Richard Boyd

For the African-American minister and businessman, see R. H. Boyd.

Richard Newell Boyd (May 19, 1942 – February 20, 2021)^[5][6] 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.^[7]

Richard Boyd
Richard Boyd
Born	Richard Newell Boyd (1942-05-19)May 19, 1942 Washington, D.C., U.S.
Died	February 20, 2021(2021-02-20) (aged 78) Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Education	MIT
Spouse	Barbara Koslowski
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic Scientific realism Moral realism philosophical naturalism[1]
Thesis	A Recursion-Theoretic Characterization of the Ramified Analytical Hierarchy (1970)
Doctoral advisor	Richard Cartwright[2]
Doctoral students	Paul Horwich, J. D. Trout
Main interests	Philosophy of science
Notable ideas	Causal theory of reference-fixing for theoretical terms,[3] definition of biological natural kinds[4][1]

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.^[8][5] 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.^[9] (He would also co-author, with Gustav Hensel and Hilary Putnam, a 1969 paper by this title.^[10])

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.^[7] 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.^[5]

Boyd held visiting positions at Claremont-McKenna College (2012),^[8] the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand (2016),^[11] and the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.^[12] And, after his retirement from Cornell, he also taught at Lewis & Clark College.^[5]

Philosophical work

Boyd was best known for his arguments in favor of scientific realism and moral realism.^[13]

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."^[14]

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." ^[15]

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."^[16]

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).
• "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.^[17]

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

Notes

1. Boyd, Richard (2010). "Realism, natural kinds, and philosophical methods". In Beebee, Helen; Sabbarton-Leary, Nigel (eds.). The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. New York: Routledge. pp. 220–221. ISBN 978-1-136-97576-9.
2. "MIT philosophy dissertations"
3. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Road Since Structure, University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 196.
5. Glaser, Linda B. (February 24, 2021). "Pioneering philosopher Richard Boyd dies at 78". Cornell Chronicle. Retrieved 2021-02-24.
6. "RICHARD BOYD Obituary - (2021) - Cleveland, OH - The Plain Dealer". obits.cleveland.com. Retrieved 2021-02-23.
7. "Richard Newell Boyd | Sage School of Philosophy Cornell Arts & Sciences". philosophy.cornell.edu. Retrieved 2021-02-23. Professor Boyd specializes in philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. He is also interested in ethics, in social and political philosophy, especially Marxism, and in the philosophy of biology. He came to the Sage School faculty in 1972, after teaching at Harvard, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley.
8. "William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellows". cmc.edu. Retrieved 2021-02-24. Richard N. Boyd [...] is well known for his work in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and ethics -- particularly on moral realism. Boyd became interested in the philosophy of science while an undergraduate mathematics major at MIT, where he later earned a Ph.D. in philosophy with a dissertation in mathematical logic. His original interests in foundational issues in philosophy of science have expanded to include interests in metaphysics (especially the metaphysics of kinds and categories - like biological species and chemical compounds - and of causation), in epistemology (especially in competing notions of rationality and objectivity), in philosophy of biology (especially in issues about the foundations of biological taxonomy and about methods in sociobiology), in philosophy of mind and language and in the foundations of ethics.
9. cgraham. "Dissertations". MIT Philosophy. Retrieved 2021-02-23.
10. Boyd, Richard; Hensel, Gustav; Putnam, Hilary (1969). "A Recursion-Theoretic Characterization of the Ramified Analytical Hierarchy". Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 141: 37–62. doi:10.2307/1995087. ISSN 0002-9947. JSTOR 1995087. S2CID 13551304.
11. "Philosophy". The University of Canterbury. Retrieved 2021-02-24.
12. "Ethics in Science". uh.edu. 2012. Retrieved 2021-02-23. Richard Boyd is Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He did his undergraduate work (mathematics) and graduate work (philosophy) at MIT. He has held teaching appointments at The University of Michigan, The University of California Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, The University of Canterbury (NZ), The University of Melbourne, and Claremont-McKenna College. He works on issues in philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of mind, and metaethics.
13. Radcliffe, Elizabeth S. (2015-04-01). "Moral and scientific realism: essays in honor of Richard N. Boyd and Nicholas L. Sturgeon". Philosophical Studies. 172 (4): 841. doi:10.1007/s11098-014-0302-3. ISSN 1573-0883. Boyd and Sturgeon are closely identified with the metaethical view known as "Cornell realism," a theory both philosophers have articulated, developed and defended throughout their careers. Boyd's and Sturgeon's moral realism involves a commitment to objective, mind-independent facts about morality. Moral facts are natural facts, but irreducible to non-moral natural facts. Boyd is also a prominent defender of scientific realism, the view that scientific theories yield knowledge of the world, including of the unobservables the theories concern. Both Boyd and Sturgeon have related interests in evolutionary biology and its implications for ethics.
14. Chakravartty, Anjan (2017). "Scientific Realism". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. § 2.1 The Miracle Argument. Retrieved 2021-02-23.
15. Lutz, Matthew; Lenman, James (2021). "Moral Naturalism". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. § 3.2 Cornell Realism. Retrieved 2021-02-23.
16. Pereboom, Derk; Kornblith, Hilary (1991). "The Metaphysics of Irreducibility". Philosophical Studies. 63 (2): 125–145. doi:10.1007/BF00381684. ISSN 0031-8116. JSTOR 4320226. S2CID 170849824.
17. • to which Boyd also contributed three chapters; an Introductory Essay, "On the Current Status of Scientific Realism", and "Observations, Explanatory Power, and Simplicity: Toward a Non-Humean Account"

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)