science

Richard Boyd

Richard Boyd is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Richard Boyd rather than just read about it. In short: Richard Newell Boyd (May 19, 1942 – February 20, 2021) was an American philosopher, who spent most of his career teaching philosophy at Cornell University where he was Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters. He specialized in epistemology, the philosophy of science, language, and mind.

Key takeaways

Richard Boyd belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Richard Boyd to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Richard Boyd from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Richard Newell Boyd (May 19, 1942 – February 20, 2021) was an American philosopher, who spent most of his career teaching philosophy at Cornell University where he was Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters. He specialized in epistemology, the philosophy of science, language, and mind.

Education and career Boyd became interested in the philosophy of science during his undergraduate studies for a mathematics major at MIT for which he was awarded an S.B. in 1963. He then, at the same institution and under the directorship of Richard Cartwright, went on to earn his Ph.D in 1970 with a doctoral thesis on mathematical logic titled A Recursion-Theoretic Characterization of the Ramified Analytical Hierarchy. (He would also co-author, with Gustav Hensel and Hilary Putnam, a 1969 paper by this title). After teaching at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Berkeley, Boyd taught, from 1972, at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. In 1981 he was appointed as the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy there, a position he retained until his retirement, as professor emeritus, in 2017. Boyd held visiting positions at Claremont-McKenna College (2012), the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand (2016), and the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. And, after his retirement from Cornell, he also taught at Lewis & Clark College.

Philosophical work Boyd was best known for his arguments in favor of scientific realism and moral realism. In the case of scientific realism, Boyd was a defender of what is called "the miracle argument" according to which if successful scientific theories "were far from the truth...the fact that they are so successful would be miraculous. And given the choice between a straightforward explanation of success and a miraculous explanation, clearly one should prefer the non-miraculous explanation, viz. that our best theories are approximately true." In the case of moral realism, he was a key figure in the meta-ethical school known as "Cornell realism." On this view, a moral property like "goodness is a complex natural property that is not directly observable, but nonetheless has a robust causal profile.... 'Goodness' is not synonymous with any simpler set of more directly observable claims. Instead, 'goodness' describes the functionally complex natural property that is the effect of certain characteristic causes, and the cause of certain characteristic effects." Boyd, along with Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, was also influential in the development of an anti-reductionist form of materialism in the philosophy of mind. In this view, although all individual psychological states and processes are entirely constituted by physical entities, the "explanations, natural kinds, and properties in psychology do not reduce to counterparts in more basic sciences, such as neurophysiology or physics."

Select works More complete publication details at Boyd's PhilPapers listing, copies of further papers at his homepage's Selected Publications

Select papers and book chapters "Determinism, laws, and predictability in principle". Philosophy of Science. 39 (4): 431–450. 1972. doi:10.1086/288466. ISSN 0031-8248. JSTOR 186328. "Scientific realism and naturalistic epistemology". PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. 80 (2): 613–662. 1980. doi:10.1086/psaprocbienmeetp.1980.2.192615. ISSN 0270-8647. JSTOR 192615. "On the current status of the issue of scientific realism" (PDF). Erkenntnis. 19 (1). Dordrecht: D. Reidel: 45–90. May 1983. doi:10.1007/BF00174775. ISSN 0165-0106. JSTOR 20010835. "What Materialism Does Not Imply," in Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology Volume I, ed. N.J. Block (1981). "Observations, Explanatory Power and Simplicity," in Experiment and Observation in Modern Science, ed. Achinstein and Hannaway (1984). "Lex Orandi est Lex Credendi," in Images of Science: Scientific Realism Versus Constructive Empiricism, ed. Churchland and Hooker (1984). "The Logician's Dilemma: Deductive Logic, Inductive Inference and Logical Empiricism," Erkenntnis (1985). JSTOR 20011956 "How to be a Moral Realist," in Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Sayre McCord (1988). "Constructivism, Realism, and Philosophical Method," in J. Earman, ed. Inference, Explanation, and Other Philosophical Frustrations. University of California Press (1992). "Metaphor and Theory Change," in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Ortony (1993)

Edited books Boyd, Richard; Gasper, Philip; Trout, J. D. (1991). The Philosophy of Science. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-52156-7.

See also American philosophy List of American philosophers

Notes

External links "Objective Truth" Boyd on The Philosophers Zone podcast with host Alan Saunders (2008) "Evolutionary theory as methodological anesthesia" (2011) video/podcast of 'Debating Darwin: evolutionary psychology" lecture for UCTV. "Is Evolutionary Psychology Misleading Us?" (2012) video of lecture for the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum of Claremont McKenna College. "Richard Boyd: Reconciling Realism and Neo-Kantian Social Constructivism" video of Science - Big Questions Revisited lecture for the Symposium on Occasion of the Farewell of Paul Hoyningen-Huene from Hannover (18 July 2014)

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Richard Boyd

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Richard Boyd claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Richard Boyd before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Richard Boyd ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Richard Boyd

In research: Richard Boyd appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Richard Boyd in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Richard Boyd is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1942 births, 2021 deaths, 20th-century American essayists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Richard Boyd outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Richard Boyd in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Richard Boyd means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
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Frequently asked questions

What is Richard Boyd in simple terms?

Why does Richard Boyd matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Richard Boyd?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Richard Boyd.