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59What Becomes of a Causal Set?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 2016.Unlike the relativity theory it seeks to replace, causal set theory has been interpreted to leave space for a substantive, though perhaps ‘localized’, form of ‘becoming’. The possibility of fundamental becoming is nourished by the fact that the analogue of Stein’s theorem from special relativity does not hold in causal set theory. Despite this, we find that in many ways, the debate concerning becoming parallels the well-rehearsed lines it follows in the domain of relativity. We present, however,…Read more
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16Response to CriticsAustralasian Philosophical Review 5 (3): 309-321. 2021.Let me begin by sincerely thanking the commentators for taking the time to share their insightful reactions to the target article [Callender 2022a]. I am very fortunate to have so many talented, di...
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16Temporal Neutrality Implies Exponential Temporal DiscountingPhilosophy of Science 1-13. forthcoming.How should one discount utility across time? The conventional wisdom in social science is that one should use an exponential discount function. Such a function is a representation of the axioms that provide a well-defined utility function plus a condition known as stationarity. Yet stationarity doesnt really have much intuitive normative pull on its own. Here I try to cast it in a normative glow by deriving stationarity from two explicitly normative premises, both suggested by the philosophical …Read more
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380The Normative Standard for Future DiscountingAustralasian Philosophical Review 5 (3): 227-253. 2021.This paper challenges the conventional wisdom dominating the social sciences and philosophy regarding temporal discounting, the practice of discounting the value of future utility when making decisions. Although there are sharp disagreements about temporal discounting, a kind of standard model has arisen, one that begins with a normative standard about how we should make intertemporal comparisons of utility. This standard demands that in so far as one is rational one discounts utilities at futur…Read more
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160Can we quarantine the quantum blight?In Steven French & Juha Saatsi (eds.), Scientific Realism and the Quantum, Oxford University Press. 2020.No shield can protect scientific realism from dealing with the quantum measurement problem. One may be able to erect barriers around the observable or classical, preserving a realism about tables, chairs and the like, but there is no safety zone within the quantum realm, the domain of our best physical theory. The upshot is not necessarily that scientific realism is in trouble. That conclusion demands further arguments. The lesson instead may be that scientific realists ought to stake their case…Read more
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28On the Horns of a Dilemma: Let the Northern White Rhino Vanish or Intervene?Ethics, Policy and Environment 26 (2): 318-332. 2023.Two females, Nadine and Fatu, are the sole surviving Northern White Rhinos (NWR). The subspecies is functionally extinct. Hope for NWR now lies in emerging reproductive and genetic technologies, which could potentially produce NWR from induced pluripotent stem cells. What is the rationale for this project? This question raises almost every philosophical issue facing conservation science today. I argue that NWR recovery is hard to justify via many traditional paths (e.g., historical fidelity, eco…Read more
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346I show how the two great Humean ways of understanding laws of nature, projectivism and systems theory, have unwittingly reprised developments in metaethics over the past century. This demonstration helps us explain and understand trends in both literatures. It also allows work on laws to “leap- frog” over the birth of many new positions, the nomic counterparts of new theories in metaethics. However, like leap-frogging from agriculture to the internet age, it’s hardly clear that we’ve landed in a…Read more
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123Review article. The view from no-whenBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (1): 135-159. 1998.
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53Quantum Mechanics: Keeping It Real?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (4): 837-851. 2023.This article is an introduction to and advertisement of Erwin Schrödinger’s little-known real-valued wave equation, the first published time dependent Schrödinger equation. I argue that this equation is not merely a historical curiosity. Not only does it show that quantum mechanics need not be viewed as essentially complex-valued, but the real formalism also provides a deep insight into the puzzling nature of time reversal in a quantum world. It is hoped that this observation will stimulate the …Read more
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164Humean supervenience and rotating homogeneous matterMind 110 (437): 25-44. 2001.is the thesis that everything supervenes upon the spatiotemporal distribution of local intrinsic qualities. A recent threat to HS, originating in thought experiments by Armstrong and Kripke, claims that the mere possibility of rotating homogeneous discs proves HS false. I argue that the rotating disc argument (RDA) fails. If I am right, Humeans needn't abandon or alter HS to make sense of rotating homogeneous discs. Homogeneous discs, as necessarily understood by RDA, are not the sorts of things…Read more
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18Physics Meets Philosophy at the Planck Scale: Contemporary Theories in Quantum GravityCambridge University Press. 2001.Was the first book to examine the exciting area of overlap between philosophy and quantum mechanics with chapters by leading experts from around the world.
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147What Becomes of a Causal Set?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (3): 907-925. 2017.ABSTRACT Unlike the relativity theory it seeks to replace, causal set theory has been interpreted to leave space for a substantive, though perhaps ‘localized’, form of ‘becoming’. The possibility of fundamental becoming is nourished by the fact that the analogue of Stein’s theorem from special relativity does not hold in CST. Despite this, we find that in many ways, the debate concerning becoming parallels the well-rehearsed lines it follows in the domain of relativity. We present, however, some…Read more
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57The past histories of moleculesIn Claus Beisbart & Stephan Hartmann (eds.), Probabilities in Physics, Oxford University Press. pp. 83--113. 2011.This chapter unfolds a central philosophical problem of statistical mechanics. This problem lies in a clash between the Static Probabilities offered by statistical mechanics and the Dynamic Probabilities provided by classical or quantum mechanics. The chapter looks at the Boltzmann and Gibbs approaches in statistical mechanics and construes some of the great controversies in the field — for instance the Reversibility Paradox — as instances of this conflict. It furthermore argues that a response …Read more
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48Time, flow, and spaceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 42. 2019.Does a temporal dual process theory explain the illusive flow of time? I point out one shortcoming of such a theory and propose an alternative that does not require either dual cognitive processes or demand such a stark asymmetry between space and time in the brain.
