BEST EXPLANATIONISM AND JUSTIFICATION FOR BELIEFS ABOUT THE FUTURE

AbstractEarl Conee and Richard Feldman have recently argued that the evidential support relation should be understood in terms of explanatory coherence: roughly, one's evidence supports a proposition if and only if that proposition is part of the best available explanation of the evidence (2008). Their thesis has been criticized through alleged counterexamples, perhaps the most important of which are cases where a subject has a justified belief about the future (Byerly 2013; Byerly and Martin forthcoming). Kevin McCain has defended the thesis against Byerly's counterexample (2013, 2014a). I argue that McCain's defense is inadequate before pointing toward a more promising solution for explanationism. The Byerly–McCain exchange is important because it casts light on the difficult issues of the standards for justification and the nature of epistemic support. Furthermore, McCain's defense of explanationism about epistemic support represents an important recent development of the burgeoning explanationist program in epistemology and philosophy of science.

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Becoming Politicized

Zeitschrift für Psychologie ◽

10.1027/2151-2604/a000311 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 225 (4) ◽

pp. 324-335 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Dimitrios Barkas ◽

Xenia Chryssochoou

Keyword(s):

Collective Identity ◽

Political Socialization ◽

Greek Society ◽

Economic Vulnerability ◽

The World ◽

The Future ◽

Identity Model ◽

Beliefs About The Future ◽

Of Greece ◽

The Way

Abstract. This research took place just after the end of the protests following the killing of a 16-year-old boy by a policeman in Greece in December 2008. Participants (N = 224) were 16-year-olds in different schools in Attiki. Informed by the Politicized Collective Identity Model ( Simon & Klandermans, 2001 ), a questionnaire measuring grievances, adversarial attributions, emotions, vulnerability, identifications with students and activists, and questions about justice and Greek society in the future, as well as about youngsters’ participation in different actions, was completed. Four profiles of the participants emerged from a cluster analysis using representations of the conflict, emotions, and identifications with activists and students. These profiles differed on beliefs about the future of Greece, participants’ economic vulnerability, and forms of participation. Importantly, the clusters corresponded to students from schools of different socioeconomic areas. The results indicate that the way young people interpret the events and the context, their levels of identification, and the way they represent society are important factors of their political socialization that impacts on their forms of participation. Political socialization seems to be related to youngsters’ position in society which probably constitutes an important anchoring point of their interpretation of the world.

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Collective futures: How our beliefs about the future of society are related to our actions and attitudes today

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e627722013-008 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Paul Bain

Keyword(s):

The Future ◽

Beliefs About The Future

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Evidence and Its Limits

10.1093/oso/9780198758709.003.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Clayton Littlejohn

Keyword(s):

Epistemic Justification ◽

Normative Reasons ◽

Justified Belief ◽

Evidential Support ◽

Way Of Thinking

On a standard way of thinking about the relationships between evidence, reasons, and epistemic justification, a subject’s evidence consists of her potential reasons for her beliefs, these reasons constitute the normative reasons that bear on whether to believe, and justification is taken to result from relations between a subject’s potential reasons for her beliefs and those beliefs. This chapter argues that this view makes a number of mistakes about the rational roles of reasons and evidence and explores some parallels between practical and theoretical reasons. Just as justified action is unobjectionable action, justified belief is unobjectionable belief. Just as you cannot object to someone deciding to do something simply on the grounds that their reasons for acting didn’t give them strong reason to act, you cannot object to someone believing something simply on the grounds that they didn’t believe for reasons that gave their beliefs strong evidential support.

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Mystical Experience and Non–Basically Justified Belief

Religious Studies ◽

10.1017/s0034412500019880 ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 25 (3) ◽

pp. 335-345 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Michael P. Levine

Keyword(s):

Mystical Experience ◽

Basic Belief ◽

Empirical Knowledge ◽

Epistemic Warrant ◽

Justified Belief ◽

Evidential Support ◽

Basic Beliefs

Two theses are central to foundationalism. First, the foundationalist claims that there is a class of propositions, a class of empirical contingent beliefs, that are ‘immediately justified’. Alternatively, one can describe these beliefs as ‘self–evident’, ‘non–inferentially justified’, or ‘self–warranted’, though these are not always regarded as entailing one another. The justification or epistemic warrant for these beliefs is not derived from other justified beliefs through inductive evidential support or deductive methods of inference. These ‘basic beliefs’ constitute the foundations of empirical knowledge. One can give a reason for the justification of a basic belief even though the justification for that belief is not based on other beliefs. Thus, according to Chisholm, if asked what one's justification was for thinking that one knew, presently, that one is thinking about a city one takes to be Albuquerque, one could simply say ‘what justifies me…is simply the fact that I am thinking about a city I take to be Albuquerque’.

