•  15
    Rescorla explores the relation between Reflection, Conditionalization, and Dutch book arguments in the presence of a weakened concept of sure loss and weakened conditions of self‐transparency for doxastic agents. The literature about Reflection and about Dutch Book arguments, though overlapping, are distinct, and its history illuminates the import of Rescorla's investigation. With examples from a previous debate in the 70s and results about Reflection and Conditionalization in the 80s, I propose…Read more
  •  8
    A Landscape of Logics beyond the Deduction Theorem
    Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 26 (1): 25-38. 2022.
    Philosophical issues often turn into logic. That is certainly true of Moore’s Paradox, which tends to appear and reappear in many philosophical contexts. There is no doubt that its study belongs to pragmatics rather than semantics or syntax. But it is also true that issues in pragmatics can often be studied fruitfully by attending to their projection, so to speak, onto the levels of semantics or syntax — just in the way that problems in spherical geometry are often illuminated by the study of pr…Read more
  •  67
    Time in physical and narrative structure
    In John B. Bender & David E. Wellbery (eds.), Chronotypes: the construction of time, Stanford University Press. pp. 19-37. 1991.
    When the reader turns to a text, he conceives of the narrated events as ordered in time. When the natural philosopher turns to the world, he also conceives of its events as ordered in time—or lately, in space-time. But each has the task of constituting this order on the basis of clues present in what is to be ordered. Interrogating the parallels to be found in their problems and methods, I shall argue that in both cases the definiteness of the relation between the order and what is ordered resid…Read more
  •  7
    The Experimental Side of Modeling (edited book)
    Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. 2018.
    An innovative, multifaceted approach to scientific experiments as designed by and shaped through interaction with the modeling process The role of scientific modeling in mediation between theories and phenomena is a critical topic within the philosophy of science, touching on issues from climate modeling to synthetic models in biology, high energy particle physics, and cognitive sciences. Offering a radically new conception of the role of data in the scientific modeling process as well as a new …Read more
  •  22
    What is Scientific Realism?
    Spontaneous Generations 9 (1): 12-25. 2018.
    Decades of debate about scientific realism notwithstanding, we find ourselves bemused by what different philosophers appear to think it is, exactly. Does it require any sort of belief in relation to scientific theories and, if so, what sort? Is it rather typified by a certain understanding of the rationality of such beliefs? In the following dialogue we explore these questions in hopes of clarifying some convictions about what scientific realism is, and what it could or should be. En route, we e…Read more
  •  6
    Updating Probability: Tracking Statistics as Criterion
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (3): 725-743. 2017.
    For changing opinion, represented by an assignment of probabilities to propositions, the criterion proposed is motivated by the requirement that the assignment should have, and maintain, the possibility of matching in some appropriate sense statistical proportions in a population. This ‘tracking’ criterion implies limitations on policies for updating in response to a wide range of types of new input. Satisfying the criterion is shown equivalent to the principle that the prior must be a convex co…Read more
  •  3
    How is Scientific Revolution / Conversion Possible?
    Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 73 63-80. 1999.
  • Laws and Symmetry
    Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 182 (3): 327-329. 1989.
  •  7
    Thomason’s Paradox for Belief, and Two Consequence Relations
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 40 (1). 2011.
    Thomason (1979/2010)'s argument against competence psychologism in semantics envisages a representation of a subject's competence as follows: he understands his own language in the sense that he can identify the semantic content of each of its sentences, which requires that the relation between expression and content be recursive. Then if the scientist constructs a theory that is meant to represent the body of the subject's beliefs, construed as assent to the content of the pertinent sentences, …Read more
  •  14
    The physics and metaphysics of identity and individuality Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9463-7 Authors Don Howard, Department of Philosophy and Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA Bas C. van Fraassen, Philosophy Department, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA Otávio Bueno, Department of Philosophy, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33124, USA Elena Caste…Read more
  •  5
    Reply to Belot, Elgin, and Horsten (review)
    Philosophical Studies 150 (3). 2010.
  •  8
  • Report on conditionals
    Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 6 (1): 5-25. 1976.
  •  4
    ¿Qué son las leyes de la naturaleza?
    Dianoia 31 (31): 211-262. 1985.
  •  104
    The Manifest Image and the Scientific Image
    In Diederik Aerts, Jan Broekaert & Ernest Mathijs (eds.), Einstein meets Magritte: an interdisciplinary reflection: the white book of "Einstein meets Magritte", Kluwer Academic. pp. 29-52. 1999.
    There are striking differences between the scientific theoretical description of the world and the way it seems to us. The consequent task of relating science to ’the world we live in’ has been a problem throughout the history of science. But have we made this an impossibility by how we formulate the problem? Some say that besides the successive world-pictures of science there is the world-picture that preceded all these and continues to exist by their side, elucidated by more humanistic philoso…Read more
  •  16
    Wilfrid Sellars on Scientific Realism
    Dialogue 14 (4): 606-616. 1975.
    There are a number of dimensions to the realism-nominalism controversy. The topics of debate comprise: necessary connections and causality, dispositions and counterfactuals, space and time, the existence of abstract entities and mathematical objects, the existence of the theoretical entities of science. On all these except the last, Sellars takes a non-realist line: and on all these except the last, I agree with him to the extent that I presently have an opinion on them. But Sellars is a scienti…Read more
  •  6
  •  110
    `World' is not a count noun
    Noûs 29 (2): 139-157. 1995.
    The word "world" has in fact many ordinary uses as a count noun; I shall discuss some of them below.(2) There is however also a distinctive philosophical use found in recent ontology (in the sense in which Quine reintroduced this term in analytic philosophy, for theories about what there is). As to this philosophical use, I shall argue that there is no reason to think that it refers to anything, if indeed it is intelligible at all
  •  4
    Updating Probability: Tracking Statistics as Criterion
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 2016.
    ABSTRACT For changing opinion, represented by an assignment of probabilities to propositions, the criterion proposed is motivated by the requirement that the assignment should have, and maintain, the possibility of matching in some appropriate sense statistical proportions in a population. This ‘tracking’ criterion implies limitations on policies for updating in response to a wide range of types of new input. Satisfying the criterion is shown equivalent to the principle that the prior must be a …Read more
  • To Save the Phenomena 1
    In C. Van Fraassen Bas (ed.), The scientific image, Oxford University Press. 1980.
    What is the empirical content of a theory? If a theory is identified with one of its linguistic formulations, the only available answers allow for no non‐trivial distinction between empirical and non‐empirical content. The restriction of such a formulated theory to a narrow ‘observational’ vocabulary is not a description of the observable part of the world but a hobbled and hamstrung description of its entire domain, still with non‐empirical implications. Viewing a theory as identified through t…Read more
  •  27
    Values and the heart's command
    Journal of Philosophy 70 (1): 5-19. 1973.
  •  3
    The World we Speak Of, and the Language We Live In
    Philosophie Et Culture: Actes du XVIIe Congrès Mondial de Philosophie 1 213-221. 1986.