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716Philosophy 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
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7Replies by CartwrightIn Luc Bovens, Carl Hoefer & Stephan Hartmann (eds.), Nancy Cartwright’s Philosophy of Science, . 2010.
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26Classicality 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
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1024Philosophy 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.
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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
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Consistency and Admissibility: Reply to MeachamIn Alastair Wilson (ed.), Chance and Temporal Asymmetry, Oxford University Press. 2014.
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2Scientific realism without the quantumIn Steven French & Juha Saatsi (eds.), Scientific Realism and the Quantum, Oxford University Press. 2020.
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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
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252Nothing 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
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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
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520Realism, 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
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10Philosophy of space-time physicsIn Peter Machamer & Michael Silberstein (eds.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science, . pp. 173-198. 2002.
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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
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118Water 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
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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
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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.
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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.
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465The 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
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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
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2John Earman, World Enough and Space-time: Absolute vs. relational theories of space and time Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 11 (3): 178-181. 1991.
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158Empirical equivalence, underdetermination, and systems of the worldPhilosophy of Science 61 (4): 592-607. 1994.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
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215ChanceIn 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
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Time and Chance PropensitiesIn Craig Callender (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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72Humean effective strategiesIn 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
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Causation in spacetime theoriesIn Helen Beebee, Peter Menzies & Christopher Hitchcock (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Causation, Oxford University Press. pp. 685--704. 2009.
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269The Best Humean System for Statistical MechanicsErkenntnis 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
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Universitat de BarcelonaICREA Research Professor
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Barcelona, Spain
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Laws of Nature |
Causation |
Theories of Causation |
Causation, Miscellaneous |
Chance and Objective Probability |
Dispositions and Powers |