Human reasoning often involves explanation. In everyday affairs, people reason to hypotheses based on the explanatory power these hypotheses afford; I might, for example, surmise that my toddler has been playing in my office because I judge that this hypothesis delivers a good explanation of the disarranged state of the books on my shelves. But such explanatory reasoning also has relevance far beyond the commonplace. Indeed, explanatory reasoning plays an important role in such varied fields as the sciences, philosophy, theology, medicine, forensics, and law. This dissertation provides an extended study into the logic of explanatory reasoning via two general questions. First, I approach the question of what exactly we have in mind when we make judgments pertaining to the explanatory power that a hypothesis has over some evidence. This question is important to this study because these are the sorts of judgments that we constantly rely on when we use explanations to reason about the world. Ultimately, I introduce and defend an explication of the concept of explanatory power in the form of a probabilistic measure. This formal explication allows us to articulate precisely some of the various ways in which we might reason explanatorily. The second question this dissertation examines is whether explanatory reasoning constitutes an epistemically respectable means of gaining knowledge. I defend the following ideas: The probability theory can be used to describe the logic of explanatory reasoning, the normative standard to which such reasoning attains. Explanatory judgments, on the other hand, constitute heuristics that allow us to approximate reasoning in accordance with this logical standard while staying within our human bounds. The most well known model of explanatory reasoning, Inference to the Best Explanation, describes a cogent, nondeductive inference form. And reasoning by Inference to the Best Explanation approximates reasoning directly via the probability theory in the real world. Finally, I respond to some possible objections to my work, and then to some more general, classic criticisms of Inference to the Best Explanation. In the end, this dissertation puts forward a clearer articulation and novel defense of explanatory reasoning.

The last forty years have seen an explosion of research directed at causation and causal inference. Statisticians developed techniques for drawing inferences about the likely effects of proposed interventions: techniques that have been applied most noticeably in social and life sciences. Computer scientists, economists, and methodologists merged graph theory and structural equation modeling in order to develop a mathematical formalism that underwrites automated search for causal structure from data. Analytic metaphysicians and philosophers of science produced an array of theories about the nature of causation and its relationship to scientific theory and practice. Causal reasoning problems come in three varieties: effects-of-causes problems, causes-of-effects problems, and structure-learning or search problems. Causes-of-effects problems are the least well-understood of the three, in part because of confusion about exactly what problem is supposed to be solved. I claim that the problem everyone is implicitly trying to solve is the problem of identifying the actual cause(s) of a given effect, which I will call simply the problem of actual causation. My dissertation is a contribution to the search for a satisfying solution to the problem of actual causation. Towards a satisfying solution to the problem of actual causation, I clarify the nature of the problem. I argue that the only serious treatment of the problem of actual causation in the statistical literature fails because it confuses actual causation with simple difference-making. Current treatments of the problem of actual causation by philosophers and computer scientists are better but also ultimately unsatisfying. After pointing out that the best current theories fail to capture intuitions about some simple voting cases, I step back and ask a methodological question: how is the correct theory of actual causation to be discovered? I argue that intuition-fitting, whether by experimentation or by armchair, is misguided, and I recommend an alternative, pragmatic approach. I show by experiments that ordinary causal judgments are closely connected to broadly moral judgments, and I argue that actual causal inferences presuppose normative, not merely descriptive, information. I suggest that the way forward in solving the problem of actual causation is to focus on norms of proper functioning.

