•  480
    Editions and Translations
    with Anke Walz
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (2): 343-44. 2007.
  •  155
    Exploring the scientific method: cases and questions (edited book)
    University of Chicago Press. 2011.
    This is not how science works. But science does work, and here award-winning teacher and scholar Steven Gimbel provides students the tools to answer for themselves this question: What actually is the scientific method?
  •  147
    Un-conventional wisdom: theory-specificity in Reichenbach's geometric conventionalism
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 35 (3): 457-481. 2004.
  •  63
    Restoring ambiguity to Achinstein's account of evidence
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (2): 269-285. 2004.
    , Peter Achinstein argues against the long-standing claim that ‘evidence’ is ambiguous in possessing a sense of confirming evidence and a sense of supporting evidence. He argues that explications of supporting evidence will necessarily violate his contentions that evidence is a discontinuous ‘threshold concept’ and that any philosophical account of supporting evidence will be too weak to be useful to working scientists. But an account of supporting evidence may be formulated which includes Achin…Read more
  •  55
    Peter Railton (1978) has introduced the influential deductive-nomological-probabilistic (DNP) model of explanation which is the culmination of a tradition of formal, non-pragmatic accounts of scientific explanation. The other models in this tradition have been shown to be susceptible to a class of counterexamples involving intervening causes which speak against their sufficiency. This treatment has never been extended to the DNP model; we contend that the usual form of these counterexamples is i…Read more
  •  46
    Peirce snatching: Towards a more pragmatic view of evidence (review)
    Erkenntnis 51 (2-3): 207-231. 1999.
    The running debate between Peter Achinstein and his critics concerning the nature of scientific evidence is misguided as each side attempts to explicate a distinct notion of evidence. Achinstein's approach, however, is valuable in helping to point out a problem with Carnap's statistical relevance model. By claiming an increase in probability to be necessary for evidence, the received view is incapable of accounting for evidence which is statistically irrelevant but explanatorily relevant. A broa…Read more
  •  41
    The Annotated Flatland (review)
    Teaching Philosophy 26 (1): 83-85. 2003.
  •  39
    The greening of white pride
    Philosophy and Geography 7 (1): 123-140. 2004.
    At first glance, it is surprising that contemporary racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan advertise a pro‐environmental stance. This fact, however, might be expected by Luc Ferry, who argues for a connection between the racism and nature protection laws of the Third Reich. Ferry argues that a non‐anthropocentric approach to nature makes it easier to dehumanize humans so that a non‐anthropocentric environmental ethic can transform into racist environmentalism. Does this contemporary case vin…Read more
  •  33
    It’s about Time: Film, Video Games, and the Advancement of an Artform
    with Joseph Roman
    Philosophies 4 (4): 56-0. 2019.
    Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin have argued that the insights obtained through the philosophical analysis of video games is not specific to video games, but to a larger class of artistic creations they term Self-Involving Interactive Fictions, or SIIFs. But there is at least one aspect of SIIF video games that is philosophically interesting and does not apply to the class of SIIFs as a whole, the ability to represent non-classical time. If SIIF video games are considered to be an extension of the ar…Read more
  •  27
    This paper describes an argumentative fallacy we call ‘Retroductive Analogy.’ It occurs when the ability of a favored hypothesis to explain some phenomena, together with the fact that hypotheses of a similar sort are well supported, is taken to be sufficient evidence to accept the hypothesis. This fallacy derives from the retroductive or abductive form of reasoning described by Charles Sanders Peirce. According to Peirce’s account, retroduction can provide good reasons to pursue a hypothesis but…Read more
  •  25
    Stakeholder theory is a significant development in the drive to provide a foundation for intuitions concerning the moral responsibility connected to corporate decision making. The move to include the interests of workers, consumers, the communities and biological environment in which the corporations instantiations are located run counter to the view in which shareholders’ interests are paramount. The non-sale of the Hershey Foods company to Wrigley1 was the ultimate result of a massive call by …Read more
  •  23
    Dad jokes, D.A.D. jokes, and the GHoST test for artificial consciousness
    with Clifton Presser and Paul Mogianesi
    Science and Philosophy 9 (1): 73-89. 2021.
    The ability of a computer to have a sense of humor, that is, to generate authentically funny jokes, has been taken by some theorists to be a sufficient condition for artificial consciousness. Creativity, the argument goes, is indicative of consciousness and the ability to be funny indicates creativity. While this line fails to offer a legitimate test for artificial consciousness, it does point in a possibly correct direction. There is a relation between consciousness and humor, but it relies on …Read more
  •  22
    Introduction : Einstein's Jewish science -- Is Einstein a Jew? -- Is relativity pregnant with Jewish concepts? -- Why did a Jew formulate the theory of relativity? -- Is the theory of relativity political science or scientific politics? -- Einstein and the Jewish intelligentsia -- Einstein's liberal science? -- Conclusion : Einstein's cosmopolitan science.
  •  21
    The ontology of team: a teleo-structural account
    with William Rasmussen and Stephen Stern
    Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 47 (3): 462-476. 2020.
    An explication of the notion of sports team involves a structural and a teleological element. The basis of a team is structural – a team is a group that containing a Distributed Internal Decision (...
  •  19
    Deep tautologies
    with Johannes Bulhof
    Pragmatics and Cognition 9 (2): 279-292. 2001.
