Journal ArticleDOI
Variety-of-evidence reasoning about the distant past
TLDR
In this paper, a case study about climate change is presented and an epistemic account of a particular discipline that is of environmental and social importance is provided. But the epistemology of studies addressing questions about historical and prehistorical phenomena is not yet connected to this topic.Abstract:
The epistemology of studies addressing questions about historical and prehistorical phenomena is a subject of increasing discussion among philosophers of science. A related field of inquiry that has yet to be connected to this topic is the epistemology of climate science. Branching these areas of research, I show how variety-of-evidence reasoning accounts for scientific inferences about the past by detailing a case study in paleoclimate reconstruction. This analysis aims to clarify the logic of historical inquiry in general and, by focusing on a case study about climate change, it offers an epistemic account of a particular discipline that is of environmental and social importance.read more
Citations
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Borehole Climate Reconstructions: Spatial Structure and Hemispheric Averages
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the subhemispheric spatial correlation of ground surface temperature and surface air temperature at various spatial scales and found that the majority of grid element means are determined from three or fewer boreholes, a number that is insufficient to suppress site-specific noise via ensemble averaging.
Journal ArticleDOI
Variety of Evidence
TL;DR: In this article, a novel explication of one notion of varied evidence and the Variety of Evidence Thesis within Bayesian models of scientific inference by appealing to measures of entropy is presented.
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Method Pluralism, Method Mismatch, & Method Bias
Adrian Currie,Shahar Avin +1 more
TL;DR: This work sketches a kind of method pluralism which turns on two properties of evidence, before using agent-based models to examine the relationship between methods, epistemic situations, and bias.
Journal ArticleDOI
Kon-Tiki Experiments
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify a species of experiment used to demonstrate the competence of a cause to produce a certain effect, and examine their role in the historical sciences, and argue that such experiments can be used to predict the future.
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Model spread and progress in climate modelling
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe an epistemological setting in which a steady (and even slightly increased) model spread is not doomed to be seen as negative, and is indeed compatible with a desirable evolution of climate models taken individually.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction
TL;DR: A hypothesis is suggested which accounts for the extinctions and the iridium observations, and the chemical composition of the boundary clay, which is thought to come from the stratospheric dust, is markedly different from that of clay mixed with the Cretaceous and Tertiary limestones, which are chemically similar to each other.
Book
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
TL;DR: Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory and the Integration of Constraint and Adaptation in Ontogeny and Phylogeny: Historical Constraints and the Evolution of Development.
Journal ArticleDOI
Studies in the Logic of Explanation
Carl G. Hempel,Paul Oppenheim +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, an elementary survey of the basic pattern of scientific explanation and a subsequent more rigorous analysis of the concept of law and of the logical structure of explanatory arguments are presented.