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31The Virtues of Vagueness in the Languages of ScienceDialogue 14 (2): 281-305. 1975.Philosophers have traditionally decried vagueness as an unmitigated evil, and natural scientists have consistently agreed with them. Nevertheless, as I hope to show, the vagueness of scientific terms has some important advantages for the theories in which these terms figure. In so arguing I do not mean to put the best face on some unpleasant facts or to make a virtue out of a necessity. I shall begin, however, by arguing that on some contemporary accounts of scientific language the vagueness of …Read more
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13Causation and Counterfactuals: Lewis' Treatment ReconsideredDialogue 18 (2): 209-219. 1979.In this paper I bring together and discuss claims that David Lewis has made in Counterfactuals, and in “Causation,” and explore a number of difficulties which the views of these two works make for each other. If these difficulties are as serious as I suggest, they will require revision or rejection of the view of causation that Lewis defends.
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41Protagoras Among the PhysicistsDialogue 22 (2): 311-317. 1983.Scientific realism at least in large measure reflects the conviction that physics limns the true nature of reality; that it is the right metaphysical picture of things. This conviction is in turn a product of the failure of positivism's attempt to expunge metaphysics from the corpus of philosophically respectable activities. Since natural science is objective knowledge of the worldpar excellencepost-positivists have embraced it as the ontology which their predecessors had failed to make unnecess…Read more
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14Welfare, the Social Issues in Philosophical Perspective. By Nicholas Rescher, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 1972. Pp. xii, 186. $7.95 (review)Dialogue 12 (1): 120-124. 1973.
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87Laws, Damn Laws, and Ceteris Paribus ClausesSouthern Journal of Philosophy 34 (S1): 183-204. 1996.
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15Prospects for the Elimination of Tastes from Economics and EthicsSocial Philosophy and Policy 2 (2): 48. 1985.De gustibus non est disputandum. This maxim reflects a fundamental problem both for the study of markets and for the concern with morals. The problem is the intractability of tastes coupled with their indispensability for both positive and normative economics. Tastes are indispensable in positive microeconomic theory because, under the label ‘preferences,’ they, together with expectations, determine choice and behavior. Tastes are equally indispensable to welfare economics' conception of morally…Read more
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61The Human Genome Project: Research Tactics and Economic StrategiesSocial Philosophy and Policy 13 (2): 1. 1996.In the Museum of Science and Technology in San Jose, California, there is a display dedicated to advances in biotechnology. Most prominent in the display is a double helix of telephone books stacked in two staggered spirals from the floor to the ceiling twenty-five feet above. The books are said to represent the current state of our knowledge of the eukaryotic genome: the primary sequences of DNA polynucleotides for the gene products which have been discovered so far in the twenty years since cl…Read more
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74Economics is Too Important to Be Left to the RhetoriciansEconomics and Philosophy 4 (1): 129. 1988.
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15Rhetoric is not Important Enough for Economists to Bother AboutEconomics and Philosophy 4 (1): 173. 1988.
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82Lakatosian Consolations for EconomicsEconomics and Philosophy 2 (1): 127. 1986.The F-twist is giving way to the methodology of scientific research programs. Milton Friedman's “Methodology for Economics” is being supplanted as the orthodox rationale for neoclassical economics by Imre Lakatos' account of scientific respectability. Friedman's instrumentalist thesis that theories are to be judged by the confirmation of their consequences and not the realism of their assumptions has long been widely endorsed by economists, under Paul Samuelson's catchy rubric “the F-twist.” It …Read more
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28Mackie and Shoemaker on dispositions and propertiesMidwest Studies in Philosophy 9 (1): 77-91. 1984.
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45Philosophy of biology: a contemporary introductionRoutledge. 2008.EM Music Education /EM is a collection of thematically organized essays that present an historical background of the picture of education first in Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, then Early-Modern Europe. The bulk of the book focuses on American education up to the present. This third edition includes readings by Orff, Kodály, Sinichi Suzuki, William Channing Woodbridge, Allan Britton, and Charles Leonhard. In addition, essays include timely topics on feminism, diversity, cognitive psych, test…Read more
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51Reductionism (and antireductionism) in biologyIn David L. Hull & Michael Ruse (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, Cambridge University Press. pp. 349--368. 2007.
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134Darwinian reductionism, or, How to stop worrying and love molecular biologyUniversity of Chicago Press. 2006.After the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, scientists working in molecular biology embraced reductionism—the theory that all complex systems can be understood in terms of their components. Reductionism, however, has been widely resisted by both nonmolecular biologists and scientists working outside the field of biology. Many of these antireductionists, nevertheless, embrace the notion of physicalism—the idea that all biological processes are physical in nature. How, Alexander Rosenberg…Read more
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66Darwinism in philosophy, social science, and policyCambridge University Press. 2000.A collection of essays by Alexander Rosenberg, the distinguished philosopher of science. The essays cover three broad areas related to Darwinian thought and naturalism: the first deals with the solution of philosophical problems such as reductionism, the second with the development of social theories, and the third with the intersection of evolutionary biology with economics, political philosophy, and public policy. Specific papers deal with naturalistic epistemology, the limits of reductionism,…Read more
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86Instrumental Biology, or the Disunity of ScienceUniversity of Chicago Press. 1994.Do the sciences aim to uncover the structure of nature, or are they ultimately a practical means of controlling our environment? In Instrumental Biology, or the Disunity of Science, Alexander Rosenberg argues that while physics and chemistry can develop laws that reveal the structure of natural phenomena, biology is fated to be a practical, instrumental discipline. Because of the complexity produced by natural selection, and because of the limits on human cognition, scientists are prevented from…Read more
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187Philosophy of social scienceWestview Press. 1988.This is an expanded and thoroughly revised edition of the widely adopted introduction to the philosophical foundations of the human sciences. Ranging from cultural anthropology to mathematical economics, Alexander Rosenberg leads the reader through behaviorism, naturalism, interpretativism about human action, and macrosocial scientific perspectives, illuminating the motivation and strategy of each.Rewritten throughout to increase accessibility, this new edition retains the remarkable achievement…Read more
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172Economics: mathematical politics or science of diminishing returns?University of Chicago Press. 1992.Economics today cannot predict the likely outcome of specific events any better than it could in the time of Adam Smith. This is Alexander Rosenberg's controversial challenge to the scientific status of economics. Rosenberg explains that the defining characteristic of any science is predictive improvability--the capacity to create more precise forecasts by evaluating the success of earlier predictions--and he forcefully argues that because economics has not been able to increase its predictive p…Read more
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23The past recaptured: Mongin on the problem of realism in economicsPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 18 (3): 379-381. 1988.
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20On the interanimation of micro and macroeconomicsPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 6 (1): 35-53. 1976.
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96Review symposium : Can economic theory explain everything?Philosophy of the Social Sciences 9 (4): 509-529. 1979.
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Arizona State UniversityPhilosophy - School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious StudiesProfessor (Part-time)
Durham, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Social Science |