•  26
    The Ambiguity Dilemma for Imprecise Bayesians
    The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
    How should we make decisions when we do not know the relevant physical probabilities? In these ambiguous situations, we cannot use our knowledge to determine expected utilities or payoffs. The traditional Bayesian answer is that we should create a probability distribution using some mix of subjective intuition and objective constraints. Imprecise Bayesians argue that this approach is inadequate for modelling ambiguity. Instead, they represent doxastic states using credal sets. Generally, insofar…Read more
  •  40
    Calibration inductive logics are based on accepting estimates of relative frequencies, which are used to generate imprecise probabilities. In turn, these imprecise probabilities are intended to guide beliefs and decisions — a process called “calibration”. Two prominent examples are Henry E. Kyburg's system of Evidential Probability and Jon Williamson's version of Objective Bayesianism. There are many unexplored questions about these logics. How well do they perform in the short-run? Under what c…Read more
  •  214
    Prisoners of Prophecy
    In Kevin S. Decker (ed.), Dune and Philosophy, Wiley. 2022-10-17.
    The deceptive strangeness of prescience in Dune is typical of Herbert's ideas. The ancient Babylonians were able to systematically predict astronomical events, but contemporary astrophysicists can forecast distant events beyond the Babylonians’ wildest dreams. Herbert describes the prescience of characters like Paul as a hyperawareness of possibilities and probabilities given certain choices, rather than being able to examine a fixed future. Common sense suggests that prescience should help us l…Read more
  •  301
    Does the Dome Defeat the Material Theory of Induction?
    Erkenntnis 88 (5): 2171-2190. 2021.
    According to John D. Norton's Material Theory of Induction, all inductive inferences are justified by local facts, rather than their formal features or some grand principles of nature's uniformity. Recently, Richard Dawid (Found Phys 45(9):1101–1109, 2015) has offered a challenge to this theory: in an adaptation of Norton's own celebrated "Dome" thought experiment, it seems that there are certain inductions that are intuitively reasonable, but which do not have any local facts that could serve t…Read more
  •  28
    Can scientific evidence outstretch what scientists have mentally entertained, or could ever entertain? This article focuses on the plausibility and consequences of an affirmative answer in a special case. Specifically, it discusses how we may treat automated scientific data-gathering systems—especially AI systems used to make predictions or to generate novel theories—from the point of view of confirmation theory. It uses AlphaFold2 as a case study.
  •  8
    Probability and Statistics in the Tinbergen-Keynes Debates
    Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 15 (2). 2022.
    As part of a book symposium on Erwin Dekker's Jan Tinbergen (1903–1994) and the Rise of Economic Expertise (2021), William Peden reflects on shared views on the objectivity and nature of statistics between Tinbergen and Keynes underlying the Tinbergen-Keynes debates.
  •  266
    Explanatory reasoning in the material theory of induction
    Metascience 31 (3): 303-309. 2022.
    In his recent book, John Norton has created a theory of inference to the best explanation, within the context of his "material theory of induction". I apply it to the problem of scientific explanations that are false: if we want the theories in our explanations to be true, then why do historians and scientists often say that false theories explained phenomena? I also defend Norton's theory against some possible objections.
  •  203
    Contemporary debates about scientific institutions and practice feature many proposed reforms. Most of these require increased efforts from scientists. But how do scientists’ incentives for effort interact? How can scientific institutions encourage scientists to invest effort in research? We explore these questions using a game-theoretic model of publication markets. We employ a base game between authors and reviewers, before assessing some of its tendencies by means of analysis and simulations.…Read more
  •  44
    The Material Theory of Induction, by John Norton (review)
    BJPS Review of Books. 2022.
    Even prior to its publication, John Norton’s book has stimulated debates about induction. Its publication will galvanize these discussions. Does it merit all this attention? Yes, and not just from philosophers of science. Practically all philosophers will find novel and thought-provoking ideas, with implications for their research.
