An interesting paper on theory-ladenness in research on black holes (Doboszewski & Elder, 2025). Relevant to debates in policy evaluation on theory-based evaluation too and the pervasive role of theory whether or not you name the TBE brand.
‘Philosophers have raised a range of worries about the ways in which observations are theory-laden. In this article, we are focusing on the theory-ladenness of measurement outcomes—the ways in which the “observations” derived from an experiment or measurement are affected by theoretical assumptions that are made in the course of the experiment. The greatest concern is that theory-ladenness may lead to a vicious circularity where the theoretical assumptions made by the experimenters—either in the physical design of the experiment or in subsequent inferences from the empirical data—make it more likely or even guarantee that the observation will confirm the theory being tested. This might occur if the hypothesis being tested is presupposed by the experimental methods being used. Franklin (2015, 156) provides the following toy example of this: if we use a mercury thermometer to test a hypothesis that substances expand as their temperature increases, this is theory-laden in a way that risks vicious circularity because the proper functioning of a mercury thermometer relies on the very hypothesis being tested.’ (pp. 829-830)
‘… the impossibility of controlled experiments on astrophysical targets (stars, galaxies, etc.) places constraints on how astronomers can investigate these systems. Simulations can help make up for the lack of controlled interventions by providing a proxy system into which one can intervene.’ (p. 830)
Doboszewski, J., & Elder, J. (2025). How Theory-Laden Are Observations of Black Holes? Philosophy of Science, 92(4), 827–849.
Joas and Knöbl (2009, p. 6) on how Popper demolished positivism in 1934:
As Popper lays out in his now very famous book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which first appeared in 1934, in the case of most scientific problems we cannot be certain whether a generalization, that is, a theory or hypothesis, truly applies in all cases. In all probability, we will never be able to verify once and for all the astrophysical statement that ‘All planets move around their suns along an elliptical trajectory’, because we are unlikely ever to get to know all the solar systems in the universe and therefore we will presumably never be able to confirm with absolute certainty that every single planet does in fact follow an elliptical trajectory around its sun, as opposed to some other route. Much the same applies to the statement ‘All swans are white’. Even if you have seen thousands of swans and all of them were in fact white, you can ultimately never be certain that a black, green, blue, etc. swan will not show up at some point. As a rule, universal statements cannot therefore be confirmed or verified. To put it another way: inductive arguments (that is, inference from individual instances to a totality) are neither logically valid nor truly compelling arguments; induction cannot be justified purely in terms of logic, because we are unable to rule out the possibility that one observation may eventually be made that refutes the general statement thought to be corroborated. Positivists’ attempts to trace laws back to elementary observations or to derive them from elementary observations and verify them are thus doomed to failure. This was precisely Popper’s criticism.
Joas, H., & Knöbl, W. (2009). What is theory? In Social theory: Twenty introductory lectures (pp. 1–19). Cambridge University Press.
“[…] if I wish to be understood by others, and if I wish to enlist others for my purposes, then I must present myself in a way that conforms to folk-psychological platitudes, or laws. To explain my actions – even my most outrageous ones – to others is to find an appropriate set of folk-psychological platitudes in the light of which I am understandable and predictable. […] Given the fundamental role of folk psychology, it should not come as a surprise that it is also the intuition most strongly protected by sanctions. Inability to come up with acceptable folk-psychological accounts of ourselves and others is sanctioned by disapproval, lack of acceptance, or even referral to psychiatric services. No wonder, therefore, that social psychologists find their subjects ‘telling more than they know’: rather than admit that they have no introspective access to many of their higher cognitive processes, subjects will tell folk-psychological stories of how their mind allegedly works.” – Martin Kusch (1999, p. 239), Psychological knowledge: A social history and philosophy. Routledge.
Suppose determinism is true. This would mean that every decision we make at any given moment follows inevitably from the laws of physics, biology, and chemistry, etc. (from here on laws of nature for short), as well as the entire chain of prior events stretching back to the beginning of the universe. Many of these laws may be neither known nor knowable. According to a widely accepted definition, free will requires the ability to have chosen otherwise. But determinism appears to rule out any possibility of having made a different choice than the one we actually did.
Philosopher Kadri Vihvelin (2004) offers a thought-provoking analysis of how free will might still be possible under determinism, a flavour of compatibilism. This post is a summary of her argument.
Before we begin, why on earth would we even entertain the idea of determinism? At first glance, the existence of randomness seems to challenge it. However, what appears random may emerge from combinations of an unimaginably vast number of deterministic causes. Pseudorandom number generators, for example, are relatively simple algorithms which produce sequences that appear random but are entirely deterministic. Algorithms are small. The universe is big. “You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is,” said Douglas Adams. The universe could be a really complicated pseudorandom generator.
Quantum mechanics also seems to challenge determinism. When measuring a quantum particle (like a photon) in superposition, the outcome follows a probability distribution (I previously tried to explain this with a toy example). This indeterminacy has led many to interpret quantum mechanics as fundamentally probabilistic. Yet some physicists defend superdeterminism, an apparently controversial idea suggesting that even quantum measurements are predetermined, including the choices physicists make when selecting measurement settings in experiments (Hossenfelder & Palmer, 2020).
