Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

172 Notes
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
1. Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction, 5.
2. Strictly speaking, of course, cathode rays are themselves theoretical entities,
whose existence is inferred from certain observable, experimental facts. But
that complication need not detain us here.
3. The term “electron” predates Thomson’s paper, having been introduced by
G. J. Stoney in 1891 as a term for a quantity of electricity. Thomson at fi rst
avoided using this term, preferring “corpuscles,” since he wished to highlight
the idea that these particles were components of atoms (Davis and Falconer,
J. J. Thomson, 133).
4. McMullin, “Structural Explanation,” 140; Swinburne, Faith and Reason, 83.
5. The literature on this topic is voluminous. A classic defence of a realist
understanding of theoretical explanation is Grover Maxwell’s 1962 paper
“The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities.”
6. This way of describing the issue takes for granted what Stathis Psillos
(“Agnostic Empiricism,” 57–58) calls “semantic realism”: the view that theoretical
explanations are in fact making assertions about unobservable entities.
What I am focusing on here is a second dimension of realism, which
Psillos calls “epistemic optimism”: the view that we can have adequate reason
to believe that such unobservable entities exist.
7. Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction, 212 (§25).
8. Ibid., 116 (§14).
9. It was, in fact, Reichenbach’s idea of the probability of a hypothesis to which
Karl Popper was objecting (Logic of Scientifi c Discovery, §80 [254 n. 3]); cf.
2.1.3.1).
10. McMullin, “Structural Explanation,” 142. Compare Hume, “Enquiry,” 4.2
§29 (32–33): “It must certainly be allowed that nature has kept us at a great
distance from all her secrets, and has afforded us only the knowledge of a few
superfi cial qualities of objects; while she conceals from us those powers and
principles on which the infl uence of those objects entirely depends.”
11. Cohen, “Interview with Einstein,” 72–73.
12. Mach, Principles of Physical Optics, viii.
13. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 179.
14. Ayer, Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, 213.
15. Ibid., 231.
16. Van Fraassen, Laws and Symmetry, 143.
17. Le Poidevin, Arguing for Atheism, 107–10.
18. To speak of the Wittgensteinian view of religious language as antirealist is
contestable. Some Wittgensteinians certainly use antirealist language. Speaking
of the act of kneeling in thanksgiving, D. Z. Phillips writes: “Talk of God
has sense in this reaction. It is not the name of an individual; it does not refer
to anything” (Religion without Explanation, 147–48). But it is notoriously
diffi cult to identify Wittgenstein’s own views on religion. (Was Wittgenstein
a Wittgensteinian?) One recent author (Vasiliou, “Wittgenstein,” 36) suggests
that Wittgenstein did not entirely reject a realist construal of religious
language, although he did reject the idea that religious propositions are held
to be true for the same kinds of reasons as scientifi c propositions.
19. Phillips suggests that when religious propositions are taken to be explanatory
hypotheses, this represents a kind of “superstition” rather than “religion”
(Religion without Explanation, 41; see also the same author’s Hermeneutics
of Contemplation, 162–67).
20. Among contemporary discussions of religious explanations, Michael Banner’s
The Justifi cation of Science and the Rationality of Religious Belief is