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405The Ultimate Argument Against Armstrong’s Contingent Necessitation View of LawsAnalysis 65 (2): 147-55. 2005.I show that Armstrong’s view of laws as second-order contingent relations of ‘necessitation’ among categorical properties faces a dilemma. The necessitation relation confers a relation of extensional inclusion (‘constant conjunction’) on its relata. It does so either necessarily or contingently. If necessarily, it is not a categorical relation (in the relevant sense). If contingently, then an explanation is required of how it confers extensional inclusion. That explanation will need to appeal to…Read more
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3110 Kuhn, Naturalism, and the Social Study of ScienceIn Vasō Kintē & Theodore Arabatzis (eds.), Kuhn's The structure of scientific revolutions revisited, Routledge. pp. 205. 2012.
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366Resemblance nominalism and counterpartsAnalysis 63 (3). 2003.In his (2002) Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra provides a powerful articulation of the claim that Resemblance Nominalism provides the best answer to the so-called Problem of Universals. Resemblance Nominalism has not been popular for some time, and one influential reason for this is the widespread belief that Resemblance Nominalism cannot dispense with all universals. The realist critics appeal to what is known as Russell’s Regress (cf. Russell 1997). If properties are to be explained in terms of one ob…Read more
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191Inference to the only explanation (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2). 2007.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (forthcoming).
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162Potency and ModalitySynthese 149 (3): 491-508. 2006.Let us call a property that is essentially dispositional a potency.1 David Armstrong thinks that potencies do not exist. All sparse properties are essentially categorical, where sparse properties are the explanatory properties of the type science seeks to discover. An alternative view, but not the only one, is that all sparse properties are potencies or supervene upon them. In this paper I shall consider the differences between these views, in particular the objections Armstrong raises against p…Read more
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48Three conservative KuhnsSocial Epistemology 17 (2 & 3). 2003.This Article does not have an abstract
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95In this article I take a loose, functional approach to defining induction: Inductive forms of reasoning include those prima facie reasonable inference patterns that one finds in science and elsewhere that are not clearly deductive. Inductive inference is often taken to be reasoning from the observed to the unobserved. But that is incorrect, since the premises of inductive inferences may themselves be the results of prior inductions. A broader conception of inductive inference regards any ampliat…Read more
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304Nature's Metaphysics: Laws and PropertiesOxford University Press. 2007.Professional philosophers and advanced students working in metaphysics and the philosophy of science will find this book both provocative and stimulating.
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243Strong necessitarianism: The nomological identity of possible worldsRatio 17 (3). 2004.Dispositional essentialism, a plausible view about the natures of (sparse or natural) properties, yields a satisfying explanation of the nature of laws also. The resulting necessitarian conception of laws comes in a weaker version, which allows differences between possible worlds as regards which laws hold in those worlds and a stronger version that does not. The main aim of this paper is to articulate what is involved in accepting the stronger version, most especially the consequence that all p…Read more
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2Discovering the essences of natural kindsIn Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds, Routledge. 2010.
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