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365What Have Google’s Random Quantum Circuit Simulation Experiments Demonstrated about Quantum Supremacy?In Hamid R. Arabnia, Leonidas Deligiannidis, Fernando G. Tinetti & Quoc-Nam Tran (eds.), Advances in Software Engineering, Education, and E-Learning: Proceedings From Fecs'20, Fcs'20, Serp'20, and Eee'20, Springer. 2021.Quantum computing is of high interest because it promises to perform at least some kinds of computations much faster than classical computers. Arute et al. 2019 (informally, “the Google Quantum Team”) report the results of experiments that purport to demonstrate “quantum supremacy” – the claim that the performance of some quantum computers is better than that of classical computers on some problems. Do these results close the debate over quantum supremacy? We argue that they do not. In the …Read more
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316Intuition and philosophical methodologyAxiomathes 18 (1): 67-89. 2008.Intuition serves a variety of roles in contemporary philosophy. This paper provides a historical discussion of the revival of intuition in the 1970s, untangling some of the ways that intuition has been used and offering some suggestions concerning its proper place in philosophical investigation. Contrary to some interpretations of the results of experimental philosophy, it is argued that generalized skepticism with respect to intuition is unwarranted. Intuition can continue to play an important …Read more
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254Where’s the Bridge? Epistemology and Epistemic LogicPhilosophical Studies 128 (1): 137-167. 2006.Epistemic logic begins with the recognition that our everyday talk about knowing and believing has some systematic features that we can track and re‡ect upon. Epistemic logicians have studied and extended these glints of systematic structure in fascinating and important ways since the early 1960s. However, for one reason or another, mainstream epistemologists have shown little interest. It is striking to contrast the marginal role of epistemic logic in contemporary epistemology with the centrali…Read more
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252Limiting SkepticismLogos and Episteme 2 (2). 2011.Skeptics argue that the acquisition of knowledge is impossible given the standing possibility of error. We present the limiting convergence strategy for responding to skepticism and discuss the relationship between conceivable error and an agent’s knowledge in the limit. We argue that the skeptic must demonstrate that agents are operating with a bad method or are in an epistemically cursed world. Such demonstration involves a significant step beyond conceivability and commits the skeptic to pote…Read more
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245Computational Models of Emergent PropertiesMinds and Machines 18 (4): 475-491. 2008.Computational modeling plays an increasingly important explanatory role in cases where we investigate systems or problems that exceed our native epistemic capacities. One clear case where technological enhancement is indispensable involves the study of complex systems.1 However, even in contexts where the number of parameters and interactions that define a problem is small, simple systems sometimes exhibit non-linear features which computational models can illustrate and track. In recent decades…Read more
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189No-Regret Learning Supports Voters’ CompetenceSocial Epistemology 1-17. forthcoming.Procedural justifications of democracy emphasize inclusiveness and respect and by doing so come into conflict with instrumental justifications that depend on voters’ competence. This conflict raises questions about jury theorems and makes their standing in democratic theory contested. We show that a type of no-regret learning called meta-induction can help to satisfy the competence assumption without excluding voters or diverse opinion leaders on an a priori basis. Meta-induction assigns weights…Read more
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151Systems of Visual Identification in Neuroscience: Lessons from Epistemic LogicPhilosophy of Science 70 (1): 89-104. 2003.The following analysis shows how developments in epistemic logic can play a nontrivial role in cognitive neuroscience. We argue that the striking correspondence between two modes of identification, as distinguished in the epistemic context, and two cognitive systems distinguished by neuroscientific investigation of the visual system (the "where" and "what" systems) is not coincidental, and that it can play a clarificatory role at the most fundamental levels of neuroscientific theory
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111The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology (edited book)Routledge. 2009._The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Second Edition_ is an invaluable guide and major reference source to the major topics, problems, concepts and debates in philosophy of psychology and is the first companion of its kind. A team of renowned international contributors provide forty-nine chapters organised into six clear parts: Historical background to Philosophy of Psychology Psychological Explanation Cognition and Representation The biological basis of psychology Perceptual Exp…Read more
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101Explanation, Representation and the Dynamical HypothesisMinds and Machines 11 (4): 521-541. 2001.This paper challenges arguments that systematic patterns of intelligent behavior license the claim that representations must play a role in the cognitive system analogous to that played by syntactical structures in a computer program. In place of traditional computational models, I argue that research inspired by Dynamical Systems theory can support an alternative view of representations. My suggestion is that we treat linguistic and representational structures as providing complex multi-dimensi…Read more
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82Epistemic logic is the logic of knowledge and belief. It provides insight into the properties of individual knowers, has provided a means to model complicated scenarios involving groups of knowers and has improved our understanding of the dynamics of inquiry.
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76How deep is AI's love? Understanding relational AIBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.We suggest that as people move to construe robots as social agents, interact with them, and treat them as capable of social ties, they might develop (close) relationships with them. We then ask what kind of relationships can people form with bots, what functions can bots fulfill, and what are the societal and moral implications of such relationships.
