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94Reflection and conditionalization: Comments on Michael RescorlaNoûs 57 (3): 539-552. 2023.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
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40A Landscape of Logics beyond the Deduction TheoremPrincipia: 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
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186Time in physical and narrative structureIn 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
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14The 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
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149What 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
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10Updating Probability: Tracking Statistics as CriterionBritish 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
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117How is Scientific Revolution / Conversion Possible?Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 73 63-80. 1999.
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53The Logical Structure of the World & Pseudo-Problems in Philosophy. Rudolf Carnap, Rolf A. George (review)Philosophy of Science 35 (3): 298-299. 1968.
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46Thomason’s Paradox for Belief, and Two Consequence RelationsJournal 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
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271The 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
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27A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England by Steven ShapinCommon Knowledge 25 (1-3): 401-402. 2019.
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26Timothy Smiley. Sense without denotation. Analysis , n.s. no. 78 , pp. 125–135Journal of Symbolic Logic 37 (2): 423. 1972.
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199Armstrong, Cartwright, and Earman on Laws and SymmetryPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (2). 1993.
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104The Manifest Image and the Scientific ImageIn 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
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205Wilfrid Sellars on Scientific RealismDialogue 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
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11What Was Perrin's Real Achievement?In Gregory J. Morgan (ed.), Philosophy of Science Matters: The Philosophy of Peter Achinstein, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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518`World' is not a count nounNoûs 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
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10The World we Speak Of, and the Language We Live InPhilosophie Et Culture: Actes du XVIIe Congrès Mondial de Philosophie 1 213-221. 1986.
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The Pragmatics of Explanation 1In C. Van Fraassen Bas (ed.), The scientific image, Oxford University Press. 1980.Explanatory power is a complex theoretical virtue, not reducible to empirical strength or adequacy, which includes other virtues as its own preconditions. Since this virtue provides one of the main criteria by which theories are evaluated, it presents thus a challenge to any empiricist account of science. After a critical account of attempted explications of the concept of scientific explanation, this chapter offers a pragmatic account that identifies explanations with answers to why‐questions. …Read more
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56Updating Probability: Tracking Statistics as CriterionBritish 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
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