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Mackie RevisitedIn Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Harry Silverstein (eds.), Causation and Explanation, Bradford. pp. 1--32. 2007.
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107Grasp and scientific understanding: a recognition accountPhilosophical Studies 181 (4): 741-762. 2024.To understand why a phenomenon occurs, it is not enough to possess a correct explanation of the phenomenon: you must grasp the explanation. In this formulation, “grasp” is a placeholder, standing for the psychological or epistemic relation that connects a mind to the explanatory facts in such a way as to produce understanding. This paper proposes and defends an account of the “grasping” relation according to which grasp of a property (to take one example of the sort of entity that turns up in ex…Read more
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108Philosophy as a Science and as a HumanityPhilosophia 52 (3): 537-544. 2024.This commentary on Philip Kitcher’s book What’s the Use of Philosophy? addresses two questions. First, must philosophers be methodologically self-conscious to do good work? Second, is there value in the questions pursued in the traditional areas of analytic philosophy?
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11The knowledge machine: how an unreasonable idea created modern scienceAllen Lane. 2020.It is only in the last three centuries that the formidable knowledge-making machine we call modern science has transformed our way of life and our vision of the universe - two thousand years after the invention of law, philosophy, drama and mathematics. Why did we take so long to invent science? And how has it proved to be so powerful?The Knowledge Machine gives a radical answer, exploring how science calls on its practitioners to do something apparently irrational- strip away all previous knowl…Read more
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45The knowledge machine: how irrationality created modern scienceLiveright Publishing Corporation. 2020.A paradigm-shifting work that revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science. Captivatingly written, interwoven with tantalizing illustrations and historical vignettes ranging from Newton's alchemy to quantum mechanics to the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy, Michael Strevens's wholly original investigation of science asks two fundamental questions: Why is science so powerful? And why did it take so long, two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematic…Read more
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104Précis of "Thinking Off Your Feet"Analysis 82 (2): 303-306. 2022.Précis of "Thinking Off Your Feet"
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44Dynamic probability and the problem of initial conditionsSynthese 199 (5-6): 14617-14639. 2021.Dynamic approaches to understanding probability in the non-fundamental sciences turn on certain properties of physical processes that are apt to produce “probabilistically patterned” outcomes. The dynamic properties on their own, however, seem not quite sufficient to explain the patterns; in addition, some sort of assumption about initial conditions must be made, an assumption that itself typically takes a probabilistic form. How should such a posit be understood? That is the problem of initial …Read more
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61Permissible idealizations for the purpose of predictionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 85 92-100. 2021.Every model leaves out or distorts some factors that are causally connected to its target phenomenon -- the phenomenon that it seeks to predict or explain. If we want to make predictions, and we want to base decisions on those predictions, what is it safe to omit or to simplify, and what ought a causal model to describe fully and correctly? A schematic answer: the factors that matter are those that make a difference to the target phenomenon. There are several ways to understand differencemaking.…Read more
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Dappled Science in a Unified WorldIn Hsiang-Ke Chao & Julian Reiss (eds.), Philosophy of Science in Practice: Nancy Cartwright and the nature of scientific reasoning., Springer International Publishing. 2016.
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98Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair PhilosophyHarvard University Press. 2019.What is going on under the hood in philosophical analysis, that familiar process that attempts to uncover the nature of such philosophically interesting kinds as knowledge, causation, and justice by the method of posit and counterexample? How, in particular, do intuitions tell us about philosophical reality? The standard, if unappealing, answer is that philosophical analysis is conceptual analysis—that what we learn about when we do philosophy is in the first instance facts about our own minds. …Read more
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87Explanation, Abstraction, and Difference‐MakingPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3): 726-731. 2019.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 99, Issue 3, Page 726-731, November 2019.
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61Philosophy Unbound: Comments on Edouard Machery's Philosophy Within Its Proper BoundsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (1): 239-245. 2019.
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70The structure of asymptotic idealizationSynthese 196 (5): 1713-1731. 2019.Robert Batterman and others have argued that certain idealizing explanations have an asymptotic form: they account for a state of affairs or behavior by showing that it emerges “in the limit”. Asymptotic idealizations are interesting in many ways, but is there anything special about them as idealizations? To understand their role in science, must we augment our philosophical theories of idealization? This paper uses simple examples of asymptotic idealization in population genetics to argue for a…Read more
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13Tychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal StructureHarvard University Press. 2013.Maxwell's deduction of the probability distribution over the velocity of gas molecules—one of the most important passages in physics (Truesdell)—presents a riddle: a physical discovery of the first importance was made in a single inferential leap without any apparent recourse to empirical evidence. Tychomancy proposes that Maxwell's derivation was not made a priori; rather, he inferred his distribution from non-probabilistic facts about the dynamics of intermolecular collisions. Further, the inf…Read more
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248Quantum Mechanics and Frequentism: A Reply to IsmaelBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (4): 575-577. 1996.
