Belief, Evidence, and Uncertainty (eBook)

Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay specializes in philosophy of science with applications of probability and statistics in addressing some long-standing problems in scientific inference. Along with his co-authors, he has both developed and sharpened a partially subjective/objective Bayesian approach in epistemology of science. They have also proposed a logic-based account of Simpson’s paradox as an alternative to the well-entrenched causal accounts of the same. He was the only philosopher involved in NASA’s multidisciplinary origin of life research 6 million dollar grant (2007 July – 2012 June) for Montana State University. He co-edited with Malcolm, R. Forster the Handbook of Philosophy of Statistics volume (Elsevier, 2011). He was an invited speaker for the International Conference on Bayesian Statistics held in Varanasi, India in 2013. He is currently editing a Newsletter for the American Philosophical Associations’ Asian Americans on “Indian Philosophy and Culture” due to come out in Feb, 2015.Gordon Brittan, Jr.’s work focuses on philosophy of science and mathematics, with special reference to the 17th and 18th centuries and the application of free-logical, statistical and probabilistic methods to the solution of traditional and contemporary methodological and epistemological problems. With Karel Lambert, he authored An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, which has appeared in four editions and been translated eight times. He is also the author of Kant’s Theory of Science (Princeton University Press, 1978) and the editor of Causality, Method, and Modality: Essays in Honor of Jules Vuillemin (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).Mark L. Taper’s research involves statistical and quantitative modelling, both analytic and computational, to answer questions in conservation biology, population dynamics, conservation genetics, evolutionary ecology, community ecology, population genetics, spatial ecology, and macro ecology. He is deeply concerned with effectively connecting ecological and evolutionary theory with the real world. This has led him to work on the construction of statistical methodologies appropriate to ecological and evolutionary problems and to an interest in the epistemological foundations of both statistics and science. He co-edited with Subhash Lele, The Nature of Scientific Evidence: Scientific, Philosophical, and Empirical Considerations (University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Confirmation and Evidence.- Chapter 3. Confirmation, Evidence and Inference.- Chapter 4. Subjective Bayesian Accounts of Evidence.- Chapter 5. Mapping the Concept of Misleading Evidence.- Chapter 6. Non-Bayesian Accounts of Evidence.- Chapter 7. Error-Statistics and Severe Testing.- Chapter 8. Confirmation/Evidence Epistemology and Resolution of Paradoxes.- Chapter 9. Concluding Remarks.