•  76
    Fictions in Science: Philosophical Essays on Modeling and Idealization (review)
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 25 (2). 2011.
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 25, Issue 2, Page 196-199, June 2011
  •  15
    The Limits of the Relative A Priori
    Soochow Journal of Philosophical Studies 16. 2007.
  •  101
    Russell’s Influence On Carnap’s Aufbau
    Synthese 131 (1): 1-37. 2002.
    This paper concerns the debate on the nature of Rudolf Carnap'sproject in his 1928 book The Logical Structure of the Worldor Aufbau. Michael Friedman and Alan Richardson haveinitiated much of this debate. They claim that the Aufbauis best understood as a work that is firmly grounded inneo-Kantian philosophy. They have made these claims in oppositionto Quine and Goodman's ``received view'' of the Aufbau. Thereceived view sees the Aufbau as an attempt to carry out indetail Russell's external world…Read more
  •  48
    This book offers new perspectives on the history of analytical philosophy, surveying recent scholarship on the philosophical study of mind, language, logic and reality over the course of the last 200 years. Each chapter contributes to a broader engagement with a wider range of figures, topics and disciplines outside of philosophy than has been traditionally associated with the history of analytical philosophy. The book acquaints readers with new aspects of analytical philosophy’s revolutionary p…Read more
  •  72
    Mathematics, Science, and Confirmation Theory
    Philosophy of Science 77 (5): 959-970. 2010.
    This paper begins by distinguishing intrinsic and extrinsic contributions of mathematics to scientific representation. This leads to two investigations into how these different sorts of contributions relate to confirmation. I present a way of accommodating both contributions that complicates the traditional assumptions of confirmation theory. In particular, I argue that subjective Bayesianism does best accounting for extrinsic contributions, while objective Bayesianism is more promising for intr…Read more
  •  49
    Ian Hacking why is there philosophy of mathematics at all? (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (3): 907-912. 2016.
  • Comments on Leiber’s “Russell and Wittgenstein”
    The Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly 125. 2005.
  •  88
    A reserved reading of Carnap's aufbau
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 86 (4). 2005.
    The two most popular approaches to Carnap's 1928 Aufbau are the empiricist reading of Quine and the neo-Kantian readings of Michael Friedman and Alan Richardson. This paper presents a third "reserved" interpretation that emphasizes Carnap's opposition to traditional philosophy and consequent naturalism. The main consideration presented in favor of the reserved reading is Carnap's work on a physical construction system. I argue that Carnap's construction theory was an empirical scientific discipl…Read more
  •  98
    Mathematical explanations of the rainbow
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 42 (1): 13-22. 2011.
    Explanations of three different aspects of the rainbow are considered. The highly mathematical character of these explanations poses some interpretative questions concerning what the success of these explanations tells us about rainbows. I develop a proposal according to which mathematical explanations can highlight what is relevant about a given phenomenon while also indicating what is irrelevant to that phenomenon. This proposal is related to the extensive work by Batterman on asymptotic expla…Read more
  •  35
    From sunspots to the Southern Oscillation: confirming models of large-scale phenomena in meteorology
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40 (1): 45-56. 2009.
    Forthcoming, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science Abstract: The epistemic problem of assessing the support that some evidence confers on a hypothesis is considered using an extended example from the history of meteorology. In this case, and presumably in others, the problem is to develop techniques of data analysis that will link the sort of evidence that can be collected to hypotheses of interest. This problem is solved by applying mathematical tools to structure the data and connec…Read more
  •  101
    This paper identifies one way that a mathematical proof can be more explanatory than another proof. This is by invoking a more abstract kind of entity than the topic of the theorem. These abstract mathematical explanations are identified via an investigation of a canonical instance of modern mathematics: the Galois theory proof that there is no general solution in radicals for fifth-degree polynomial equations. I claim that abstract explanations are best seen as describing a special sort of depe…Read more
  •  38
    Carnap Brought Home: The View from Jena (review)
    Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 12 213-218. 2006.
  •  135
    Russell's version of the multiple-relation theory from the "Theory of Knowledge" manuscript is presented and defended against some objections. A new problem, related to defining truth via correspondence, is reconstructed from Russell's remarks and what we know of Wittgenstein's objection to Russell's theory. In the end, understanding this objection in terms of correspondence helps to link Russell's multiple-relation theory to his later views on propositions.
  •  196
    Abstract Explanations in Science
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (4): 857-882. 2014.
