-
71The truth paysSynthese 43 (3). 1980.Why is truth valuable? Why are true beliefs generally preferable to false beliefs and why should we often be willing to expend energy and resources to obtain the truth? Pragmatist theories of truth, whatever their shortcomings, are the only ones which attempt to answer these questions. According to James’ version of the pragmatic theory.
-
18On The Likelihood Principle and a Supposed AntinomyPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1978. 1978.Allan Birnbaum has alleged that use of a likelihood criterion can find strong evidence against a true hypothesis with probability one. It is shown that, correctly applied, use of the likelihood function does not lead to any such result. Specifically, Birnbaum's example involves composite hypotheses, and, from a Bayesian point of view, the support of a composite hypothesis can be adequately assessed only by averaging the likelihoods of its constituent simple hypotheses.
-
2"I have come to think that the laws of physics are real because my experience with the laws of physics does not seem to me to be very different in any fundamental way from my experience with rocks. For those who have not lived with the laws of physics, I can offer the obvious argument that the laws of physics as we know them work, and there is no other known way of looking at nature that works in anything like the same sense.".
-
20Why is there anything except physics?In Jakob Hohwy & Jesper Kallestrup (eds.), Being Reduced: New Essays on Reduction, Explanation, and Causation, Oxford University Press. 2008.
-
723Two accounts of laws and timePhilosophical Studies 160 (1): 115-137. 2012.Among the most important questions in the metaphysics of science are "What are the natures of fundamental laws and chances?" and "What grounds the direction of time?" My aim in this paper is to examine some connections between these questions, discuss two approaches to answering them and argue in favor of one. Along the way I will raise and comment on a number of issues concerning the relationship between physics and metaphysics and consequences for the subject matter and methodology of metaphys…Read more
-
Mind Matters in Eighty-Fourth Annual Meeting American Philosophical Association, Eastern DivisionJournal of Philosophy 84 (11): 630-642. 1987.
-
8Counterfactuals and the Second LawIn Huw Price & Richard Corry (eds.), Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality: Russell's Republic Revisited, Oxford University Press. 2006.
-
300Why is there anything except physics?Synthese 170 (2). 2009.In the course of defending his view of the relation between the special sciences and physics from Jaegwon Kim’s objections Jerry Fodor asks “So then, why is there anything except physics?” By which he seems to mean to ask if physics is fundamental and complete in its domain how can there be autonomous special science laws. Fodor wavers between epistemological and metaphysical understandings of the autonomy of the special sciences. In my paper I draw out the metaphysical construal of his view and…Read more
-
1Prima Facie obligation: its deconstruction and reconstructionIn Ernest Lepore (ed.), John Searle and His Critics, Blackwell. 1991.
-
140It is not so much a distinct and established academic discipline as it is a sort of boundary, a sort of frontier, across which theoretical physics and modern western philosophy have been interrogating and informing and unsettling one another, for something on the order of four hundred years now, about the character of matter, the nature of space and time, the question of determinism, meaning of chance, the possibility of knowledge, and much else besides.
-
24An argument for strong supervenienceIn Elias E. Savellos & Ümit D. Yalçin (eds.), Supervenience: New Essays, Cambridge University Press. pp. 218--225. 1995.
-
79Wanted Dead or Alive: Two Attempts to Solve Schrodinger's ParadoxPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1990 277-285. 1990.We discuss two recent attempts two solve Schrodinger's cat paradox. One is the modal interpretation developed by Kochen, Healey, Dieks, and van Fraassen. It allows for an observable which pertains to a system to possess a value even when the system is not in an eigenstate of that observable. The other is a recent theory of the collapse of the wave function due to Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber. It posits a dynamics which has the effect of collapsing the state of macroscopic systems. We argue that t…Read more
-
387David Lewis’s Humean Theory of Objective ChancePhilosophy of Science 71 (5): 1115--25. 2004.The most important theories in fundamental physics, quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, posit objective probabilities or chances. As important as chance is there is little agreement about what it is. The usual “interpretations of probability” give very different accounts of chance and there is disagreement concerning which, if any, is capable of accounting for its role in physics. David Lewis has contributed enormously to improving this situation. In his classic paper “A Subjectivist's …Read more
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Physical Science |
Philosophy of Probability |
General Philosophy of Science |