No God, no God's Eye: A Quasi-Putnamian Argument for Monotheism

Argument or no argument ?

We will call such adjuncts instances of the X or no X construction It was suggested in the middle 1980s by Alexis Manaster-Ramer that well-formed instances of X or no X involve a string X of unbounded length preceding or no, with an exact copy following (for a brief allusion to it in print, see Manaster-Ramer 1986). This claim has received hardly any discussion at all in the subsequent literatu...

The No Alternatives Argument

Scientific theories are hard to find, and once scientists have found a theory H, they often believe that there are not many distinct alternatives to H. But is this belief justified? What should scientists believe about the number of alternatives to H, and how should they change these beliefs in the light of new evidence? These are some of the questions that we will address in this paper. We als...

No eye for ears

A 50-year-old man was seen for chronic renal failure of unknown origin. He had been diagnosed in 1981 and monitored continuously while his renal functions had deteriorated slowly; his current glomerular filtration rate was 17 ml/min. On this occasion, he was seen by a new doctor who observed that he was hard of hearing. The day was unusually bright and sunny; hence lateral cervical scars, 3 cm ...

The probabilistic no miracles argument

This paper develops a probabilistic reconstruction of the No Miracles Argument (NMA) in the debate between scientific realists and anti-realists. The goal of the paper is to clarify and to sharpen the NMA by means of a probabilistic formalization. In particular, I demonstrate that the persuasive force of the NMA depends on the particular disciplinary context where it is applied, and the stabili...

No other gods. On science and American social thought