Department of History and Philosophy of Science will hold the 48th meeting of Tokyo Colloquium of Cognitive Philosophy. Everyone is welcome.

Date & Time: 1 August (Friday), 2014, 18:00-20:00
Venue: the 14th Building, Room 710 on the 7th floor, Komaba Campus

Presenter: Satoshi Kudo(The university of Tokyo)
Title: Pessimistic induction and retrospective judgment

Abstract:
Science has achieved such great success that we are naturally tempted to believe that scientific theories are at least approximately true. Scientific anti-realists, however, argue that empirical success is not a good indicator for truth because there were a lot of theories that were once successful but later turned out to be false. One way of responding to this ‘pessimistic induction’ is to claim that (some of) such false-but-successful theories were still partially true and thereby successful. Scientific realists hope to find such historical patterns of theory change that if one had believed to be true only those components of past theories that were responsible for their success, one could have evaded the historical challenge of the pessimistic induction. But how can realists identify the components of a past theory that were responsible for its success? Note that if they are to judge certain components as irresponsible just because they are no longer preserved in present theories, realists are guaranteed to find their favorite historical patterns. Discussants on both sides, therefore, assume that realists have to propose criteria for identifying the working and idle parts of a theory that do not depend on today's theoretical viewpoint. This presentation questions this assumption and argues that realists cannot and need not abandon retrospective judgment. The basic point is that if we were denied today's viewpoint, we would be only allowed (something close to) a priori foundationalism.