Overview
- Gives an excellent overview over the thoughts of a distinguished analytic philosopher
- Unfolds the philosophical significance of ranking theory which equals that of probability theory
- Offers valuable insights on the nature of causation, laws, coherence, and concepts
Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science (BSPS, volume 256)
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Keywords
Table of contents (16 chapters)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editor
Wolfgang Spohn, born 1950, is one of the most distinguished analytic philosophers and philosophers of science of Germany, editor-in-chief of Erkenntnis for more than 13 years, author of two books and more than 60 papers covering a wide range: epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of science, philosophical logic, philosophy of language and mind, and the theory of practical rationality. This collection presents 15 of his most important essays on theoretical philosophy. The centre piece is his uniquely successful theory of the dynamics of belief, tantamount to an account of induction and nowadays widely acknowledged as ‘ranking theory’. Like any account of induction, this theory has deep implications ingeniously elaborated in the papers included. They cover an account of deterministic and also probabilistic causation, initially subjectively relativized, but then objectivized in a projectivistic sense, and an account of explanation and of strict, of ceteris paribus, and of chance laws. They advance a coherentist epistemology, though giving foundationalist intuitions their due, and establish some coherence principles as a priori true, entailing even a weak principle of causality. They finally shed light on concept formation by more broadly embedding the epistemological considerations into the framework of two-dimensional semantics. All this is carried out with formal rigor when feasible.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Causation, Coherence and Concepts
Book Subtitle: A Collection of Essays
Editors: Wolfgang Spohn
Series Title: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5474-7
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4020-5473-0Published: 26 November 2008
Softcover ISBN: 978-94-007-8705-6Published: 30 October 2014
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4020-5474-7Published: 14 November 2008
Series ISSN: 0068-0346
Series E-ISSN: 2214-7942
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVI, 386
Topics: Philosophy of Science, Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics