•  17
    The role of mathematics in explanation
    Metascience 1-3. forthcoming.
  •  15
    Two Concepts of Double Prevention
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (n/a). 2022.
    Is double prevention causation? Some say yes and some say no, but the answer is yes and no. Interrupting double prevention, where A prevents B from continuing to prevent something, is causation, while blocking double prevention, where A intervenes before B has begun preventing anything, is not. I present two arguments for this thesis. First, it sorts canonical examples of double prevention correctly. Second, well-known theoretical arguments that double prevention is not causation only show that …Read more
  •  17
    Groll on Bionormativity and the Value of Genetic Knowledge
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 16 (1): 182-192. 2023.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Groll on Bionormativity and the Value of Genetic KnowledgeBradford Skow (bio)1. IntroductionShould people who plan to use donated sperm and/or eggs to conceive a child use an open donor who agrees ahead of time that any resulting children may be told who the donor is? In Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation (Groll 2021), Daniel Groll answers yes. He argues that using an anonymous donor would b…Read more
  •  29
    When (Imagined) Evidence Explains Fictionality
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (4): 464-476. 2022.
    Sometimes, a proposition is fictional in a story in virtue of the fact that other fictional truths are good evidence for it. Cases are presented in which this evidential rule, and not some rule that invokes counterfactuals or intentions, is what explains what is fictional. Applications are made to the question of interpretive pluralism and the problem of imaginative resistance. In the background is pluralism about fictionality: the evidential rule is one of a variety of rules that are needed to …Read more
  •  52
    The Moodless Theory of Modality: An Introduction and Defence
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2): 279-295. 2022.
    This paper proposes a new reductive theory of modality, called the moodless theory of modality. This theory, and not modal realism, is the closest modal analogue of the tenseless theory of time. So, if the tenseless theory is true, and the temporality–modality analogy is good, it is the moodless theory that follows. I also argue that the moodless theory, considered on its own, is better than modal realism: arguments often thought to be decisive against modal realism are weak against it.
  •  38
    Questioning Imaginative Resistance and Resistant Reading
    British Journal of Aesthetics 61 (4): 575-587. 2021.
    It is widely accepted that readers will resist imagining that a character in a story did something morally wrong, even if the story endorses this judgement. This paper argues, first, that readers will not resist if the question of whether that act was wrong is not salient as they read; and, second, that asking a certain question can be part of correctly appreciating a story—even if that question is not in the foreground of the story, and even if the story itself discourages readers from asking i…Read more
  •  24
    The Role of Chance in Explanation
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (1): 103-123. 2014.
    ‘Those ice cubes melted because by melting total entropy increased and entropy increase has a very high objective chance.’ What role does the chance in this explanation play? I argue that it contributes to the explanation by entailing that the melting was almost necessary, and defend the claim that the fact that some event was almost necessary can, in the right circumstances, constitute a causal explanation of that event.
  •  18
    Bradford Skow examines important philosophical questions about causation and explanation. His answers rely on a pair of connected distinctions: the distinction between acting and not acting, and that between situations in which an event happens and when something is in some state.
  •  69
    The Tenseless Theory of Time and the Moodless Theory of Modality
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (2): 506-524. 2018.
    This paper develops a moodless theory of modality, intended to be as closely analogous to the tenseless theory of time as possible. It is argued that the new theory is distinct from David Lewis' modal realism and that it solves certain problems better than modal realism does, namely, the problem of advanced modalizing, the problem of necessitism, and the problem of conflict with common opinion.
  • The Metaphysics of Quantities and Their Dimensions
    In Karen Bennett & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Volume 10, Oxford University Press. pp. 171-198. 2017.
  •  47
    Argues that there is no interpretation of the commonly-accepted idea that "explanation is that which produces understanding" on which it is of any use for finding what philosophers looking for a theory of explanation have been after. Contains a close examination of a couple of philosophers' attempts to use this idea for that purpose.
  •  14
    Summary
    Analysis 78 (1): 93-96. 2018.
    © The Authors 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] time pass? Well of course it does. Iconoclasts and gadflies might deny it, but they’re just looking for negative attention. It is therefore frustrating to be told, as I have been, that one's theory of time is false because it leaves out the passage of time. In a way, Objective Becoming is a defence of the theory I prefer ag…Read more
  •  86
    Some thoughts on Experiencing Time
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (3): 302-314. 2018.
    This paper examples several arguments from Simon Prosser's book Experiencing Time. His argument against the doctrine of the specious present is applauded. His argument that even if time passes, nothing can detect the passage of time, is questioned. Also challenged are his claims that our experience represents things as enduring, rather than perduring, and represents things as having contradictory properties.
  •  59
    Some Questions about The Moving Spotlight
    Analysis 77 (4): 800-810. 2017.
    © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] don’t like sports, but it is a sports metaphor that comes to mind: if my team were out of the playoffs, I’d be rooting for Cameron. Unlike Cameron, I think that The Block Universe Theory of Time is true, but like Cameron I’ve argued that the best alternative, the theory it should be squaring off against in the World Series of T…Read more
  •  43
    Precis of Objective Becoming
    Philosophical Studies 175 (7): 1787-1789. 2018.
  •  71
    Replies to Deasy and Maudlin
    Philosophical Studies 175 (7): 1815-1823. 2018.
  •  59
    Replies to Cameron, Wilson and Leininger
    Analysis 78 (1): 128-138. 2018.
    © The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Cameron thinks that MST-Supertime, MST-Supertense and MST-Time are defective as versions of the moving spotlight theory and goes on to describe what he thinks they are missing. But I don’t think they are defective; and what Cameron says is missing from these theories is actually present in a version of MST-Time that appears …Read more
  •  68
    Levels of Reasons and Causal Explanation
    Philosophy of Science 84 (5): 905-915. 2017.
    I defend the theory that the reasons why some event occurred are its causes. Many “counterexamples” to this theory turn on confusing two levels of reasons. We should distinguish the reasons why an event occurred from the reasons why those reasons are reasons. An example that treats a second-level reason as a first-level reason will look like a counterexample if that second-level reason is not a cause. But second-level reasons need not be first-level reasons.
  •  254
    On the meaning of the question “How fast does time pass?”
    Philosophical Studies 155 (3): 325-344. 2011.
    In this paper I distinguish interpretations of the question ``How fast does time pass?’’ that are important for the debate over the reality of objective becoming from interpretations that are not. Then I discuss how one theory that incorporates objective becoming—the moving spotlight theory of time—answers this question. It turns out that there are several ways to formulate the moving spotlight theory of time. One formulation says that time passes but it makes no sense to ask how fast; another f…Read more
  •  299
    Haecceitism, anti-haecceitism, and possible worlds: A case study
    Philosophical Quarterly 58 (230): 97-107. 2008.
    Possible-worlds talk obscures, rather than clarifies, the debate about haecceitism. In this paper I distinguish haecceitism and anti-haecceitism from other doctrines that sometimes go under those names. Then I defend the claim that there are no non-tendentious definitions of ‘haecceitism’ and ‘anti-haecceitism’ using possible-worlds talk. That is, any definition of ‘haecceitism’ using possible-worlds talk depends, for its correctness, on a substantive theory of the nature of possible worlds. This e…Read more
  •  344
    Experience and the passage of time
    Philosophical Perspectives 25 (1): 359-387. 2011.
    Some philosophers believe that the passage of time is a real phenomenon. And some of them find a reason to believe this when they attend to features of their conscious experience. In fact this “argument from experience” is supposed to be one of the main arguments for passage. What exactly does this argument look like? Is it any good?
  •  116
    The role of chance in explanation
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1): 1-21. 2013.
    ?Those ice cubes melted because by melting total entropy increased and entropy increase has a very high objective chance.? What role does the chance in this explanation play? I argue that it contributes to the explanation by entailing that the melting was almost necessary, and defend the claim that the fact that some event was almost necessary can, in the right circumstances, constitute a causal explanation of that event
  •  161
    More on haecceitism and possible worlds
    Analytic Philosophy 52 (4): 267-269. 2011.
  •  80
    Are There Non-Causal Explanations (of Particular Events)?
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 65 (3): 445-467. 2014.
    Philosophers have proposed many alleged examples of non-causal explana- tions of particular events. I discuss several well-known examples and argue that they fail to be non-causal.
  •  99
    Does Temperature Have a Metric Structure?
    Philosophy of Science 78 (3): 472-489. 2011.
    Is there anything more to temperature than the ordering of things from colder to hotter? Are there also facts, for example, about how much hotter (twice as hot, three times as hot...) one thing is than another? There certainly are---but the only strong justification for this claim comes from statistical mechanics. What we knew about temperature before the advent of statistical mechanics (what we knew about it from thermodynamics) provided only weak reasons to believe it.
  •  93
    The Dynamics of Non-Being
    Philosophers' Imprint 10. 2010.
    Maybe there is something rather than nothing because the nothingness force acted on itself, and when the nothing nothings itself it produces something. Robert Nozick suggested this as a candidate explanation of the fact that there is something rather than nothing. If he is right that it is a candidate explanation, we should pay attention: there are not many candidates out there. But his "explanation" looks, instead, like a paradigm case of philosophical nonsense. In this paper I describe a "meta…Read more
  •  100
    Extrinsic temporal metrics
    In Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Volume 5, Oxford University Press. 2010.
    When distinguishing absolute, true, and mathematical time from relative, apparent, and common time, Newton wrote: “absolute, true, and mathematical time, in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly” [Newton 2004b: 64]. Newton thought that the temporal metric is intrinsic. Many philosophers have argued—for empiricist reasons or otherwise—that Newton was wrong about the nature of time. They think that the flow of time does involve “reference to som…Read more