The Pauli Objection

Of Objection

Sierra Legal is filing this Notice of Objection on behalf of the David Suzuki Foundation, Environmental Defence, and the Canadian Environmental Law Association, pursuant to sections 332(2) and 333 of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999 to the Minister of the Environment, the Hon. John Baird, with respect to the proposed Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers Regulations. The proposed regula...

The Intelligibility Objection against Underdetermination

One of the objections against the thesis of underdetermination of theories by observations is that it is unintelligible. Any two empirically equivalent theories — so the argument goes — are in principle intertranslatable, hence cannot count as rivals in any non-trivial sense. Against that objection, this paper shows that empirically equivalent theories may contain theoretical sentences that are...

The Future Similarity Objection Revisited

David Lewis has long defended an analysis of counterfactuals in terms of comparative similarity of possible worlds.1 According to Lewis, a counterfactual of the form ̳If it were the case that A, then it would be that C‘ is (non-vacuously) true if and only if some world where A and C are both true is more similar to the actual world than any world where A is true and C is false. The purpose of th...

Permissivism and the arbitrariness objection

Permissivism says that for some propositions and bodies of evidence, there is more than one rationally permissible doxastic attitude that can be taken towards that proposition given the evidence. Some critics of this view argue that it condones, as rationally acceptable, sets of attitudes that manifest an untenable kind of arbitrariness. I begin by providing a new and more detailed explication ...

Engaging with the Expressivist Objection