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120Landauer defended: Reply to NortonStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 44 (3): 263-271. 2013.Ladyman, Presnell, and Short proposed a model of the implementation of logical operations by physical processes in order to clarify the exact statement of Landauer's Principle, and then offered a new proof of the latter based on the construction of a thermodynamic cycle, arguing that if Landauer's Principle were false it would be possible to harness a machine that violated it to produce a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. In a recent paper in this journal, John Norton directly chall…Read more
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185Entanglement and non-factorizabilityStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 44 (3): 215-221. 2013.Quantum mechanics tells us that states involving indistinguishable fermions must be antisymmetrized. This is often taken to mean that indistinguishable fermions are always entangled. We consider several notions of entanglement and argue that on the best of them, indistinguishable fermions are not always entangled. We also present a simple but unconventional way of representing fermionic states that allows us to maintain a link between entanglement and non-factorizability.
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22Physics and Computation:The Statues of Landauer's PrincipleIn S. B. Cooper, B. Löwe & A. Sorbi (eds.), Computation and Logic in the Real World. CiE 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4497, . 2007.Realism about computation is the view that whether or not a particular physical system is performing a particular computation is at least sometimes a mindindependent feature of reality. The caveat ’at least sometimes’ is necessary here because a realist about computation need not believe that all instances of computation should be realistically construed. The computational theory of mind presupposes realism about computation. If whether or not the human nervous system implements particular compu…Read more
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43How do we refer to chemical substances, and in particular to chemical elements? This question relates to many philosophical questions, including whether or not theories are incommensurable, the extent to which past theories are later discarded, and issues about scientific realism. This chapter considers the first explicit reference to types of colorless air in late-eighteenth-century chemical practice. Reference to a gas by one chemist was generally intended to give others epistemological, metho…Read more
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589An Analysis of the Interaction Between Intelligent Software Agents and Human UsersMinds and Machines 28 (4): 735-774. 2018.Interactions between an intelligent software agent and a human user are ubiquitous in everyday situations such as access to information, entertainment, and purchases. In such interactions, the ISA mediates the user’s access to the content, or controls some other aspect of the user experience, and is not designed to be neutral about outcomes of user choices. Like human users, ISAs are driven by goals, make autonomous decisions, and can learn from experience. Using ideas from bounded rationality, …Read more
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138An Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics: Locality, Fields, Energy and MassMind 113 (451): 562-565. 2004.
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91The Hole Argument in Homotopy Type TheoryFoundations of Physics 50 (4): 319-329. 2020.The Hole Argument is primarily about the meaning of general covariance in general relativity. As such it raises many deep issues about identity in mathematics and physics, the ontology of space–time, and how scientific representation works. This paper is about the application of a new foundational programme in mathematics, namely homotopy type theory, to the Hole Argument. It is argued that the framework of HoTT provides a natural resolution of the Hole Argument. The role of the Univalence Axiom…Read more
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72Universes and univalence in homotopy type theoryReview of Symbolic Logic 12 (3): 426-455. 2019.The Univalence axiom, due to Vladimir Voevodsky, is often taken to be one of the most important discoveries arising from the Homotopy Type Theory research programme. It is said by Steve Awodey that Univalence embodies mathematical structuralism, and that Univalence may be regarded as ‘expanding the notion of identity to that of equivalence’. This article explores the conceptual, foundational and philosophical status of Univalence in Homotopy Type Theory. It extends our Types-as-Concepts interpre…Read more
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30Does Physics Answer Metaphysical Questions?Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 61 179-201. 2007.According to logical positivism, so the story goes, metaphysical questions are meaningless, since they do not admit of empirical confirmation or refutation. However, the logical positivists did not in fact reject as meaningless all questions about for example, the structure of space and time. Rather, key figures such as Reichenbach and Schlick believed that scientific theories often presupposed a conceptual framework that was not itself empirically testable, but which was required for the theory…Read more
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99Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics NaturalizedIn James Ladyman & Don Ross (eds.), Every thing must go: metaphysics naturalized, Oxford University Press. 2007.This book argues that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it really is, and not on philosophers' a priori intuitions, common sense, or simplifications of science. In addition to showing how recent metaphysics has drifted away from connection with all other serious scholarly inquiry as a result of not heeding this restriction, this book demonstrates how to build a metaphysics compatible with current fundament…Read more
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29Ontological Epistemological and Methodological PositionsIn Theo Kuipers (ed.), General Philosophy of Science, Elsevier. pp. 303-376. 2007.
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21Commentary: Reply to Hawthorne: Physics before Metaphysics 1In Simon Saunders, Jonathan Barrett, Adrian Kent & David Wallace (eds.), Many Worlds?: Everett, Quantum Theory, and Reality, Oxford University Press. 2010.The metaphysical conception of the generation of the macroworld from fundamental physics that Hawthorne considers is criticized in this Commentary, and compared with the scientific account offered by Halliwell and Hartle. It is argued that Hawthorn's critique of Everettian quantum mechanics fails.