That’s just a sketch; however, hopefully enough to suggest that determinism isn’t too absurd to read on.
Choosing means, more specifically, making choices on the basis of reasons. Libet and others have conducted numerous studies on the neuroscience of choosing, which may challenge the role of conscious choice (see Haggard, 2024, for discussion). However, we are more than what we are conscious of. For example, we retrieve memories without knowing how our brains searched for them, and we move through the world without being aware of how our nervous system coordinates muscle movements. I’m happy to accept a choice as mine, even if a bunch of subconscious processes did the choosing, so long as it was made on the basis of reasons – even ones I’m unaware of.
At the heart of Vihvelin’s position is the idea that our choices stem from bundles of dispositions (tendencies, causal powers, or capacities) much like the ability to speak French, drive, dance, or sing. Crucially, dispositions don’t disappear simply because we haven’t exercised them. If we chose to run at a particular moment, that doesn’t mean we lacked the disposition to walk, crawl, skip, or dance. Likewise, if we spoke French at some point, it doesn’t follow that we couldn’t have spoken English (assuming we know both languages). Or consider something simpler: a working sprinkler system. It has the dispositions required to flood a room – detecting heat or smoke (reasons) and releasing water (making a choice) – even if it never activates during its lifetime.
Free will, according to Vihvelin’s compatibilist account, is the ability to make choices on the basis of reasons and to have this ability is to have a bundle of dispositions. She offers the following menu of dispositions that are likely needed (p. 439):
“[T]he disposition to form and revise beliefs in response to evidence and argument; the disposition to form intentions (choose, try to act) in response to her desires […] and beliefs about how to achieve those desires; the disposition to engage in practical reasoning in response to her intention to make a rational (defensible, justifiable) decision about what to do and her belief that by engaging in practical reasoning she will succeed in making such a decision.”
So, given determinism (laws of nature, history of the universe) and a choice we made, we had a bundle of dispositions that would have enabled us to choose otherwise – free will.
Vihvelin spells out the argument as follows (p. 432):
Dispositions are compatible with determinism.
Abilities are dispositions or bundles of dispositions.
Therefore, the existence of abilities is compatible with determinism.
Free will is the ability to choose on the basis of reasons (I’d add, including subconscious reasons and choosing), and we have this ability by having a bundle of dispositions.
Therefore, free will (the ability to choose on the basis of reasons) is compatible with determinism.
Abilities (like other dispositions) typically continue to exist even when they are not being exercised or manifested.
Therefore, determinism is compatible with the existence of unexercised abilities, including the ability to choose on the basis of reasons.
Abilities are like dispositions with respect to the entailment from the claim that a person has the ability (disposition) to do X to the claim that the person can do X.
Therefore, determinism is compatible with the truth of the claim that persons can choose and do other than what they actually choose and do.
I think that this argument also relates to what Holland (1986, p. 947) called the fundamental problem of causal inference. When evaluating a social programme, we observe the outcomes (like mental health or education) of those who take part, but we can’t observe what someone’s outcome would have been without the programme: the counterfactual outcome. We can infer their counterfactual outcomes (on average) from a well-constructed comparison group, or we can make a reasoned argument based on a theory of what they might have been able to do without the programme, including a theory of their bundles of dispositions.
It’s a similar issue with free will. When someone chooses to do something at some point in time, we can’t observe what their outcome would have been had they chosen to do differently. But, according to Vihvelin’s analysis, if they had free will, they had a bundle of dispositions that would have enabled them to choose otherwise. We can infer how they could have chosen, perhaps by finding people like them who did choose differently, or by making a counterfactual argument on the basis of what their bundle of dispositions are.
Thank you Joanna and the Philosophy Circle at NLC (14 November 2025) for helpful discussion!
“There is relatively little written about sexual orientation in analytic philosophy journals. However, there is a ton of relevant work on sexual orientation in non-analytic or non-philosophy journals. Philosophers, as Eric Schwitzgebel has pointed out, don’t like to cite. Citation rates in philosophy are very low. Combine this with the fact that there’s a lot of social philosophy that has existed prior to the social turn, and we have a recipe for philosophical Columbusing—the act of pretending to discover (or mistakenly thinking that one has discovered) a philosophical insight that has already existed.”
In an introduction to psychodynamic ideas, Jonathan Shedler (2022, p. 432) claims:
“If behavior were unavoidably determined, there would be no reason to practice psychoanalytic therapy or, for that matter, any form of therapy.”
Although I’m not sure about determinism, I think this assertion is false. I also believe it is important to understand why it is false for clients who do believe in determinism, such as the occasional philosopher.
