D. H. Mellor

Foundations: Essays in Philosophy, Logic, Mathematics and Economics

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On Raising the Chances of Effects

There is no doubt that effects need probabilities. Deterministic causes — sufficient and/or necessary conditions — give effects probability 1 with their causes and/or probability 0 without them. And the indeterministic causation of Salmon (1984) and others has probabilities of effects built into its very foundations.

Wholes and parts: the limits of composition

Abstract The paper argues that very different part-whole relations hold between different kinds of entities. While these relations share most of their formal properties, they need not share all of them. Nor need other mereological principles be true of all kinds of part-whole pairs. In particular, it is argued that the principle of unrestricted composition, that any two or more entities have a mereological sum, while true of sets and propositions, is false of things and events.

How Much of the Mind is a Computer

How much of the mind is a computer? Computational psychologists, who ‘see psychology as the study of the various computational processes whereby mental representations are constructed, organised and transformed’, 1say that most if not all of it is. I think they are wrong. Most of the mind is not a computer: most mental processes are not computations.

Chance and Degrees of Belief

Are there chances, and if so, what are they? These are still contentious questions. Like Salmon, I believe that there are chances, but I disagree with him about what they are. We do agree on some points, principally that chance is a species of objective probability, namely physical or statistical probability. Some thinkers have claimed to discern another species in this genus, namely the relational probability that inductive logic treats of. I doubt the claim: inductive probabilities are, I suspect, all descended from chances. Certainly most are, so chance is anyway the right species to study first. Whether it exhausts the genus is a question we can afford to leave open.

Cambridge philosophers. I: F. P. Ramsey

Frank Plumpton Ramsey was born in February 1903, and he died in January 1930—just before his 27th birthday. In his short life he produced an extraordinary amount of profound and original work in economics, mathematics and logic as well as in philosophy: work which in all these fields is still, over sixty years on, extremely influential.

Laws, chances and properties

Abstract The paper develops a unified account of both deterministic and indeterministic laws of nature which inherits the merits but not the defects of the best existing accounts. As in Armstrongs account, laws are embodied in facts about universals; but not in higher‐order relations between them, and the necessity of laws is not primitive but results from their containing chances of 0 or 1. As in the Ramsey‐Lewis account, law statements would be the general axioms and theorems of the simplest deductive theory of everything; but because laws are not so defined, simplicity of statement is not a criterion of law‐hood.

The Popper Phenomenon

Popper has been the most prolific, wide-ranging and well-known of recent philosophers of science, and the most influential among scientists. In philosophy he has also unfortunately been made into a cult figure, like Wittgenstein; disciples have vied for the masters mantle and doctrines have been scrutinized as much for heresy as for error. This is a pity. Philosophy of science is a hard enough job without complicating it with personalities, patents and package deals. So is the job of integrating it with the rest of philosophy, dominated as it still is in this two-cultures country by a pervasive ignorance of and distaste for the sciences. Both jobs have been made harder by Popperian polemics, and the disrepute they have brought philosophy of science into among philosophers at large. This matters because of the importance of much Popperian work. Much of it is true, much of it is original. It would have been still better, and had more deserved influence, had it been better integrated with other work in modern philosophy, in fields ranging from the foundations of statistics to the philosophy of language. Even as it is, there is no denying how much poorer philosophy, and especially philosophy of science, would have been without Poppers work and that to which, one way and another, it has given rise. The appearance of a Schilpp volume or two on Popper is therefore apt and welcome, in that it both signals Poppers achievements and is to some extent an occasion for our mutual enlightenment.1 However, I should be failing to exhibit an appropriately critical rationality if I did not draw some attention to the defects as well as the merits of the piece, which in many ways embodies characteristic Popperian qualities. There are interesting contributions from distinguished scientists and other theorists whom Popper has stimulated in their work. In many ways the remarkable influence Poppers work has had on the practitioners of the subjects he has philosophized about is the best testimony to its value. There is also here a useful variety of philosophical comment and criticism. But there is also too much hagiography and too much sectarian warfare. And Poppers passion for explaining himself at length has really got rather out of hand. Less bibliography, these volumes run to I 200 pages, which is more than Einstein or Russell needed; and one would not have thought their work so much less noteworthy than Poppers. Not that in fact there is that much more in these volumes, it is just repeated more and at greater length. I suspect the

Science, belief, and behaviour : essays in honour of R.B. Braithwaite

This volume is a collection of original essays by eminent philosophers written for R. B. Braithwaites eightieth birthday to celebrate his work and teaching. In one way or another, all the essays reflect his central concern with the impact of science on our beliefs about the world and the responses appropriate to that. Together they testify to the signal importance of his contributions in areas of philosophy bearing on this concern: the philosophy of science, especially of the statistical sciences, theories of belief and of probability, decision theory and games theory. This book, which includes a full bibliography of Professor Braithwaites work, will interest advanced students and professionals in the fields of philosophy and psychology.

Religious and Secular Statements

The relation between religious and scientific explanations of events and states of affairs has been the subject of much debate. For example, are the statements ‘Johns life was saved by surgery’ ‘Johns life was saved in answer to prayer’ in competition with each other and, if so, in what way? They do not seem to be rival causal explanations, nor are they straightforwardly contradictory. Yet each seems to cast doubt on the other, or at least to make it to some extent redundant.