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211A guide to naturalizing semanticsIn C. Wright & Bob Hale (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Blackwell: Oxford. pp. 108-126. 1997.
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115The role of 'conceptual role semantics'Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 23 (July): 305-15. 1982.
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40What is wrong with 'wrongful life' cases?Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 10 (2): 127-146. 1985.torts raise a number of interesting and perplexing philosophical issues. In a suit for ‘wrongful life’, the plaintiff (usually an infant) brings an action (usually against a physician) claiming that some negligent action has caused the plaintiff's life, say by not informing the parents of the likely prospect that their child would be born with severe defects. The most perplexing feature of this is that the plaintiff is claiming that he would have been better off if he had never been born. A numb…Read more
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113Symposiums papers: Two no-collapse interpretations of quantum theoryNoûs 23 (2): 169-186. 1989.
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69Mental causation, or something near enoughIn Brian P. McLaughlin & Jonathan D. Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. pp. 243--64. 2007.
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6From physics to physicalismIn Carl Gillett & Barry Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and its Discontents, Cambridge University Press. 2001.The appeal of materialism lies precisely in this, in its claim to be natural metaphysics within the bounds of science. That a doctrine which promises to gratify our ambition (to know the noumenal) and our caution (not to be unscientific) should have great appeal is hardly something to be wondered at. (Putnam (1983), p.210) Materialism says that all facts, in particular all mental facts, obtain in virtue of the spatio- temporal distribution, and properties, of matter. It was, as Putnam says, “met…Read more
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386Determinism and ChanceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 32 (4): 609-620. 2001.It is generally thought that objective chances for particular events different from 1 and 0 and determinism are incompatible. However, there are important scientific theories whose laws are deterministic but which also assign non-trivial probabilities to events. The most important of these is statistical mechanics whose probabilities are essential to the explanations of thermodynamic phenomena. These probabilities are often construed as 'ignorance' probabilities representing our lack of knowledg…Read more
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63The 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.
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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.
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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.".
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18Why is there anything except physics?In Jakob Hohwy & Jesper Kallestrup (eds.), Being Reduced: New Essays on Reduction, Explanation, and Causation, Oxford University Press. 2008.
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Mind Matters in Eighty-Fourth Annual Meeting American Philosophical Association, Eastern DivisionJournal of Philosophy 84 (11): 630-642. 1987.
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714Two 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
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Physical Science |
Philosophy of Probability |
General Philosophy of Science |