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21The Alleged Coupling/Constitution Fallacy and Mature SciencesIn Richard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind, Bradford Book. 2010.
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20The Epistemology of Constructive EmpiricismIn Bradley John Monton (ed.), Images of empiricism: essays on science and stances, with a reply from Bas C. van Fraassen, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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1033Social machines are systems formed by technical and human elements interacting in a structured manner. The use of digital platforms as mediators allows large numbers of human participants to join such mechanisms, creating systems where interconnected digital and human components operate as a single machine capable of highly sophisticated behaviour. Under certain conditions, such systems can be described as autonomous and goal-driven agents. Many examples of modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) ca…Read more
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80Introduction: Structuralists of the world uniteStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 74 1-3. 2019.Key arguments and claims in Steven French's The Structure of the World are articulated and assessed. Differences between different forms of ontic structural realism are articulated, and some problems raised for some aspects of French's version.
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158Scientific Realism AgainSpontaneous Generations 9 (1): 99-107. 2018.The present paper concerns how scientific realism is formulated and defended. It is argued that van Fraassen is fundamentally right that scientific realism requires metaphysics in general, and modality in particular. This is because of several relationships that raise problems for the ontology of scientific realism, namely those between: scientific realism and common sense realism; past and current theories; the sciences of different scales; and the ontologies of the special sciences and fundame…Read more
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62Theory comparison and choice in chemistry, 1766–1791Foundations of Chemistry 20 (3): 169-189. 2017.This is the second of a pair of papers, of which the first showed how each of the main late phlogistic theories effectively reached impasses due to internal problems or included features which made them unacceptable even to other phlogistians. This paper deals with theory comparison and theory change. It gives an unprecedentedly detailed comparison between the available theories in 1790–1791, and shows that this was overwhelmingly in favour of the new chemistry. This time period correlates well …Read more
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55The development of problems within the phlogiston theories, 1766–1791Foundations of Chemistry 19 (3): 241-280. 2017.This is the first of a pair of papers. It focuses on the development of the most notable phlogistic theories during the period 1766–1791, including the main experiments that their proponents proposed them to interpret. There was a rapid proliferation of late phlogistic theories, particularly from 1784, and the accounts of composition and important implications of the main theories are set out and their issues analysed. Each of them either reached impasses due to internal problems, or included fe…Read more
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206On representing the relationship between the mathematical and the empiricalPhilosophy of Science 69 (3): 497-518. 2002.We examine, from the partial structures perspective, two forms of applicability of mathematics: at the “bottom” level, the applicability of theoretical structures to the “appearances”, and at the “top” level, the applicability of mathematical to physical theories. We argue that, to accommodate these two forms of applicability, the partial structures approach needs to be extended to include a notion of “partial homomorphism”. As a case study, we present London's analysis of the superfluid behavio…Read more
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61Empirical factors and structure transference: Returning to the London accountStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 43 (2): 95-104. 2012.
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197Models and structures: Phenomenological and partialStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 43 (1): 43-46. 2012.In a recent paper, Suárez and Cartwright return to the example of London and London's construction of a model for superconductivity and raise a number of concerns against the account of this construction presented in French and Ladyman and elsewhere. In this discussion note, we examine the challenge they raised and offer our responses.
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458What is a complex system?European Journal for Philosophy of Science 3 (1): 33-67. 2013.Complex systems research is becoming ever more important in both the natural and social sciences. It is commonly implied that there is such a thing as a complex system, different examples of which are studied across many disciplines. However, there is no concise definition of a complex system, let alone a definition on which all scientists agree. We review various attempts to characterize a complex system, and consider a core set of features that are widely associated with complex systems in the…Read more
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262Scientific structuralism: On the identity and diversity of objects in a structureAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 81 (1). 2007.
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27S cientific S tructuralism: O n the I dentity and D iversity of O bjects in a S tructureAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 81 (1): 23-43. 2007.
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34Ontological, epistemological and methodological positionsIn Theo A. F. Kuipers (ed.), General Philosophy of Science, North Holland. pp. 303--376. 2007.
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385What's really wrong with constructive empiricism? Van Fraassen and the metaphysics of modalityBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (4): 837-856. 2000.Constructive empiricism is supposed to offer a positive alternative to scientific realism that dispenses with the need for metaphysics. I first review the terms of the debate before arguing that the standard objections to constructive empiricism are not decisive. I then explain van Fraassen's views on modality and counterfactuals, and argue that, because constructive empiricism recommends on epistemological grounds belief in the empirical adequacy rather than the truth of theories, it requires t…Read more
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