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1The Philosophy of Progress…PSA Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1978 (2): 530-547. 1978.Philosophical dialogue is a curious activity. Arguments are expected to be rigorous, but no demand is made that there must be evidence for the premisses. Terminology is expected to be precise, but its appropriateness to the subject matter under discussion can be left unexplored. Officially, nothing is conceded; but, in fact, a great deal is taken for granted. Ad argumentum mingles indiscriminately with ad hominem; and, above all, the evidential warrant for one’s philosophical claims is, like the…Read more
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113Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum (edited book)D. Reidel. 1983.GEOMETRY AND SEMANTICS: AN EXAMINATION OF PUTNAM'S PHILOSOPHY OF GEOMETRY There are many ways to shed light on how and why our conception of geometry changed during the last two centuries. One fruitful strategy is to relate those ...
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3Aliados extraños: la inferencia a la mejor explicación y el estándar de prueba penalProblema. Anuario de Filosofía y Teoria Del Derecho 1 (1): 305-327. 2007.In this short essay the author deals with the fundamental question of whether the Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) model has sufficient grounds to be considered as a substitute of the current criminal standard of proof (proof Beyond All Reasonable Doubt). After giving an overview of the IBE model as proposed in more general fields such as epistemology and the philosophy of science, and after concluding that the IBE has failed as a model of the acceptance and rejection of scientific theori…Read more
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Convergence or divergence in the evolution of (criminal) rights? : a case study of the multiple incoherencies of the presumption of innocenceIn Gustavo Ortiz-Millán & Juan Antonio Cruz Parcero (eds.), Mind, Language and Morality: Essays in Honor of Mark Platts, Routledge. 2018.
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4Scientific Progress and Content LossIn Eliot Deutsch (ed.), Culture and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives, University of Hawaii Press. pp. 561-569. 1991.
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3The Rules of Trial, Political Morality and the Costs of Error: Or, Is Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt Doing More Harm than Good?In Leslie Green & Brian Leiter (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law: Volume 1, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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14Commentary: Science at the Bar–Causes for ConcernScience, Technology and Human Values 7 (4): 16-19. 1982.
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665The Epistemic, the Cognitive, and the SocialIn Peter Machamer & Gereon Wolters (eds.), Science, values, and objectivity, University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 14-23. 2004.
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27The re-emergence of hyphenated history-and-philosophy-of-science and the testing of theories of scientific changeStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 59 74-77. 2016.
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1Scrutinizing Science: Empirical Studies of Scientific ChangeBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (4): 1063-1065. 1994.
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Beyond Positivism and Relativism: Theory, Method, and EvidenceBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (3): 447-454. 1997.
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14VI. Thomas Reid and the Newtonian Turn of British Methodological ThoughtIn John W. Davis & Robert E. Butts (eds.), The Methodological Heritage of Newton, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 103-131. 1971.
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The Idea of a Physical Theory From Galileo to Newton: Studies in Seventeenth-Century MethodologyDissertation, Princeton University. 1966.
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145The Elementary Epistemic Arithmetic of Criminal JusticeEpisteme 5 (3): 282-294. 2008.This paper propounds the following theses: 1). that the traditional focus on the Blackstone ratio of errors as a device for setting the criminal standard of proof is ill-conceived, 2). that the preoccupation with the rate of false convictions in criminal trials is myopic, and 3). that the key ratio of interest, in judging the political morality of a system of criminal justice, involves the relation between the risk that an innocent person runs of being falsely convicted of a serious crime and th…Read more
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24Quarta sessió del Seminari de Larry Lawdan.
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102For more than a half-century, evidence scholars have been exploring whether the criminal standard of proof can be grounded in decision theory. Such grounding would require the emergence of a social consensus about the utilities to be assigned to the four outcomes at trial. Significant disagreement remains, even among legal scholars, about the relative desirability of those outcomes and even about the formalisms for manipulating their respective utilities. We attempt to diagnose the principal rea…Read more
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23Progress and Its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific GrowthPhilosophical Review 87 (4): 614. 1978.
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160Commentary: Science at the Bar-Causes for ConcernScience, Technology, and Human Values 7 (41): 16-19. 1982.
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55The history of science and the philosophy of scienceIn R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie & M. J. S. Hodge (eds.), Companion to the History of Modern Science, Routledge. pp. 47--59. 1990.
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48Thinking about error in the lawIn Alvin I. Goldman & Dennis Whitcomb (eds.), Social Epistemology: Essential Readings, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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115Science and Relativism: Some key controversies in the philosophy of scienceUniversity of Chicago Press. 1990.Some Key Controversies in the Philosophy of Science Larry Laudan. the mouths of my realist, relativist, and positivist. (By contrast, there is at least one person who hews to the line I have my prag- matist defending.) But I have gone to some ...
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284How about bust? Factoring explanatory power back into theory evaluationPhilosophy of Science 64 (2): 306-316. 1997.1. Introduction. The papers by Hellman and Mayo offer up a rich menu of problems and proposed solutions, so there is much here for a friendly critic to fasten on. In order to bring a modicum of focus to my commentary, I shall limit my remarks to the Duhem problem and its radiations in epistemology and methodology. Both Mayo and Hellman claim to have solutions to that hoary old problem and they tout these solutions as key indicators of the explanatory power of their respective technical epistemol…Read more
Areas of Specialization
20th Century Philosophy |
General Philosophy of Science |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Law |
General Philosophy of Science |