There are few doubts about the significance of science and technology for modern human culture and society. But as historians, we are still struggling to find appropriate descriptive terms to capture the broad processes of transformation brought about by “techno-science,” the merging of technical production and modern institutionalized science. This dissertation argues that the term “experience” may serve as such an analytic lens in the specific historical setting of German aviation research from the 1920s through 1945. I reconstruct, on the one hand, the theorization of experience as a concept by the technical physicist Paul von Handel, influenced by the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington’s distinction between "scientific" and "everyday" experience. On the other hand, I use the term as a historian’s analytic concept to investigate practices in the context of flight experiments that I take to be constitutive of my historical actors’ experiences. These are recordings of experimental pilots’ cognitive judgements and bodily actions, some of them—such as in-flight note taking—continuous with older cultural technologies. On both of these levels of analysis, I explore the different resonances of “experience” as a term with a legacy as a central epistemological concept in the modern sciences, and as capturing the changing everyday reality in an increasingly technicized environment. My analysis of the textual theorization and simultaneous practical constitution of "techno-scientific experience" serves to read in a new light the story of the pilot and physicist Melitta Schiller-Stauffenberg. Of Jewish descent, Schiller chose to work for the Luftwaffe, the German air force, until her death in 1945 on a flight searching for her husband, Count Alexander Stauffenberg, who was imprisoned after his brother’s failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. The concept and practical reality of “experience” are key to understanding the two striking choices Schiller made as intrinsically connected: the professional choice of working simultaneously as a pilot and a physicist, and the political choice of supporting the Reich’s war effort. Schiller’s story may be understood as exemplifying the fragile identity of the experiencing and the knowing self in 20th-century techno-scientific modernity. / History of Science

<p> One of Carnap&rsquo;s overarching aims was to set philosophy on a firm scientific footing. He relied primarily on two ideas to achieve his ideal of a scientific philosophy: verificationism, according to which only empirically testable or logically determinate sentences are meaningful, and the Principle of Tolerance, which held that we are free to choose whichever system of empirical knowledge is most expedient. The logical empiricism embodied in these views is is widely believed to have been decisively refuted by a variety of objections. </p><p> My dissertation seeks to clarify the content and aims of Carnap&rsquo;s tolerance and verificationism, and to defend the resulting view against some of the most influential objections to logical empiricism. I argue that both tolerance and verificationism are manifestations of Carnap&rsquo;s fundamentally pragmatic conception of scientific language; for Carnap, precise formulations of scientific theory&mdash;&ldquo;languages for science&rdquo;&mdash; are to be viewed as instruments for the derivation of intersubjective observational knowledge. </p><p> Verificationism, on my interpretation, is the decision to narrow one&rsquo;s options for a language for science to those languages in which every sentence is either empirically testable or logically determinate. This decision is motivated by Carnap&rsquo;s pragmatism: any sentence that is neither empirically testable nor logically determinate makes no contribution to the aim with which the pragmatist uses scientific language. </p><p> I use this pragmatist account of verificationism to respond to two objections. The first is Hilary Putnam&rsquo;s version of the argument that verificationism is neither empirical nor analytic, and is therefore meaningless by its own lights. According to Putnam, Carnap&rsquo;s construal of verificationism as significant in a practical, but non-cognitive, sense, in response to the objection, presupposes verificationism. Carnap&rsquo;s response is therefore viciously circular. I respond that Carnap&rsquo;s non-cognitive conception of verificationism presupposes pragmatism, and not verificationism, and thereby avoids Putnam&rsquo;s circularity. Second, there is a widespread belief that verificationism requires a criterion of empirical significance in order to demarcate the empirically testable sentences, but that no such criterion can be formulated. I reply that by adopting the pragmatic conception, the verificationist can select her favored language in the case-by-case manner described by Goldfarb and Ricketts, without a criterion of empirical significance. </p><p> Carnap&rsquo;s pragmatism maintains that the goal of scientific language is the derivation of observation reports. It therefore helps itself to a notion of observation report, of observation language. This notion is another major source of skepticism about logical empiricism. I argue that Carnap&rsquo;s account of observation language in &ldquo;Testability and Meaning&rdquo; is sufficient for the purposes of his pragmatism. On this account, a term is observational to the extent that it can be applied on the basis of minimal observation and inference. A degree of observationality can then be arbitrarily designated sufficient and necessary for a term&rsquo;s being observational in the language. I show that this approach to fixing the observation language is not vulnerable to van Fraassen&rsquo;s objections. </p><p> Finally, pragmatism helps to clarify Carnap&rsquo;s Principle of Tolerance. According to a widely held view, Carnap&rsquo;s tolerance rests on &ldquo;relativity to language&rdquo;: since a language for science provides the rules for inquiry&mdash;be these semantic or evidential rules&mdash;language cannot itself be subject to such rules. So interpreted, the Principle of Tolerance is able to provide a critique of what I call &lsquo;first philosophy&rsquo;, i.e., the doctrine that the choice of concepts or rules in science can be constrained by considerations external to these rules. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)</p>

