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What Is Perspectivism, and Does It Count as Realism?In Michela Massimi & Casey D. Mccoy (eds.), Understanding Perspectivism (Open Access): Scientific Challenges and Methodological Prospects, Routledge. pp. 49-64. 2019.Epistemic humility and semantic considerations for perspectival realism are the focus of Chapter 3 by Paul Teller. Teller characterizes perspectivism as the view that human knowledge is always from a particular perspective. Perspectival realism, he argues, is unlike scientific realism, which subsumes a particular kind of semantic realism, which Teller calls “referential realism.” Referential realism fails according to Teller, and his alternative to this general story of reference is pragmatic in…Read more
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26Williamson’s Epistemicism and Properties Accounts of PredicatesPhilosophia 52 (1): 161-186. 2024.If the semantic values of predicates are, as Williamson assumes (_Philsophical Perspectives,_ _13_, 505–517, 1999, 509) properties in the intensional sense, then epistemicism is immediate. Epistemicism fails, so also this properties account of predicates. I deploy examination of Williamson’s account as a foil against properties as semantic values, showing that his two positive arguments for bivalence fail, as do his efforts to rescue epistemicism from obvious problems. In Part II I argue that, d…Read more
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45The rotating disk argument and Humean supervenience: cutting the Gordian knotAnalysis 62 (3): 205-210. 2002.
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31The philosophy of physics - Roberto torretti; cambridge university press, cambridge, 1999, pp. XVI+512, index, US $70.00, ISBN 0-521-56259-7 (hbk), 0-521-56571-5 (pbk) (review)Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 33 (4): 725-730. 2002.
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283The law‐idealizationPhilosophy of Science 71 (5): 730-741. 2004.There are few, perhaps no known, exact, true, general laws. Some of the work of generalization is carried by ceteris paribus generalizations. I suggest that many models continue such work in more complex form, with the idea of ceteris paribus conditions thought of as extended to more general conditions of application. I use the term regularity guide to refer collectively to cp‐generalizations and such regularity‐purveying models. Laws in the traditional sense can then be thought of as idealizati…Read more
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164The concept of measurement-precisionSynthese 190 (2): 189-202. 2013.The science of metrology characterizes the concept of precision in exceptionally loose and open terms. That is because the details of the concept must be filled in—what I call narrowing of the concept—in ways that are sensitive to the details of a particular measurement or measurement system and its use. Since these details can never be filled in completely, the concept of the actual precision of an instrument system must always retain some of the openness of its general characterization. The id…Read more
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111“Saving the Phenomena” TodayPhilosophy of Science 77 (5): 815-826. 2010.Bogen and Woodward argued the indirect connection between data and theory in terms of their conception of “phenomena.” I outline and elaborate on their presentation. To illuminate the connection with contemporary thinking in terms of models, I distinguish between phenomena tokens, representations of which can be identified with data models, and phenomena types that can be identified with relatively low-lying models or aspects of models in the model hierarchy. Throughout I stress the role of idea…Read more
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44On Quine's Relativity of OntologyCanadian Journal of Philosophy 3 (2). 1973.Quine's essay, “Ontological Relativity” [2] has brought about not a little confusion and disagreement. What is Quine's doctrine, and what are his arguments for it? The following paragraphs search for an answer. First a word about my aims. I will avoid adding to the already extensive discussion of Quine's older thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. Instead, where connections between the old and new doctrines become apparent, I will focus on the connections themselves and their repercussions…Read more
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50Mechanism, Reduction, and Emergence in Two Stories of the Human Epistemic EnterpriseErkenntnis 73 (3). 2010.The traditional way of thinking about science goes back to the corpuscular philosophy with its micro-reductive mechanism and metaphor of reading God's Book of Nature. This "story-1" with its rhetoric of exact truths contrasts with "story-2" which describes science as a continuation of the always imperfect powers of representation given to us by evolution. On story-2 reduction is one among other knowledge fashioning strategies and shares the imperfections of all human knowledge. When we appreciat…Read more
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306Making worlds with symbolsSynthese 198 (Suppl 21): 5015-5036. 2018.I modify and generalize Carnap’s notion of frameworks as a way of unpacking Goodman’s metaphor of “making worlds with symbols”. My frameworks provide, metaphorically, a way of making worlds out of symbols in as much as all our framework-bound access to the world is through frameworks that always stand to be improved in accuracy, precision, and usually both. Such improvement is characterized in pragmatist terms.
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65Learning to live with voluntarismSynthese 178 (1): 49-66. 2011.This paper examines and finds wanting the arguments against van Fraassen’s voluntarism, the view that the only constraint of rationality is consistency. Foundationalists claim that if we have no grounds or rationale for a belief or rule, rationality demands that we suspend it. But that begs the question by assuming that there have to be grounds or a rationale. Instead of asking, why should we hold a basic belief or rule, the question has to be: why should not we be committed as we are? Within a …Read more
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29The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum TheoryPhilosophy of Science 55 (1): 155-156. 1988.
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92The poor man's guide to supervenience and determinationSouthern Journal of Philosophy Supplement 22 (S1): 137-62. 1984.
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195We develop an approach to the problem of de se belief usually expressed with the question, what does the shopper with the leaky sugar bag have to learn to know that s/he is the one making the mess. Where one might have thought that some special kind of “de se” belief explains the triggering of action, we maintain that this gets the order of explanation wrong. We sketch a very simple cognitive architecture that yields de se-like behavior on which the action-triggering functionality of the belief-…Read more
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310Nature is complex, exceedingly so. A repercussion of this “complex world constraint” is that it is, in practice, impossible to connect words to the world in a foolproof manner. In this paper I explore the ways in which the complex world constraint makes vagueness, or more generally imprecision, in language in practice unavoidable, illuminates what vagueness comes to, and guides us to a sensible way of thinking about truth. Along the way we see that the problem of ceteris paribus laws is exact…Read more
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246Science is widely taken to aim, and often to succeed, in producing truths, a “mirror of nature”. Not so. Instead, science fashions models, understood broadly as representations that are never both completely precise and completely accurate. . This chapter discusses how the misconception arose and how it is now being corrected. The account begins with a tension between the founding metaphors of the Scientific Revolution, reading God’s book of nature and the clock metaphor. The former pre-fram…Read more
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274If the semantic value of predicates are, as Williamson assumes, properties, then epistemicism is immediate. Epistemicism fails, so also this properties view of predicates. I use examination of Williamsons position as a foil, showing that his two positive arguments for bivalence fail, and that his efforts to rescue epistemicism from obvious problems fail to the point of incoherence. In Part II I argue that, despite the properties view’s problems, it has an important role to play in combinatori…Read more
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14Subjectivity and Knowing What It’s LikeIn Ansgar Beckermann, Hans Flohr & Jaegwon Kim (eds.), Emergence or Reduction?: Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physicalism, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 180-200. 1992.
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32A Contemporary Look at EmergenceIn Ansgar Beckermann, Hans Flohr & Jaegwon Kim (eds.), Emergence or Reduction?: Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physicalism, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 139-154. 1992.
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23Karel Lambert and Gordon G. Brittan Jr. An introduction to the philosophy of science. Second, revised and expanded edition. Ridgeview Publishing Company, Reseda, Calif., 1979, x + 164 pp (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 47 (2): 476-477. 1982.