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298The Possibility of Language: Internal Tensions in Wittgenstein's Tractatus (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (1): 167-169. 2007.James Bogen - The Possibility of Language: Internal Tensions in Wittgenstein's Tractatus - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.1 167-169 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by James Bogen University of Pittsburgh María Cerezo. The Possibility of Language: Internal Tensions in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. CSLI Lecture Notes, 147. Stanford: CSLI, 2005. Pp. xiv + 321. Paper, $30.00. The Possibility of Language is a difficult, painstakingly …Read more
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270Theory and observation in scienceStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2009.Scientists obtain a great deal of the evidence they use by observingnatural and experimentally generated objects and effects. Much of thestandard philosophical literature on this subject comes from20th century logical positivists and empiricists, theirfollowers, and critics who embraced their issues and accepted some oftheir assumptions even as they objected to specific views. Theirdiscussions of observational evidence tend to focus on epistemologicalquestions about its role in theory testing. T…Read more
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218‘Saving the phenomena’ and saving the phenomenaSynthese 182 (1): 7-22. 2011.Empiricists claim that in accepting a scientific theory one should not commit oneself to claims about things that are not observable in the sense of registering on human perceptual systems (according to Van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism) or experimental equipment (according to what I call liberal empiricism ). They also claim scientific theories should be accepted or rejected on the basis of how well they save the phenomena in the sense delivering unified descriptions of natural regularitie…Read more
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154Evading the IRSIn Martin R. Jones & Nancy Cartwright (eds.), Idealization XII: Correcting the Model. Idealization and Abstraction in the Sciences, Rodopi. 2005.'IRS' is our term for the logical empiricist idea that the best way to understand the epistemic bearing of observational evidence on scientific theories is to model it in terms of Inferential Relations among Sentences representing the evidence, and sentences representing hypotheses the evidence is used to evaluate. Developing ideas from our earlier work, including 'Saving the Phenomena'(Phil Review 97, 1988, p.303-52 )we argue that the bearing of observational evidence on theory depends upon cau…Read more
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145Epistemological custard pies from functional brain imagingPhilosophy of Science 69 (3). 2002.This paper discusses features of an epistemically valuable form of evidence that raise troubles for received and new epistemological treatments of experimental evidence
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122Regularities and causality; generalizations and causal explanationsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (2): 397-420. 2005.Machamer, Darden, and Craver argue that causal explanations explain effects by describing the operations of the mechanisms which produce them. One of this paper’s aims is to take advantage of neglected resources of Mechanism to rethink the traditional idea that actual or counterfactual natural regularities are essential to the distinction between causal and non-causal co-occurrences, and that generalizations describing natural regularities are essential components of causal explanations. I think…Read more
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118The hodgkin‐huxley equations and the concrete model: Comments on Craver, Schaffner, and WeberPhilosophy of Science 75 (5): 1034-1046. 2008.I claim that the Hodgkin‐Huxley (HH) current equations owe a great deal of their importance to their role in bringing results from experiments on squid giant action preparations to bear on the study of the action potential in other neurons in other in vitro and in vivo environments. I consider ideas from Weber and Craver about the role of Coulomb’s and other fundamental equations in explaining the action potential and in HH’s development of their equations. Also, I offer an embellishment to Scha…Read more
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117Analysing causality: The opposite of counterfactual is factualInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 18 (1). 2002.Using Jim Woodward's Counterfactual Dependency account as an example, I argue that causal claims about indeterministic systems cannot be satisfactorily analysed as including counterfactual conditionals among their truth conditions because the counterfactuals such accounts must appeal to need not have truth values. Where this happens, counterfactual analyses transform true causal claims into expressions which are not true.
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83Mechanistic Information and Causal ContinuityIn Phyllis McKay Illari Federica Russo (ed.), Causality in the Sciences, Oxford University Press. 2011.Some biological processes move from step to step in a way that cannot be completely understood solely in terms of causes and correlations. This paper develops a notion of mechanistic information that can be used to explain the continuities of such processes. We compare them to processes that do not involve information. We compare our conception of mechanistic information to some familiar notions including Crick’s idea of genetic information, Shannon-Weaver information, and Millikan’s biosemantic…Read more
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81Familiar versions of empiricism overemphasize and misconstrue the importance of perceptual experience. I discuss their main shortcomings and sketch an alternative framework for thinking about how human sensory systems contribute to scientific knowledge.
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80Observations, theories and the evolution of the human spiritPhilosophy of Science 59 (4): 590-611. 1992.Standard philosophical discussions of theory-ladeness assume that observational evidence consists of perceptual outputs (or reports of such outputs) that are sentential or propositional in structure. Theory-ladeness is conceptualized as having to do with logical or semantical relationships between such outputs or reports and background theories held by observers. Using the recent debate between Fodor and Churchland as a point of departure, we propose an alternative picture in which much of what …Read more
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73Symposium papers, comments and an abstract: Comments on "the sociology of knowledge about child abuse"Noûs 22 (1): 65-66. 1988.
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65Noise in the WorldPhilosophy of Science 77 (5): 778-791. 2010.This essay uses Györgi Buzsáki's use of EEG data to draw conclusions about brain function as an example to show that investigators sometimes draw conclusions from noisy data by analyzing the noise rather than by extracting a signal from it. The example makes vivid some important differences between McAllister's, Woodward's, and my ideas about how data are interpreted.
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60Freedom and happiness in mill's defence of libertyPhilosophical Quarterly 28 (113): 325-338. 1978.
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55`Two as good as a hundred': Poorly replicated evidence in some nineteenth-century neuroscientific researchStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 32 (3): 491-533. 2000.According to a received doctrine, espoused, by Karl Popper and Harry Collins, and taken for granted by many others, poorly replicated evidence should be epistemically defective and incapable of persuading scientists to accept the views it is used to argue for. But John Hughlings Jackson used poorly replicated clinical and post-mortem evidence to mount rationally compelling and influential arguments for a highly progressive theory of the organization of the brain and its functions. This paper set…Read more
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54This paper compares the relative merits of two alternatives to traditional accounts of causal explanation: Jim Woodward's counterfactual invariance account, and the Mechanistic account of Machamer, Darden, and Craver. Mechanism wins (a) because we have good causal explanations for chaotic effects whose production does not exhibit the counterfactual regularities Woodward requires, and (b)because arguments suggested by Belnap's and Green's discussion of prediction (in'Facing the Future' chpt 6)sho…Read more
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53Titles and abstracts for the Pitt-London Workshop in the Philosophy of Biology and Neuroscience: September 2001.
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48Experiment and observationIn Peter K. Machamer & Michael Silberstein (eds.), The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of science, Blackwell. pp. 128--148. 2002.This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Neglecting Experiment; Distorting Observation The Socio‐Theoretical Turn Some Issues for Empirical Epistemologists.
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