Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America
  •  37
    A Photcopy of Thinking Things Through, Princeton Univeresity Press, 1980.
  •  30
    The Principle of Total Evidence is many things. We describe some of them.
  •  35
    Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (edited book)
    with Merrilee H. Salmon, John Earman, and James G. Lennox
    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
  • Foundations of Space-Time Theories
    with J. S. Earman and J. J. Stachel
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 31 (3): 311-315. 1980.
  •  1
    Theory and Evidence
    Philosophy of Science 48 (3): 498-500. 1981.
  •  101
    Lost in the tensors: Einstein's struggles with covariance principles 1912–1916
    with John Earman
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 9 (4): 251-278. 1978.
  • Theory and Evidence
    Ethics 93 (3): 613-615. 1980.
  •  17
    The 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
  •  85
    Foundations of Space-Time Theories: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (edited book)
    with John Earman and John J. Stachel
    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 ...
  •  120
  •  74
    On Writing the History of Special Relativity
    PSA: 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
  •  205
    The gravitational red shift as a test of general relativity: History and analysis
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 11 (3): 175-214. 1980.
  •  65
    Creative Abduction, Factor Analysis, and the Causes of Liberal Democracy
    Kriterion - 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
  •  73
    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.
  •  46
    What Is Going on Inside the Arrows? Discovering the Hidden Springs in Causal Models
    with Alexander Murray-Watters
    Philosophy 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
  •  25
    sities. 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
  •  19
    We 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.
  •  44
    Two Flagpoles Are More Paradoxical than One
    Philosophy 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.
  •  5
    Déjà vu all over again
    In Jonathan D. Cohen & Jonathan W. Schooler (eds.), Scientific Approaches to Consciousness, Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 373--377. 1997.
  •  216
    Convergence to the truth and nothing but the truth
    Philosophy 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
  •  25
    We describe the (enormous) size of the search space for Dynamic Casual Models and generalizations of them
  •  1
    Theory and Evidence
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 32 (3): 314-318. 1981.
  •  43
    Words, 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
  •  257
    Review 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
  •  18
    Statistical Inference and Data Mining
    with David Madigan, Daniel Pregibon, and Padhraic Smyth