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31Predictive Accuracy as an Achievable Goal of SciencePhilosophy of Science 69 (S3). 2002.What has science actually achieved? A theory of achievement should define what has been achieved, describe the means or methods used in science, and explain how such methods lead to such achievements. Predictive accuracy is one truth-related achievement of science, and there is an explanation of why common scientific practices tend to increase predictive accuracy. Akaike's explanation for the success of AIC is limited to interpolative predictive accuracy. But therein lies the strength of the gen…Read more
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33Wayne Myrvold (2003) has captured an important feature of unified theories, and he has done so in Bayesian terms. What is not clear is whether the virtue of such unification is most clearly understood in terms of Bayesian confirmation. I argue that the virtue of such unification is better understood in terms of other truth-related virtues such as predictive accuracy.
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84Book Review:How the Laws of Physics Lie Nancy Cartwright (review)Philosophy of Science 52 (3): 478-. 1985.
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107Bayes and Bust: Simplicity as a Problem for a Probabilist’s Approach to Confirmation (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (3): 399-424. 1995.The central problem with Bayesian philosophy of science is that it cannot take account of the relevance of simplicity and unification to confirmation, induction, and scientific inference. The standard Bayesian folklore about factoring simplicity into the priors, and convergence theorems as a way of grounding their objectivity are some of the myths that Earman's book does not address adequately. 1Review of John Earman: Bayes or Bust?, Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 1992, £33.75cloth.
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89Miraculous consilience of quantum mechanicsIn Ellery Eells & James Fetzer (eds.), The Place of Probability in Science, Springer. pp. 201--228. 2010.
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13Scientific EvidenceIn Steven French & Juha Saatsi (eds.), Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Continuum. pp. 179. 2011.
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27Type 1: This process occurs for half of the population. For this segment of the population, there is 10% chance of developing the disease. There is a test for the disease such that 90% of the people who have the disease in this case will test positive (event E), while the false positive rate is 10%, which means that there is a 10% chance of testing positive for the disease when they do not have the disease.
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51This chapter examines four solutions to the problem of many models, and finds some fault or limitation with all of them except the last. The first is the naïve empiricist view that best model is the one that best fits the data. The second is based on Popper’s falsificationism. The third approach is to compare models on the basis of some kind of trade off between fit and simplicity. The fourth is the most powerful: Cross validation testing.
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67Unification, explanation, and the composition of causes in Newtonian mechanicsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 19 (1): 55-101. 1988.William Whewell’s philosophy of scientific discovery is applied to the problem of understanding the nature of unification and explanation by the composition of causes in Newtonian mechanics. The essay attempts to demonstrate: the sense in which ”approximate’ laws successfully refer to real physical systems rather than to idealizations of them; why good theoretical constructs are not badly underdetermined by observation; and why, in particular, Newtonian forces are not conventional and how empiri…Read more
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58The debate between Whewell and Mill on the nature of scientific inductionIn Dov M. Gabbay, John Woods & Akihiro Kanamori (eds.), Handbook of the History of Logic, Elsevier. pp. 10--93. 2004.
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45Kenneth Wilson won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1982 for applying renormalization group, which he learnt from quantum field theory (QFT), to problems in statistical physics—the induced magnetization of materials (ferromagnetism) and the evaporation and condensation of fluids (phase transitions). See Wilson (1983). The renormalization group got its name from its early applications in QFT. There, it appeared to be a rather ad hoc method of subtracting away unwanted infinities. The further allegat…Read more
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14Ellery Eells, 1953-2006Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 80 (2). 2006.
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24Wayne Myrvold (2003) has captured an important feature of unified theories, and he has done so in Bayesian terms. What is not clear is whether the virtue of such unification is most clearly understood in terms of Bayesian confirmation. I argue that the virtue of such unification is better understood in terms of other truth-related virtues such as predictive accuracy.
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62Deductive logic is about the validity of arguments. An argument is valid when its conclusion follows deductively from its premises. Here’s an example: If Alice is guilty then Bob is guilty, and Alice is guilty. Therefore, Bob is guilty. The validity of the argument has nothing to do with what the argument is about. It has nothing to do with the meaning, or content, of the argument beyond the meaning of logical phrases such as if…then. Thus, any argument of the following form (called modus ponens…Read more
Areas of Specialization
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Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Philosophy, Misc |
M&E, Misc |
Metaphysics |
Epistemology |
Formal Epistemology |
Realism and Anti-Realism |
Causal Modeling |
Causal Reasoning |