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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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43Words, 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
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251Review 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
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80Causal 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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60The theory of your dreamsIn Robert S. Cohen & Larry Laudan (eds.), Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum, D. Reidel. pp. 57--71. 1983.
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10Inference, Explanation, and Other Frustrations: Essays in the Philosophy of Science (edited book)University of California Press: Berkeley. 1992.
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274Rabbit huntingSynthese 121 (1-2): 55-78. 1999.Twenty years ago, Nancy Cartwright wrote a perceptive essay in which she clearly distinguished causal relations from associations, introduced philosophers to Simpson’s paradox, articulated the difficulties for reductive probabilistic analyses of causation that flow from these observations, and connected causal relations with strategies of action (Cartwright 1979). Five years later, without appreciating her essay, I and my (then) students began to develop formal representations of causal and probab…Read more
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44The ability to identify the mineral composition of rocks and soils is an important tool for the exploration of geological sites. Even though expert knowledge is commonly used for this task, it is desirable to create automated systems with similar or better performance. For instance, NASA intends to design robots that are sufficiently autonomous to perform this task on planetary missions. Spectrometer readings provide one important source of data for identifying sites with minerals of interest. R…Read more
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33The "dynamical systems" model of cognitive processing is not an alternative computational model. The proposals about "computation" that accompany it are either vacuous or do not distinguish it from a variety of standard computational models. I conclude that the real motivation for van Gelder's version of the account is not technical or computational, but is rather in the spirit of natur-philosophie.
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15Your 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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8And the Nature of TheoriesIn Merrilee H. Salmon (ed.), Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Hackett. pp. 104. 1992.
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52Theory discovery from data with mixed quantifiersJournal of Philosophical Logic 19 (1). 1990.Convergent realists desire scientific methods that converge reliably to informative, true theories over a wide range of theoretical possibilities. Much attention has been paid to the problem of induction from quantifier-free data. In this paper, we employ the techniques of formal learning theory and model theory to explore the reliable inference of theories from data containing alternating quantifiers. We obtain a hierarchy of inductive problems depending on the quantifier prefix complexity of t…Read more
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186On the Methods of Cognitive NeuropsychologyBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (3): 815-835. 1994.Contemporary cognitive neuropsychology attempts to infer unobserved features of normal human cognition, or ‘cognitive architecture’, from experiments with normals and with brain-damaged subjects in whom certain normal cognitive capacities are altered, diminished, or absent. Fundamental methodological issues about the enterprise of cognitive neuropsychology concern the characterization of methods by which features of normal cognitive architecture can be identified from such data, the assumptions …Read more
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233Android epistemology for babies: Relections on words, thoughts and theoriesSynthese 122 (1-2): 53-68. 2000.Words, Thoughts and Theories arguesthat infants and children discover the physical and psychological featuresof the world by a process akin to scientific inquiry, more or less asconceived by philosophers of science in the 1960s (the theory theory).This essay discusses some of the philosophical background to analternative, more popular, ``modular'''' or ``maturational'''' account ofdevelopment, dismisses an array of philosophical objections to the theorytheory, suggests that the theory theory off…Read more
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34Our primary interest is in determining how many gene perturbation experiments are required to determine the Various algorithms have been proposed for learning..
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29We describe a unification of old and recent ideas for formulating graphical models to explain time series data, including Granger causality, semi-automated search procedures for graphical causal models, modeling of contemporaneous influences in times series, and heuristic generalized additive model corrections to linear models. We illustrate the procedures by finding a structure of exogenous variables and mediating variables among time series of remote geospatial indices of ocean surface tempera…Read more
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25We 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
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114When 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
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221Instrumental ProbabilityThe 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
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21Review of Eric Christian Barnes, The Paradox of Predictivism (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (6). 2008.
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20Your 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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