Oscar Westerblad MA

September 1, 2023 until February 29, 2024

Affiliation: University of Iceland

Anti-exceptionalists about logic make claims about the methods of their fields being analogous or similar to methods of empirical sciences. Logic, they say, isn’t special. These claims have led to much recent research on the various ways in which logical theory choice, logical evidence, and the metaphysics of logic might be similar to or continuous with those of the sciences. My project aims to critically examine these claims to continuity and similarity from the perspective of recent philosophy of science. On the negative side, the project will provide a criticism of the recent attempts at constructing abductive and model-based anti-exceptionalist epistemologies of logic. On the positive side, I aim to provide a characterisation of what philosophers of science call referencemodels, arguing that out of the heterogenous set of what models are, reference-models could be suited for anti-exceptionalist purposes, possibly overcoming various problems that current approaches face. The aim is to draw out fruitful connections between philosophy of logic and philosophy of science to develop novel insights about the nature of logical methodology and epistemology.

Lecture

Philosophy of Science Colloquium TALK: Oscar Westerblad (IVC Fellow) | Anti-Exceptionalism and the Problem of Abduction: Modelling in Logic and in Science

Philosophy of Science Colloquium

Date: 2023 November 30,

Time: 3-4.30 pm CET

Venue: NIG, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien, SR 2H

Abstract:

Anti-exceptionalism is the view that logic is not special, that the methods — and perhaps the subject matter — of logic are continuous with other forms of inquiry, like the sciences. Logical theories, like scientific theories, are constructed on abductive or predictive grounds, evaluated based on whether they have the best fit with the data, as well as according to epistemic and non-epistemic virtues. In this way, logical theory-construction and theory-evaluation is of a piece with methods used in the sciences. The anti-exceptionalist slogan could be taken to be, 'if scientists can do it, we can do it too!'. The aim of this talk is to critically evaluate this anti-exceptionalist position from the point of view of contemporary philosophy of science. In the first half of the talk, I will raise a few issues that the anti-exceptionalist faces: there are problems concerning the nature of logical evidence, the function of abduction, and appeal to theoretical virtues. In the second half of the talk, I proceed more positively to argue that if we want to remain anti-exceptionalists, we can learn from the detailed work that philosophers of science have been doing on the nature of modelling practice.

Research Report

During my time as a fellow at the Institute Vienna Circle, I had an aim to begin work on a very different topic to what I had been working on in my PhD thesis. My project aimed to critically examine contemporary anti-exceptionalist views of logic that try to draw analogies between the workings of the sciences and the workings of logic. Initially, this project had took a critical approach, as I saw good reason to be skeptical of some of the claims to continuity between science and logic, as indeed the recent literature on anti-exceptionalism has shown. Various criticisms of abductive methodologies in logic have been produced, and new views have been developed, like what has been dubbed predicitivism by Ben Martin and Ole Hjortland. While my project started out in this critical direction, my time as a fellow gave me the  opportunity to develop a novel antiexceptionalist approach that grew out of my initial research. I call this approach diagnosticism, which attempts to establish connections between certain kinds of diagnostic and design-based methods in the sciences and in the work the logicians do (drawing especially on the work of Mark Wilson). This is now being developed into a paper spelling out the details of this view. I presented parts of this research at the Philosophy of Science Colloquium in Vienna, as well as a workshop titled Perspectives in Logic and Philosophy II. The fellowship also afforded crucial time to apply to postdoctoral positions, which has led to taking up a postdoctoral research position at the University of Iceland, where I will continue work on the epistemology of science and logic, as well as philosophical methodology.