•  19
  •  24
    Grasp and scientific understanding: a recognition account
    Philosophical Studies 1-22. forthcoming.
    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
  •  42
    Philosophy as a Science and as a Humanity
    Philosophia 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?
  •  108
    Review of Woodward, Making Things Happen (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (1): 233-249. 2007.
  •  4
    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
  •  24
    The knowledge machine: how irrationality created modern science
    Liveright 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
  •  54
    Précis of "Thinking Off Your Feet"
    Analysis 82 (2): 303-306. 2022.
    Précis of "Thinking Off Your Feet"
  •  27
    Dynamic probability and the problem of initial conditions
    Synthese 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
  •  46
    Permissible idealizations for the purpose of prediction
    Studies 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
  • Dappled Science in a Unified World
    In Hsiang-Ke Chao & Julian Reiss (eds.), Philosophy of Science in Practice: Nancy Cartwright and the nature of scientific reasoning., Springer International Publishing. 2016.
  •  60
    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
  •  73
    Explanation, Abstraction, and Difference‐Making
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3): 726-731. 2019.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 99, Issue 3, Page 726-731, November 2019.
  •  46
    Philosophy Unbound: Comments on Edouard Machery's Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (1): 239-245. 2019.
  •  53
    The structure of asymptotic idealization
    Synthese 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
  •  5
    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
  •  165
    Quantum Mechanics and Frequentism: A Reply to Ismael
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (4): 575-577. 1996.
  •  4
    The causes of characteristic properties: Insides versus categories
    Behavioral 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.
  •  30
    M. STREVENSBigger Than Chaos: Understanding Complexity Through Probability (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (4): 875-882. 2010.
  •  161
    Response to Strevens
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1): 193-212. 2008.
    No Abstract
  • Bigger Than Chaos: The Probabilistic Structure of Complex Systems
    Dissertation, 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
  •  7
    C. S. BERTUGLIA AND F. VAIO Nonlinearity, Chaos, and Complexity (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (2): 447-451. 2009.
  •  99
    Do large probabilities explain better?
    Philosophy of Science 67 (3): 366-390. 2000.
    It is widely held that the size of a probability makes no difference to the quality of a probabilistic explanation. I argue that explanatory practice in statistical physics belies this claim. The claim has gained currency only because of an impoverished conception of probabilistic processes and an unwarranted assumption that all probabilistic explanations have a single form.
  •  178
    The Role of the Matthew Effect in Science
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 37 (2): 159-170. 2006.
    Robert Merton observed that better-known scientists tend to get more credit than less well-known scientists for the same achievements; he called this the Matthew effect. Scientists themselves, even those eminent researchers who enjoy its benefits, regard the effect as a pathology: it results, they believe, in a misallocation of credit. If so, why do scientists continue to bestow credit in the manner described by the effect? This paper advocates an explanation of the effect on which it turns out …Read more
  •  77
    In this book, Michael Strevens aims to explain how simplicity can coexist with, indeed be caused by, the tangled interconnections between a complex system's ...
  •  183
    The bayesian treatment of auxiliary hypotheses
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (3): 515-537. 2001.
    This paper examines the standard Bayesian solution to the Quine–Duhem problem, the problem of distributing blame between a theory and its auxiliary hypotheses in the aftermath of a failed prediction. The standard solution, I argue, begs the question against those who claim that the problem has no solution. I then provide an alternative Bayesian solution that is not question-begging and that turns out to have some interesting and desirable properties not possessed by the standard solution. This s…Read more
  •  31
    Remarks on Harman and Kulkarni's "Reliable Reasoning"
    Abstracta 5 (S3): 27-41. 2009.
    Reliable Reasoning is a simple, accessible, beautifully explained introduction to Vapnik and Chervonenkis’s statistical learning theory. It includes a modest discussion of the application of the theory to the philosophy of induction; the purpose of these remarks is to say something more. 27
  •  110
    Ontology, Complexity, and Compositionality
    In Matthew H. Slater & Zanja Yudell (eds.), Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: New Essays, Oxford University Press. 2017.
    Sciences of complex systems thrive on compositional theories – toolkits that allow the construction of models of a wide range of systems, each consisting of various parts put together in different ways. To be tractable, a compositional theory must make shrewd choices about the parts and properties that constitute its basic ontology. One such choice is to decompose a system into spatiotemporally discrete parts. Compositional theories in the high-level sciences follow this rule of thumb to a certa…Read more