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3The Adventures Among the. Asteroids of Angela Android, Series 8400XFIn K. M. Ford & Z. W. Pylyshyn (eds.), The Robot's Dilemma Revisited: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence, Ablex. pp. 25. 1996.
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52Why you'll never know whether Roger Penrose is a computerBehavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4): 666-667. 1990.
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25Learning the structure of deterministic systemsIn Alison Gopnik & Laura Schulz (eds.), Causal Learning: Psychology, Philosophy, and Computation, Oxford University Press. pp. 231--240. 2007.
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69A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste (review)Philosophy of Science 66 (3). 1999.Jaegwon Kim's Mind in a Physical World is an argument about mental causation that provides both a metaphysical theory and a lucid commentary on contemporary philosophical views. While I strongly recommend Kim's book to anyone interested in the subject, my endorsement is not unconditional, because I cannot make the same recomendation of the subject itself. Considering arguments of Davidson, Putnam, Burge, Block, and Kim himself, I conclude that the subject turns on a variety of implausible but re…Read more
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115We believe in freedom of the will so that we can learnBehavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (5): 661-662. 2004.The central theoretical issue of Wegner's book is: Why do we have the illusion of conscious will? I suggest that learning requires belief in the autonomy of action. You should believe in freedom of the will because if you have it you're right, and if you don't have it you couldn't have done otherwise anyway. —Sam Buss (Lecture at University of California, San Diego, 2000).
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74Revisions of bootstrap testingPhilosophy of Science 50 (4): 626-629. 1983.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of J STOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. J STOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non—commercial use.
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18These are chapters from a book forthcoming from MIT Press. Comments to the author at [email protected] would be most welcome. Still time for changes.
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175The sum rule is well-confirmedPhilosophy of Science 44 (1): 86-94. 1977.Simon Kochen and Ernst Specker's well-known argument against hidden variable theories for quantum mechanics is also an argument against the possibility of quantum systems having, simultaneously, precise values for all of the dynamical quantities associated with such systems. Devices for defeating the argument were in the literature even before its publication, but recently Arthur Fine has raised a new difficulty. Fine points out that Kochen and Specker's argument requires the following principle…Read more
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25This essay review, originally presented an APA symposium on Alberto Coffa's The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap, argues that the logical tradition Coffa studied, while embedded in neo and anti-Kantianism, entirely missed the more lasting developments in psychology that Kant provoked.
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37Review: A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste (review)Philosophy of Science 66 (3). 1999.Jaegwon Kim's Mind in a Physical World is an argument about mental causation that provides both a metaphysical theory and a lucid commentary on contemporary philosophical views. While I strongly recommend Kim's book to anyone interested in the subject, my endorsement is not unconditional, because I cannot make the same recomendation of the subject itself. Considering arguments of Davidson, Putnam, Burge, Block, and Kim himself, I conclude that the subject turns on a variety of implausible but re…Read more
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44Two Flagpoles Are More Paradoxical than OnePhilosophy of Science 45 (1). 1978.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of J STOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. J STOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non—commercial use.
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73Explanations, Tests, Unity and NecessityNoûs 14 (1). 1980.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of J STOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. J STOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non—commercial use.
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44What Is Going on Inside the Arrows? Discovering the Hidden Springs in Causal ModelsPhilosophy of Science 82 (4): 556-586. 2015.Using Gebharter’s representation, we consider aspects of the problem of discovering the structure of unmeasured submechanisms when the variables in those submechanisms have not been measured. Exploiting an early insight of Sober’s, we provide a correct algorithm for identifying latent, endogenous structure—submechanisms—for a restricted class of structures. The algorithm can be merged with other methods for discovering causal relations among unmeasured variables, and feedback relations between m…Read more
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25sities. TETRAD II discovers a class of possible causal structures of a system from a data set containing measurements of the system variables. The signi cance of learning the causal structure of a system is that it allows for predicting the e ect of interventions into the system, crucial in policy making. Our data sets contained information on 204 U.S. national universities, collected by the US News and World Report magazine for the purpose of college ranking in 1992 and 1993. One apparently rob…Read more
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19We applied TETRAD II, a causal discovery program developed in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Philosophy, to a database containing information on 204 U.S. colleges, collected by the US News and World Report magazine for the purpose of college ranking. Our analysis focuses on possible causes of low freshmen retention in U.S. colleges. TETRAD II finds a set of causal structures that are compatible with the data.
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5Déjà vu all over againIn Jonathan D. Cohen & Jonathan W. Schooler (eds.), Scientific Approaches to Consciousness, Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 373--377. 1997.
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216Convergence to the truth and nothing but the truthPhilosophy of Science 56 (2): 185-220. 1989.One construal of convergent realism is that for each clear question, scientific inquiry eventually answers it. In this paper we adapt the techniques of formal learning theory to determine in a precise manner the circumstances under which this ideal is achievable. In particular, we define two criteria of convergence to the truth on the basis of evidence. The first, which we call EA convergence, demands that the theorist converge to the complete truth "all at once". The second, which we call AE co…Read more
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25We describe the (enormous) size of the search space for Dynamic Casual Models and generalizations of them
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82Causal modeling with the TETRAD programSynthese 68 (1). 1986.Drawing substantive conclusions from linear causal models that perform acceptably on statistical tests is unreasonable if it is not known how alternatives fare on these same tests. We describe a computer program, TETRAD, that helps to search rapidly for plausible alternatives to a given causal structure. The program is based on principles from statistics, graph theory, philosophy of science, and artificial intelligence. We describe these principles, discuss how TETRAD employs them, and argue tha…Read more
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43Words, Thoughts and Theories argues that infants and children discover the physical and psychological features of the world by a process akin to scientific inquiry, more or less as conceived by philosophers of science in the 1960s (the theory theory). This essay discusses some of the philosophical background to an alternative, more popular, “modular” or “maturational” account of development, dismisses an array of philosophical objections to the theory theory, suggests that the theory theory offe…Read more
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254Review of James Woodward: Making Things Happen (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (4): 779-790. 2004."Goodness of Fit": Clinical Applications from Infancy through Adult Life. By Stella Chess & Alexander Thomas. Brunner/Mazel, Philadelphia, PA, 1999. pp. 229. pound24.95 (hb). Chess and Thomas's pioneering longitudinal studies of temperamental individuality started over 40 years ago (Thomas et al., 1963). Their publications soon became and remain classics. Their concept of "goodness of fit" emerges out of this monumental work but has had a long gestation period. In their new book, the authors dis…Read more
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45The ability to identify the mineral composition of rocks and soils is an important tool for the exploration of geological sites. Even though expert knowledge is commonly used for this task, it is desirable to create automated systems with similar or better performance. For instance, NASA intends to design robots that are sufficiently autonomous to perform this task on planetary missions. Spectrometer readings provide one important source of data for identifying sites with minerals of interest. R…Read more
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60The theory of your dreamsIn Robert S. Cohen & Larry Laudan (eds.), Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum, D. Reidel. pp. 57--71. 1983.
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10Inference, Explanation, and Other Frustrations: Essays in the Philosophy of Science (edited book)University of California Press: Berkeley. 1992.
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