This article explores Michael Faraday's “Historical Sketch of Electro-Magnetism” as a fruitful source for understanding the epistemic significance of experimentation. In this work Faraday provides a catalog of the numerous experimental and theoretical developments in the early history of electromagnetism. He also describes methods that enable experimentalists to dissociate experimental results from the theoretical commitments generating their research. An analysis of the methods articulated in this sketch is instructive for confronting epistemological worries about the theory-dependence of experimentation.

Hope is a ubiquitous feature of human experience, but there has been relatively little scholarship within contemporary analytic philosophy devoted to the systematic analysis of its nature and value. In the last decade, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in the study of hope and, in particular, its role in human agency. This scholarly attention reflects an ambivalence about hope's effects. While the possession of hope can have salutary consequences, it can also make the agent vulnerable to certain kinds of personal risk. The pervasiveness of hope is not a sign of its quality; only a well-tuned hope can be a virtue. Recently, Nancy Snow has argued that hope can be an intellectual virtue. Framing her account as a contribution to regulative epistemology, she contends that the intellectual virtue of hope can (i) motivate the pursuit of important epistemic ends, (ii) create dispositions that enable the successful pursuit of these aims, and (iii) generate a method for enduring intellectual projects. In this paper, I provide a critical appraisal of Snow's account of hope as an intellectual virtue. One important implication of this critique is that hope can function as an intellectual virtue only to the extent that it has benefitted from the correcting and perfecting influence of other cognitive excellences.

Abstract:William Whewell raised a series of objections concerning John Stuart Mill's philosophy of science which suggested that Mill's views were properly informed neither by the history of science nor by adequate reflection on scientific practices. These objections, if accurate, would be devastating given Mill's expressed aim of constructing a philosophy of science that was grounded on historical achievements in the sciences and the practices driving these developments. The aim of this paper is to revisit and evaluate this incisive Whewellian criticism of Mill's views. I accomplish this task by assessing Whewell's critique of Mill's use of the discovery of electrical induction as an illustration of the Method of Difference. The historical evidence demonstrates that Mill's reconstruction of this discovery is inadequate for many of the reasons Whewell cites. But a study of Michael Faraday's research leading to this discovery also raises some questions about Whewell's own characterization of this historical episode in the science of electromagnetism. Thus, this example provides an opportunity to reconsider the debate between Whewell and Mill concerning the role of the sciences in the development of an adequate philosophy of scientific methodology.

While epistemic justification is a central concern for both contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science, debates in contemporary epistemology about the nature of epistemic justification have not been discussed extensively by philosophers of science. As a step toward a coherent account of scientific justification that is informed by, and sheds light on, justificatory practices in the sciences, this paper examines one of these debates-the internalist-externalist debate-from the perspective of objective accounts of scientific evidence. In particular, we focus on Deborah Mayo's error-statistical theory of evidence because it is a paradigmatically objective theory of evidence that is strongly informed by methodological practice. We contend that from the standpoint of such an objective theory of evidence, justification in science has both externalist and internalist characteristics. In reaching this conclusion, however, we find that the terms of the contemporary debate between internalists and externalists have to be redefined to be applicable to scientific contexts.