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112Subsistence versus Sustainable Emissions? Equity and Climate ChangeEnvironmental Philosophy 7 (1): 1-15. 2010.In this essay, I first consider what the implications of global climate change will be regarding issues of equity. Secondly, I consider two types of proposals which focus on sustainable emissions and subsistence rights respectively. Thirdly, I consider where these proposal types conflict. Lastly, I argue under plausible assumptions, these two proposals actually imply similar policies regarding global climate change.
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Pessimism about Ecosystem Ecology: A Reply to SagoffInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
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641Ecological Stability, Model Building, and Environmental Policy: A Reply to Some of the PessimismPhilosophy of Science 68 (3). 2001.Recently, there has been a rise in pessimism concerning what theoretical ecology can offer conservation biologists in the formation of reasonable environmental policies. In this paper, I look at one of the pessimistic arguments offered by Kristin Shrader-Frechette and E. D. McCoy (1993, 1994)--the argument from conceptual imprecision. I suggest that their argument rests on an inadequate account of the concepts of ecological stability and that there has been conceptual progress with respect to co…Read more
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236True Lies: Realism, Robustness, and ModelsPhilosophy of Science 78 (5): 1177-1188. 2011.In this essay, I argue that uneliminated idealizations pose a serious problem for scientific realism. I consider one method for “de-idealizing” models—robustness analysis. However, I argue that unless idealizations are eliminated from an idealized theory and robustness analysis need not do that, scientists are not justified in believing that the theory is true. I consider one example of modeling from the biological sciences that exemplifies the problem.
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