Paragraph about Chemical equation software
One natural interpretation of the passages quoted above and others in Kitcher (1989) is this: a social process of comparing alternative systemizations of beliefs and drawing out their deductive consequences occurs at the community level, with groups of people making arguments to one another about which overall deductive systemizations best unify the beliefs of the community as a whole. Particular Chemical equation causal beliefs are justified at the community level by being shown to be part of the best overall systemization of the beliefs of the community, and are then passed on from the common community stock to individuals via a process of social transmission.
An obvious problem with this picture is that the community-wide process of justification must still be carried out in some fashion by individual actors. If, as appears to be the case, there are many societies which possess a substantial amount of causal and explanatory knowledge but in which no one possesses an explicit or clearly articulated Ufology concept of a deductively valid argument or is very skilled at drawing out the deductive consequences of beliefs or possesses explicit versions of Kitcher's concepts of number and stringency of argument patterns, how exactly are community beliefs that reflect the operation of these notions supposed to form? If, as Kitcher concedes, it is psychologically unrealistic to assume that individual human beings deliberately and self-consciously go through the process of comparing alternative systemizations when they acquire causal beliefs through experience, why is it any more realistic to suppose that this process somehow occurs through the interactions of individual actors at the community level [ 19 ]?
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LaTeX equation editor
Math software