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55Android epistemology: Computation, artificial intelligenceIn Merrilee H. Salmon (ed.), Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Hackett. pp. 364. 1992.
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Explanation and truthIn Deborah G. Mayo & Aris Spanos (eds.), Error and Inference: Recent Exchanges on Experimental Reasoning, Reliability, and the Objectivity and Rationality of Science, Cambridge University Press. 2009.
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59Kevin T. Kelly, Cory Juhl and Clark Glymour. Reliability, Realism, and Relativism
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121On some patterns of reductionPhilosophy of Science 37 (3): 340-353. 1970.The notion of reduction in the natural sciences has been assimilated to the notion of inter-theoretical explanation. Many philosophers of science (following Nagel) have held that the apparently ontological issues involved in reduction should be replaced by analyses of the syntactic and semantic connections involved in explaining one theory on the basis of another. The replacement does not seem to have been especially successful, for we still lack a plausible account of inter-theoretical explanat…Read more
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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46What 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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25We describe the (enormous) size of the search space for Dynamic Casual Models and generalizations of them
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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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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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