Tracking Truth
Knowledge, Evidence, and Science
Sherrilyn Roush
Price: £55.00 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-927473-4
Publication date: 10 November 2005
256 pages, 234x156 mm
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| Reviews |
| - 'Provides a sustained and ambitious development of the basic idea that knowledge is true belief that tracks the truth... excellent.' - Eric Christian Barnes, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
- 'Sherrilyn Roush's exemplary breathes life into what I would have sworn was a moribund philosophical project.' - Kenny Easwaran, Mind Journal
- 'The central ideas in Roush's book focus on applying some of Nozick's ideas both to standard epistemological conundrums and to live issues in philosophy of science. The resulting tour de force is interesting and though-provoking.' - Horacio Arlo-Costa, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
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| Description | | - First book from a very talented young philosopher
- A comprehensive defence of a distinctive position in epistemology
- Provides real unification of the concepts of knowledge and evidence
- Substantial coverage of scientific realist issues
| Tracking Truth
presents a unified treatment of knowledge, evidence, and epistemological realism and anti-realism about scientific theories. A wide range of knowledge-related phenomena, especially but not only in science, strongly favour the idea of tracking as the key to what makes something knowledge. A subject who tracks the truth - an idea first formulated by Robert Nozick - has the
ability to follow the truth through time and changing circumstances. Epistemologists rightly concluded that Nozick's theory was not viable, but a simple revision of that view is not only viable but superior to other current views. In this new tracking account of knowledge, in contrast to the old view, knowledge has the property of closure under known implication, and troublesome counterfactuals
are replaced with well-defined conditional probability statements. Of particular interest are the new view's treatment of skepticism, reflective knowledge, lottery propositions, knowledge of logical truth, and the question why knowledge is power in the Baconian sense.
Ideally, evidence indicates a hypothesis and discriminates it from other possible hypotheses. This is the idea behind a tracking
view of evidence, and Sherrilyn Roush provides a defence of a confirmation theory based on the Likelihood Ratio. The accounts of knowledge and evidence she offers provide a deep and seamless explanation of why having better evidence makes one more likely to have knowledge. Roush approaches the question of epistemological realism about scientific theories through the question what is required for
evidence, and rejects both traditional realist and traditional anti-realist positions in favour of a new position which evaluates realist claims in a piecemeal fashion according to a general standard of evidence. The results show that while anti-realists were immodest in declaring a priori what science could not do, realists were excessively sanguine about how far our actual evidence has so far
taken us.
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Readership: Scholars and students of philosophy, particularly epistemologists and philosophers of science.
| Contents |
1.
Tracking: at home on the range
Appendix A: Knowledge without justification
2.
Tracking with closure
3.
Tracking: more and better
4.
Tracking over the rivals
Appendix B: Sensitivity and safety
5.
What is evidence? Discrimination, indication, and leverage
Appendix C: The likelihood ratio, high P(e), and high P(h/e)
6.
Real anti-realism: the evidential approach
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Sherrilyn Roush, Rice University, Texas
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