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What is a scientific instrument, now?

Journal of the History of Collections ◽

10.1093/jhc/fhy045 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 31 (3) ◽

pp. 453-467 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Liba Taub

Keyword(s):

Philosophy Of Science ◽

History Of Science ◽

Smithsonian Institution ◽

Scientific Instrument ◽

Scientific Instruments ◽

Classic Article ◽

The Future ◽

History Of

Abstract In 1990, Deborah Jean Warner, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, published her now-classic article ‘What is a scientific instrument, when did it become one, and why?’. These questions were prompted by practical curatorial considerations: what was she supposed to collect for her museum? Today, we are still considering questions of what we collect for the future, why, and how. These questions have elicited some new and perhaps surprising answers since the publication of Warner’s article, sometimes – but not only – as a reflection of changing technologies and laboratory practices, and also as a result of changes in those disciplines that study science, including history of science and philosophy of science. In focusing attention on meanings associated with scientific instrument collections, and thinking about what objects are identified as scientific instruments, I consider how definitions of instruments influence what is collected and preserved.

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Evaluating the Potential Contribution of District Heating to the Flexibility of the Future Italian Power System

Energies ◽

10.3390/en15020584 ◽

2022 ◽

Vol 15 (2) ◽

pp. 584

Author(s):

Chiara Magni ◽

Sylvain Quoilin ◽

Alessia Arteconi

Keyword(s):

Power Systems ◽

Power System ◽

Large Scale ◽

District Heating ◽

Energy System ◽

Heat Pumps ◽

Electricity Sector ◽

Potential Contribution ◽

The Future ◽

Promising Solution

Flexibility is crucial to enable the penetration of high shares of renewables in the power system while ensuring the security and affordability of the electricity dispatch. In this regard, heat–electricity sector coupling technologies are considered a promising solution for the integration of flexible devices such as thermal storage units and heat pumps. The deployment of these devices would also enable the decarbonization of the heating sector, responsible for around half of the energy consumption in the EU, of which 75% is currently supplied by fossil fuels. This paper investigates in which measure the diffusion of district heating (DH) coupled with thermal energy storage (TES) units can contribute to the overall system flexibility and to the provision of operating reserves for energy systems with high renewable penetration. The deployment of two different DH supply technologies, namely combined heat and power units (CHP) and large-scale heat pumps (P2HT), is modeled and compared in terms of performance. The case study analyzed is the future Italian energy system, which is simulated through the unit commitment and optimal dispatch model Dispa-SET. Results show that DH coupled with heat pumps and CHP units could enable both costs and emissions related to the heat–electricity sector to be reduced by up to 50%. DH systems also proved to be a promising solution to grant the flexibility and resilience of power systems with high shares of renewables by significantly reducing the curtailment of renewables and cost-optimally providing up to 15% of the total upward reserve requirements.

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Editor's Introduction

Spontaneous Generations A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science ◽

10.4245/sponge.v9i1.29354 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 1

Author(s):

Curtis Forbes

Keyword(s):

Philosophy Of Science ◽

Empirical Evidence ◽

Scientific Realism ◽

Scientific Theories ◽

The Future ◽

Technical Details ◽

Realism Debate

The debate over scientific realism, simply put, is a debate over what we can and should believe about reality once we've critically assessed all the available arguments and empirical evidence. Thinking earnestly about the merits of scientific realism as a philosophical thesis requires navigating contentious historiographical issues, being familiar with the technical details of various scientific theories, and addressing disparate philosophical problems spanning aesthetics, metaphysics, epistemology, and beyond. This issue of Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science aims to make participating in the scientific realism debate easier for both newcomers and veterans, collecting over twenty invited and peer-reviewed papers under the title "The Future of the Scientific Realism Debate: Contemporary Issues Concerning Scientific Realism."

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