<p> My dissertation lies at the philosophical intersection of the American pragmatist tradition and contemporary epistemology. By treating truth, justification, and belief as matters of degree, I develop a measure of knowledge that captures all of our fundamental intuitions while providing answers to the problems of epistemic luck, skepticism, and scientific pessimism. </p><p> Traditionally, knowledge is understood as justified true belief that is not due to luck. My project follows this general outline. First, I describe the pragmatist understanding of truth first articulated by Charles Sanders Peirce in the late nineteenth century. My first chapter offers Peirce's understanding of truth as the best explanation of our intuitive understanding of what it is for a proposition to be the case and shows how we can understand Peirce's theory as compatible with contemporary theories of truth. </p><p> In my second chapter, I develop a theory of belief such that an agent believes a proposition when she acts as if that proposition were a rule governing her behavior. On this view, beliefs are theoretical entities posited to make sense of other agents' actions. Following this account of belief, I describe what it is for a belief to be true and argue that sense of truth in which beliefs are true is best understood as an approximation of the full descriptive truth. </p><p> My third, fourth, and fifth chapters are an account of justification. Chapter 3 is a descriptive account of synchronic justification: we all reject or accept propositions in accordance with maximizing the coherence of our belief-networks. Chapters 4 and 5 articulate and then defend a new measure of diachronic justification, which is a measure of the degree to which a belief is appropriately revisable and therefore embeddable in an ongoing process of fallibilist inquiry. I develop a novel formal quantification of methodological justification and show that it gives plausible results when applied to popular cases. </p><p> My final chapter brings justification, truth, and belief together into a scalar knowledge measure. I locate my theory in ongoing epistemic inquiry, describing its conceptual advantages over rival theories as well as its ability to replicate their successes.</p>

Evolution by natural selection began as a biological concept, but since Darwin it has been recognized to have broader application than biology. Applying evolutionary ideas beyond biology requires that the principles of evolution by natural selection be abstracted and generalized from the biological case. The received view of evolution by natural selection in biology is itself seriously flawed, which understandably renders the project of abstracting it and applying it elsewhere challenging. This thesis develops a generalized account of models of evolution by natural selection which is used to resolve various outstanding issues in the philosophy of biology. This also clarifies the methods and prospects of applying evolution by natural selection to non-biological domains. It does so by analyzing models of evolution both within biology and outside it, relying in particular on the contrast provided by models of firm competition in evolutionary economics. This analysis highlights those aspects of the classical view which must be abandoned or revised, and leads to the development of a neo-dynamical model of evolution, which is developed, explained, defended, and applied to problems in evolutionary biology and multi-level selection theory.

