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2552An 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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469Diagrams 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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459An 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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108The logic of soku in the kyoto schoolPhilosophy East and West 54 (3): 302-321. 2004.Can contradictions be meaningful? How can one assert 'P soku not-P' or 'P and yet not-P' without sacrificing intelligibility? Expanding on previous attempts, mainly by Dilworth and Heisig, to demystify the soku connective, a formal system is presented here for the logic of soku. Through a formal distinction between internal and external negation, grammatical features of the soku connective are shown to be logically irrelevant, and the principle of non-contradiction is preserved. Disparities with…Read more
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135General relativity and the standard model: Why evidence for one does not disconfirm the otherStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 40 (2): 124-132. 2008.General Relativity and the Standard Model often are touted as the most rigorously and extensively confirmed scientific hypotheses of all time. Nonetheless, these theories appear to have consequences that are inconsistent with evidence about phenomena for which, respectively, quantum effects and gravity matter. This paper suggests an explanation for why the theories are not disconfirmed by such evidence. The key to this explanation is an approach to scientific hypotheses that allows their actual …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 |