved in attempts to con... more In [13], Meehl drew attention to what he saw as a substantive problem involved in attempts to confirm theories in psychological research, suggesting that there is a radical asymmetry between the manner in which theories in physics and theories in psychology are confirmed. In the physical sciences, improvement in experimental design, instrumentation, or amount of data-in short, increased power-typically makes it more difficult to confirm a theory; in current psychological research the situation is just the opposite. Recently, however, Herbert Keuth has responded that at least one of Meehl's central contentions is without foundation ([9], p. 546). As a result of Keuth's paper, philosophers unacquainted with current work in psychology may be left with the mistaken impression that all is well in that domain, or at least, that there exist no substantive problems concerning theory confirmation in the social sciences over and above the well-known infirmities besetting theory confirmation in hard sciences such as physics. We will examine Keuth's criticisms and show why they fail. We will then attempt to clarify the problem of null hypothesis testing and its role in theory confirmation in psychological research and, finally, conclude by suggesting some possible remedial actions. We plan to take up Keuth's points in order, but a brief restatement of the logic behind the use of significance testing may make what follows clearer to those unacquainted with the contemporary psychological scene. (There is not space here to present anything like a comprehensve discussion of the topic; for that the reader should consult almost any text on statistics, e.g., [6].)1 One of the major assumptions made by Meehl is that substantive theories in the physical sciences tend to imply or predict absolute point values whereas substantive theories in psychology tend only to predict directional differences on some variable between two groups of subjects. Of course, theories in physics do not by necessity make point predictions nor do those in psychology necessarily make directional predictions. However, due to less sophisticated
Page 1. NOUS 29:1 (1995) 96-114 Leibniz on Intension and Extension CHRIS SWOYER University of Okl... more Page 1. NOUS 29:1 (1995) 96-114 Leibniz on Intension and Extension CHRIS SWOYER University of Oklahoma ... The central notions of this logic are the two-place relations, oo (identity) and inesse (inclusion), and a binary, conjunction-like operation, ED. ...
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