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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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675The 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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28The 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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144Two dogmas of methodologyPhilosophy of Science 43 (4): 585-597. 1976.This paper argues that it has been widely assumed by philosophers of science that the cumulative retention of explanatory success is a "sine qua non" for making judgements about the progress or rational preferability of one theory over another. It has also been assumed that it is impossible to make objective, Comparative judgements of the acceptability of rival theories unless all the statements of both theories could be translated into a common language. This paper seeks to show that both these…Read more
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„A Confutation of Convergent Realism “in Yuri Balashov and Alex RosenbergIn Yuri Balashov & Alexander Rosenberg (eds.), Philosophy of Science: Contemporary Readings, Routledge. pp. 211--33. 2002.
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256Normative naturalismPhilosophy of Science 57 (1): 44-59. 1990.Normative naturalism is a view about the status of epistemology and philosophy of science; it is a meta-epistemology. It maintains that epistemology can both discharge its traditional normative role and nonetheless claim a sensitivity to empirical evidence. The first sections of this essay set out the central tenets of normative naturalism, both in its epistemic and its axiological dimensions; later sections respond to criticisms of that species of naturalism from Gerald Doppelt, Jarrett Leplin …Read more
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112Some problems facing intuitionist meta-methodologiesSynthese 67 (1). 1986.Intuitionistic meta-methodologies, which abound in recent philosophy of science, take the criterion of success for theories of scientific rationality to be whether those theories adequately explicate our intuitive judgments of rationality in exemplary cases. Garber's (1985) critique of Laudan's (1977) intuitionistic meta-methodology, correct as far as it goes, does not go far enough. Indeed, Garber himself advocates a form of intuitionistic meta-methodology; he merely denies any special role for…Read more
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47Reply to Mary HesseThe Monist 55 (3): 525-525. 1971.I am happy to see Dr. Hesse’s clarification of her earlier discussion of consilience. I shall not comment here on her interesting, if controversial, thesis that a confirmed theory confers no likelihood on its untested entailments, except insofar as the latter are analogous to previously confirmed entailments of that theory. It would be premature to comment on the thesis until Hesse has spelled out in more detail her account of analogy.
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32Views of progress: Separating the pilgrims from the rakesPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 10 (3): 273-286. 1980.
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68Dominance and the disunity of method: Solving the problems of innovation and consensusPhilosophy of Science 56 (2): 221-237. 1989.It is widely supposed that the scientists in any field use identical standards for evaluating theories. Without such unity of standards, consensus about scientific theories is supposedly unintelligible. However, the hypothesis of uniform standards can explain neither scientific disagreement nor scientific innovation. This paper seeks to show how the presumption of divergent standards (when linked to a hypothesis of dominance) can explain agreement, disagreement and innovation. By way of illustra…Read more
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Progress and its problems: Towards a theory of scientific growthBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 32 (1): 57-71. 1978.
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The methodological foundations of Mach's anti-atomism and their historical rootsIn Peter K. Machamer & Robert G. Turnbull (eds.), Motion and Time, Space and Matter, Ohio State University Press. pp. 390--417. 1976.
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54A problem-solving approach to scientific progressIn Ian Hacking (ed.), Scientific revolutions, Oxford University Press. 1981.
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73Towards a Reassessment of Comte’s ‘Methode Positive’Philosophy of Science 38 (1): 35-53. 1971.In this study of Auguste Comte's philosophy of science, an attempt is made to explicate his views on such methodological issues as explanation, prediction, induction and hypothesis. Comte's efforts to resolve the dual problems of demarcation and meaning led to the enunciation of principles of verifiability and predictability. Comte's hypothetico-deductive method is seen to permit conjectures dealing with unobservable entities
Areas of Specialization
20th Century Philosophy |
General Philosophy of Science |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Law |
General Philosophy of Science |