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921Hearts of darkness: 'perpetrator history' and why there is no whyHistory of the Human Sciences 17 (2-3): 211-251. 2004.Three theories contend as explanations of perpetrator behavior in the Holocaust as well as other cases of genocide: structural, intentional, and situational. Structural explanations emphasize the sense in which no single individual or choice accounts for the course of events. In opposition, intentional/cutltural accounts insist upon the genocides as intended outcomes, for how can one explain situations in which people ‘step up’ and repeatedly kill defenseless others in large numbers over sustain…Read more
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818The Epistemology of “Epistemology Naturalized”Dialectica 53 (2): 87-110. 1999.Quine's “Epistemology Naturalized” has become part of the canon in epistemology and excited a widespread revival of interest in naturalism. Yet the status accorded the essay is ironic, since both friends and foes of philosophical naturalism deny that Quine makes a plausible case that the methods of naturalism can accommodate the problems of epistemology.
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815The PastsHistory and Theory 51 (3): 313-339. 2012.ABSTRACTThis essay offers a reconfiguration of the possibility‐space of positions regarding the metaphysics and epistemology associated with historical knowledge. A tradition within analytic philosophy from Danto to Dummett attempts to answer questions about the reality of the past on the basis of two shared assumptions. The first takes individual statements as the relevant unit of semantic and philosophical analysis. The second presumes that variants of realism and antirealism about the past ex…Read more
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613The silence of the norms: The missing historiography of The Structure of Scientific RevolutionsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (4): 545-552. 2013.History has been disparaged since the late 19th century for not conforming to norms of scientific explanation. Nonetheless, as a matter of fact a work of history upends the regnant philosophical conception of science in the second part of the 20th century. Yet despite its impact, Kuhn’s Structure has failed to motivate philosophers to ponder why works of history should be capable of exerting rational influence on an understanding of philosophy of science. But all this constitutes a great irony a…Read more
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493MistakesSynthese 136 (3): 389-408. 2003.A suggestion famously made by Peter Winch and carried through to present discussions holds that what constitutes the social as a kind consists of something shared – rules or practices commonly learned, internalized, or otherwise acquired by all members belonging to a society. This essays argues against the explanatory efficacy of appeals to this shared something as constitutive of a social kind by examining a violation of social norms or rules, viz., mistakes. I argue that an asymmetric relation…Read more
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278Beyond understanding: the career of the concept of understanding in the human sciencesPhilosophy of the Social Sciences. forthcoming.
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225The End of Histories? Review Essay of Alexander Rosenberg’s How History Gets Things Wrong: the Neuroscience of Our Addiction to StoriesJournal of the Philosophy of History 1-9. forthcoming.Alex Rosenberg’s latest book purports to establish that narrative history cannot have any epistemic value. Rosenberg argues not for the replacement of narrative history by something more science-like, but rather the end of histories understood as an account of human doings under a certain description. This review critiques three of his main arguments: 1) narrative history must root its explanations in folk psychology, 2) there are no beliefs nor desires guiding human action, and 3) historical na…Read more
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221Ways of pastmakingHistory of the Human Sciences 15 (4): 125-143. 2002.Riddles of induction – old or new, Hume’s or Goodman’s – pose unanswered challenges to assumptions that experiences logically legitimate expectations or classifications. The challenges apply both to folk beliefs and to scientific ones. In particular, Goodman’s ‘new riddle’ famously confounds efforts to specify how additional experiences confirm the rightness of currently preferred ways of organizing objects, i.e. our favored theories of what kinds there are.1 His riddle serves to emphasize that nei…Read more
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202Ghosts and the Machine: Philosophy of Social Science in Contemporary PerspectiveIn Stephen P. Turner & Paul Andrew Roth (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Blackwell. pp. 1--17. 2003.
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156Personhood, property rights, and the permissibility of abortionLaw and Philosophy 2 (2). 1983.The purpose of this paper is to argue that the tactic of granting a fetus the legal status of a person will not, contrary to the expectations of opponents of abortion, provide grounds for a general prohibition on abortions. I begin by examining two arguments, one moral (J. J. Thomson's A Defense of Abortion) and the other legal (D. Regan's Rewriting Roe v. Wade), which grant the assumption that a fetus is a person and yet argue to the conclusion that abortion is permissible. However, both Thomso…Read more
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141What does the sociology of scientific knowledge explain?: or, when epistemological chickens come home to roostHistory of the Human Sciences 7 (1): 95-108. 1994.
