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69Review of Robert DiSalle, Understanding Space-Time: The Philosophical Development of Physics From Newton to Einstein (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (9). 2008.
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466Freedom from the Inside OutRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 50 201-. 2002.Since the death of strong reductionism, philosophers of science have expanded the horizons of their understandings of the physical, mental, and social worlds, and the complex relations among them. To give one interesting example, John Dupre has endorsed a notion of downward causation: ‘higher-level’ events causing events at a ‘lower’ ontological level. For example, my intention to type the letter ‘t’ causes the particular motions experienced by all the atoms in my left forefinger as I type it. T…Read more
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933Probability in GRW theoryStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 38 (2): 371-389. 2007.GRW Theory postulates a stochastic mechanism assuring that every so often the wave function of a quantum system is `hit', which leaves it in a localised state. How are we to interpret the probabilities built into this mechanism? GRW theory is a firmly realist proposal and it is therefore clear that these probabilities are objective probabilities (i.e. chances). A discussion of the major theories of chance leads us to the conclusion that GRW probabilities can be understood only as either single c…Read more
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158Empirical equivalence, underdetermination, and systems of the worldPhilosophy of Science 61 (4): 592-607. 1994.The underdetermination of theory by evidence must be distinguished from holism. The latter is a doctrine about the testing of scientific hypotheses; the former is a thesis about empirically adequate logically incompatible global theories or "systems of the world". The distinction is crucial for an adequate assessment of the underdetermination thesis. The paper shows how some treatments of underdetermination are vitiated by failure to observe this distinction, and identifies some necessary condit…Read more
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215ChanceIn Donald Borchert (ed.), Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan. 2006.Much is asked of the concept of chance. It has been thought to play various roles, some in tension with or even incompatible with others. Chance has been characterized negatively, as the absence of causation; yet also positively—the ancient Greek τυχη´ reifies it—as a cause of events that are not governed by laws of nature, or as a feature of the laws themselves. Chance events have been understood epistemically as those whose causes are unknown; yet also objectively as a distinct ontological kin…Read more
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Time and Chance PropensitiesIn Craig Callender (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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72Humean effective strategiesIn Dag Westerståhl, Petr Hajek & Luis Valdes-Villanueva (eds.), Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the 12th International Congress, Kcl Press. 2005.In a now-classic paper, Nancy Cartwright argued that the Humean conception of causation as mere regular co-occurrence is too weak to make sense of our everyday and scientific practices. Specifically she claimed that in order to understand our reasoning about, and uses of, effective strategies, we need a metaphysically stronger notion of causation and causal laws than Humeanism allows. Cartwright’s arguments were formulated in the framework of probabilistic causation, and it is precisely in the d…Read more
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Causation in spacetime theoriesIn Helen Beebee, Peter Menzies & Christopher Hitchcock (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Causation, Oxford University Press. pp. 685--704. 2009.
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269The Best Humean System for Statistical MechanicsErkenntnis 80 (S3): 551-574. 2015.Classical statistical mechanics posits probabilities for various events to occur, and these probabilities seem to be objective chances. This does not seem to sit well with the fact that the theory’s time evolution is deterministic. We argue that the tension between the two is only apparent. We present a theory of Humean objective chance and show that chances thus understood are compatible with underlying determinism and provide an interpretation of the probabilities we find in Boltzmannian stati…Read more
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59Physics and the Humean approach to probabilityIn Claus Beisbart & Stephan Hartmann (eds.), Probabilities in Physics, Oxford University Press. pp. 321. 2011.
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79Einstein's struggle for a Machian gravitation theoryStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 25 (3): 287-335. 1994.The story of Einstein's struggle to create a general theory of relativity, and his early discontentment with the final form of the theory , is well known in broad outline. Thanks to the work of John Norton and others, much of the fine detail of the story is also now known. One aspect of Einstein's work in this period has, however, been relatively neglected: Einstein's commitment to Mach's ideas on inertia, and the influence this commitment had on Einstein's work on general relativity from 1907 t…Read more
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266Causality and determinism: Tension, or outright conflict?Revista de Filosofía (Madrid) 29 (2): 99-115. 2004.In the philosophical tradition, the notions of determinism and causality are strongly linked: it is assumed that in a world of deterministic laws, causality may be said to reign supreme; and in any world where the causality is strong enough, determinism must hold. I will show that these alleged linkages are based on mistakes, and in fact get things almost completely wrong. In a deterministic world that is anything like ours, there is no room for genuine causation. Though there may be stable enou…Read more
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207Kant's hands and Earman's pions: Chirality arguments for substantival spaceInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14 (3). 2000.This paper outlines a new interpretation of an argument of Kant's for the existence of absolute space. The Kant argument, found in a 1768 essay on topology, argues for the existence of Newtonian-Euclidean absolute space on the basis of the existence of incongruous counterparts (such as a left and a right hand, or any asymmetrical object and its mirror-image). The clear, intrinsic difference between a left hand and a right hand, Kant claimed, cannot be understood on a relational view of space - f…Read more
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Universitat de BarcelonaICREA Research Professor
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Barcelona, Spain
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Laws of Nature |
Causation |
Theories of Causation |
Causation, Miscellaneous |
Chance and Objective Probability |
Dispositions and Powers |