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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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161Potency 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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191Inference to the only explanation (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2). 2007.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (forthcoming).
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298Nature'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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48Three conservative KuhnsSocial Epistemology 17 (2 & 3). 2003.This Article does not have an abstract
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90In 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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238Strong 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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42Book reviews (review)This book is part of the Fundamentals in Philosophy series, edited by John Shand, offering introductions to core areas of philosophy which are “not mere bland expositions, and as such are original pieces of philosophy in their own right”. Alexander Bird’s book meets this remit admirably. In my review I shall concentrate on the philosophical argument of the work and set aside its merits as a student text though they compare well with rivals currently on offer.
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13Kuhn on Reference and EssencePhilosophia Scientiae 8 39-71. 2004.La thèse kuhnienne de l’incommensurabilité semble mettre en cause le réalisme scientifique. Une réponse à cette mise en cause consiste à se focaliser sur la continuité de la référence. La théorie causale de la référence, en particulier, semble offrir la possibilité d’une continuité de la référence susceptible de fournir une base pour l’espèce de comparabilité entre théories que requiert le réaliste. Dans « baptiser et rebaptiser : la vulnérabilité des désignations rigides », Kuhn attaque la théo…Read more
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83… And Then Again, He Might Not BeAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (3): 517-521. 2009.In reply to Michael Bertrand, I clarify my view that the problem of physical evil is not an a priori problem but an a posteriori one
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44The philosophy of history of science of Thomas KuhnDiscusiones Filosóficas 13 (21). 2012.Int his article, I argue that Kuhn was a historicist in two respects. First, he was a conservative in Mannheim’s sense—tradition is important for understanding scientific change, and the evaluation of a scientific idea is relative to historical context. Secondly, Kuhn embraced determinism—there is a pattern to scientific change, akin to laws of scientific development. I show that Kuhn’s determinism requires that he is an internalist about the causes of scientific change; Kuhn’s internal- ism con…Read more
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413Kuhn and Philosophy of Science in the Twentieth CenturyAnnals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 12 (2): 61-74. 2004.Thomas Kuhn was undoubtedly the strongest influence on the philosophy of science in the last third of the twentieth century. Yet today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is unclear what his legacy really is. In the philosophy of science there is no characteristically Kuhnian school. This could be because we are all Kuhnians now. But it might also be because Kuhn’s thought, although revolutionary in its time, has since been superseded. In a sense both may be true. We are all Coperni…Read more
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385Overpowering: How the Powers Ontology Has Overreached ItselfMind 125 (498): 341-383. 2016.Many authors have argued in favour of an ontology of properties as powers, and it has been widely argued that this ontology allows us to address certain philosophical problems in novel and illuminating ways, for example, causation, representation, intentionality, free will and liberty. I argue that the ontology of powers, even if successful as an account of fundamental natural properties, does not provide the insight claimed as regards the aforementioned non-fundamental phenomena. I illustrate t…Read more
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75The historical turn in the philosophy of scienceIn Stathis Psillos & Martin Curd (eds.), Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Routledge. pp. 67--77. 2008.
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482Essences and natural kindsIn Robin Le Poidevin, Simons Peter, McGonigal Andrew & Ross P. Cameron (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, Routledge. pp. 497--506. 2009.Essentialism as applied to individuals is the claim that for at least some individuals there are properties that those individuals possess essentially. What it is to possess a property essentially is a matter of debate. To possess a property essentially is often taken to be akin to possessing a property necessarily, but stronger, although this is not a feature of Aristotle’s essentialism, according to which essential properties are those thing could not lose without ceasing to exist. Kit Fine (1…Read more
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124Selection and explanationIn Rethinking Explanation, Springer. pp. 131--136. 2006.Selection explanations explain some non-accidental generalizations in virtue of a selection process. Such explanations are not particulaizable - they do not transfer as explanations of the instances of such generalizations. This is unlike many explanations in the physical sciences, where the explanation of the general fact also provides an explanation of its instances (i.e. standard D-N explanations). Are selection explanations (e.g. in biology) therefore a different kind of explanation? I argue…Read more
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35Can Scientific Practices Put Norms Back into Nature? (review)Metascience 13 (1): 106-108. 2004.Review of Joseph Rouse, How Scientific Practises Matter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003
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13Review of Karl Popper: The Myth of the Framework_; Karl Raimund Popper: _Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: In Defence of Interaction (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (1): 149-151. 1996.
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305Laws and essencesRatio 18 (4). 2005.Those who favour an ontology based on dispositions are thereby able to provide a dispositional essentialist account of the laws of nature. In part 1 of this paper I sketch the dispositional essentialist conception of properties and the concomitant account of laws. In part 2, I characterise various claims about the modal character of properties that fall under the heading ‘quidditism’ and which are consequences of the categoricalist view of properties, which is the alternative to the dispositiona…Read more
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276Abductive knowledge and Holmesian inferenceIn Tamar Szabó Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 1--31. 2005.The usual, comparative, conception of inference to the best explanation (IBE) takes it to be ampliative. In this paper I propose a conception of IBE ('Holmesian inference') that takes it to be a species of eliminative induction and hence not ampliative. This avoids several problems for comparative IBE (for example, how could it be reliable enough to generate knowledge?). My account of Holmesian inference raises the suspicion that it could never be applied, on the grounds that scientific hypothes…Read more
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