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83Linear structural equation models (SEMs) are widely used in sociology, econometrics, biology, and other sciences. A SEM (without free parameters) has two parts: a probability distribution (in the Normal case specified by a set of linear structural equations and a covariance matrix among the “error” or “disturbance” terms), and an associated path diagram corresponding to the causal relations among variables specified by the structural equations and the correlations among the error terms. It is of…Read more
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16Interpreting LeamerEconomics and Philosophy 1 (2): 290. 1985.It is easy for a professional philosopher who reads Learner's essay “Let's Take the Con Out of Econometrics” to find a great deal in it that seems contentious, cavalier, or objectionable. Philosophers may even be puzzled as to what the fuss is all about. My guess is that the sorts of complaints philosophical readers are likely to make about Learner's paper are more the result of style than substance. The substance is very important
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60Joseph E. Early, Sr. : Chemical Explanation: Characteristics, Development, Autonomy (review)Philosophy of Science 71 (3): 415-418. 2004.Magnani, Lorenzo (2001), Abduction, Reason, and Science: Processes of Discovery and Explanation. New York: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers. Magnani. Lorenzo, and Nancy Nersessian (eds.) (2002), Model-Based Reasoning: Technology, Science, Values. New York: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers. Joseph E. Earley, Sr. (ed.), Chemical Explanation: Characteristics, Development, Autonomy, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 988. New York Academy of Sciences (2003), 370 pp., $130.00 (cloth…Read more
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127Buy and use thinking things throughMinds and Machines 8 (2): 309-310. 1998.Department of Philosophy, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, Ca 92093, U.S.A., and Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA, U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected].
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21Of the many proposals for inferring genetic regulatory structure from microarray measurements of mRNA transcript hybridization, several aim to estimate regulatory structure from the associations of gene expression levels measured in repeated samples. The repeated samples may be from a single experimental condition, or from several distinct experimental conditions; they may be “equilibrium” measurements or time series; the associations may be estimated by correlation coefficients or by conditiona…Read more
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96Hypothetico-deductivism is hopelessPhilosophy of Science 47 (2): 322-325. 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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19Missing elements: what philosophers of science might discover in chemistryIn Nalini Bhushan & Stuart M. Rosenfeld (eds.), Of Minds and Molecules: New Philosophical Perspectives on Chemistry, Oxford University Press. pp. 17--33. 2000.
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70On the Possibility of Inference to the Best ExplanationJournal of Philosophical Logic 41 (2): 461-469. 2012.Various proposals have suggested that an adequate explanatory theory should reduce the number or the cardinality of the set of logically independent claims that need be accepted in order to entail a body of data. A (and perhaps the only) well-formed proposal of this kind is William Kneale’s: an explanatory theory should be finitely axiomatizable but it’s set of logical consequences in the data language should not be finitely axiomatizable. Craig and Vaught showed that Kneale theories (almost) al…Read more
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12A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to WasteMind in a Physical WorldJaegwon KimPhilosophy of Science 66 (3): 455-471. 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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165The epistemology of geometryNoûs 11 (3): 227-251. 1977.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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34For most of the contributions to this volume, the project is this: Fill out “Event X is a cause of event Y if and only if……” where the dots on the right are to be filled in by a claims formulated in terms using any of (1) descriptions of possible worlds and their relations; (2) a special predicate, “is a law;” (3) “chances;” and (4) anything else one thinks one needs. The form of analysis is roughly the same as that sought in the Meno, and the methodology is likewise Socratic—proposals, examples…Read more
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325Conditioning and interveningBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (4): 1001-1021. 1994.We consider the dispute between causal decision theorists and evidential decision theorists over Newcomb-like problems. We introduce a framework relating causation and directed graphs developed by Spirtes et al. (1993) and evaluate several arguments in this context. We argue that much of the debate between the two camps is misplaced; the disputes turn on the distinction between conditioning on an event E as against conditioning on an event I which is an action to bring about E. We give the essen…Read more
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