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723Two accounts of laws and timePhilosophical Studies 160 (1): 115-137. 2012.Among the most important questions in the metaphysics of science are "What are the natures of fundamental laws and chances?" and "What grounds the direction of time?" My aim in this paper is to examine some connections between these questions, discuss two approaches to answering them and argue in favor of one. Along the way I will raise and comment on a number of issues concerning the relationship between physics and metaphysics and consequences for the subject matter and methodology of metaphys…Read more
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390Determinism and ChanceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 32 (4): 609-620. 2001.It is generally thought that objective chances for particular events different from 1 and 0 and determinism are incompatible. However, there are important scientific theories whose laws are deterministic but which also assign non-trivial probabilities to events. The most important of these is statistical mechanics whose probabilities are essential to the explanations of thermodynamic phenomena. These probabilities are often construed as 'ignorance' probabilities representing our lack of knowledg…Read more
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386David Lewis’s Humean Theory of Objective ChancePhilosophy of Science 71 (5): 1115--25. 2004.The most important theories in fundamental physics, quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, posit objective probabilities or chances. As important as chance is there is little agreement about what it is. The usual “interpretations of probability” give very different accounts of chance and there is disagreement concerning which, if any, is capable of accounting for its role in physics. David Lewis has contributed enormously to improving this situation. In his classic paper “A Subjectivist's …Read more
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300Why is there anything except physics?Synthese 170 (2). 2009.In the course of defending his view of the relation between the special sciences and physics from Jaegwon Kim’s objections Jerry Fodor asks “So then, why is there anything except physics?” By which he seems to mean to ask if physics is fundamental and complete in its domain how can there be autonomous special science laws. Fodor wavers between epistemological and metaphysical understandings of the autonomy of the special sciences. In my paper I draw out the metaphysical construal of his view and…Read more
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239Physicalism and its Discontents (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2001.Physicalism, a topic that has been central to modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics, is the philosophical view that everything in the space-time world is ultimately physical. The physicalist will claim that all facts about the mind and the mental are physical facts and deny the existence of mental events and state insofar as these are thought of as independent of physical things, events and states. This collection of essays, first published in 2001, offers a series of perspectives on this im…Read more
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215Counterfactuals all the way down? Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9437-9 Authors Jim Woodward, History and Philosophy of Science, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA Barry Loewer, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA John W. Carroll, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8103, USA Marc Lange, Department of Philosophy, University of Nor…Read more
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211A guide to naturalizing semanticsIn C. Wright & Bob Hale (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Blackwell: Oxford. pp. 108-126. 1997.
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200Copenhagen versus Bohmian Interpretations of Quantum Theory1 (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (2): 317-328. 1998.
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174Comments on Jaegwon Kim’s Mind and the Physical WorldPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (3). 2002.NRP is a family of views differing by how they understand “reduction” and “physicalism.” Following Kim I understand the non-reduction as holding that some events and properties are distinct from any physical events and properties. A necessary condition for physicalism is that mental properties, events, and laws supervene on physical ones. Kim allows various understandings of “supervenience” but I think that physicalism requires at least the claim that any minimal physical duplicate of the actual…Read more
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140It is not so much a distinct and established academic discipline as it is a sort of boundary, a sort of frontier, across which theoretical physics and modern western philosophy have been interrogating and informing and unsettling one another, for something on the order of four hundred years now, about the character of matter, the nature of space and time, the question of determinism, meaning of chance, the possibility of knowledge, and much else besides.
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131The package deal account of laws and propertiesSynthese 199 (1-2): 1065-1089. 2020.This paper develops an account of the metaphysics of fundamental laws I call “the Package Deal Account ” that is a descendent of Lewis’ BSA but differs from it in a number of significant ways. It also rejects some elements of the metaphysics in which Lewis develops his BSA. First, Lewis proposed a metaphysical thesis about fundamental properties he calls “Humean Supervenience” according to which all fundamental properties are instantiated by points or point sized individuals and the only fundame…Read more
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116Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental CausationJournal of Philosophy 98 (6): 315. 2001.
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115The role of 'conceptual role semantics'Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 23 (July): 305-15. 1982.
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113Symposiums papers: Two no-collapse interpretations of quantum theoryNoûs 23 (2): 169-186. 1989.
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94Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Fred I. DretskePhilosophy of Science 49 (2): 297-300. 1982.
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Physical Science |
Philosophy of Probability |
General Philosophy of Science |