Richard Boyd

Richard Newell Boyd (born 19 May 1942) is an American philosopher, who spent most of his career teaching philosophy at Cornell University.

Boyd earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 1970. Boyd's doctoral thesis, directed by Richard Cartwright, was titled A Recursion-Theoretic Characterization of the Ramified Analytical Hierarchy.

Boyd taught for most of his career at Cornell University, though he also taught briefly at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Berkeley. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Boyd is best known for his arguments in favor of scientific realism and moral realism.

In the case of scientific realism, Boyd has been 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 is 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."

His co-edited book The Philosophy of Science (ISBN 0-262-52156-3) is used in undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses.