June 21, 2009
Intelligent Design and Scientific Instrumentalism
John Beaudoin's recent paper "Sober on Intelligent Design Theory and the Intelligent Designer" contains the following fascinating remark in a footnote: [William] Dembski has suggested that the designer referred to in ID theory need not be
real: it could in principle be treated by design theorists as a mere useful fiction, if that should better fit with a particular design theorist's philosophy of science.
Beaudoin cites Dembski's
No Free Lunch, p. 15, and
The Design Revolution, p. 65. I haven't bothered to read too much on the whole ID thing because it is not closely related to my main philosophical interests and from a theological/religious perspective seems like a mere distraction. Furthermore, most ID types seem to me to exaggerate the problems of 'orthodox' evolutionary biology...
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Topic(s):
Bas van Fraassen
,
Contemporary Thinkers
,
George Berkeley
,
Historical Thinkers
,
Instrumentalism
,
Intelligent Design
,
John Beaudoin
,
Penelope Maddy
,
Philosophy
,
Philosophy of Science
,
Science
,
William Dembski
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Kenny at
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November 30, 2007
What Does Bayesian Epistemology Have To Do With Probabilities?
The answer to the question in the title of this post may seem obvious (after all, isn't Bayesianism
all about probabilities?), but I think that the long discussion that followed
Lauren's post on van Fraassen's objection to Bayesianism from quantum mechanics shows that it isn't clear at all - or at least, that it wasn't clear to either of us as we were discussing the issue. I think that I now understand why. In this post, I'm going to give three answers to this question, which I will call The Primitivist Account (P), The Kripkean Possible Worlds Account (KPW), and the Lewisian Possible Worlds Account (LPW). This post will discuss...
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November 7, 2007
GUEST BLOG: Bayesian Probability and Quantum Mechanics
Hello. As a brief introductory reminder, I'm Lauren, Kenny's fiance, and a guest blogger here when I have time (which isn't very often.) However, I am going to take some time to discuss a paper by Bas C. van Fraassen, Conditionalizing on Violated Bell's Inequalities, in which he claims that quantum mechanics creates problems for Bayesian epistemology. I have two main points to make in response, the first is that he doesn't actually need quantum mechanics for his argument, and the second is where he has failed to account for the effect of choosing which events to talk about, which...
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