<p> This dissertation is about impacts to the capacities for autonomy and collaboration for the cyborg self integrated with brain-machine (BMI) and brain-to-brain interfaces (BTBI). These capacities are dependent on the reorganization of the cyborg self boundaries which are contingent on the development cycle of the underlying BTBI multidimensional systems as evidenced in recent neuroscience research and development (Carmena et al., 2003; Fitzsimmons, Lebedev, Peikon &amp; Nicolelis, 2009; Hochberg et al., 2012; Pais-Vieira, Lebedev, Kunicki, Wang, &amp; Nicolelis, 2013; Pais-Vieira, Chiuffa, Lebedev, Yadav, &amp; Nicolelis, 2015; Ramakrishnan et al., 2015; Wessberg et al., 2000) and speculated by the science fiction of the Nexus trilogy (Naam, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c). </p><p> The central accomplishments of this study include furthering the concept of the cyborg by positing a cyborg self with representational, cognitive, and functional dimensions, and identifying the cyborg self as a special case of the &ldquo;cognitive assemblage&rdquo; (Hayles, 2017, p 11). My analysis entails understanding an interdisciplinary model of the self that addresses the dynamic nature of the biological self, the self as a process, as a complex system emerging from material, physiological, cognitive, psychological, and social processes that is autobiographical and unified, having ownership and agency of mind and body (Damasio, 2010; Hayles, 2017; Marks-Tarlow, 1999; Ramachandran, 2004) dovetailing (Clark, 2003, 2008) with nonconscious cognitive assemblages (Hayles, 2017). I demonstrate that the dimensions of the cyborg self are reorganized by the development process of BMI and BTBI further affecting the locus or loci of self. The recursive reorganization of the cyborg self boundaries and dimensions leads to greatly fluctuating capacities for autonomy and collaboration. </p><p> I discuss the competing cultural forces such as transhumanism, and government and corporate interests promoting and hindering the advancement of NBIC and BTBI research and development, as well as the role of science fiction as a futuring tool, and the possibility, probability, and preferability of a cyborg self in 2040. </p><p> The research design is essentially a case study of contemporary and speculative BTBI in which I analyzed the multidimensional systems that comprise BTBI, their functionalities, and their development evolution. I analyzed how the cyborg self, autonomy, and collaboration showed up for the subjects integrated with BTBI. As NBIC and BTBI progresses, autonomy and collaboration face many challenges as they become pendulums swinging between ever increasing and decreasing capacities that are contingent upon the latest development cycle.</p><p>

This thesis examines the nature of biological species, and argues that species are real. The thesis starts with a descriptive account of species drawn from biology. This includes taxonomic views, theories of speciation and theories in ecology. In this chapter a particular definition of species, 'the biospecies', is reached. The thesis continues in Chapter Two with a philosophical account of species, which aims at reaching an understanding of the kind of entities species are. The chapter concludes that species are natural kinds, but not as traditionally construed. Chapter Three looks closely at the use biologists make of species terms, and argues that biological theories are committed to such terms. That species terms cannot be dispensed with in biological statements indicates that species are real. If species are real, they are entities for which questions of identity make sense. Chapter Four reviews different criteria for the individuation and identity of species. All the criteria are found to suffer from problems of vagueness. In view of the difficulty of providing criteria for species identity, the thesis turns in the fifth chapter to two biological views---numerical taxonomy and neo-Darwinism---which claim that biological theories can dispense with species terms. But a look at these reductive theories shows that one loses a certain measure of explanation if species are dispensed with. In the light of the failure of the reductive theories, a fresh attempt is made in Chapter Six at giving a criterion for species sameness. This last chapter also serves as a general conclusion to the thesis.

In this thesis I employ a constructivist epistemological stance (principally influenced by that due to George Kelly) to critically examine the curricular response to contemporary notions of truth, objectivity and knowledge. I take science education (at both Secondary and Tertiary levels) as ray special reference within the education system. An important part of my work explores students' and teachers' personal meanings of science and scientific method, i. e. alternative conceptions of science, and I see it as contributing to the growing body of research concerned with alternative conceptions in science: the 'Alternative Conceptions Movement' (ACM) in educational research. To help articulate ray views on these matters I use an augmented version of a framework or model, developed by my immediate colleagues, for conceptualising cognitive aspects of science education and the transformation of scientific knowledge. My version of this framework features components under the following main headings: 'Scientists'-Science', 'Philosophers'-Science', 'Curricular-Science', 'Teachers'-Science', 'Students'-Science', and 'Childrens'-Science'. I argue that, suitably augmented and interpreted, Kelly's theory is capable of rationally integrating existing ACM research, together with my own. My classroom research uses a number of complementary investigative methods, some of them novel. These may be grouped under the following three headings: - interviews - lesson observations - written exercises I present an outline of a theory of teaching which is compatible with ACM research and make recommendations for future science teaching and research. N. B. To avoid an insidious (male) sexism and 'his/her' formulations which I find tedious, I shall use plural forms throughout this thesis, e.g. their, themself.

Abstract not available.