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40Grasp 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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72Philosophy as a Science and as a HumanityPhilosophia 1-8. forthcoming.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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115Review of Woodward, Making Things Happen (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (1): 233-249. 2007.
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6The 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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30The 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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61Précis of "Thinking Off Your Feet"Analysis 82 (2): 303-306. 2022.Précis of "Thinking Off Your Feet"
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39Dynamic 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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48Permissible 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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66Thinking 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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77Explanation, 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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50Philosophy Unbound: Comments on Edouard Machery's Philosophy Within Its Proper BoundsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (1): 239-245. 2019.
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55The 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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9Tychomancy: 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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181Quantum Mechanics and Frequentism: A Reply to IsmaelBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (4): 575-577. 1996.
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41Book 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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8The 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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34M. STREVENSBigger Than Chaos: Understanding Complexity Through Probability (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (4): 875-882. 2010.
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171Response 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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149Ceteris Paribus Hedges: Causal Voodoo that WorksJournal of Philosophy 109 (11): 652-675. 2012.What do the words "ceteris paribus" add to a causal hypothesis, that is, to a generalization that is intended to articulate the consequences of a causal mechanism? One answer, which looks almost too good to be true, is that a ceteris paribus hedge restricts the scope of the hypothesis to those cases where nothing undermines, interferes with, or undoes the effect of the mechanism in question, even if the hypothesis's own formulator is otherwise unable to specify fully what might constitute such u…Read more
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125The Essentialist Aspect of Naive TheoriesCognition 74 (149): 175. 2000.Recent work on children’s inferences concerning biological and chemical categories has suggested that children (and perhaps adults) are essentialists— a view known as psychological essentialism. I distinguish three varieties of psychological essentialism and investigate the ways in which essentialism explains the inferences for which it is supposed to account. Essentialism succeeds in explaining the inferences, I argue, because it attributes to the child belief in causal laws connecting category…Read more
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89The Reference Class Problem in Evolutionary Biology: Distinguishing Selection from DriftIn Grant Ramsey & Charles H. Pence (eds.), Chance in Evolution, University of Chicago. 2016.Evolutionary biology distinguishes differences in survival and reproduction rates due to selection from those due to drift. The distinction is usually thought to be founded in probabilistic facts: a difference in (say) two variants' average lifespans over some period of time that is due to selection is explained by differences in the probabilities relevant to survival; in the purest cases of drift, by contrast, the survival probabilities are equal and the difference in lifespans is a matter of c…Read more
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84Replies to Weatherson, Hall, and Lange (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2): 492-505. 2012.
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95Probability and chanceIn D. M. Borchert (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, second edition, Macmillan. 2006.The weather report says that the chance of a hurricane arriving later today is 90%. Forewarned is forearmed: expecting a hurricane, before leaving home you pack your hurricane lantern.
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172Mackie RemixedIn J. K. Campbell, M. O'Rourke & H. S. Silverstein (eds.), Causation and Explanation, Mit Press. pp. 4--93. 2007.Cases of overdetermination or preemption continue to play an important role in the debate about the proper interpretation of causal claims of the form "C was a cause of E". I argue that the best treatment of preemption cases is given by Mackie's venerable INUS account of causal claims. The Mackie account suffers, however, from problems of its own. Inspired by its ability to handle preemption, I propose a dramatic revision to the Mackie account – one that Mackie himself would certainly have rejec…Read more
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226The Role of the Priority Rule in ScienceJournal of Philosophy 100 (2): 55-79. 2003.Science's priority rule rewards those who are first to make a discovery, at the expense of all other scientists working towards the same goal, no matter how close they may be to making the same discovery. I propose an explanation of the priority rule that, better than previous explanations, accounts for the distinctive features of the rule. My explanation treats the priority system, and more generally, any scheme of rewards for scientific endeavor, as a device for achieving an allocation of reso…Read more
Areas of Specialization
General Philosophy of Science |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Metaphilosophy |
Interpretation of Probability |