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117Review of Woodward, Making Things Happen (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (1): 233-249. 2007.
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115Ontology, Complexity, and CompositionalityIn Matthew H. Slater & Zanja Yudell (eds.), Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: New Essays, Oxford University Press. 2017.Sciences of complex systems thrive on compositional theories – toolkits that allow the construction of models of a wide range of systems, each consisting of various parts put together in different ways. To be tractable, a compositional theory must make shrewd choices about the parts and properties that constitute its basic ontology. One such choice is to decompose a system into spatiotemporally discrete parts. Compositional theories in the high-level sciences follow this rule of thumb to a certa…Read more
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112Do large probabilities explain better?Philosophy of Science 67 (3): 366-390. 2000.It is widely held that the size of a probability makes no difference to the quality of a probabilistic explanation. I argue that explanatory practice in statistical physics belies this claim. The claim has gained currency only because of an impoverished conception of probabilistic processes and an unwarranted assumption that all probabilistic explanations have a single form.
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105Stochastic Independence and Causal ConnectionErkenntnis 80 (S3): 605-627. 2015.Assumptions of stochastic independence are crucial to statistical models in science. Under what circumstances is it reasonable to suppose that two events are independent? When they are not causally or logically connected, so the standard story goes. But scientific models frequently treat causally dependent events as stochastically independent, raising the question whether there are kinds of causal connection that do not undermine stochastic independence. This paper provides one piece of an answe…Read more
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103Reconsidering authorityIn Tamar Szabó Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology: Volume 3, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 294-330. 2007.How to regard the weight we give to a proposition on the grounds of its being endorsed by an authority? I examine this question as it is raised within the epistemology of science, and I argue that “authority-based weight” should receive special handling, for the following reason. Our assessments of other scientists’ competence or authority are nearly always provisional, in the sense that to save time and money, they are not made nearly as carefully as they could be---indeed, they are typically m…Read more
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100High-Level Exceptions ExplainedErkenntnis 79 (S10): 1819-1832. 2014.Why are causal generalizations in the higher-level sciences “inexact”? That is, why do they have apparent exceptions? This paper offers one explanation: many causal generalizations cite as their antecedent—the \(F\) in \(Fs\,\, {\textit{are}}\,\, G\) —a property that is not causally relevant to the consequent, but which is rather “entangled” with a causally relevant property. Entanglement is a relation that may exist for many reasons, and that allows of exceptions. Causal generalizations that sp…Read more
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95Probability and chanceIn D. M. Borchert (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, second edition, . 2006.The weather report says that the chance of a hurricane arriving later today is 90%. Forewarned is forearmed: expecting a hurricane, before leaving home you pack your hurricane lantern.
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92Economic Approaches to Understanding Scientific NormsEpisteme 8 (2): 184-200. 2011.A theme of much work taking an ““economic approach”” to the study of science is the interaction between the norms of individual scientists and those of society at large. Though drawing from the same suite of formal methods, proponents of the economic approach offer what are in substantive terms profoundly different explanations of various aspects of the structure of science. The differences are illustrated by comparing Strevens's explanation of the scientific reward system (the ““priority rule””…Read more
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90The Reference Class Problem in Evolutionary Biology: Distinguishing Selection from DriftIn Grant Ramsey & Charles H. Pence (eds.), Chance in Evolution, University of Chicago. 2016.Evolutionary biology distinguishes differences in survival and reproduction rates due to selection from those due to drift. The distinction is usually thought to be founded in probabilistic facts: a difference in (say) two variants' average lifespans over some period of time that is due to selection is explained by differences in the probabilities relevant to survival; in the purest cases of drift, by contrast, the survival probabilities are equal and the difference in lifespans is a matter of c…Read more
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88Against Lewis’s New Theory of Causation: A Story with Three MoralsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (4). 2003.A recent paper by David Lewis, "Causation as Influence", proposes a new theory of causation. I argue against the theory, maintaining that (a) the relation asserted by a claim of the form "C was a cause of E" is distinct from the relation of causal influence, (b) the former relation depends very much, contra Lewis, on the individuation conditions for the event E, and (c) Lewis's account is unsatisfactory as an analysis of either kind of relation. The counterexamples presented here provide, I sugg…Read more
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85Why Represent Causal Relations?In Alison Gopnik & Laura Schulz (eds.), Causal Learning: Psychology, Philosophy, Computation, Oxford University Press. pp. 245--260. 2007.Why do we represent the world around us using causal generalizations, rather than, say, purely statistical generalizations? Do causal representations contain useful additional information, or are they merely more efficient for inferential purposes? This paper considers the second kind of answer: it investigates some ways in which causal cognition might aid us not because of its expressive power, but because of its organizational power. Three styles of explanation are considered. The first, build…Read more
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84Replies to Weatherson, Hall, and Lange (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2): 492-505. 2012.
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83Science is epistemically special, or so I will assume: it is better able to produce knowledge about the workings of the world than other knowledge-directed pursuits. Further, its superior epistemic powers are due to its being in some sense especially empirical: in particular, science puts great weight on a form of inductive reasoning that I call empirical con rmation. My aim in this paper is to investigate the nature of science’s “empiricism”, and to provide a preliminary explanation of the conn…Read more
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81Bigger than Chaos: Understanding Complexity through ProbabilityHarvard University Press. 2003.In this book, Michael Strevens aims to explain how simplicity can coexist with, indeed be caused by, the tangled interconnections between a complex system's ...
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77Explanation, Abstraction, and Difference‐MakingPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3): 726-731. 2019.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 99, Issue 3, Page 726-731, November 2019.
