Search Results

At each stage of inquiry, actions, choices, and judgments carry with them a chance that they will lead to mistakes and false conclusions. One of the most vigorously discussed kinds of epistemic risk is inductive risk—that is, the risk of inferring a false positive or a false negative from statistical evidence. This chapter develops a more fine-grained typology of epistemic risks and argues that many of the epistemic risks that have been classified as inductive risks are actually better seen as examples of a more expansive category, which this paper dubs “phronetic risk.” This more fine-grained typology helps to show that values in science often operate not exclusively at the level of individual psychologies but also at the level of knowledge-generating social institutions.

This chapter provides six arguments in favor of scientifically based ontology and against speculative ontology, a branch of analytic metaphysics. Parts of contemporary speculative ontology are untenable because they are factually false; intuitions are not domain-invariant; conceptual analysis is too closely tied to everyday experience; what counts as an acceptable philosophical idealization is left unarticulated; the world is not scale-invariant; and anthropocentric epistemology does not always minimize epistemic risk. Nevertheless, specifically philosophical arguments are necessary when making ontological claims and complete deference to scientific consensus is unreasonable. The overall strategy is to recognize that different domains of reality require different methods of discovery and justification, and that a significant part of contemporary metaphysics is employing methods that are inappropriate to its goals.

This chapter concerns pernicious predictive inferences: taking someone to be likely to possess a socially disvalued trait based on statistical information about the prevalence of that trait within a social group to which she belongs. Some scholars have argued that pernicious predictive inferences are morally prohibited, but are sometimes epistemically required, leaving us with a tragic conflict between the requirements of epistemic rationality and those of morality. Others have responded by arguing that pernicious predictive inferences are sometimes epistemically prohibited. The present chapter takes a different approach, considering the sort of reluctance to draw pernicious predictive inferences that seems morally praiseworthy and vindicating its epistemic status. We argue that, even on a simple, orthodox Bayesian picture of the requirements of epistemic rationality, agents must consider the costs of error—including the associated moral and political costs—when forming and revising their credences. Our attitudes toward the costs of error determine how “risky” different credences are for us, and our epistemic states are justified in part by our attitudes toward epistemic risk. Thus, reluctance to draw pernicious predictive inferences need not be epistemically irrational, and the apparent conflict between morality and epistemic rationality is typically illusory.

This chapter develops the notion of degrees of metaphysical inference, giving content to a number of widely used but only vaguely specified metaphors regarding what it could mean to “naturalize” metaphysical inferences by “grounding” them in scientific knowledge, and what it could mean to “derive” ontological conclusions from scientific work, or use such work as a “constraint” on ontological theorizing. It examines the prospects of demarcating scientific ontology from non-scientific, philosophical ontologically, the nature of a priori presuppositions and inferences and their possible roles in this demarcation, and the idea of naturalizing metaphysical inferences. In conclusion, it considers whether there is, in fact, anything like an objective distinction to be made between genuinely theorizing and merely speculating about ontology.

In Chapter 2, I consider several “line-drawing” problems. First, in the diagnosis of early-stage cancer, there is an epistemic risk involved in assessing whether a suspicious lesion is likely to progress to metastasis. Pathologists’ assessment of a disease state is not strictly an empirical judgment, but also an evaluative one. This raises some interesting questions about what role values should play in diagnosis and treatment decisions. Second, in decisions about when, whether, and how often to screen, the evidence underdetermines judgments of “effectiveness.” Finally, early-stage cancer raises interesting questions about the line between health and disease.

A contrast is drawn between two approaches to ontology: scientific ontology, which is constrained by scientific knowledge, and speculative ontology, which is not. Three primary arguments are provided against speculative ontology: its factual falsity, its appeal to intuitions as a source of knowledge, and its lack of attention to scale variance. The need to formulate criteria judging the appropriateness of philosophical idealizations is suggested and reasons are given not to take scientists’ ontological positions as a guide to the correct ontology either for a given theory or more generally.