Eric Christian Barnes
Biographic Data
| ID | 2526633 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eric Christian Barnes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eric Christian |
| FAMILY NAME | Barnes |
| SIGNATURE | BARNES E C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Southern Methodist University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8018-8773 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 46 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Why Moral Competence Cannot Be Purely Cognitive
It is widely held that moral competence is a necessary condition for moral accountability. Although moral competence may be defined in various ways, a family of views can be classified as cognitive accounts insofar as they identify moral competence with either the possession of a true belief regarding the moral status of one's action or the capacity to form such a belief. I argue that cognitive accounts are untenable because they cannot adequatel…
An Argument for the Law of Desire
The law of desire has been proposed in several forms, but its essential claim is that agents always act on their strongest proximal action motivation. This law has threatening consequences for human freedom, insofar as it greatly limits agents’ ability to do otherwise given their motivational state. It has proven difficult to formulate a version that escapes counterexamples and some categorically deny its truth. Noticeable by its absence in the l…
The roots of predictivism
Evidence and Leverage
Sherrilyn Roush's Tracking Truth provides a sustained and ambitious development of the basic idea that knowledge is true belief that tracks the truth. In this essay, I provide a quick synopsis of Roush's book and offer a substantive discussion of her analysis of scientific evidence. Roush argues that, for e to serve as evidence for h, it should be easier to determine the truth value of e than it is to determine the truth value of h, an ideal she …
On Mendeleev’s predictions
Predictivism for Pluralists
Predictivism asserts that novel confirmations carry special probative weight. Epistemic pluralism asserts that the judgments of agents (about, e.g., the probabilities of theories) carry epistemic import. In this paper, I propose a new theory of predictivism that is tailored to pluralistic evaluators of theories. I replace the orthodox notion of use-novelty with a notion of endorsement-novelty, and argue that the intuition that predictivism is tru…
The Quantitative Problem of Old Evidence
The quantitative problem of old evidence is the problem of how to measure the degree to which e confirms h for agent A at time t when A regards e as justified at t. Existing attempts to solve this problem have applied the e-difference approach, which compares A's probability for h at t with what probability A would assign h if A did not regard e as justified at t. The quantitative problem has been widely regarded as unsolvable primarily on the gr…
Probabilities and Epistemic Pluralism
A pluralistic scientific method is one that incorporates a variety of points of view in scientific inquiry. This paper investigates one example of pluralistic method: the use of weighted averaging in probability estimation. I consider two methods of weight determination, one based on disjoint evidence possession and the other on track record. I argue that weighted averaging provides a rational procedure for probability estimation under certain co…
Inference to the loveliest explanation
Truthlikeness, Translation, and Approximate Causal Explanation
D. Miller's demonstrations of the language dependence of truthlikeness raise a profound problem for the claim that scientific progress is objective. In two recent papers (Barnes 1990, 1991) I argue that the objectivity of progress may be grounded on the claim that the aim of science is not merely truth but knowledge; progress thus construed is objective in an epistemic sense. In this paper I construct a new solution to Miller's problem grounded o…
Explanatory Unification and the Problem of Asymmetry
Philip Kitcher has proposed a theory of explanation based on the notion of unification. Despite the genuine interest and power of the theory, I argue here that the theory suffers from a fatal deficiency: It is intrinsically unable to account for the asymmetric structure of explanation, and thus ultimately falls prey to a problem similar to the one which beset Hempel's D-N model. I conclude that Kitcher is wrong to claim that one can settle the is…
Beyond verisimilitude
The language dependence of accuracy
Inference to the loveliest explanation
Explanatory Unification and the Problem of Asymmetry
Philip Kitcher has proposed a theory of explanation based on the notion of unification. Despite the genuine interest and power of the theory, I argue here that the theory suffers from a fatal deficiency: It is intrinsically unable to account for the asymmetric structure of explanation, and thus ultimately falls prey to a problem similar to the one which beset Hempel's D-N model. I conclude that Kitcher is wrong to claim that one can settle the is…
Beyond verisimilitude
On Mendeleev’s predictions
The Quantitative Problem of Old Evidence
The quantitative problem of old evidence is the problem of how to measure the degree to which e confirms h for agent A at time t when A regards e as justified at t. Existing attempts to solve this problem have applied the e-difference approach, which compares A's probability for h at t with what probability A would assign h if A did not regard e as justified at t. The quantitative problem has been widely regarded as unsolvable primarily on the gr…
The language dependence of accuracy
Evidence and Leverage
Sherrilyn Roush's Tracking Truth provides a sustained and ambitious development of the basic idea that knowledge is true belief that tracks the truth. In this essay, I provide a quick synopsis of Roush's book and offer a substantive discussion of her analysis of scientific evidence. Roush argues that, for e to serve as evidence for h, it should be easier to determine the truth value of e than it is to determine the truth value of h, an ideal she …
