Tim Maudlin

Time travel has been a staple of science fiction. With the advent of general relativity it has been entertained by serious physicists. But, especially in the philosophy literature, there have been arguments that time travel is inherently paradoxical. The most famous paradox is the grandfather paradox: you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, thereby preventing your own existence. To avoid inconsistency some circumstance will have to occur which makes you fail in this attempt to kill your grandfather. Doesn't this require some implausible constraint on otherwise unrelated circumstances? We examine such worries in the context of modern physics.

This book on the philosophy of science argues for an empiricism, opposed to the tradition of David Hume, in which singular rather than general causal claims are primary; causal laws express facts about singular causes whereas the general causal claims of science are ascriptions of capacities or causal powers, capacities to make things happen. Taking science as measurement, Cartwright argues that capacities are necessary for science and that these can be measured, provided suitable conditions are met. There are case studies from both econometrics and quantum mechanics.

This essay is born of a misunderstanding. When Barry Loewer mentioned to me that he might be interested in an essay on David Bohm’s version or interpretation of quantum theory, he happened also to mention the work of Wilfrid Sellars, which coincidentally was on his mind. I mistakenly understood that what was wanted was an essay connecting Bohm and Sellars. This directed my thoughts down pathways they would not otherwise have taken, and sent me back to some works of Sellars which had lain neglected on my shelves. What follows is the result of this fortuitous juxtaposition of ideas.

ABSTRACT In “Temporal Passage and the ‘No Alternate Possibilities Argument’”, Jonathan Tallant takes up one objection based on the observation that if time passes at the rate of one second per second there is no other possible rate at which it could pass. The argument rests on the premise that if time passes at some rate then it could have passed at some other rate. Since no alternative rate seems to be coherent, one concludes that time cannot pass at all. The obvious weak point of the NAP is the premise itself.

Truth and Paradox largely consists of three connected technical projects together with a more general account of the nature of truth. The first project is the most familiar: providing an account of how logically complex sentences get assigned truth values on the basis of the truth values assigned to the logically atomic sentences. The second is construction of valid, syntactically specifiable inference rules for a language that includes the familiar logical connectives and the truth predicate. The third is an account of the normative rules governing the assertion of sentences. Let me sketch these in order.

Violations of Bell's Inequality can only be reliably produced if some information about the apparatus setting on one wing is available on the other, requiring superluminal information transmission. In this paper I inquire into the minimum amount of information needed to generate quantum statistics for correlated photons. Reflection on informational constraints clarifies the significance of Fine's Prism models, and allows the construction of several models more powerful than Fine's. These models are more efficient than Fine claims to be possible and work for the full range of possible analyzer settings. It also demonstrates that the division of theories into those that violate parameter independence and those that violate outcome independence sheds no light on the question of superluminal information transmission.

Consider the sentence 'This sentence is not true'. It seems that the sentence can be neither true nor not true, on pain of contradiction. Certain notorious paradoxes like this have bedevilled philosophical theories of truth. Tim Maudlin presents an original account of logic and semantics which deals with these paradoxes, and allows him to set out a new theory of truth-values and the norms governing claims about truth. All philosophers interested in logic and language will find Truth and Paradox a stimulating read

Truth and Paradox largely consists of three connected technical projects together with a more general account of the nature of truth. The first project is the most familiar: providing an account of how logically complex sentences get assigned truth values on the basis of the truth values assigned to the logically atomic sentences. The second is construction of valid, syntactically specifiable inference rules for a language that includes the familiar logical connectives and the truth predicate. The third is an account of the normative rules governing the assertion of sentences. Let me sketch these in order.

Przekład na podstawie: Tim Maudlin, „Distilling Metaphysics from Quantum Physics”, w: The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, red. Michael J. Loux i Dean W. Zimmerman, 461–487 Przełożony tu na język polski tekst „Distilling Metaphysics from Quantum Physics” Tima Maudlina stanowi rozdział z The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics. Autor omawia w nim sześć ważnych zagadnień metafizycznych, na które fizyka kwantowa rzuca nowe światło. Każde z nich naświetla z punktu widzenia trzech podstawowych interpretacji mechaniki kwantowej: teorii kolapsu funkcji falowej, teorii zmiennych ukrytych i interpretacji wieloświatowej. Omówione zagadnienia to determinizm, dookreśloność wartości wielkości fizycznych, rola obserwatora, nieoznaczoność i komplementarność, logika kwantowa, a także splątanie kwantowe i nielokalność.