Along with such criteria as truth, comprehensiveness, explanatory adequacy, and simplicity (as well as others), philosophers of science usually also mention predictive accuracy as a criterion of theory choice. But while philosophers have devoted attention to the problem of the logical structure of scientific prediction, it seems that little attention has been devoted to the difficult question of what precisely constitutes predictive accuracy, at least ‘predictive accuracy’ in the sense in which I will discuss it here.

I will in this paper discuss the role of predictive accuracy in theory choice. But before that, I will address the problem of what constitutes predictive accuracy more generally and independently of its role in theory choice. I will approach the problem of predictive accuracy from a pragmaticpoint of view, and then try to assess the role of predictive accuracy in theory choice from that perspective.

It is thought by some philosophers that certain arguments developed by Peter Strawson in Individuals show that Derek Parfit's claim in Reasons and Persons that experiences can be referred to without referring to persons is incoherent. In this paper I argue that Parfit's claim is not threatened by these arguments.

We have conflicting pre-philosophical intuitions about what it means ‘to be true to ourselves.’ On the one hand, autonomy and authenticity seem closely connected to the lucidity of reflectiveness; on the other, they seem tightly interwoven with the immediacy of unreflectiveness. As opposed to a ‘Platonic’ intuition about the inferiority of the unexamined life, we have an equally strong ‘Nietzschean’ intuition about the corrosiveness of the examined life. Broadly speaking, the first intuition is more akin to the tradition of the Enlightenment, and the second, more to that of Romanticism; the one is reminiscent of Descartes and Hume, the other of Rousseau and Herder.

The use of the technical term ‘autonomy’ and the concomitant term ‘self’ is primarily limited to philosophy, while in daily life ‘freedom’ and ‘person,’ respectively, are used instead. Unfortunately, in their deployment of these technical terms philosophers have generally failed to acknowledge the two modes of ‘being true to ourselves’ associated with the Enlightenment and Romanticism, for they usually employ the concept of autonomy in a unitary way.

Leading accounts of personal autonomy are content-neutral: they insist that there are no a priori constraints on the content of the desires or values that might motivate an autonomous action. In Gerald Dworkin's provocative words, ‘the autonomous person can be a tyrant or a slave, a saint or sinner, a rugged individualist or champion of fraternity, a leader or follower.’ ‘There is nothing in the idea of autonomy that precludes a person from saying, “I want to be the kind of person who acts at the command of others. I define myself as a slave and endorse those attitudes and preferences. My autonomy consists in being a slave.” ’ John Christman similarly claims that ‘any desire, no matter how evil, self-sacrificing, or slavish it might be’ could be autonomously formed. The same seems to apply to Harry Frankfurt's view, that actions are autonomous if they stem from second-order volitions that reflect what the agent cares about; it puts no constraints on the content of what a person might care about. All of these accounts hold that the mere content of a desire or value is never sufficient to rule out that it might be autonomously acted on by someone.

Peirce is often credited with having formulated a pragmatic theory of truth. This can be misleading, if it is assumed that Peirce was chiefly interested in providing a metaphysical analysis of the immediate conditions under which a belief or proposition is true, or the conditions under which a proposition or belief is said to be madetrue. Cheryl Misak has exposed the subtleties in Peirce's discussion of truth, especially showing the difficulties faced by any ascription to him of an analytic definition of truth. In this paper I follow Misak in urging that Peirce's contribution to the philosophical discussion about the nature of truth was not of that kind. What makes his pragmatic approach distinctive is that rather than attempting to state the nature of truth per se, it attempts to uncover the beliefs and expectations we commit ourselves to when we make specific claims that such and such is true or is the case.