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62Book ReviewRobert W. Batterman, The Devil in the Details: Asymptotic Reasoning in Explanation, Reduction and Emergence. Oxford: Oxford University Press , 160 pp., $35.00 cloth (review)Philosophy of Science 69 (4): 654-657. 2002.
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15The causes of characteristic properties: Insides versus categoriesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (5): 502-503. 2014.Cimpian & Salomon propose that the inherence heuristic, a tendency to explain the behavior and other properties of things in terms of their intrinsic characteristics, precedes and explains “essentialist thinking” about natural kinds. This commentary reviews evidence that it is rather essentialism that precedes the assumption of inherence, and suggests that essentialism can do without the inherence heuristic altogether.
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45M. STREVENSBigger Than Chaos: Understanding Complexity Through Probability (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (4): 875-882. 2010.
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197Response to StrevensPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1): 193-212. 2008.No Abstract
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Bigger Than Chaos: The Probabilistic Structure of Complex SystemsDissertation, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick. 1996.The dissertation concerns the use of physical probability in higher level scientific theories such as statistical mechanics and evolutionary biology. My focus is complex systems--systems containing large numbers of parts that move independently yet interact strongly, such as gases and ecosystems. Although the underlying dynamics of such systems are prohibitively complex, their macrolevel behavior can often be predicted given information about physical probabilities. ;The technique has the follow…Read more
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102Against Lewis’s New Theory of Causation: A Story with Three MoralsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (4). 2003.A recent paper by David Lewis, "Causation as Influence", proposes a new theory of causation. I argue against the theory, maintaining that (a) the relation asserted by a claim of the form "C was a cause of E" is distinct from the relation of causal influence, (b) the former relation depends very much, contra Lewis, on the individuation conditions for the event E, and (c) Lewis's account is unsatisfactory as an analysis of either kind of relation. The counterexamples presented here provide, I sugg…Read more
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156The bayesian treatment of auxiliary hypotheses: Reply to Fitelson and WatermanBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (4): 913-918. 2005.Bayesian treatment of auxiliary hypotheses rests on a misinterpretation of Strevens's central claim about the negligibility of certain small probabilities. The present paper clarifies and proves a very general version of the claim. The project Clarifications The negligibility argument Generalization and proof.
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109Economic Approaches to Understanding Scientific NormsEpisteme 8 (2): 184-200. 2011.A theme of much work taking an ““economic approach”” to the study of science is the interaction between the norms of individual scientists and those of society at large. Though drawing from the same suite of formal methods, proponents of the economic approach offer what are in substantive terms profoundly different explanations of various aspects of the structure of science. The differences are illustrated by comparing Strevens's explanation of the scientific reward system (the ““priority rule””…Read more
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126Reconsidering authorityIn Tamar Szabó Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology: Volume 3, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 294-330. 2007.How to regard the weight we give to a proposition on the grounds of its being endorsed by an authority? I examine this question as it is raised within the epistemology of science, and I argue that “authority-based weight” should receive special handling, for the following reason. Our assessments of other scientists’ competence or authority are nearly always provisional, in the sense that to save time and money, they are not made nearly as carefully as they could be---indeed, they are typically m…Read more
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61Only causation matters: reply to Ahn et alCognition 82 (1): 71-76. 2001.This paper is a reply to a discussion of my paper The Essentialist Aspect of Naive Theories by Ahn, Kalish, Gelman, Medin, Luhmann, Atran, Coley and Shafto; both the discussion and my reply appeared in the November 2001 issue of Cognition.
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95Why Represent Causal Relations?In Alison Gopnik & Laura Schulz (eds.), Causal learning: psychology, philosophy, and computation, Oxford University Press. pp. 245--260. 2007.Why do we represent the world around us using causal generalizations, rather than, say, purely statistical generalizations? Do causal representations contain useful additional information, or are they merely more efficient for inferential purposes? This paper considers the second kind of answer: it investigates some ways in which causal cognition might aid us not because of its expressive power, but because of its organizational power. Three styles of explanation are considered. The first, build…Read more
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163How are the sciences of complex systems possible?Philosophy of Science 72 (4): 531-556. 2005.To understand the behavior of a complex system, you must understand the interactions among its parts. Doing so is difficult for non-decomposable systems, in which the interactions strongly influence the short-term behavior of the parts. Science's principal tool for dealing with non-decomposable systems is a variety of probabilistic analysis that I call EPA. I show that EPA's power derives from an assumption that appears to be false of non-decomposable complex systems, in virtue of their very …Read more
Areas of Specialization
General Philosophy of Science |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Metaphilosophy |
Interpretation of Probability |