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402Physical 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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328The 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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251Correspondence truth and scientific realismSynthese 159 (1). 2007.I argue that one good reason for Scientific Realists to be interested in correspondence theories is the hope they offer us of being able to state and defend realistic theses in the face of well-known difficulties about modern physics: such theses as, that our theories are approximately true, or that they will tend to approach the truth. I go on to claim that this hope is unlikely to be fulfilled. I suggest that Realism can still survive in the face of these difficulties, as a claim about the kin…Read more
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224Gauges: 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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146Constructive empiricismSynthese 101 (2). 1994.Constructive Empiricism, the view introduced in The Scientific Image, is a view of science, an answer to the question “what is science?” Arthur Fine’s and Paul Teller’s contributions to this symposium challenge especially two key ideas required to formu- late that view, namely the observable/unobservable and accept- ance/belief distinctions. I wish to thank them not only for their insightful critique but also for the support they include. For they illuminate and counter some misunderstandings of…Read more
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134Foundations of statistical mechanics—two approachesPhilosophy of Science 70 (1): 126-144. 2003.This paper is a discussion of David Albert's approach to the foundations of classical statistical menchanics. I point out a respect in which his account makes a stronger claim about the statistical mechanical probabilities than is usually made, and I suggest what might be motivation for this. I outline a less radical approach, which I attribute to Boltzmann, and I give some reasons for thinking that this approach is all we need, and also the most we are likely to get. The issue between the two a…Read more
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111Wheeler–Feynman Again: A Reply to PriceBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (3): 381-383. 1995.
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103Holes and determinism: Another lookPhilosophy of Science 62 (3): 425-437. 1995.I argue that Earman and Norton's familiar "hole argument" raises questions as to whether GTR is a deterministic theory only given a certain assumption about determinism: namely, that to ask whether a theory is deterministic is to ask about the physical situations described by the theory. I think this is a mistake: whether a theory is deterministic is a question about what sentences can be proved within the theory. I show what these sentences look like: for interesting theories, a harmless bit of…Read more
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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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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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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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65Price on the Wheeler-feynman theoryBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (1): 288-294. 1994.
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59Church'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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50Postscript to 'a problem about frequencies in direct inference'Philosophical Studies 48 (1). 1985.
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43Tooley on causation and probabilitiesAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 78 (2). 2000.This Article does not have an abstract
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38Theories of Truth and ReferenceErkenntnis 13 (1): 111--129. 1978.Much recent work in the philosophy of language has been concerned with the project of constructing a theory of reference and truth for natural languages. I shall discuss certain assumptions which have been tacitly in the background of most of this work; what I hope my rather sceptical discussion will show is that the project of giving a theory of reference and truth is much more problematic - and more closely tied to questions of general philosophical interest - than is usually suspected.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Physical Science |