Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America
  •  25
    Causal learning in children: Causal maps and Bayes nets
    with Alison Gopnik, David M. Sobel, and Laura E. Schultz
    We outline a cognitive and computational account of causal learning in children. We propose that children employ specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate “causal map” of the world: an abstract, coherent representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously represented by the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or “Bayes nets”. Human causal learning and inference may involve computations similar to those for learnig…Read more
  •  21
    Review of Eric Christian Barnes, The Paradox of Predictivism (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (6). 2008.
  •  103
    When is a brain like the planet?
    Philosophy of Science 74 (3): 330-347. 2007.
    Time series of macroscopic quantities that are aggregates of microscopic quantities, with unknown one‐many relations between macroscopic and microscopic states, are common in applied sciences, from economics to climate studies. When such time series of macroscopic quantities are claimed to be causal, the causal relations postulated are representable by a directed acyclic graph and associated probability distribution—sometimes called a dynamical Bayes net. Causal interpretations of such series im…Read more
  •  205
    Instrumental Probability
    The Monist 84 (2): 284-300. 2001.
    The claims of science and the claims of probability combine in two ways. In one, probability is part of the content of science, as in statistical mechanics and quantum theory and an enormous range of "models" developed in applied statistics. In the other, probability is the tool used to explain and to justify methods of inference from records of observations, as in every science from psychiatry to physics. These intimacies between science and probability are logical sports, for while we think sc…Read more
  •  152
    Relevant evidence
    Journal of Philosophy 72 (14): 403-426. 1975.
    S CIENTISTS often claim that an experiment or observation tests certain hypotheses within a complex theory but not others. Relativity theorists, for example, are unanimous in the judgment that measurements of the gravitational red shift do not test the field equations of general relativity; psychoanalysts sometimes complain that experimental tests of Freudian theory are at best tests of rather peripheral hypotheses; astronomers do not regard observations of the positions of a single planet as a …Read more
  •  7
    JON WILLIAMSON Bayesian Nets and Causality (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (4): 849-855. 2009.
  •  20
    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.
  •  35
    Hans Reichenbach
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
  •  12
    Clark Glymour. Psychology as Physics
  •  16
    Reflectance spectroscopy is a standard tool for studying the mineral composition of rock and soil samples and for remote sensing of terrestrial and extraterrestrial surfaces. We describe research on automated methods of mineral identification from reflectance spectra and give evidence that a simple algorithm, adapted from a well-known search procedure for Bayes nets, identifies the most frequently occurring classes of carbonates with reliability equal to or greater than that of human experts. We…Read more
  •  41
    After reviewing theoretical reasons for doubting that machine learning methods can accurately infer gene regulatory networks from microarray data, we test 10 algorithms on simulated data from the sea urchin network, and on microarray data for yeast compared with recent experimental determinations of the regulatory network in the same yeast species. Our results agree with the theoretical arguments: most algorithms are at chance for determining the existence of a regulatory connection between gene…Read more
  •  84
    If quanta had logic
    with Michael Friedman
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 1 (1). 1972.
  •  19
    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/tenns.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.
  •  64
    Doing Without Concepts, by Edouard Machery
    Mind 119 (475): 823-827. 2010.
    (No abstract is available for this citation).
  •  12
    Getting to the Truth through Conceptual Revolutions
    PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1990. 1990.
    There is a popular view that the alleged meaning shifts resulting from scientific revolutions are somehow incompatible with the formulation of general norms for scientific inquiry. We construct methods that can be shown to be maximally reliable at getting to the truth when the truth changes in response to the state of the scientist or his society.
  •  9
    A fictional consideration of the hazards life might hold if certain theories of mind were true. Originally given as an after dinner talk at the University of North Carolina Conference.
  •  9
    Critical notice
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 6 (1): 161-175. 1976.
  •  225
    Learning causes: Psychological explanations of causal explanation (review)
    Minds and Machines 8 (1): 39-60. 1998.
    I argue that psychologists interested in human causal judgment should understand and adopt a representation of causal mechanisms by directed graphs that encode conditional independence (screening off) relations. I illustrate the benefits of that representation, now widely used in computer science and increasingly in statistics, by (i) showing that a dispute in psychology between ‘mechanist’ and ‘associationist’ psychological theories of causation rests on a false and confused dichotomy; (ii) sho…Read more
  •  44
    The conditional intervention principle is a formal principle that relates patterns of interventions and outcomes to causal structure. It is a central assumption of the causal Bayes net formalism. Four experiments suggest that preschoolers can use the conditional intervention principle both to learn complex causal structure from patterns of evidence and to predict patterns of evidence from knowledge of causal structure. Other theories of causal learning do not account for these results.
  • Causation and Statistical Inference
    In Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock & Peter Menzies (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Causation, Oxford University Press. 2009.
  •  16
  •  39
  • The first holistic revolution: alternative medicine in the nineteenth century
    with James C. Whorton and D. Stalker
    In Douglas Stalker & Clark Glymour (eds.), Examining Holistic Medicine, Prometheus Books. pp. 29--48. 1989.
  •  35
    Poincaré’s Probabilities, Kantified, Post-Modernized (review)
    Biological Theory 9 (1): 113-114. 2014.
    One of a pair of reviews of Michael Strevens’ book, Tychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal Structure, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2013, pp 265, $39.95 hbk, ISBN 978-0674073111. See also Bookstein (2014, this issue)
  •  86
    Bootstraps and probabilities
    Journal of Philosophy 77 (11): 691-699. 1980.
    The Joumal 0f Philosophy, Vol. 77, No. 11, Seventy—Seventh Annual Meeting American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division (Nov., 1980), 691-699.