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75Dappled Science in a Unified WorldIn H.-K. Chao, J. Reiss & S.-T. Chen (eds.), Philosophy of Science in Practice: Nancy Cartwright and the Nature of Scientific Reasoning, Springer. 2017.Science as we know it is “dappled”. Its picture of the world is a mosaic in which different aspects of the world, different systems, are represented by narrow-scope theories or models that are largely disconnected from one another. The best explanation for this disunity in our representation of the world, Nancy Cartwright has proposed, is a disunity in the world itself: rather than being governed by a small set of strict fundamental laws, events unfold according to a patchwork of principles cove…Read more
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74Complexity TheoryIn Paul Humphreys (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science, Oxford University Press Usa. 2016.Complexity theory attempts to explain, at the most general possible level, the interesting behaviors of complex systems. Two such behaviors are the emergence of simple or stable high-level behavior from relatively complex low-level behavior, and the emergence of sophisticated high-level behavior from relatively simple low-level behavior; they are often found nested in the same system. Concerning the emergence of simplicity, this essay examines Herbert Simon's explanation from near-decomposabilit…Read more
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73Philosophy as a Science and as a HumanityPhilosophia 1-8. forthcoming.This commentary on Philip Kitcher’s book What’s the Use of Philosophy? addresses two questions. First, must philosophers be methodologically self-conscious to do good work? Second, is there value in the questions pursued in the traditional areas of analytic philosophy?
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68It is argued that the relation of instance confirmation has a role to play in scientific methodology that complements, rather than competing with, a modern account of inductive support such as Bayesian confirmation theory. When an instance confirms a hypothesis, it provides inductive support, but it also provides two things that other inductive supporters normally do not: first, a connection to “empirical data” that makes science epistemically special, and second, inductive support not only for …Read more
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66Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair PhilosophyHarvard University Press. 2019.What is going on under the hood in philosophical analysis, that familiar process that attempts to uncover the nature of such philosophically interesting kinds as knowledge, causation, and justice by the method of posit and counterexample? How, in particular, do intuitions tell us about philosophical reality? The standard, if unappealing, answer is that philosophical analysis is conceptual analysis—that what we learn about when we do philosophy is in the first instance facts about our own minds. …Read more
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65It seems very important to us whether or not a generalization offers counter-factual support—but why? Surely what happens in other possible worlds can neither help nor hurt us? This paper explores the question whether counter-factual support does, nevertheless, have some practical value. (The question of theoretical value will be addressed but then put aside.) The following thesis is proposed: the counterfactual-supporting generalizations are those for which there exists a compact and under norm…Read more
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62Précis of "Thinking Off Your Feet"Analysis 82 (2): 303-306. 2022.Précis of "Thinking Off Your Feet"
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55The structure of asymptotic idealizationSynthese 196 (5): 1713-1731. 2019.Robert Batterman and others have argued that certain idealizing explanations have an asymptotic form: they account for a state of affairs or behavior by showing that it emerges “in the limit”. Asymptotic idealizations are interesting in many ways, but is there anything special about them as idealizations? To understand their role in science, must we augment our philosophical theories of idealization? This paper uses simple examples of asymptotic idealization in population genetics to argue for a…Read more
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53ChaosIn D. M. Borchert (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, second edition, . 2006.A physical system has a chaotic dynamics, according to the dictionary, if its behavior depends sensitively on its initial conditions, that is, if systems of the same type starting out with very similar sets of initial conditions can end up in states that are, in some relevant sense, very different. But when science calls a system chaotic, it normally implies two additional claims: that the dynamics of the system is relatively simple, in the sense that it can be expressed in the form of a mathema…Read more
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52Scientific Sharing, Communism, and the Social ContractIn Thomas Boyer-Kassem, Conor Mayo-Wilson & Michael Weisberg (eds.), Scientific Collaboration and Collective Knowledge, Oxford University Press. pp. 3--33. 2017.Research programs regularly compete to achieve the same goal, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA or the construction of a TEA laser. The more the competing programs share information, the faster the goal is likely to be reached, to society's benefit. But the "priority rule"—the scientific norm mandating that the first program to reach the goal in question receive all the credit for the achievement—provides a powerful disincentive for programs to share information. How, then, is the cl…Read more
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52A symposium on Michael Strevens' book "Tychomancy", concerning the psychological roots and historical significance of physical intuition about probability in physics, biology, and elsewhere.
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51Herding and the quest for creditJournal of Economic Methodology 20 (1). 2013.The system for awarding credit in science—the priority rule—functions, I have proposed elsewhere, to bring about something close to a socially optimal distribution of scientists among scientific research programs. If all goes well, then, potentially fruitful new ideas will be explored, unpromising ideas will be ignored, and fashionable but oversubscribed ideas will be deprived of further resources. Against this optimistic background, the present paper investigates the ways in which things might …Read more
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50Philosophy Unbound: Comments on Edouard Machery's Philosophy Within Its Proper BoundsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (1): 239-245. 2019.
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49Permissible idealizations for the purpose of predictionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 85 92-100. 2021.Every model leaves out or distorts some factors that are causally connected to its target phenomenon -- the phenomenon that it seeks to predict or explain. If we want to make predictions, and we want to base decisions on those predictions, what is it safe to omit or to simplify, and what ought a causal model to describe fully and correctly? A schematic answer: the factors that matter are those that make a difference to the target phenomenon. There are several ways to understand differencemaking.…Read more
Areas of Specialization
General Philosophy of Science |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Metaphilosophy |
Interpretation of Probability |