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Possibility, physical and metaphysicalIn Carl Gillett & Barry Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and its Discontents, Cambridge University Press. 2001.
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79A note on Van Fraassen's modal interpretation of quantum mechanicsPhilosophy of Science 63 (1): 91-104. 1996.Although there has been some discussion in the literature of Bas van Fraassen's modal interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, it has for the most part been concentrated on difficulties that van Fraassen's viewpoint shares with those of some other authors, including Kochen, Dieks, and Healey. van Fraassen's approach has, however, some problems of its own; in this note we want to focus on what seems to us to be one of the most serious of these. The difficulty concerns immediately repeated non-disturb…Read more
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5Twenty-Five Years of Logical Methodology in PolandPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 40 (3): 447-449. 1980.
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14Yoemon Sampei. On the complete basis for the sets. Commentarii mathematici Universitatis Sancti Pauli, vol. 13 , pp. 81–88 (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 40 (2): 243. 1975.
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25Yoemon Sampei. On the principle of effective choice and its applications. Commentarii mathematici Universitatis Sancti Pauli, vol. 15 , pp. 29–42 (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 40 (2): 243-244. 1975.
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16George Boolos and Richard Jeffrey. Computability and logic. Cambridge University Press, New York and London1974, x + 262 pp (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 42 (4): 585-586. 1977.
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20Wilfrid Hodges. Logic. Pelican books. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, England, 1977, 331 pp (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 45 (2): 382-383. 1980.
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19Kelly Kevin T. and Oliver Schulte. The computable testability of theories making uncomputable predictions. Erkenntnis, vol. 43 , pp. 29–66 (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 61 (3): 1049. 1996.
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344The epistemology of social facts: the evidential value of personal experience versus testimonyIn Georg Meggle (ed.), Social Facts and Collective Intentionality. Philosophische Forschung / Philosophical research, Dr. Haensel-hohenhausen. pp. 43-51. 2002."The Personal is Political": This was an often-heard slogan of feminist groups in the late sixties and early seventies. The slogan is no doubt open to many interpretations. There is one interpretation which touches on the epistemology of social facts, viz. the slogan claims that in assessing the features of a political system, personal experiences have privileged evidentiary value. For instancte, in the face of third person reports about political corruption, I may remain unmoved in my belief th…Read more
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2Possibility: Physical and metaphysicalIn Carl Gillett & Barry M. Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and Its Discontents, Cambridge University Press. 2001.
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30Levi's decision theoryPhilosophy of Science 57 (1): 158-168. 1990.Suppose my utilities are representable by a set of utility assignments, each defined for atomic sentences; suppose my beliefs are representable by a set of probability assignments. Then each of my utility assignments together with each of my probability assignments will determine a utility assignment to non-atomic sentences, in a familiar way. This paper is concerned with the question, whether I am committed to all the utility assignments so constructible. Richard Jeffrey (1984) says (in effect)…Read more
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36Discussion: Malament on Time ReversalPhilosophy of Science 73 (4): 448-458. 2006.David Malament has recently responded to David Albert's argument that classical electrodynamics is not time-reversal invariant by introducing a novel conception of time reversal, which supports the conventional view that under time reversal the magnetic field changes sign but the electric field remains unchanged. I will argue here that Malament's transformation has both passive and active versions. I will claim that the passive version is not relevant to Albert's argument, and the active version…Read more
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227Gauges: Aharonov, Bohm, Yang, HealeyPhilosophy of Science 66 (4): 606-627. 1999.I defend the interpretation of the Aharonov-Bohm effect originally advanced by Aharonov and Bohm, i.e., that it is caused by an interaction between the electron and the vector potential. The defense depends on taking the fiber bundle formulation of electrodynamics literally, or almost literally
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77Causation, physics and the constitution of reality: Russell's republic revisitedAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (4). 2008.(2008). Causation, Physics and the Constitution of Reality: Russell's Republic Revisited. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 86, No. 4, pp. 688-690
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403Physical and metaphysical necessityPacific Philosophical Quarterly 88 (4). 2007.I propose a different way of thinking about metaphysical and physical necessity: namely that the fundamental notion of necessity is what would ordinarily be called "truth in all physically possible worlds" – a notion which includes the standard physical necessities and the metaphysical ones as well; I suggest that the latter are marked off not as a stricter kind of necessity but by their epistemic status. One result of this reconceptualization is that the Descartes-Kripke argument against natura…Read more
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24Interventionism in Statistical MechanicsEntropy 14 (2): 344-369. 2012.I defend the idea that the fact that no system is entirely isolated can be used to explain the successful use of the microcanonical distribution in statistical mechanics. The argument turns on claims about what is needed for an adequate explanation of this fact: I argue in particular that various competing explanations do not meet reasonable conditions of adequacy, and that the most striking lacuna in Interventionism – its failure to explain the ‘arrow of time’ – is no real defect.
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61Church's Translation ArgumentCanadian Journal of Philosophy 9 (1). 1979.What are the objects of the so-called ‘propositional attitudes’ — belief, desire, and the like? One of the best-known accounts holds them to be sentences. According to this account — which I shall call the ‘linguistic theory’ — an analysis of the logical form of a sentence like John believes that the moon is roundwill see the word ‘that’ as a hidden pair of quotation marks: except for niceties of idiom, might be written John believes ‘the moon is round’. asserts that a certain relation, the ‘bel…Read more
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4Review: Yoemon Sampei, On the Complete Basis for the $Delta^1_2$ Sets (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 40 (2): 243-243. 1975.
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69Malament and Zabell on Gibbs phase averagingPhilosophy of Science 56 (2): 325-340. 1989.In their paper "Why Gibbs Phase Averages Work--The Role of Ergodic Theory" (1980), David Malament and Sandy Zabell attempt to explain why phase averaging over the microcanonical ensemble gives correct predictions for the values of thermodynamic observables, for an ergodic system at equilibrium. Their idea is to bypass the traditional use of limit theorems, by relying on a uniqueness result about the microcanonical measure--namely, that it is uniquely stationary translation-continuous. I argue th…Read more
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