  •  42
    The debates between Bayesian, frequentist, and other methodologies of statistics have tended to focus on conceptual justifications, sociological arguments, or mathematical proofs of their long run properties. Both Bayesian statistics and frequentist (“classical”) statistics have strong cases on these grounds. In this article, we instead approach the debates in the “Statistics Wars” from a largely unexplored angle: simulations of different methodologies’ performance in the short to medium run. W…Read more
  •  432
    Evidentialism, Inertia, and Imprecise Probability
    The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1-23. forthcoming.
    Evidentialists say that a necessary condition of sound epistemic reasoning is that our beliefs reflect only our evidence. This thesis arguably conflicts with standard Bayesianism, due to the importance of prior probabilities in the latter. Some evidentialists have responded by modelling belief-states using imprecise probabilities (Joyce 2005). However, Roger White (2010) and Aron Vallinder (2018) argue that this Imprecise Bayesianism is incompatible with evidentialism due to “inertia”, where…Read more
  •  128
    Report on "Bayes By the Sea"
    The Reasoner 13 (10): 3-4. 2019.
  •  919
    The origins of testing scientific models with statistical techniques go back to 18th century mathematics. However, the modern theory of statistical testing was primarily developed through the work of Sir R.A. Fisher, Jerzy Neyman, and Egon Pearson in the inter-war period. Some of Fisher's papers on testing were published in economics journals (Fisher, 1923, 1935) and exerted a notable influence on the discipline. The development of econometrics and the rise of quantitative economic models in the…Read more
  •  352
    Probability and arguments: Keynes’s legacy
    Cambridge Journal of Economics 45 (5). 2021.
    John Maynard Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability is the seminal text for the logical interpretation of probability. According to his analysis, probabilities are evidential relations between a hypothesis and some evidence, just like the relations of deductive logic. While some philosophers had suggested similar ideas prior to Keynes, it was not until his Treatise that the logical interpretation of probability was advocated in a clear, systematic and rigorous way. I trace Keynes’s influence in the …Read more
  •  34
    Pharmacovigilance as Personalized Evidence
    In Chiara Beneduce & Marta Bertolaso (eds.), Personalized Medicine in the Making, Springer. pp. 147-171. 2022.
    Personalized medicine relies on two points: 1) causal knowledge about the possible effects of X in a given statistical population; 2) assignment of the given individual to a suitable reference class. Regarding point 1, standard approaches to causal inference are generally considered to be characterized by a trade-off between how confidently one can establish causality in any given study (internal validity) and extrapolating such knowledge to specific target groups (external validity). Regarding …Read more
  •  21
    What Can Armstrongian Universals Do for Induction?
    Philosophia 49 (3): 1145-1161. 2020.
    David Armstrong argues that necessitation relations among universals are the best explanation of some of our observations. If we consequently accept them into our ontologies, then we can justify induction, because these necessitation relations also have implications for the unobserved. By embracing Armstrongian universals, we can vindicate some of our strongest epistemological intuitions and answer the Problem of Induction. However, Armstrong’s reasoning has recently been challenged on a variety…Read more
  •  57
    According to John D. Norton's Material Theory of Induction, all reasonable inductive inferences are justified in virtue of background knowledge about local uniformities in nature. These local uniformities indicate that our samples are likely to be representative of our target population in our inductions. However, a variety of critics have noted that there are many circumstances in which induction seems to be reasonable, yet such background knowledge is apparently absent. I call such absences ‘t…Read more
  •  25
    The Selective Confirmation Answer to the Paradox of the Ravens
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 32 (3-4): 177-193. 2019.
    Philosophers such as Goodman, Scheffler and Glymour aim to answer the Paradox of the Ravens by distinguishing between confirmation simpliciter and selective confirmation. In the latter concept, the evidence both supports a hypothesis and undermines one of its "rivals". In this article, I argue that while selective confirmation does seem to be an important scientific notion, no attempt to formalise it thus far has managed to solve the Paradox of the Ravens.
  •  42
    The Bayesian Era in the philosophy of science
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 80 123-127. 2020.