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137The philosophy of history: An agendaJournal of the Philosophy of History 1 (1): 1-9. 2007.The Founding declaration of the journal.
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137Hayden White and the Aesthetics of HistoriographyHistory of the Human Sciences 5 (1): 17-35. 1992.
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134Review of C. Mantzavinos, Naturalistic Hermeneutics (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (2). 2006.
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131Varieties and vagaries of historical explanationJournal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2): 214-226. 2008.For the better part of the 20th century, expositions of issues regarding historical explanation followed a predictable format, one that took as given the nonequivalence of explanations in history and philosophical models of scientific explanation. Ironically, at the present time, the philosophical point of note concerns how the notion of science has itself changed. Debates about explanation in turn need to adapt to this. This prompts the question of whether anything now still makes plausible the…Read more
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119The Full Hempel (review)History and Theory 38 (2): 249-263. 1999.Book reviewed in this article: The Logic of Historical Explanation by Clayton Roberts
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94On missing Neurath's boat: Some reflections on recent Quine literatureSynthese 61 (2): 205-231. 1984.
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90The bureaucratic turn: Weber contra Hempel in Fuller's social epistemologyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 34 (3-4). 1991.Like the positivists, Fuller is concerned to demarcate and systematically evaluate scientific claims and practices. Fuller corrects and reforms the positivist enterprise in light of his sociological naturalism. What Fuller's analysis brings to the fore is how the naturalization of epistemology makes the power?knowledge relation into an epistemological issue. Yet, in his writings. Fuller is radically divided with respect to how to react to this fact. Specifically, Fuller vacillates between, on th…Read more
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82Hayden White in Philosophical Perspective: Review Essay of Herman Paul’s Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (1): 102-111. 2014.For almost half a century, the person most responsible for fomenting brouhahas regarding degrees of plasticity in the writing of histories has been Hayden White. Yet, despite the voluminous responses provoked by White’s work, almost no effort has been made to treat White’s writings in a systematic yet sympathetic way as a philosophy of history. Herman Paul’s book begins to remedy that lack and does so in a carefully considered and extremely scholarly fashion. In his relatively brief six chapters…Read more
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80The epistemology of "epistemology naturalized"Dialectica 53 (2). 1999.Quine's “Epistemology Naturalized” has become part of the canon in epistemology and excited a widespread revival of interest in naturalism. Yet the status accorded the essay is ironic, since both friends and foes of philosophical naturalism deny that Quine makes a plausible case that the methods of naturalism can accommodate the problems of epistemology
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77Testing normative naturalism: The problem of scientific medicineBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (2): 571-584. 1994.Laudan's normative naturalism' claims to account for the success of science by construing theories and other claims as methodological rules interpreted as defeasible hypothetical imperatives for securing cognitive ends. We ask two questions regarding the adequacy for medicine of Laudan's meta- methodology. First, although Laudan denies that general aims can be assigned to a science, we show that this is not the case for medicine. Second, we argue that Laudan's account yields mixed results as a t…Read more
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73Siegel on naturalized epistemology and natural sciencePhilosophy of Science 50 (3): 482-493. 1983.What is the relation of epistemology, understood as the study of the evaluation of knowledge claims, and empirical psychology, understood as the study of the causal generation of a person's beliefs? Quine maintains that the relation is one of “mutual containment”.Epistemology in its new setting, conversely, is contained in natural science, as a chapter of psychology. … We are studying how the human subject of our study posits bodies and projects his physics from his data, and we appreciate that …Read more
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70A Rationalist Methodology for the Social SciencesPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 19 (1): 104-108. 1989.
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69The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2003._The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences _collects newly commissioned essays that examine fundamental issues in the social sciences
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64Essentially narrative explanationsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 62 (C): 42-50. 2017.
Santa Cruz, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Social Science |
20th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Physical Science |