Tracking Truth

Abstract

This book develops and defends a new externalist, reliabilist theory of knowledge and evidence, and develops a new view about scientific realism. Knowledge is viewed as a tracking theory that has a conditional probability rather than counterfactual formulation, and the property of closure under known implication is imposed on knowledge. It is argued that the tracking theory of evidence is best formulated and defended as a confirmation theory based on the Likelihood Ratio. These tracking theories of knowledge and evidence fit together to provide a deep explanation of why having better evidence makes one more likely to know. The new tracking theory of knowledge is argued to be superior to all currently known externalist rivals. It provides a distinctive explanation of why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief, and explains why knowledge is power in the Baconian sense. Finally, the book argues that confirmation theory is relevant to debates about scientific realism, and defends a position intermediate between realism and anti-realism based on a view about what having evidence requires.

The Crux of Crucial Experiments: Duhem's Problems and Inference to the Best Explanation

“…This is what Roush ([2005], p. 15) suggests in her brief discussion of the Meselson-Stahl case: It is hard to argue with the claim that all, some, or none of an original strand appears in a daughter molecule, and all, some or none exhaust the possibilities. The genius of the investigation, perhaps, was to have pitched the question at a level of description where this exhaustiveness could be achieved in a simple way.…”

“…It seems to me that only such an IBE-type of argument can make sense of the widely shared intuition (see Franklin [2007], Section E.2; Roush [2005], pp. 14-6) that the Meselson-Stahl data provided strong discriminatory evidence for the semi-conservative hypothesis.…”

“…Assuming that the hypotheses do not differ too much in prior probability, this already means that the semi-conservative hypotheses had a higher posterior probability after the experiment was done. Alternatively, it could be argued that explanatory considerations afford the semi-conservative scheme with the most favourable likelihood ratio (Roush [2005]). …”

Which Causes of Moral Beliefs Matter?

“…I too will be concerned with externalist varieties of epistemic status in this article, and in particular I have in mind Sherrilyn Roush's (2005) account of 1. By a distal cause of a belief, I refer here specifically to a higher-order process that produces the proximal process that produces the belief.…”

Realism and the absence of rivals

“…Note that this is not so much a strategy for responding to these arguments as it is the strategy, since any epistemic realist will 5 See also Roush (2005), Magnus (2010), andWray (2011). Of course, the name and general structure of the argument stems from Laudan's (1981) hugely influential discussion of the Pessimistic Meta-Induction.…”