    In this review essay of Jan Sprenger and Stephan Hartman's new book Bayesian Philosophy of Science (2019), I discuss the objectivity of Bayesianism, its implications for the scientific realism debates, and the extent to which they have succeeded in formalising Karl Popper's concept of corroboration.
  •  10
    Peter Achinstein's "Speculation Within and About Science" (review)
    Metapsychology Online Reviews. 2019.
    Over the past 50 years, Peter Achinstein has earned a reputation in the philosophy of science for careful, thought-provoking, and methodologically significant conceptual analyses. This new book matches that reputation: he begins with a detailed analysis a particular notion, speculation, and the clarified concept serves as the glue to hold together the book's wide-ranging discussions. Achinstein also investigates issues of interest for practicing scientists and the ideas of practicing scientists …Read more
  •  33
    Ivan Moscati, "Measuring Utility" (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Review of Books 1 1. 2019.
    In late-nineteenth-century economics, there was an epoch-defining shift from the labour theory of value to the marginal utility theory of value. According to the latter, the economic value of some circumstance (obtaining some good, some service, and so on) is its subjective utility at the margin. Thus, while there is an absolute sense in which I prefer having water to having diamonds, at the present moment I value one more unit of diamonds more than I value one more unit of water. That is why I …Read more
  •  31
    Richard Bradley, "Decision Theory with a Human Face." (review)
    Philosophy in Review 40 (1): 4-6. 2020.
    A non-expert who struggles to make good decisions and who turns to decision theory for help, might be more than a little surprised by what they find. If they read a standard treatment of the subject, they will find that they are assumed to be logically omniscient: they know all the logical facts about the propositions whose truth they have considered. Their beliefs are also assumed to be logically closed: if they believe each of a set of propositions S, then they believe everything that can be d…Read more
  •  30
    A Conciliatory Answer to the Paradox of the Ravens
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 51 (1): 45-64. 2020.
    In the Paradox of the Ravens, a set of otherwise intuitive claims about evidence seems to be inconsistent. Most attempts at answering the paradox involve rejecting a member of the set, which seems to require a conflict either with commonsense intuitions or with some of our best confirmation theories. In contrast, I argue that the appearance of an inconsistency is misleading: ‘confirms’ and cognate terms feature a significant ambiguity when applied to universal generalisations. In particular, the…Read more
  •  14
    Nicholas Maxwell's "Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment" (review)
    Metapsychology Online Reviews 22 (44). 2018.
    Nicholas Maxwell is not afraid of big ideas. As the title suggests, this book covers several sweeping topics: aside from those in the title, Maxwell discusses the methodology of social science, interdisciplinarity, quantum mechanics, and more besides. Given the 325-page word-length, this scope inevitably means that the ideas and arguments are frequently underdeveloped. However, despite this proportion of pages to topics, Maxwell's book is clear, accessible, and (most importantly) thought-provoki…Read more
  •  433
    Imprecise Probability and the Measurement of Keynes's "Weight of Arguments"
    IfCoLog Journal of Logics and Their Applications 5 (4): 677-708. 2018.
    Many philosophers argue that Keynes’s concept of the “weight of arguments” is an important aspect of argument appraisal. The weight of an argument is the quantity of relevant evidence cited in the premises. However, this dimension of argumentation does not have a received method for formalisation. Kyburg has suggested a measure of weight that uses the degree of imprecision in his system of “Evidential Probability” to quantify weight. I develop and defend this approach to measuring weight. I illu…Read more
  •  72
    Direct Inference in the Material Theory of Induction
    Philosophy of Science 86 (4): 672-695. 2019.
    John D. Norton’s “Material Theory of Induction” has been one of the most intriguing recent additions to the philosophy of induction. Norton’s account appears to be a notably natural account of actual inductive practices, although his theory has attracted considerable criticism. I detail several novel issues for his theory but argue that supplementing the Material Theory with a theory of direct inference could address these problems. I argue that if this combination is possible, a stronger theory…Read more