    This article focuses on a case that expert practitioners count as an explanation: a mathematical account of Plateau’s laws for soap films. I argue that this example falls into a class of explanations that I call abstract explanations.explanations involve an appeal to a more abstract entity than the state of affairs being explained. I show that the abstract entity need not be causally relevant to the explanandum for its features to be explanatorily relevant. However, it remains unclear how to uni…Read more
  •  166
    Mathematical Structural Realism
    In Alisa Bokulich & Peter Bokulich (eds.), Scientific Structuralism, Springer Science+business Media. pp. 67--79. 2011.
    Epistemic structural realists have argued that we are in a better epistemic position with respect to the structural claims made by our theories than the non-structural claims. Critics have objected that we cannot make the structure/non-structure distinction precise. I respond that a focus on mathematical structure leads to a clearer understanding of this debate. Unfortunately for the structural realist, however, the contribution that mathematics makes to scientific representation undermines any …Read more
  •  60
    Philosophers unacquainted with the workings of actual scientific practice are prone to imagine that our best scientific theories deliver univocal representations of the physical world that we can use to calibrate our metaphysics and epistemology. Those few philosophers who are also scientists, like Heinrich Hertz, tend to contest this assumption. As Jesper Lützen relates in his scholarly and engaging book, Hertz's Principles of Mechanics contributed to a lively debate about the content of classi…Read more
  •  100
    The Applicability of Mathematics
    Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2010.
    Depending on how it is clarified, the applicability of mathematics can lie anywhere on a spectrum from the completely trivial to the utterly mysterious. At the one extreme, it is obvious that mathematics is used outside of mathematics in cases which range from everyday calculations like the attempt to balance one s checkbook through the most demanding abstract modeling of subatomic particles. The techniques underlying these applications are perfectly clear to those who have mastered them and the…Read more
  •  81
    Bas C. Van Fraassen * Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (3): 677-682. 2011.
  •  76
    Philosophy of Mathematics
    In J. Saatsi & S. French (eds.), Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Continuum. pp. 314-333. 2011.
    For many philosophers of science, mathematics lies closer to logic than it does to the ordinary sciences like physics, biology and economics. While this view may account for the relative neglect of the philosophy of mathematics by philosophers of science, it ignores at least two pressing questions about mathematics that philosophers of science need to be able to answer. First, do the similarities between mathematics and science support the view that mathematics is, after all, another science? Se…Read more
  •  98
    Mathematical Idealization
    Philosophy of Science 74 (5): 957-967. 2007.
    Mathematical idealizations are scientific representations that result from assumptions that are believed to be false, and where mathematics plays a crucial role. I propose a two stage account of how to rank mathematical idealizations that is largely inspired by the semantic view of scientific theories. The paper concludes by considering how this approach to idealization allows for a limited form of scientific realism. ‡I would like to thank Robert Batterman, Gabriele Contessa, Eric Hiddleston, N…Read more
  •  19
    History of Philosophical Analysis [review of Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century ] (review)
    Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 25 (2): 167-171. 2005.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2502\REVIEWS.252 : 2006-02-27 11:52 Reviews  HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS C P Philosophy / Purdue U. West Lafayette,  ,  @. Scott Soames. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Vol. : The Dawn of Analysis; Vol. : The Age of Meaning. Princeton: Princeton U. P., . Pp. xix, ; xxii, . . (hb), . (pb) for…Read more
  •  193
    Carnap's logical structure of the world
    Philosophy Compass 4 (6): 951-961. 2009.
    This article aims to give an overview of Carnap's 1928 book Logical Structure of the World or Aufbau and the most influential interpretations of its significance. After giving an outline of the book in Section 2 , I turn to the first sustained interpretations of the book offered by Goodman and Quine in Section 3 . Section 4 explains how this empirical reductionist interpretation was largely displaced by its main competitor. This is the line of interpretation offered by Friedman and Richardson wh…Read more
  •  35
  •  95
    On Batterman's 'On the Explanatory Role of Mathematics in Empirical Science'
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (1). 2011.
    This discussion note of (Batterman [2010]) clarifies the modest aims of my 'mapping account' of applications of mathematics in science. Once these aims are clarified it becomes clear that Batterman's 'completely new approach' (Batterman [2010], p. 24) is not needed to make sense of his cases of idealized mathematical explanations. Instead, a positive proposal for the explanatory power of such cases can be reconciled with the mapping account.