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55Chance and Temporal Asymmetry, edited by Alastair Wilson: Oxford: Routledge, 2014, pp. vii + 297, £45 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (1): 209-210. 2016.
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611Time in CosmologyIn Eleanor Knox & Alastair Wilson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics, Routledge. 2022.Readers familiar with the workhorse of cosmology, the hot big bang model, may think that cosmology raises little of interest about time. As cosmological models are just relativistic spacetimes, time is understood just as it is in relativity theory, and all cosmology adds is a few bells and whistles such as inflation and the big bang and no more. The aim of this chapter is to show that this opinion is not completely right...and may well be dead wrong. In our survey, we show how the hot big bang m…Read more
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153Trouble in Paradise?The Monist 80 (1): 24-43. 1997.Throughout its history, Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics has been systematically misunderstood and ignored. It was often dismissed for reasons having more to do with politics, religion, positivism, and sloppy thought, than for reasons central to physics. Still, like any physical theory, Bohm's theory faces challenges of varying degrees of severity. Here we review and evaluate some of these challenges.
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82On April 1, 2016, at the Annual Meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, a book symposium, organized by Alyssa Ney, was held in honor of David Albert’s After Physics. All participants agreed that it was a valuable and enlightening session. We have decided that it would be useful, for those who weren’t present, to make our remarks publicly available. Please bear in mind that what follows are remarks prepared for the session, and that on some points participants m…Read more
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148Taking Thermodynamics Too SeriouslyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 32 (4): 539-553. 2001.This paper discusses the mistake of understanding the laws and concepts of thermodynamics too literally in the foundations of statistical mechanics. Arguing that this error is still made in subtle ways, the article explores its occurrence in three examples: the Second Law, the concept of equilibrium and the definition of phase transitions.
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204What is 'the problem of the direction of time'?Philosophy of Science 64 (4): 234. 1997.This paper searches for an explicit expression of the so-called problem of the direction of time. I argue that the traditional version of the problem is an artifact of a mistaken view in the foundations of statistical mechanics, and that to the degree it is a problem, it is really one general to all the special sciences. I then search the residue of the traditional problem for any remaining difficulty particular to time's arrow and find that there is a special puzzle for some types of scientific…Read more
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100Time, Reality & Experience (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2002.Collection of original essays by leading philosophers on a range of questions about time.
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12Time, Reality and Experience (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2002.Why does time seem to flow in one direction? Can we influence the past? Is only the present real? Does relativity conflict with our common understanding of time? How does time relate to free will? Could science do away with time? These questions and others about time are among the most puzzling problems in philosophy and science. In this exciting collection of original articles, eminent philosophers propose novel answers to these and other questions. Based on the latest research in philosophy an…Read more
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193Time's ontic voltageIn Adrian Bardon (ed.), The Future of the Philosophy of Time, Routledge. pp. 73-94. 2011.Philosophy of time, as practiced throughout the last hundred years, is both language- and existence-obsessed. It is language-obsessed in the sense that the primary venue for attacking questions about the nature of time—in sharp contrast to the primary venue for questions about space—has been philosophy of language. Although other areas of philosophy have long recognized that there is a yawning gap between language and the world, the message is spreading slowly in philosophy of time.[1] Since twe…Read more
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447Reducing thermodynamics to statistical mechanics: The case of entropyJournal of Philosophy 96 (7): 348-373. 1999.This article argues that most of the approaches to the foundations of statistical mechanics have severed their link with the original foundational project, the project of demonstrating how real mechanical systems can behave thermodynamically.
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68The emergence and interpretation of probability in Bohmian mechanicsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 38 (2): 351-370. 2007.A persistent question about the deBroglie–Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics concerns the understanding of Born’s rule in the theory. Where do the quantum mechanical probabilities come from? How are they to be interpreted? These are the problems of emergence and interpretation. In more than 50 years no consensus regarding the answers has been achieved. Indeed, mirroring the foundational disputes in statistical mechanics, the answers to each question are surprisingly diverse. This paper is …Read more
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48Review of Robin le poidevin, The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (7). 2008.
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129The metaphysics of time reversal: Hutchison on classical mechanicsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (3): 331-340. 1995.What grounds the standard claim that classical mechanics is time-reversal invariant? Hutchison (1993, 1995) challenges the conventional reasoning underlying the belief that classical mechanics is time reversal invariant and argues that it is not in any well-defined sense. I find a defensible criterion that will exclude his cases, thereby rescuing a sense in which we can say that classical mechanics is time reversal invariant.
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37Answers in search of a question: ‘proofs’ of the tri-dimensionality of spaceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 36 (1): 113-136. 2005.From Kant’s first published work to recent articles in the physics literature, philosophers and physicists have long sought an answer to the question, why does space have three dimensions. In this paper, I will flesh out Kant’s claim with a brief detour through Gauss’ law. I then describe Büchel’s version of the common argument that stable orbits are possible only if space is three-dimensional. After examining objections by Russell and van Fraassen, I develop three original criticisms of my own.…Read more