• If—as many scholars aver—gender is not a biological but rather a social fact, then how is it possible for someone assigned to the category Man at birth at some point later to feel or otherwise experience a personal (as contrasted with social) reality as a woman? If gender is social, how could a statement of the form “I feel like a woman” be true for such a person? This paper aims to defuse the apparent tension, by articulating an account of the construction of oneself-as-gendered (which we may r…Read more
  •  1
    Why I am not a friend
    In D. E. Wittkower (ed.), Facebook and Philosophy. 2010.
  •  3
    What is a feminist to do with rational choice?
    In Alan Nelson (ed.), A Companion to Rationalism, Blackwell. pp. 450-467. 2005.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Rational Choice Moral Philosophy Science of Human Behavior Back to Moral Philosophy Rational Choice, Finally Against Orthodoxy Public and Private.
  •  2
    The Logic of Scientific Discovery by Karl Popper
    In The Classics of Western Philosophy. pp. 512-518. 2003.
    In his magnum opus, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (first published in German in 1934, English translation, 1959), Karl Popper make two fundamental philosophical moves. First, he relocates the center of gravity of the philosophical treatment of science around what he calls the problem of demarcation. This is the problem of distinguishing between science, on the one hand, and everything else on the other. (By contrast, his contemporaries of the Vienna Circle, whose positivism would prove the m…Read more
  • Practitioners of science treat evidence as separate and objective body of materials, potentially quite diverse, but importantly “prior to,” or at any rate independent of, all theory. Philosophers of science, by contrast, are increasingly wary about the role of theory in testing and measurement contexts, and hence have problematized the notion of evidence as prior or independent, even in the context of measurement. This paper argues that there is a very real and important sense in which empirical…Read more
  • There is no core to precaution
    Review Journal of Political Philosophy 7 41-49. 2009.
    This paper challenges Gardiner’s (2006) contention that his Core Precautionary Principle (CPP) “tracks our [precautionary] intuitions about some core cases, including the paradigmatic environmental ones”. And instead sketches a handful of precautionary practices in navigational systems that (collectively) do better at tracking these “intuitions”. There is no way of measuring these diverse practices as to relative weakness or strength against each other. And ultimately it makes little sense to ta…Read more
  •  4
    Philosophy of Science
    In AccessScience. 2019.
    The subfield of philosophy that treats fundamental questions pertaining to science. The philosophy of science explores the fundamental principles, purposes, methodologies, implications, and reliability of the human enterprise known as science. It seeks to describe our best understanding of the universe, at all scales, as well as to engage with the question of how we can—as fallible organisms—reliably come to possess such knowledge. How can it be possible for us to arrive at theories that describ…Read more
  • Talk abounds regarding the loss of public trust in such institutions as science or mainstream news media, but there is little clarity about the nature of public trust. Public trust, as this paper explains, is a correlate of a certain type of power in the sphere of communication—one enjoyed by a broadcast source (such as a scientific publication or a news outlet) in proportion to a number of recipients in its broadcast area who adopt its messages, or at least are open to receiving them. This essa…Read more
  • Prevailing in the survey industry is the conception that public sentiment is a simple arithmetic function of individuals’ sentiments, many of them held only privately, maybe even secretly. Against this conception, the present paper argues that public sentiment is better construed as strategic deductions from publicly available evidence—a matter of the public working out a common sentiment from publicly available information. This conception diverges dramatically from a conception of public senti…Read more
  • Introduction
    with Henry Kyburg Jr
    In M. Thalos & H. Kyburg Jr (ed.), Probability is the Very Guide of Life: The Philosophical Uses of Probability. 2003.
    In this introduction we shall array a family of fundamental questions pertaining to probability, especially as it has been judged to bear upon the guidance of life. Applications and uses of probability theory need either to address some or all of these questions, or to tell us why they don’t. The essays assembled in this volume bring integrative perspectives on this family of questions. We asked the authors to describe in their own voices the intellectual histories of their contributions, so as …Read more
  •  11
    What does “Black lives matter” say that “All lives matter” does not? In particular, why do we appreciate a kind of conflict between them? This essay is about the way that social identities work in human life. Appreciating the way that identity works will shed light on the way that “All lives matter” undermines the force of “Black lives matter.”
  •  6
    Existentialism
    In Graham Oppy (ed.), A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, Wiley. 2019.
    This chapter explores connections among death, meaning, and belief in a divine being. It wrestles with questions around whether it is possible for an atheist to live a meaningful life, especially in the face of the twin realities of individual death, on the one hand, and human extinction, on the other. Can theists and atheists think about the meaning of life in the same way? The conclusion is that most likely there are unbridgeable chasms between the theists’ and the atheists’ conceptions of mea…Read more
  •  9
    A Modest Proposal for Interpreting Structural Explanations
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (2): 279-295. 1998.
    Social sciences face a well-known problem, which is an instance of a general problem faced as well by psychological and biological sciences: the problem of establishing their legitimate existence alongside physics. This, as will become clear, is a problem in metaphysics. I will show how a new account of structural explanations, put forward by Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, which is designed to solve this metaphysical problem with social sciences in mind, fails to treat the problem in any impor…Read more
  •  127
    Against border patrols
    In Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci (ed.), Science Unlimited? Challenges of Scientism, . 2017.
  • Attitude: How we learn to inhabit the future
    In Leo Zaibert (ed.), The Theory and Practice of Ontology: Essays in Honor of Barry Smith. 2016.
  • Distinction, Judgment and Discipline
    In Michael Gorman and Jonathan Sanford (ed.), Categories. 2004.
  •  277
    A modest proposal for interpreting structural explanations
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (2): 279-295. 1998.
    Social sciences face a well-known problem, which is an instance of a general problem faced as well by psychological and biological sciences: the problem of establishing their legitimate existence alongside physics. This, as will become clear, is a problem in metaphysics. I will show how a new account of structural explanations, put forward by Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, which is designed to solve this metaphysical problem with social sciences in mind, fails to treat the problem in any impor…Read more