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What Does the Sociology of Scientific Knowlegde ExplainIn Irving Velody & Robin Williams (eds.), The Politics of Constructionism, Sage Publications. pp. 69--82. 1998.
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48Three grades of normative involvement: Risjord, Stueber, and Henderson on norms and explanationPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 35 (3): 339-352. 2005.What makes for a good explanation of a person’s actions? Their reasons, or soa natural reply goes. But how do reasons function as part of explanations, that is, within an account of the causes of action? Here philosophers divide concerning the logical relation in which reasons stand to actions. For, tradition holds, reasons evaluatively characterized must be causally inert, inasmuch as the normative features cannot be found in any account of the empirical/descriptive. To countenance reasons as c…Read more
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24Dubious liaisons: A review of Alvin Goldman's liaisons: Philosophy meets the cognitive and social sciences (review)Philosophical Psychology 9 (2). 1996.Alvin Goldman's recent collection (Goldman, 1992) includes many of the important and seminal contributions made by him over the last three decades to epistemology, philosophy of mind, and analytic metaphysics. Goldman is an acknowledged leader in efforts to put material from cognitive and social science to good philosophical use. This is the “liaison” which Goldman takes his own work to exemplify and advance. Yet the essays contained in Liaisons chart an important evolution in Goldman's own view…Read more
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22The anti-social epistemology of narrative experimentsSocial Epistemology 5 (4). 1991.No abstract
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34Review of Hilary Kornblith, Knowledge and its Place in Nature (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2003 (12). 2003.
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28New Philosophy of Social Science: Problems of IndeterminacyMetaphilosophy 26 (4): 440-448. 1995.This article defends methodological and theoretical pluralism in the social sciences. While pluralistic, such a philosophy of social science is both pragmatic and normative. Only by facing the problems of such pluralism, including how to resolve the potential conflicts between various methods and theories, is it possible to discover appropriate criteria of adequacy for social scientific explanations and interpretations. So conceived, the social sciences do not give us fixed and universal feature…Read more
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3Book Reviews : Objectivity, Empiricism and Truth. By R. H. Newell. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. Pp. 124. $24.95 (cloth (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 19 (2): 244-247. 1989.
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9MURRAY G. MURPHEY, "Philosophical Foundations of Historical Knowledge" (review)History and Theory 34 (3): 231. 1995.
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607The silence of the norms: The missing historiography of The Structure of Scientific RevolutionsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (4): 545-552. 2013.History has been disparaged since the late 19th century for not conforming to norms of scientific explanation. Nonetheless, as a matter of fact a work of history upends the regnant philosophical conception of science in the second part of the 20th century. Yet despite its impact, Kuhn’s Structure has failed to motivate philosophers to ponder why works of history should be capable of exerting rational influence on an understanding of philosophy of science. But all this constitutes a great irony a…Read more
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137Hayden White and the Aesthetics of HistoriographyHistory of the Human Sciences 5 (1): 17-35. 1992.
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80The epistemology of "epistemology naturalized"Dialectica 53 (2). 1999.Quine's “Epistemology Naturalized” has become part of the canon in epistemology and excited a widespread revival of interest in naturalism. Yet the status accorded the essay is ironic, since both friends and foes of philosophical naturalism deny that Quine makes a plausible case that the methods of naturalism can accommodate the problems of epistemology
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32Review Symposium: S. Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our TimesHistory of the Human Sciences 14 (2): 87-97. 2001.
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69A Rationalist Methodology for the Social SciencesPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 19 (1): 104-108. 1989.
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32Microfoundations Without Foundations: Comments on LittleSouthern Journal of Philosophy 34 (S1): 57-64. 1996.
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220Ways of pastmakingHistory of the Human Sciences 15 (4): 125-143. 2002.Riddles of induction – old or new, Hume’s or Goodman’s – pose unanswered challenges to assumptions that experiences logically legitimate expectations or classifications. The challenges apply both to folk beliefs and to scientific ones. In particular, Goodman’s ‘new riddle’ famously confounds efforts to specify how additional experiences confirm the rightness of currently preferred ways of organizing objects, i.e. our favored theories of what kinds there are.1 His riddle serves to emphasize that nei…Read more
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42Truth in interpretation: The case of psychoanalysisPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 21 (2): 175-195. 1991.This article explores and attempts to resolve some issues that arise when psychoanalytic explanations are construed as a type of historical or narrative explanation. The chief problem is this: If one rejects the claim of narratives to verisimilitude, this appears to divorce the notion of explanation from that of truth. The author examines, in particular, Donald Spence's attempt to deal with the relation of narrative explanations and truth. In his critique of Spence's distinction between narrativ…Read more
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43Editor’s Introduction:“What Does History Matter to...?”Journal of the Philosophy of History 5 (3): 301-307. 2011.
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88The bureaucratic turn: Weber contra Hempel in Fuller's social epistemologyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 34 (3-4). 1991.Like the positivists, Fuller is concerned to demarcate and systematically evaluate scientific claims and practices. Fuller corrects and reforms the positivist enterprise in light of his sociological naturalism. What Fuller's analysis brings to the fore is how the naturalization of epistemology makes the power?knowledge relation into an epistemological issue. Yet, in his writings. Fuller is radically divided with respect to how to react to this fact. Specifically, Fuller vacillates between, on th…Read more
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13Review of Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical Choice (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (8). 2008.
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92On missing Neurath's boat: Some reflections on recent Quine literatureSynthese 61 (2): 205-231. 1984.
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2Michael Krausz, ed., Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 10 (2): 66-70. 1990.
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130Varieties and vagaries of historical explanationJournal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2): 214-226. 2008.For the better part of the 20th century, expositions of issues regarding historical explanation followed a predictable format, one that took as given the nonequivalence of explanations in history and philosophical models of scientific explanation. Ironically, at the present time, the philosophical point of note concerns how the notion of science has itself changed. Debates about explanation in turn need to adapt to this. This prompts the question of whether anything now still makes plausible the…Read more
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21Hayden White in Philosophical Perspective: Review Essay of Herman Paul’s Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (1): 102-111. 2014.For almost half a century, the person most responsible for fomenting brouhahas regarding degrees of plasticity in the writing of histories has been Hayden White. Yet, despite the voluminous responses provoked by White’s work, almost no effort has been made to treat White’s writings in a systematic yet sympathetic way as a philosophy of history. Herman Paul’s book begins to remedy that lack and does so in a carefully considered and extremely scholarly fashion. In his relatively brief six chapters…Read more
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24The epistemology of science after QuineIn Stathis Psillos & Martin Curd (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science, Routledge. pp. 3. 2008.
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St. Louis Roundtable on Philosophy of the Social SciencePhilosophy of the Social Sciences 32 (1): 3-91. 2002.
Santa Cruz, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Social Science |
20th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Physical Science |