Predictivism for Pluralists
Predictivism asserts that novel confirmations carry special probative weight. Epistemic pluralism asserts that the judgments of agents (about, e.g., the probabilities of theories) carry epistemic import. In this paper, I propose a new theory of predictivism that is tailored to pluralistic evaluators of theories. I replace the orthodox notion of use-novelty with a notion of endorsement-novelty, and argue that the intuition that predictivism is tru…
Probabilities and Epistemic Pluralism
A pluralistic scientific method is one that incorporates a variety of points of view in scientific inquiry. This paper investigates one example of pluralistic method: the use of weighted averaging in probability estimation. I consider two methods of weight determination, one based on disjoint evidence possession and the other on track record. I argue that weighted averaging provides a rational procedure for probability estimation under certain co…
Truthlikeness, Translation, and Approximate Causal Explanation
D. Miller's demonstrations of the language dependence of truthlikeness raise a profound problem for the claim that scientific progress is objective. In two recent papers (Barnes 1990, 1991) I argue that the objectivity of progress may be grounded on the claim that the aim of science is not merely truth but knowledge; progress thus construed is objective in an epistemic sense. In this paper I construct a new solution to Miller's problem grounded o…
The language dependence of accuracy
Beyond verisimilitude
Explanatory Unification and the Problem of Asymmetry
Philip Kitcher has proposed a theory of explanation based on the notion of unification. Despite the genuine interest and power of the theory, I argue here that the theory suffers from a fatal deficiency: It is intrinsically unable to account for the asymmetric structure of explanation, and thus ultimately falls prey to a problem similar to the one which beset Hempel's D-N model. I conclude that Kitcher is wrong to claim that one can settle the is…
Inference to the loveliest explanation
Truthlikeness, Translation, and Approximate Causal Explanation
D. Miller's demonstrations of the language dependence of truthlikeness raise a profound problem for the claim that scientific progress is objective. In two recent papers (Barnes 1990, 1991) I argue that the objectivity of progress may be grounded on the claim that the aim of science is not merely truth but knowledge; progress thus construed is objective in an epistemic sense. In this paper I construct a new solution to Miller's problem grounded o…
Probabilities and Epistemic Pluralism
A pluralistic scientific method is one that incorporates a variety of points of view in scientific inquiry. This paper investigates one example of pluralistic method: the use of weighted averaging in probability estimation. I consider two methods of weight determination, one based on disjoint evidence possession and the other on track record. I argue that weighted averaging provides a rational procedure for probability estimation under certain co…
The Quantitative Problem of Old Evidence
The quantitative problem of old evidence is the problem of how to measure the degree to which e confirms h for agent A at time t when A regards e as justified at t. Existing attempts to solve this problem have applied the e-difference approach, which compares A's probability for h at t with what probability A would assign h if A did not regard e as justified at t. The quantitative problem has been widely regarded as unsolvable primarily on the gr…
On Mendeleev’s predictions
Predictivism for Pluralists
Predictivism asserts that novel confirmations carry special probative weight. Epistemic pluralism asserts that the judgments of agents (about, e.g., the probabilities of theories) carry epistemic import. In this paper, I propose a new theory of predictivism that is tailored to pluralistic evaluators of theories. I replace the orthodox notion of use-novelty with a notion of endorsement-novelty, and argue that the intuition that predictivism is tru…
Evidence and Leverage
Sherrilyn Roush's Tracking Truth provides a sustained and ambitious development of the basic idea that knowledge is true belief that tracks the truth. In this essay, I provide a quick synopsis of Roush's book and offer a substantive discussion of her analysis of scientific evidence. Roush argues that, for e to serve as evidence for h, it should be easier to determine the truth value of e than it is to determine the truth value of h, an ideal she …
The roots of predictivism
An Argument for the Law of Desire
The law of desire has been proposed in several forms, but its essential claim is that agents always act on their strongest proximal action motivation. This law has threatening consequences for human freedom, insofar as it greatly limits agents’ ability to do otherwise given their motivational state. It has proven difficult to formulate a version that escapes counterexamples and some categorically deny its truth. Noticeable by its absence in the l…
Why Moral Competence Cannot Be Purely Cognitive
It is widely held that moral competence is a necessary condition for moral accountability. Although moral competence may be defined in various ways, a family of views can be classified as cognitive accounts insofar as they identify moral competence with either the possession of a true belief regarding the moral status of one's action or the capacity to form such a belief. I argue that cognitive accounts are untenable because they cannot adequatel…
Epistemology (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Philosophy and History of Science (11 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (6 works) · Mathematics (4 works) · Philosophy of science (4 works) · Science and Climate Studies (4 works) · Metaphysics (3 works) · Miller (3 works)