•  5
    Testabilité et signification
    with Pierre Wagner and Delphine Chapuis-Schmitz
    Vrin. 2014.
    Translation into French of Rudolf Carnap's Testability and Meaning (1936-1937): Carnap, Rudolf. "Testability and meaning." Philosophy of science 3.4 (1936): 419-471 and Carnap, Rudolf. "Testability and meaning—continued." Philosophy of science 4.1 (1937): 1-40. Introduction by Pierre Wagner; translation by Yann Benétreau-Dupin and Delphine Chapuis-Schmitz. Testabilité et signification est un classique de la philosophie des sciences dont aucune traduction n’avait jusqu’alors été offerte au public…Read more
  •  36
    Philosophy and Science of Risk: An Introduction
    with Isabelle Peschard and Christopher Wessels
    Routledge. 2022.
    What is risk? How do we assess risk? What are the ethical implications of risk? The concept of risk is important – sometimes even crucial – for many philosophical domains, from philosophy of science and technology to ethics and sustainability. Philosophy and Science of Risk is a clear, wide-ranging introduction to this urgent and fast-growing subject. It covers the following key topics: • The philosophical and historical background to understanding and interpreting risk • The meaning of risk and…Read more
  •  20
    Revisiting Model-Based Learning (review)
    Science & Education 27 (9-10): 1033-1037. 2018.
  •  50
    Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes. A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 201706. 2017.
    This new book by cosmologists Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes is another entry in the long list of cosmology-centered physics books intended for a large audience. While many such books aim at advancing a novel scientific theory, this one has no such scientific pretense. Its goals are to assert that the universe is fine-tuned for life, to defend that this fact can reasonably motivate further scientific inquiry as to why it is so, and to show that the multiverse and intelligent design hypothes…Read more
  •  82
    The Cosmos As Involving Local Laws and Inconceivable without Them
    with Chris J. Smeenk
    The Monist 100 (3): 357-372. 2017.
    Traditional debates, such as those regarding whether the universe is finite in spatial or temporal extent, exemplified, according to Kant, the inherent tendency of pure reason to lead us astray. Although various aspects of Kant’s arguments fail to find a footing in modern cosmology, Kant’s objections to the search for a complete objective description of the cosmos are related to three intertwined issues that are still of central importance: the applicability of universal laws, the status of dist…Read more
  •  112
    Buridan's Solution to the Liar Paradox
    History and Philosophy of Logic 36 (1): 18-28. 2015.
    Jean Buridan has offered a solution to the Liar Paradox, i.e. to the problem of assigning a truth-value to the sentence ‘What I am saying is false’. It has been argued that either this solution is ad hoc since it would only apply to self-referencing sentences [Read, S. 2002. ‘The Liar Paradox from John Buridan back to Thomas Bradwardine’, Vivarium, 40 , 189–218] or else it weakens his theory of truth, making his ‘a logic without truth’ [Klima, G. 2008. ‘Logic without truth: Buridan on the Liar’,…Read more
  •  55
    The didactics of astronomy is a relatively young field with respect to that of other sciences. Historical issues have most often been part of the teaching of astronomy, although that often does not stem from a specific didactics. The teaching of astronomy is often subsumed under that of physics. One can easily consider that, from an educational standpoint, astronomy requires the same mathematical or physical strategies. This approach may be adequate in many cases but cannot stand as a general pr…Read more
  •  188
    The Bayesian Who Knew Too Much
    Synthese 192 (5): 1527-1542. 2015.
    In several papers, John Norton has argued that Bayesianism cannot handle ignorance adequately due to its inability to distinguish between neutral and disconfirming evidence. He argued that this inability sows confusion in, e.g., anthropic reasoning in cosmology or the Doomsday argument, by allowing one to draw unwarranted conclusions from a lack of knowledge. Norton has suggested criteria for a candidate for representation of neutral support. Imprecise credences (families of credal probability f…Read more
  •  964
    The low representation (< 30%) of women in philosophy in English-speaking countries has generated much discussion, both in academic circles and the public sphere. It is sometimes suggested (Haslanger 2009) that unconscious biases, acting at every level in the field, may be grounded in gendered schemas of philosophers and in the discipline more widely, and that actions to make philosophy a more welcoming place for women should address such schemas. However, existing data are too limited to fully …Read more
  •  512
    An Empiricist Criterion of Meaning
    South African Journal of Philosophy 30 (2): 95-108. 2011.
    The meaning of scientific propositions is not always expressible in terms of observable phenomena. Such propositions involve generalizations, and also terms that are theoretical constructs. I study here how to assess the meaning of scientific propositions, that is, the specific import of theoretical terms. Empiricists have expressed a concern that scientific propositions, and theoretical terms, should always be, to some degree, related to observable consequences. We can see that the former empir…Read more
  •  60
    This is an editorial report on the outcomes of an international conference sponsored by a grant from the National Science Foundation to the School of Education at Boston University and the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University for a conference titled: How Can the History and Philosophy of Science Contribute to Contemporary US Science Teaching? The presentations of the conference speakers and the reports of the working groups are reviewed. Multiple themes emerged for K…Read more
  •  243
    Blurring Out Cosmic Puzzles
    Philosophy of Science 82 (5). 2015.
    The Doomsday argument and anthropic reasoning are two puzzling examples of probabilistic confirmation. In both cases, a lack of knowledge apparently yields surprising conclusions. Since they are formulated within a Bayesian framework, they constitute a challenge to Bayesianism. Several attempts, some successful, have been made to avoid these conclusions, but some versions of these arguments cannot be dissolved within the framework of orthodox Bayesianism. I show that adopting an imprecise framew…Read more
  •  72
    Teaching the Conceptual History of Physics to Physics Teachers
    with Peter Garik, Luciana Garbayo, Charles Winrich, Andrew Duffy, Nicholas Gross, and Manher Jariwala
    Science & Education 24 (4): 387-408. 2015.
    For nearly a decade we have taught the history and philosophy of science as part of courses aimed at the professional development of physics teachers. The focus of the history of science instruction is on the stages in the development of the concepts and theories of physics. For this instruction, we designed activities to help the teachers organize their understanding of this historical development. The activities include scientific modeling using archaic theories. We conducted surveys to gauge …Read more
  •  121
    Probabilistic Reasoning in Cosmology
    Dissertation, The University of Western Ontario. 2015.
    Cosmology raises novel philosophical questions regarding the use of probabilities in inference. This work aims at identifying and assessing lines of arguments and problematic principles in probabilistic reasoning in cosmology. -/- The first, second, and third papers deal with the intersection of two distinct problems: accounting for selection effects, and representing ignorance or indifference in probabilistic inferences. These two problems meet in the cosmology literature when anthropic conside…Read more