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37A Photcopy of Thinking Things Through, Princeton Univeresity Press, 1980.
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30The Principle of Total Evidence is many things. We describe some of them.
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33Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (edited book)Hackett Publishing Company. 1992.A reprint of the Prentice-Hall edition of 1992. Prepared by nine distinguished philosophers and historians of science, this thoughtful reader represents a cooperative effort to provide an introduction to the philosophy of science focused on cultivating an understanding of both the workings of science and its historical and social context. Selections range from discussions of topics in general methodology to a sampling of foundational problems in various physical, biological, behavioral, and soci…Read more
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Foundations of Space-Time TheoriesBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 31 (3): 311-315. 1980.
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46Lost in the tensors: Einstein's struggles with covariance principles 1912–1916Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 9 (4): 251-278. 1978.
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Theories: An Examination of the Logical Empiricist Philosophy of ScienceDissertation, Indiana University. 1969.
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17The second edition of a unique introductory text, offering an account of the logical tradition in philosophy and its influence on contemporary scientific disciplines. Thinking Things Through offers a broad, historical, and rigorous introduction to the logical tradition in philosophy and its contemporary significance. It is unique among introductory philosophy texts in that it considers both the historical development and modern fruition of a few central questions. It traces the influence of phil…Read more
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85Foundations of Space-Time Theories: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (edited book)University of Minnesota Press. 1974.Some Philosophical Prehistory of General Relativity As history, my remarks will form rather a medley. If they can claim any sort of unity (apart from a ...
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120What revisions does bootstrap testing need? A replyPhilosophy of Science 55 (2): 260-264. 1988.
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74On Writing the History of Special RelativityPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1982. 1982.Nearly all accounts of the genesis of special relativity unhesitatingly assume that the theory was worked out in a roughly five week period following the discovery of the relativity of simultaneity. Not only is there no direct evidence for this common presupposition, there are numerous considerations which militate against it. The evidence suggests it is far more reasonable that Einstein was already in possession of the Lorentz and field transformations, that he had applied these to the dynamics…Read more
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175The gravitational red shift as a test of general relativity: History and analysisStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 11 (3): 175-214. 1980.
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65Creative Abduction, Factor Analysis, and the Causes of Liberal DemocracyKriterion - Journal of Philosophy 33 (1): 1-22. 2019.The ultimate focus of the current essay is on methods of “creative abduction” that have some guarantees as reliable guides to the truth, and those that do not. Emphasizing work by Richard Englehart using data from the World Values Survey, Gerhard Schurz has analyzed literature surrounding Samuel Huntington’s well-known claims that civilization is divided into eight contending traditions, some of which resist “modernization” – democracy, civil rights, equality of rights of women and minorities, s…Read more
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28By combining experimental interventions with search procedures for graphical causal models we show that under familiar assumptions, with perfect data, N - 1 experiments suffice to determine the causal relations among N > 2 variables when each experiment randomizes at most one variable. We show the same bound holds for adaptive learners, but does not hold for N > 4 when each experiment can simultaneously randomize more than one variable. This bound provides a type of ideal for the measure of succ…Read more
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38Bohm's Metaphors, Causality, and the Quantum PotentialErkenntnis 59 (1): 77-95. 2003.David Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics yields a quantum potential, Q. In his early work, the effects of Q are understood in causal terms as acting through a real (quantum) field which pushes particles around. In his later work (with Basil Hiley), the causal understanding of Q appears to have been abandoned. The purpose of this paper is to understand how the use of certain metaphors leads Bohm away from a causal treatment of Q, and to evaluate the use of those metaphors.
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79Nancy Cartwright devotes half of her new book, Hunting Causes and Using Them, to critcizing "Bayes Net Methods"--as she calls them--and what she takes to be their assumptions. All of her critical claims are false or at best fractionally true. This paper reviews the literature she addresses but appears not to have met.
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133& Carnegie Mellon University Abstract The rationality of human causal judgments has been the focus of a great deal of recent research. We argue against two major trends in this research, and for a quite different way of thinking about causal mechanisms and probabilistic data. Our position rejects a false dichotomy between "mechanistic" and "probabilistic" analyses of causal inference -- a dichotomy that both overlooks the nature of the evidence that supports the induction of mechanisms and misse…Read more
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137What is right with 'bayes net methods' and what is wrong with 'hunting causes and using them'?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (1): 161-211. 2010.Nancy Cartwright's recent criticisms of efforts and methods to obtain causal information from sample data using automated search are considered. In addition to reviewing that effort, I argue that almost all of her criticisms are false and rest on misreading, overgeneralization, or neglect of the relevant literature
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45Jon Williamson bayesian nets and causalityBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (4): 849-855. 2009.
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26Your 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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25Your 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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