Suppose behaviour were unavoidably determined. We still experience stuff, some of it fun, some of it not. Our accompanying conscientious sensations that go along for the ride doesn’t seem to care. Related to this, I think it’s interesting that we still go to the cinema and read books even though we know the ending has already been decided: we seem to derive great pleasure from finding out what happens next. “You should go on living, if only to satisfy your curiosity”, goes the Yiddish proverb.
Importantly for therapy, chatting with someone and feeling listened to partially determines what we do and how we feel. While it’s possible that therapy is merely another link in the massive causal network of the universe, it is hopefully more likely to improve someone’s life than other links, regardless of how predetermined going to see the therapist and its consequences might be. As Galen Strawson puts it (2010, p. 247, footnote 22):
“Naive fatalism holds that there is no point in doing anything because everything is predetermined […], hence nothing you can do can change how things will be. It is false, because one’s doings and deliberations can change things, being themselves real parts of the (possibly deterministic) causal process.”
References
Shedler, J. (2022). That Was Then, This Is Now: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy For The Rest Of Us. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 58, 405–437.
Strawson, G. (2010). Freedom and Belief, Revised Edition.
I happened upon an interesting question on Philosophy Stack Exchange: “What are the main views among academics on the question of the relation between logic and human cognition?” Here follows (a lightly edited version of) my answer.
Van Benthem (2008) offers examples of how cognition and social practices influence the development of logics, citing, e.g., Prior’s work on temporal structures and Lewis and Stalnaker on comparative orderings of possible worlds. He concedes that much of the work in this direction is informal (p. 74):
Logicians analyzing natural language, or computer scientists modeling “common sense”, tend to go by their own intuitions, anecdotal evidence from colleagues, email surveys of sometimes surprising naiveness, and other easy procedures that avoid the laboratories and statistical packages of the world of careful experimental design. But even so, experimental evidence is relevant, in that these theories can be, and sometimes are, modified under pressure of evidence from actual usage, even when it comes through these home-grown sources.
He also points to work in the other direction, where cognitive scientists take non-classical logics and use them to model social and cognitive phenomena. An example I know about (it was one of the reasons I chose my PhD topic and supervisor) is Stenning and van Lambalgen’s (2005) analysis of the “suppression task” in psychology, using nonmonotonic logic. Probability theory may be viewed as a kind of logic and it is used in cognitive science too; try e.g., Pfeifer (2013) and references that follow.
One key element of cognitive science studies that use logics is how people interpret tasks, and often have different interpretations, which can be modelled as choosing a logic and setting its parameters. Geis and Zwicky (1971) observe that logic students sometimes map the natural language indicative “if A, then B” to a biconditional in classical logic, so even in logic class interpretations aren’t naive.
Cognitive scientists don’t expect non-specialists to be aware of the logics that model their interpretations and inferences, e.g., here’s Da Silva Neves, Bonnefon, and Raufaste (2002, p. 110) discussing the relationship between potential properties of people’s reasoning systems and how people feel that they reason:
… even if we expect human inference to corroborate these properties, we know of no sufficient reason to think that lay reasoners would recognize any rationality postulate as valid, neither that they would conscientiously use them to guide their reasoning. […W]e assume that human inference is constrained by knowledge organisation in memory and that its formal properties emerge from a spreading activation process operating directly on knowledge structures.
Da Silva Neves, R., Bonnefon, J. F., & Raufaste, E. (2002). An empirical test of patterns for nonmonotonic inference. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 34, 107-130.
Geis, M. L., & Zwicky, A. M. (1971). On invited inferences. Linguistic inquiry, 2(4), 561-566.
“For the believer in generative causality the existence of the statistics is but the first step in a long process of investigation which ends only when the nature of the things involved has been found out and the reasons for the statistics thus elicited. Science follows the generative rather than the successionist theory of causality.”
– Rom Harré (1972, p. 118)
Harre, R. (1972). The philosophies of science. Oxford University Press.
I know you like the way that I look
And it looks like I like you too
You know I do
I like the way you know
That I like how you look
And you like me too
I know you do
I see you look at me
And I know that you think
You like what you see
I want you too
Thomas Nagel (1969, pp. 10-11) [Sexual Perversion. The Journal of Philosophy, 66, 5-17]:
At some point Romeo notices Juliet. He is moved, somehow, by the softness of her hair and the diffidence with which she sips her martini, and this arouses him sexually. […] Juliet now senses Romeo in another mirror on the opposite wall, though neither of them yet knows that he is seen by the other […]. But now, cleverly calculating the line of her stare without actually looking her in the eyes, he realizes that it is directed at him through the mirror on the opposite wall. That is, he notices, and moreover senses, Juliet sensing him. […] But there is a further step. Let us suppose that Juliet […] now senses that he senses her. This puts Romeo in a position to notice, and be aroused by, her arousal at being sensed by him. He senses that she senses that he senses her. This is still another level of arousal, for he becomes conscious of his sexuality through his awareness of its effect on her and of her awareness that this effect is due to him.
“I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task” (Nagel, 1974).
“Feel the rain on your skin, no one else can feel it for you” (Bedingfield, 2004).
