Frecuentemente se atribuye al empirismo apelar a principios no empíricos para defender el conocimiento empírico, por ello se le ha acusado de incurrir en cierta clase de autorrefutación. Con el advenimiento del empirismo lógico, esta objeción tomó la forma de cuestionamiento al criterio empirista de significado, señalando que, al no tratarse de una...
The discussion on mathematical explanation has inherited the same sense of dissatisfaction that philosophers of science expressed, in the context of scientific explanation, towards the deductive-nomological model. This model is regarded as unable to cover cases of bona fide mathematical explanations and, furthermore, it is largely ignored in the re...
Published in History of psychiatry
Recent research suggests that the DSM psychiatric classification is in a paradigmatic crisis and that the DSM-5 will be unable to overcome it. One possible reason is that the DSM is based on a neopositivist epistemology which is inadequate for the present-day needs of psychopathology. However, in which sense is the DSM a neopositivist system? This ...
Published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Published in Philosophical Studies
It has often been argued that Humean accounts of natural law cannot account for the role played by laws in scientific explanations. Loewer (Philosophical Studies 2012) has offered a new reply to this argument on behalf of Humean accounts—a reply that distinguishes between grounding (which Loewer portrays as underwriting a kind of metaphysical expla...
International audience
A rebours des discussions sur l'explication, qui semblent faire de la pertinence explicative un problème unique, plusieurs critères de pertinence explicative sont ici distingués. Est en particulier soulignée l'importance de la notion de pertinence intra-scientifique, qui est analysée de façon précise sur la base de l'explication de la loi des aires...
The following article presents an approach to the explanation concept developed by Carl Hempel, its characteristics and requirements to reach what logical empiricism would call the model of legal coverage or methodological monism. Additionally it has a reconstruction of the differences between explanation and prediction, and the application of the ...
Published in Journal of Philosophical Logic
First, a brief historical trace of the developments in confirmation theory leading up to Goodman’s infamous “grue” paradox is presented. Then, Goodman’s argument is analyzed from both Hempelian and Bayesian perspectives. A guiding analogy is drawn between certain arguments against classical deductive logic, and Goodman’s “grue” argument against cla...
Phylogenetic systematics (the cladistic analysis of phylogenetic relationships) is not hypotheticodeductively structured (in the sense of a covering law model of scientific explanation). If it were, there would be no reason to call for total evidence, since that requirement is automatically satisfied in a deductively structured explanation. Instead...
