Richard Boyd

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 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. and the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. And, after his retirement from Cornell, he also taught at Lewis & Clark College.

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

"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. .