•  916
    Probability in GRW theory
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 38 (2): 371-389. 2007.
    GRW Theory postulates a stochastic mechanism assuring that every so often the wave function of a quantum system is `hit', which leaves it in a localised state. How are we to interpret the probabilities built into this mechanism? GRW theory is a firmly realist proposal and it is therefore clear that these probabilities are objective probabilities (i.e. chances). A discussion of the major theories of chance leads us to the conclusion that GRW probabilities can be understood only as either single c…Read more
  •  797
    Nancy Cartwright is one of the most distinguished and influential contemporary philosophers of science. Despite the profound impact of her work, there is neither a systematic exposition of Cartwright’s philosophy of science nor a collection of articles that contains in-depth discussions of the major themes of her philosophy. This book is devoted to a critical assessment of Cartwright’s philosophy of science and contains contributions from Cartwright's champions and critics. Broken into three par…Read more
  •  788
    Philosophy of Space‐Time Physics
    In Peter Machamer & Michael Silberstein (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science, Blackwell. 2002.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Relationism, Substantivalism and Space‐time Conventionalism about Space‐time Black Holes and Singularities Horizons and Uniformity Conclusion.
  •  664
    Philosophy of the Physical Sciences
    In Paul Humphreys (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science, Oxford University Press Usa. 2016.
    The authors survey some debates about the nature and structure of physical theories and about the connections between our physical theories and naturalized metaphysics. The discussion is organized around an “ideal view” of physical theories and criticisms that can be raised against it. This view includes controversial commitments regarding the best analysis of physical modalities and intertheory relations. The authors consider the case in favor of taking laws as the primary modal notion, discuss…Read more
  •  478
    The goal of this paper is to sketch and defend a new interpretation or 'theory' of objective chance, one that lets us be sure such chances exist and shows how they can play the roles we traditionally grant them. The account is 'Humean' in claiming that objective chances supervene on the totality of actual events, but does not imply or presuppose a Humean approach to other metaphysical issues such as laws or causation. Like Lewis (1994) I take the Principal Principle (PP) to be the key to underst…Read more
  •  463
    Realism, reference & perspective
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 10 (3): 1-22. 2020.
    This paper continues the defense of a version of scientific realism, Tautological Scientific Realism, that rests on the claim that, excluding some areas of fundamental physics about which doubts are entirely justified, many areas of contemporary science cannot be coherently imagined to be false other than via postulation of radically skeptical scenarios, which are not relevant to the realism debate in philosophy of science. In this paper we discuss, specifically, the threats of meaning change an…Read more
  •  456
    Freedom from the Inside Out
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 50 201-. 2002.
    Since the death of strong reductionism, philosophers of science have expanded the horizons of their understandings of the physical, mental, and social worlds, and the complex relations among them. To give one interesting example, John Dupre has endorsed a notion of downward causation: ‘higher-level’ events causing events at a ‘lower’ ontological level. For example, my intention to type the letter ‘t’ causes the particular motions experienced by all the atoms in my left forefinger as I type it. T…Read more
  •  403
    The paper investigates the kind of dependence relation that best portrays Machian frame-dragging in general relativity. The question is tricky because frame-dragging relates local inertial frames to distant distributions of matter in a time-independent way, thus establishing some sort of non-local link between the two. For this reason, a plain causal interpretation of frame-dragging faces huge challenges. The paper will shed light on the issue by using a generalized structural equation model ana…Read more
  •  373
    For fundamentalism
    Philosophy of Science 70 (5): 1401--1412. 2003.
    In this paper I defend fundamental physical laws from the arguments mounted by Nancy Cartwright in her (1999) book The Dappled World (and other publications). I argue, positively, that we have a good deal of evidence for mathematical laws—not just causal capacities—underlying many natural phenomena. I also argue, negatively, that Cartwright's main arguments unfairly demand that a fundamentalist be a strong reductionist.
  •  305
    Energy Conservation in GTR
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 31 (2): 187-199. 2000.
    The topics of gravitational field energy and energy-momentum conservation in General Relativity theory have been unjustly neglected by philosophers. If the gravitational field in space free of ordinary matter, as represented by the metric g ab itself, can be said to carry genuine energy and momentum, this is a powerful argument for adopting the substantivalist view of spacetime.This paper explores the standard textbook account of gravitational field energy and argues that (a) so-called stress-en…Read more
  •  257
    Determinism and Chance from a Humean Perspective
    In Friedrich Stadler, Dennis Dieks, Wenceslao González, Hartmann J., Uebel Stephan, Weber Thomas & Marcel (eds.), The Present Situation in the Philosophy of Science, Springer. pp. 351--72. 2010.
    On the face of it ‘deterministic chance’ is an oxymoron: either an event is chancy or deterministic, but not both. Nevertheless, the world is rife with events that seem to be exactly that: chancy and deterministic at once. Simple gambling devices like coins and dice are cases in point. On the one hand they are governed by deterministic laws – the laws of classical mechanics – and hence given the initial condition of, say, a coin toss it is determined whether it will land heads or tails.2 On the …Read more
  •  247
    Causality and determinism: Tension, or outright conflict?
    Revista de Filosofía (Madrid) 29 (2): 99-115. 2004.
