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78Nancy 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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45By 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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130What 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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40Jon Williamson bayesian nets and causalityBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (4): 849-855. 2009.
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128& 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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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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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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For Real: Reflections on Science and ObjectivityIn M. Maxwell & C. Wade Savage (eds.), Science, Mind, and Psychology: Essays in Honor of Grover Maxwell, University Press of America. pp. 35. 1989.
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15Examining Holistic Medicine (edited book)Prometheus Books. 1985.Essays discuss the history, philosophy, methodology, and practices of holistic medicine
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23Physics by conventionPhilosophy of Science 39 (3): 322-340. 1972.“It ain't nuthin' until I call it.”Bill Guthrie, UmpireNumerous criticisms of Adolf Grünbaum's account of conventions in physics have been published, and he has replied to most of them. Nonetheless, there seem to me to be good reasons for offering further criticism. In the first place Grünbaum's philosophy seems to me at least partly an extrapolation of one aspect of the views on conventions developed by Reichenbach and others. Since I think many of the issues which Reichenbach attempted to sett…Read more
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1"Afterword to" Freud, Kepler and the Clinical EvidenceIn Richard Wollheim & James Hopkins (eds.), Philosophical Essays on Freud, Cambridge University Press. pp. 29--31. 1982.
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82Thoroughly Modern MenoIn Inference, Explanation, and Other Frustrations: Essays in the Philosophy of Science, University of California Press: Berkeley. pp. 3--22. 1992.Clark Glymour and Kevin T. Kelly. Thoroughly Modern Meno
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Explanation and truthIn Deborah G. Mayo & Aris Spanos (eds.), Error and Inference: Recent Exchanges on Experimental Reasoning, Reliability, and the Objectivity and Rationality of Science, Cambridge University Press. 2009.
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56Kevin T. Kelly, Cory Juhl and Clark Glymour. Reliability, Realism, and Relativism
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106On some patterns of reductionPhilosophy of Science 37 (3): 340-353. 1970.The notion of reduction in the natural sciences has been assimilated to the notion of inter-theoretical explanation. Many philosophers of science (following Nagel) have held that the apparently ontological issues involved in reduction should be replaced by analyses of the syntactic and semantic connections involved in explaining one theory on the basis of another. The replacement does not seem to have been especially successful, for we still lack a plausible account of inter-theoretical explanat…Read more
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55Android epistemology: Computation, artificial intelligenceIn Merrilee H. Salmon (ed.), Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Hackett. pp. 364. 1992.
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51Why you'll never know whether Roger Penrose is a computerBehavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4): 666-667. 1990.
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22Learning the structure of deterministic systemsIn Alison Gopnik & Laura Schulz (eds.), Causal Learning: Psychology, Philosophy, and Computation, Oxford University Press. pp. 231--240. 2007.
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69A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste (review)Philosophy of Science 66 (3). 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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3The Adventures Among the. Asteroids of Angela Android, Series 8400XFIn K. M. Ford & Z. W. Pylyshyn (eds.), The Robot's Dilemma Revisited: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence, Ablex. pp. 25. 1996.
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114We believe in freedom of the will so that we can learnBehavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (5): 661-662. 2004.The central theoretical issue of Wegner's book is: Why do we have the illusion of conscious will? I suggest that learning requires belief in the autonomy of action. You should believe in freedom of the will because if you have it you're right, and if you don't have it you couldn't have done otherwise anyway. —Sam Buss (Lecture at University of California, San Diego, 2000).
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74Revisions of bootstrap testingPhilosophy of Science 50 (4): 626-629. 1983.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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