•  9
    Talk at the Philosophy [in:of:for:and] Digital Knowledge Infrastructures online workshop (08/09/2022).
  •  16
    Welcome to the machine
    Philosophers' Magazine 81 33-39. 2018.
    No abstract available.
  •  122
    The puzzle of virtual theft
    Analysis 80 (3): 493-499. 2020.
    How can you steal something that doesn’t exist? This question confronts those of us who take an irrealist view of virtual objects and agree with the Supreme Court of the Netherlands that robbery took place when two boys used non-virtual violence to coerce a third boy into relinquishing his virtual amulet and mask. Here we outline this Puzzle of Virtual Theft, along with the closely related Puzzle of Virtual Value. After demonstrating how these puzzles are deeply problematic for the irrealist, we…Read more
  •  759
    Virtual Reality: Digital or Fictional?
    Disputatio 11 (55): 371-397. 2019.
    Are the objects and events that take place in Virtual Reality genuinely real? Those who answer this question in the affirmative are realists, and those who answer in the negative are irrealists. In this paper we argue against the realist position, as given by Chalmers (2017), and present our own preferred irrealist account of the virtual. We start by disambiguating two potential versions of the realist position—weak and strong— and then go on to argue that neither is plausible. We then introduce…Read more
  •  330
    Making a Contribution and Making a Difference
    American Philosophical Quarterly 55 (3): 303-312. 2018.
    There are at least two different concepts that philosophers might target when analyzing causation: a pre-selective notion and a selective notion. This paper argues that these two distinct conceptions have been conflated to date, citing the puzzles of overdetermination, extensionality, and transitivity as evidence. The primary aim of the paper is to help reset the methodological scene concerning analyses of causation.
  •  33
    Welcome to the Machine
    The Philosophers' Magazine 81 33-39. 2018.
    No abstract available.
  •  931
    Transitivity and Proportionality in Causation
    Synthese 195 (3): 1211-1229. 2018.
    It is commonly assumed that causation is transitive and in this paper I aim to reconcile this widely-held assumption with apparent evidence to the contrary. I will discuss a familiar approach to certain well-known counterexamples, before introducing a more resistant sort of case of my own. I will then offer a novel solution, based on Yablo’s proportionality principle, that succeeds in even these more resistant cases. There is a catch, however. Either proportionality is a constraint on which caus…Read more
  •  1273
    The Deviance in Deviant Causal Chains
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 4 (2): 162-170. 2015.
    Causal theories of action, perception and knowledge are each beset by problems of so-called ‘deviant’ causal chains. For each such theory, counterexamples are formed using odd or co-incidental causal chains to establish that the theory is committed to unpalatable claims about some intentional action, about a case of veridical perception or about the acquisition of genuine knowledge. In this paper I will argue that three well-known examples of a deviant causal chain have something in common: they…Read more
  •  1135
    Events and their counterparts
    Philosophical Studies 173 (5): 1291-1308. 2016.
    This paper argues that a counterpart-theoretic treatment of events, combined with a counterfactual theory of causation, can help resolve three puzzles from the causation literature. First, CCT traces the apparent contextual shifts in our causal attributions to shifts in the counterpart relation which obtains in those contexts. Second, being sensitive to shifts in the counterpart relation can help diagnose what goes wrong in certain prominent examples where the transitivity of causation appears t…Read more
  •  133
    Counterfactuals and counterparts: defending a neo-Humean theory of causation
    Dissertation, Macquarie University and University of Glasgow. 2015.
    Whether there exist causal relations between guns firing and people dying, between pedals pressed and cars accelerating, or between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, is typically taken to be a mind-independent, objective, matter of fact. However, recent contributions to the literature on causation, in particular theories of contrastive causation and causal modelling, have undermined this central causal platitude by relativising causal facts to models or to interests. This thesis flies…Read more
  •  586
    The Non‐Occurrence Of Events
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2): 269-285. 2017.
    What is it for an event not to occur? This is an urgent, yet under explored, question for counterfactual analyses of causation quite generally. In this paper I take a lead from Lewis in identifying two different possible standards of non-occurrence that we might adopt and I argue that we need to apply them asymmetrically: one standard for the cause, another for the effect. This is a surprising result. I then offer a contextualist refinement of the Lewis approach in light of initial problems, and…Read more
  •  901
    Causal exclusion and the limits of proportionality
    Philosophical Studies 174 (6): 1459-1474. 2017.
    Causal exclusion arguments are taken to threaten the autonomy of the special sciences, and the causal efficacy of mental properties. A recent line of response to these arguments has appealed to “independently plausible” and “well grounded” theories of causation to rebut key premises. In this paper I consider two papers which proceed in this vein and show that they share a common feature: they both require causes to be proportional to their effects. I argue that this feature is a bug, and one tha…Read more