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19Get with the program: Kasparov, deep blue, and accusations of unsportsthinglike conductJournal of Applied Philosophy 15 (2). 1998.Garry Kasparov made two allegations of unfairness in his recent chess match with the computer ‘Deep Blue’. The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether the ethos of the contest would be violated if the purported activities had occurred and on what grounds. Kasparov’s first allegation, that the program was tampered with during play, would if true, violate fair play as it would encroach on Deep Blue’s autonomy, a necessary condition for fair play in individual strategic endeavours. The most…Read more
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13Deep tautologiesPragmatics and Cognition 9 (2): 279-291. 2001.The standard understanding of tautologies is that they are semantically vacuous. Yet tautological utterances occur frequently in conversational discourse. One approach contends that apparent tautological statements are either genuinely tautologous and thereby semantically vacuous or are what we term “pseudo-tautologies”, i.e., sentences that only bear a formal syntactic resemblance to tautologies but are not in fact tautologous. Another approach follows Grice and asserts that the meaning of a ta…Read more
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75Restoring ambiguity to Achinstein's account of evidenceBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (2): 269-285. 2004., Peter Achinstein argues against the long-standing claim that ‘evidence’ is ambiguous in possessing a sense of confirming evidence and a sense of supporting evidence. He argues that explications of supporting evidence will necessarily violate his contentions that evidence is a discontinuous ‘threshold concept’ and that any philosophical account of supporting evidence will be too weak to be useful to working scientists. But an account of supporting evidence may be formulated which includes Achin…Read more
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32Retroductive Analogy: How to and How Not to Make Claims of Good Reasons to Believe in Evolutionary and Anti-Evolutionary Hypotheses (review)Argumentation 24 (1): 71-84. 2010.This paper describes an argumentative fallacy we call ‘Retroductive Analogy.’ It occurs when the ability of a favored hypothesis to explain some phenomena, together with the fact that hypotheses of a similar sort are well supported, is taken to be sufficient evidence to accept the hypothesis. This fallacy derives from the retroductive or abductive form of reasoning described by Charles Sanders Peirce. According to Peirce’s account, retroduction can provide good reasons to pursue a hypothesis but…Read more
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34If I Had a Hammer: Why Logical Positivism Better Accounts for the Need for Gender and Cultural StudiesStudies in Practical Philosophy 2 (2): 150-166. 2000.
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11Avoiding the Super-Naturalistic Fallacy: Practical Reasoning and the Insightful UndergraduateJournal of Thought 37 (3). 2002.
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22Einstein's Jewish science: physics at the intersection of politics and religionJohns Hopkins University Press. 2012.Introduction : Einstein's Jewish science -- Is Einstein a Jew? -- Is relativity pregnant with Jewish concepts? -- Why did a Jew formulate the theory of relativity? -- Is the theory of relativity political science or scientific politics? -- Einstein and the Jewish intelligentsia -- Einstein's liberal science? -- Conclusion : Einstein's cosmopolitan science.
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Physical Science |
General Philosophy of Science |