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714Is theology respectable as metaphysics?Zygon 43 (3): 579-592. 2008.Theology involves inquiry into God's nature, God's purposes, and whether certain experiences or pronouncements come From God. These inquiries are metaphysical, part of theology's concern with the veridicality of signs and realities that are independent from humans. Several research programs concerned with the relation between theology and science aim to secure theology's intellectual standing as a metaphysical discipline by showing that it satisfies criteria that make modern science reputable, o…Read more
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1470Correlative Reasoning about Water in Mengzi 6A2Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 15 (2): 193-207. 2016.Mengzi 孟子 6A2 contains the famous water analogy for the innate goodness of human nature. Some evaluate Mengzi’s reasoning as strong and sophisticated; others, as weak or sophistical. I urge for more nuance in our evaluation. Mengzi’s reasoning fares poorly when judged by contemporary standards of analogical strength. However, if we evaluate the analogy as an instance of correlative thinking within a yin-yang 陰陽 cosmology, his reasoning fares well. That cosmology provides good reason to assert th…Read more
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2545An Atheistic Argument from UglinessEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 7 (1): 209-217. 2015.The theistic argument from beauty has what we call an 'evil twin', the argument from ugliness. The argument yields either what we call 'atheist win', or, when faced with aesthetic theodicies, 'agnostic tie' with the argument from beauty.
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18Review of Kurt Pritzl, O.p. (Ed.), Truth: Studies of a Robust Presence (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (4). 2010.
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88When do data provide good evidence for a hypothesis, evidence that warrants an inference to the hypothesis? Standard answers either reject the legitimacy of induction or else allow warranted inference from data to hypothesis when there are suitable relationships between and among the data and hypotheses. The severity account rejects all of these, maintaining instead that the good evidence relation concerns not only relations between data and hypotheses but also the methods for obtaining the data…Read more
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70Constraint‐Based Reasoning for Search and Explanation: Strategies for Understanding Variation and Patterns in BiologyDialectica 70 (3): 343-374. 2016.Life scientists increasingly rely upon abstraction-based modeling and reasoning strategies for understanding biological phenomena. We introduce the notion of constraint-based reasoning as a fruitful tool for conceptualizing some of these developments. One important role of mathematical abstractions is to impose formal constraints on a search space for possible hypotheses and thereby guide the search for plausible causal models. Formal constraints are, however, not only tools for biological expla…Read more
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114Inference to the More Robust ExplanationBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (1): 75-102. 2018.ABSTRACT There is a new argument form within theoretical biology. This form takes as input competing explanatory models; it yields as output the conclusion that one of these models is more plausible than the others. The driving force for this argument form is an analysis showing that one model exhibits more parametric robustness than its competitors. This article examines these inferences to the more robust explanation, analysing them as variants of inference to the best explanation. The article…Read more
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468Diagrams as locality aids for explanation and model construction in cell biologyBiology and Philosophy 27 (5): 705-721. 2012.Using as case studies two early diagrams that represent mechanisms of the cell division cycle, we aim to extend prior philosophical analyses of the roles of diagrams in scientific reasoning, and specifically their role in biological reasoning. The diagrams we discuss are, in practice, integral and indispensible elements of reasoning from experimental data about the cell division cycle to mathematical models of the cycle’s molecular mechanisms. In accordance with prior analyses, the diagrams prov…Read more
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458An Arrovian Impossibility Theorem for the Epistemology of DisagreementLogos and Episteme 3 (1): 97-115. 2012.According to conciliatory views about the epistemology of disagreement, when epistemic peers have conflicting doxastic attitudes toward a proposition and fully disclose to one another the reasons for their attitudes toward that proposition (and neither has independent reason to believe the other to be mistaken), each peer should always change his attitude toward that proposition to one that is closer to the attitudes of those peers with which there is disagreement. According to pure higher-ord…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Physical Science |
Asian Philosophy |
PhilPapers Editorships
The Huayan School of Chinese Buddhism |