    In the philosophical tradition, the notions of determinism and causality are strongly linked: it is assumed that in a world of deterministic laws, causality may be said to reign supreme; and in any world where the causality is strong enough, determinism must hold. I will show that these alleged linkages are based on mistakes, and in fact get things almost completely wrong. In a deterministic world that is anything like ours, there is no room for genuine causation. Though there may be stable enou…Read more
  •  243
    Causal determinism
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
  •  231
    The Best Humean System for Statistical Mechanics
    Erkenntnis 80 (S3): 551-574. 2015.
    Classical statistical mechanics posits probabilities for various events to occur, and these probabilities seem to be objective chances. This does not seem to sit well with the fact that the theory’s time evolution is deterministic. We argue that the tension between the two is only apparent. We present a theory of Humean objective chance and show that chances thus understood are compatible with underlying determinism and provide an interpretation of the probabilities we find in Boltzmannian stati…Read more
  •  215
    Chance
    In Donald Borchert (ed.), Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan. 2006.
    Much is asked of the concept of chance. It has been thought to play various roles, some in tension with or even incompatible with others. Chance has been characterized negatively, as the absence of causation; yet also positively—the ancient Greek τυχη´ reifies it—as a cause of events that are not governed by laws of nature, or as a feature of the laws themselves. Chance events have been understood epistemically as those whose causes are unknown; yet also objectively as a distinct ontological kin…Read more
  •  215
    Nothing to come in a relativistic setting
    Disputatio 13 (63): 433-444. 2021.
    In this paper we critically review Correia’s and Rosenkranz’s Nothing to Come. A Defence of the Growing Block Theory of Time, published by Springer in 2018. By taking into account the essential reliance of the book on tense logic, we bring out the existence of a conflict between their logical axioms, that presuppose truth bivalence even for statements concerning future contingents, and the principle of groundedness that they also advocate. According to this principle, a proposition Q is now grou…Read more
  •  197
    Absolute versus relational spacetime: For better or worse, the debate goes on
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (3): 451-467. 1998.
    The traditional absolutist-relationist debate is still clearly formulable in the context of General Relativity Theory (GTR), despite the important differences between Einstein's theory and the earlier context of Newtonian physics. This paper answers recent arguments by Robert Rynasiewicz against the significance of the debate in the GTR context. In his (1996) (‘Absolute vs. Relational Spacetime: An Outmoded Debate?’), Rynasiewicz argues that already in the late nineteenth century, and even more …Read more
  •  190
    Kant's hands and Earman's pions: Chirality arguments for substantival space
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14 (3). 2000.
    This paper outlines a new interpretation of an argument of Kant's for the existence of absolute space. The Kant argument, found in a 1768 essay on topology, argues for the existence of Newtonian-Euclidean absolute space on the basis of the existence of incongruous counterparts (such as a left and a right hand, or any asymmetrical object and its mirror-image). The clear, intrinsic difference between a left hand and a right hand, Kant claimed, cannot be understood on a relational view of space - f…Read more
  •  163
    In a recent article, Gordon Belot uses the so-called undermining phenomenon to try to raise a new difficulty for reductive accounts of objective probability, such as Humean Best System accounts. In this paper I will give a critical discussion of Belot’s paper and argue that, in fact, there is no new difficulty here for chance reductionists to address.
  •  145
    The underdetermination of theory by evidence must be distinguished from holism. The latter is a doctrine about the testing of scientific hypotheses; the former is a thesis about empirically adequate logically incompatible global theories or "systems of the world". The distinction is crucial for an adequate assessment of the underdetermination thesis. The paper shows how some treatments of underdetermination are vitiated by failure to observe this distinction, and identifies some necessary condit…Read more
  •  103
    Water has a microstructural essence after all
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (1): 1-15. 2018.
    In recent years attacks on the Kripke-Putnam approach to natural kinds and natural kind terms have proliferated. In a recent paper, Häggqvist and Wikforss (The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1–23, 2017) attack the once-dominant essentialist account of natural kinds. Häggqvist & Wikforss also suggest that it is time to return to some sort of cluster-based descriptivist semantics for natural kind terms, thus targeting both the metaphysical and semantic tenets that underpin the Krip…Read more
  •  95
    Philosophy of space-time physics
    with Claire Callender
    In , . 2002.
  •  95
    The Metaphysics of Space-Time Substantivalism
    Journal of Philosophy 93 (1): 5-27. 1996.
  •  74
    Einstein's struggle for a Machian gravitation theory
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 25 (3): 287-335. 1994.
    The story of Einstein's struggle to create a general theory of relativity, and his early discontentment with the final form of the theory , is well known in broad outline. Thanks to the work of John Norton and others, much of the fine detail of the story is also now known. One aspect of Einstein's work in this period has, however, been relatively neglected: Einstein's commitment to Mach's ideas on inertia, and the influence this commitment had on Einstein's work on general relativity from 1907 t…Read more
  •  64
    Humean effective strategies
    In Dag Westerståhl, Petr Hajek & Luis Valdes-Villanueva (eds.), Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the 12th International Congress, Kcl Press. 2005.
    In a now-classic paper, Nancy Cartwright argued that the Humean conception of causation as mere regular co-occurrence is too weak to make sense of our everyday and scientific practices. Specifically she claimed that in order to understand our reasoning about, and uses of, effective strategies, we need a metaphysically stronger notion of causation and causal laws than Humeanism allows. Cartwright’s arguments were formulated in the framework of probabilistic causation, and it is precisely in the d…Read more
  •  54