-
709Philosophy of the Physical SciencesIn 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
-
7Replies by CartwrightIn Luc Bovens, Carl Hoefer & Stephan Hartmann (eds.), Nancy Cartwright’s Philosophy of Science, . 2010.
-
25Classicality and Bell’s theoremEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (3): 1-24. 2023.A widespread view among physicists is that Bell’s theorem rests on an implicit assumption of “classicality,” in addition to locality. According to this understanding, the violation of Bell’s inequalities poses no challenge to locality, but simply reinforces the fact that quantum mechanics is not classical. The paper provides a critical analysis of this view. First we characterize the notion of classicality in probabilistic terms. We argue that classicality thus construed has nothing to do with t…Read more
-
993Philosophy of Space‐Time PhysicsIn 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.
-
63Objective chance: not propensity, maybe determinismLato Sensu, Revue de la Société de Philosophie des Sciences 3 (1): 31-42. 2016.One currently popular view about the nature of objective probabilities, or objective chances, is that they – or some of them, at least – are primitive features of the physical world, not reducible to anything else nor explicable in terms of frequencies, degrees of belief, or anything else. In this paper I explore the question of what the semantic content of primitive chance claims could be. Every attempt I look at to supply such content either comes up empty-handed, or begs important questions a…Read more
-
Consistency and Admissibility: Reply to MeachamIn Alastair Wilson (ed.), Chance and Temporal Asymmetry, Oxford University Press. 2014.
-
2Scientific realism without the quantumIn Steven French & Juha Saatsi (eds.), Scientific Realism and the Quantum, Oxford University Press. 2020.
-
12Measures of effectiveness in medical research: Reporting both absolute and relative measuresStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 88. 2021.Biomedical research, especially pharmaceutical research, has been criticised for engaging in practices that lead to over-estimations of the effectiveness of medical treatments. A central issue concerns the reporting of absolute and relative measures of medical effectiveness. In this paper we critically examine proposals made by Jacob Stegenga to (a) give priority to the reporting of absolute measures over relative measures, and (b) downgrade the measures of effectiveness (effect sizes) of the tr…Read more
-
242Nothing to come in a relativistic settingDisputatio 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
-
17The philosopher’s paradoxTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 34 (3): 407-421. 2019.We offer a novel argument for one-boxing in Newcomb’s Problem. The intentional states of a rational person are psychologically coherent across time, and rational decisions are made against this backdrop. We compare this coherence constraint with a golf swing, which to be effective must include a follow-through after the ball is in flight. Decisions, like golf swings, are extended processes, and their coherence with other psychological states of a player in the Newcomb scenario links her choice w…Read more
-
510Realism, reference & perspectiveEuropean 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
-
10Philosophy of space-time physicsIn Peter Machamer & Michael Silberstein (eds.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science, . pp. 173-198. 2002.
-
810Nancy Cartwright’s Philosophy of Science (edited book)Routledge. 2008.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
-
117Water has a microstructural essence after allEuropean 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
-
500The Third Way on Objective Probability: A Sceptic's Guide to Objective ChanceMind 116 (463): 549-596. 2007.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
-
18Chance in the World: A Humean Guide to Objective ChanceOup Usa. 2018.This book explains how we can understand objective chance in a metaphysically neutral way, as reducible to certain patterns that can be discerned in the actual events of our world.
-
193In 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.
-
451The metaphysics of Machian frame-draggingIn Claus Beisbart, Tilman Sauer & Christian Wüthrich (eds.), Thinking About Space and Time: 100 Years of Applying and Interpreting General Relativity, Birkhäuser. 2020.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
-
2John Earman, World Enough and Space-time: Absolute vs. relational theories of space and time Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 11 (3): 178-181. 1991.
-
General Relativity and Spacetime RelationismDissertation, Stanford University. 1992.This dissertation takes up the project of showing that, in the context of the general theory of relativity , spacetime relationism is not a refuted or hopeless view, as many in the recent literature have maintained . Most of the challenges to the relationist view in General Relativity can be satisfactorily answered; in addition, the opposing absolutist and substantivalist views of spacetime can be shown to be problematic. The crucial burden for relationists concerned with GTR is to show that the…Read more
-
206Kant's hands and Earman's pions: Chirality arguments for substantival spaceInternational 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
-
214Absolute versus relational spacetime: For better or worse, the debate goes onBritish 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
-
385For fundamentalismPhilosophy 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.
-
57Calibration: Being in Tune with FrequenciesDialectica 66 (3): 435-452. 2012.Our beliefs can have, or fail to have, a significant epistemic virtue: they can be true. What about our partial beliefs – that is, credences or subjective probabilities? Is there an epistemic virtue that credences can have or fail to have, whose nature or role with respect to credences is analogous to the role that truth has with respect to full beliefs? Van Fraassen argued in the 1980s that there is indeed such an analog virtue, and he claimed that it is calibration: our credences should match,…Read more
-
269Determinism and Chance from a Humean PerspectiveIn 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
-
Universitat de BarcelonaICREA Research Professor
-
Barcelona, Spain
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Laws of Nature |
Causation |
Theories of Causation |
Causation, Miscellaneous |
Chance and Objective Probability |
Dispositions and Powers |