    The standard understanding of tautologies is that they are semantically vacuous. Yet tautological utterances occur frequently in conversational discourse. One approach contends that apparent tautological statements are either genuinely tautologous and thereby semantically vacuous or are what we term ¿pseudo-tautologies¿, i.e., sentences that only bear a formal syntactic resemblance to tautologies but are not in fact tautologous. Another approach follows Grice and asserts that the meaning of a ta…Read more
  •  10
    “I Said Something Wrong”: Transworld Obligation in Yesterday
    Film-Philosophy 25 (2): 151-164. 2021.
    Danny Boyle's film Yesterday is a contemporary morality play in which the main character, Jack Malik, a failing singer-songwriter, is magically sent to a different possible world in which the Beatles never existed. Possessing his memory of the Beatles’ catalogue in the new possible world, he is now in sole possession of an extremely valuable artifact. Recording and performing the songs of the Beatles and passing them off as his own, he becomes rich, famous, and deeply unhappy. Once he confesses …Read more
  •  9
    Deep tautologies
    with Johannes Bulhof
    Pragmatics and Cognition 9 (2): 279-291. 2001.
    The standard understanding of tautologies is that they are semantically vacuous. Yet tautological utterances occur frequently in conversational discourse. One approach contends that apparent tautological statements are either genuinely tautologous and thereby semantically vacuous or are what we term “pseudo-tautologies”, i.e., sentences that only bear a formal syntactic resemblance to tautologies but are not in fact tautologous. Another approach follows Grice and asserts that the meaning of a ta…Read more
  •  9
    Heckler Ethics
    Florida Philosophical Review 15 (1): 78-87. 2015.
    The discourse surrounding humor and ethics has focused exclusively on jokes – Are certain jokes immoral to tell? Why can some people tell some jokes and not others? How soon is too soon? Two cases which have widely considered important in assessing the answers to these questions – those of Michael Richards and Daniel Tosh – actually fail to address the questions at all in that while the events discussed occurred during the comedians’ sets in a comedy club, neither were jokes. Both, rather, were …Read more
  •  8
    Garry Kasparov made two allegations of unfairness in his recent chess match with the computer ‘Deep Blue’. The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether the ethos of the contest would be violated if the purported activities had occurred and on what grounds. Kasparov’s first allegation, that the program was tampered with during play, would if true, violate fair play as it would encroach on Deep Blue’s autonomy, a necessary condition for fair play in individual strategic endeavours. The most…Read more
  •  8
    Woke Comedy vs. Pride Comedy: Kondabolu, Peters, and the Ethics of Performed Indian Accents
    with Jingwei Zhan and Rushil Chandra
    The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 1 (1): 211-219. 2020.
    Humor can be used as a tool for a wide range of tasks, including fighting for social justice. How to most effectively use it, however, is a matter of contention. Jokes that alienate members of an out-group can be called “Otherizing,” and can cause harm by virtue of the alienation. Woke comics, like Hari Kondabolu, intentionally avoid Otherizing in general, but may engage in a version of it that seeks to defang stereotypical treatments of out-groups by replacing the alienating content with someth…Read more
  •  7
    Get With the Program: Kasparov, Deep Blue, and Accusations of Unsportsthinglike Conduct
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 15 (2): 145-154. 1998.
    Garry Kasparov made two allegations of unfairness in his recent chess match with the computer ‘Deep Blue’. The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether the ethos of the contest would be violated if the purported activities had occurred and on what grounds. Kasparov’s first allegation, that the program was tampered with during play, would if true, violate fair play as it would encroach on Deep Blue’s autonomy, a necessary condition for fair play in individual strategic endeavours. The most…Read more
  •  7
    Free-Range Philosophy: Modes of Philosophical Analysis across the Discipline … and across the Road
    with Vernon Cisney
    The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 2 (1): 189-202. 2021.
    Philosophy’s richness comes in part from the wide range of conceptual frameworks from which meaning can be made of aspects of the world. Philosophy can be done from feminist, Marxist, positivist, or Freudian standpoints. The difference in the sorts of analyses produced by these different approaches can be tricky to explain to undergraduates. Contained here are short explanations of the nature of a collection of these frameworks and a fun example of each, an analysis of the chicken crossing the r…Read more
  •  6
    Defending Einstein: Hans Reichenbach's Writings on Space, Time and Motion (edited book)
    with Anke Walz
    Cambridge University Press. 2009.
    Hans Reichenbach, a philosopher of science who was one of five students in Einstein's first seminar on the general theory of relativity, became Einstein's bulldog, defending the theory against criticism from philosophers, physicists, and popular commentators. This book chronicles the development of Reichenbach's reconstruction of Einstein's theory in a way that clearly sets out all of its philosophical commitments and its physical predictions as well as the battles that Reichenbach fought on its…Read more
  •  4
    Bild-ing Science: The Multiplicity of Bild-Types in Boltzmann
    with Richard Lambert
    Foundations of Science 1-20. forthcoming.
    Ludwig Boltzmann’s Bildtheorie has been portrayed as a pre-cursor of the semantic view of theories and as such, the word “Bild” is translated as model. But this anachronistic understanding of Boltzmann’s use of Bilder fails to account for the wide range of roles they play in his understanding of scientific methodology. When the concept of Bild is understood historically in Viennese thought, a much broader sense emerges that leads to the investigation of its use in multiple ways in various contex…Read more
  •  4
    Isn’t That Response Clever? A Reply to Critics
    The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 2 (1): 239-250. 2021.