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69Software Intensive SciencePhilosophy and Technology 27 (3): 461-477. 2014.This paper argues that the difference between contemporary software intensive scientific practice and more traditional non-software intensive varieties results from the characteristically high conditionality of software. We explain why the path complexity of programs with high conditionality imposes limits on standard error correction techniques and why this matters. While it is possible, in general, to characterize the error distribution in inquiry that does not involve high conditionality, we …Read more
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66The Architecture of Cognition: Rethinking Fodor and Pylyshyn's Systematicity Challenge (edited book)MIT Press. 2014.Philosophers and cognitive scientists reassess systematicity in the post-connectionist era, offering perspectives from ecological psychology, embodied and distributed cognition, enactivism, and other methodologies.
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59What can neuroscience explain?Brain and Mind 2 (2): 243-248. 2001.Horgan’s perceptive discussion of Freudian psychology, Prozac and evolutionary biology cannot mitigate the problems that seriously weaken his book (Horgan, 1999). While he certainly manages to deflate some of the more outrageous hype surrounding the scientific and often not-so-scientific study of the mind, his criticism of the brain and behavioral sciences contains a number of flaws, some of which I will address below. My response focuses on his discussion of neuroscience. As we shall see, the t…Read more
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58An asymmetry between the demands at the computational and algorithmic levels of description furnishes the illusion that the abstract profile at the computational level can be multiply realized, and that something is actually being shared at the algorithmic one. A disembodied rendering of the situation lays the stress upon the different ways in which an algorithm can be implemented. However, from an embodied approach, things look rather different. The relevant pairing, I shall argue, is not betwe…Read more
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57How Computational Models Predict the Behavior of Complex SystemsFoundations of Science 18 (4): 809-821. 2013.In this paper, we argue for the centrality of prediction in the use of computational models in science. We focus on the consequences of the irreversibility of computational models and on the conditional or ceteris paribus, nature of the kinds of their predictions. By irreversibility, we mean the fact that computational models can generally arrive at the same state via many possible sequences of previous states. Thus, while in the natural world, it is generally assumed that physical states have a…Read more
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55A Computational Modeling Strategy for LevelsPhilosophy of Science 75 (5): 608-620. 2008.Rather than taking the ontological fundamentality of an ideal microphysics as a starting point, this article sketches an approach to the problem of levels that swaps assumptions about ontology for assumptions about inquiry. These assumptions can be implemented formally via computational modeling techniques that will be described below. It is argued that these models offer a way to save some of our prominent commonsense intuitions concerning levels. This strategy offers a way of exploring the ind…Read more
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47Software engineering standards for epidemiological modelsHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (4): 1-24. 2020.There are many tangled normative and technical questions involved in evaluating the quality of software used in epidemiological simulations. In this paper we answer some of these questions and offer practical guidance to practitioners, funders, scientific journals, and consumers of epidemiological research. The heart of our paper is a case study of the Imperial College London covid-19 simulator, set in the context of recent work in epistemology of simulation and philosophy of epidemiology.
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46Emergence and Reflexive DownwardPrincipia: An International Journal of Epistemology 6 (1). 2002.This paper responds to Jaegwon Kim's powerful objection to the very possibility of genuinely novel emergent properties Kim argue that the incoherence of reflexive downward causation means that the causal power of an emergent phenomenon is ultimately reducible to the causal powers of its constituents. I offer a a simple argument showing how to characterize emergent properties m terms of the effects of structural relations an the causal powers of that constituents.
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40Quantifiers, Questions and Quantum Physics: Essays on the Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka (edited book)Springer. 2004.This volume gathers together essays from some of Hintikka’s colleagues and former students exploring his influence on their work and pursuing some of the insights that we have found in his work. This book includes a comprehensive overview of Hintikka’s philosophy by Dan Kolak and John Symons and an annotated bibliography of Hintikka’s work. Table of Contents: Foreword; Daniel Kolak and John Symons. Hintikka on Epistemological Axiomatizations; Vincent F. Hendricks. Hintikka on the Problem with th…Read more
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39Ontology and Methodology in Analytic PhilosophyIn Roberto Poli & Johanna Seibt (eds.), Theory and Applications of Ontology: Philosophical Perspectives, Springer Verlag. pp. 349--394. 2010.
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38Social Agency for Artifacts: Chatbots and the Ethics of Artificial IntelligenceDigital Society 3 1-28. 2024.Ethically significant consequences of artificially intelligent artifacts will stem from their effects on existing social relations. Artifacts will serve in a variety of socially important roles—as personal companions, in the service of elderly and infirm people, in commercial, educational, and other socially sensitive contexts. The inevitable disruptions that these technologies will cause to social norms, institutions, and communities warrant careful consideration. As we begin to assess these ef…Read more
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36The individuality of artifacts and organismsHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2-3). 2010.
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34Emergence and reflexive downward causationPrincipia 6 (1): 183-202. 2002.This paper responds to Jaegwon Kim's powerful objection to the very possibility of genuinely novel emergent properties. Kim argues that the incoherence of reflexive downward causation means that the causal power of an emergent phenomenon is ultimately reducible to the causal powers of its constituents. I offer a simple argument showing how to characterize emergent properties m terms of the effects of structural relations an the causal powers of that. constituents
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34Why There is no General Solution to the Problem of Software VerificationFoundations of Science 25 (3): 541-557. 2020.How can we be certain that software is reliable? Is there any method that can verify the correctness of software for all cases of interest? Computer scientists and software engineers have informally assumed that there is no fully general solution to the verification problem. In this paper, we survey approaches to the problem of software verification and offer a new proof for why there can be no general solution.
Lawrence, Kansas, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |