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496Optimism about the pessimistic inductionIn P. D. Magnus & Jacob Busch (eds.), New waves in philosophy of science, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 29-58. 2009.How confident does the history of science allow us to be about our current well-tested scientific theories, and why? The scientific realist thinks we are well within our rights to believe our best-tested theories, or some aspects of them, are approximately true.2 Ambitious arguments have been made to this effect, such as that over historical time our scientific theories are converging to the truth, that the retention of concepts and claims is evidence for this, and that there can be no other ser…Read more
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127Précis of tracking truthPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (1): 213-222. 2009.In Tracking Truth I undertook a broader project than is typical today toward questions about knowledge, evidence, and scientific realism. The range of knowledge phenomena is much wider than the kind of homely examples—such as ‘‘She has a bee in her bonnet’’—that are often the fare in discussions of knowledge. Scientists have knowledge gained in sophisticated and deliberate ways, and non-human animals have reflexive and rudimentary epistemic achievements that we can easily slip into calling ‘‘kno…Read more
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17Peter Achinstein. The Book of Evidence. 290 pp., index. London: Oxford University Press, 2001. $49.95 (review)Isis 94 (1): 203-204. 2003.
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280Discussion note: Positive relevance defendedPhilosophy of Science 71 (1): 110-116. 2004.This paper addresses two examples due to Peter Achinstein purporting to show that the positive relevance view of evidence is too strong, that is, that evidence need not raise the probability of what it is evidence for. The first example can work only if it makes a false assumption. The second example fails because what Achinstein claims is evidence is redundant with information we already have. Without these examples Achinstein is left without motivation for his account of evidence, which uses t…Read more
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290Justification and the growth of errorPhilosophical Studies 165 (2): 527-551. 2013.It is widely accepted that in fallible reasoning potential error necessarily increases with every additional step, whether inferences or premises, because it grows in the same way that the probability of a lengthening conjunction shrinks. As it stands, this is disappointing but, I will argue, not out of keeping with our experience. However, consulting an expert, proof-checking, constructing gap-free proofs, and gathering more evidence for a given conclusion also add more steps, and we think thes…Read more
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393Closure On SkepticismJournal of Philosophy 107 (5): 243-256. 2010.It is received wisdom that the skeptic has a devastating line of argument in the following. You probably think, he says, that you know that you have hands. But if you knew that you had hands, then you would also know that you were not a brain in a vat, a brain suspended in fluid with electrodes feeding you perfectly coordinated impressions that are generated by a supercomputer, of a world that looks and moves just like this one. You would know you weren’t in this state if you knew you had hands,…Read more
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379Knowledge of Our Own BeliefsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (3): 45-69. 2016.There is a widespread view that in order to be rational we must mostly know what we believe. In the probabilistic tradition this is defended by arguments that a person who failed to have this knowledge would be vulnerable to sure loss, or probabilistically incoherent. I argue that even gross failure to know one's own beliefs need not expose one to sure loss, and does not if we follow a generalization of the standard bridge principle between first-order and second-order beliefs. This makes it pos…Read more
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358Copernicus, Kant, and the anthropic cosmological principlesStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 34 (1): 5-35. 2003.In the last three decades several cosmological principles and styles of reasoning termed 'anthropic' have been introduced into physics research and popular accounts of the universe and human beings' place in it. I discuss the circumstances of 'fine tuning' that have motivated this development, and what is common among the principles. I examine the two primary principles, and find a sharp difference between these 'Weak' and 'Strong' varieties: contrary to the view of the progenitors that all anth…Read more
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33Over the centuries since the modern scientific revolution that started with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, two things have changed that have required reorientation of our assumptions and re-education of our reflexes. First, we have learned that even the very best science is fallible; eminently successful theories investigated and supported through the best methods, and by the best evidence available, might be not just incomplete but wrong. That is, it is possible to have a justified be…Read more
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160Love SciencePhilosophy Department Newsletter UC Berkeley 2 4-5. 2008.Disclaimer: This work on marginal science has not been funded by the National Science Foundation.
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193Fallibility and AuthorityIn William Sims Bainbridge (ed.), Leadership in Science and Technology: A Reference Handbook, Sage. 2012.Over the centuries since the modern scientific revolution that started with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, two things have changed that have required reorientation of our assumptions and re-education of our reflexes. First, we have learned that even the very best science is fallible; eminently successful theories investigated and supported through the best methods, and by the best evidence available, might be not just incomplete but wrong. That is, it is possible to have a justified be…Read more
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19Warren Goldfarb. Deductive logic. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 2003, xv + 292 pp (review)Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 10 (4): 570-573. 2004.
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332Alternate Possibilities and their EntertainmentPhilosophy 73 (4): 559-571. 1998.In this paper it is argued that Frankfurt's and Strawson's defenses of compatibilism are insufficient due to neglected features of the role of alternate possibilities in assigning moral responsibility. An attempt is made to locate more adequately the genuine source of tension between free will and determinism, in a crowding phenomenon in the view of an action which our concept of responsibility has not grown up coping with. Finally, an argument is made that due to the nature of belief we can bel…Read more
Areas of Specialization
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Epistemology |
Formal Epistemology |
Knowledge |
Scientific Method |
Probabilistic Reasoning |
Bayesian Reasoning |
Philosophy of Probability |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
General Philosophy of Science |