In a now-classic paper, Nancy Cartwright argued that the Humean conception of causation as mere regular co-occurrence is too weak to make sense of our everyday and scientific practices. Specifically she claimed that in order to understand our reasoning about, and uses of, effective strategies, we need a metaphysically stronger notion of causation and causal laws than Humeanism allows. Cartwright’s arguments were formulated in the framework of probabilistic causation, and it is precisely in the domain of (objective) probabilities that I (...) am interested in defending a form of Humeanism. In this paper I will unpack some examples of effective strategies and discuss how well they fit the framework of causal laws and criteria such as CC from Cartwright’s and others’ works on probabilistic causality. As part of this discussion, I will also consider the concept or concepts of objective probability presupposed in these works. I will argue that Cartwright’s notion of a nomological machine, or a mechanism as defined by Stuart Glennan, is better suited for making sense of effective strategies, and therefore that a metaphysically primitive notion of causal law (or singular causation, or capacity, as Cartwright argues in (1989)) is not – here, at least – needed. These conclusions, as well as the concept of objective probabilities I defend, are largely in harmony with claims Cartwright defends in The Dappled World. My discussion aims, thus, to bring out into the open how far Cartwright’s current views are from a radically anti-Humean, causal-fundamentalist picture. (shrink)

Although the principle of informed consent is well established and its importance widely acknowledged, it has met with criticism for decades. Doubts have been raised for a number of different reasons. In particular, empirical data show that people regularly fail to reproduce the information provided to them. Many critics agree, therefore, that the received concept of informed consent is no more than a myth. Strategies to overcome this problem often rest on a flawed concept of informed consent. In this paper, (...) it is suggested that informed consent is a communicative act between two persons. The challenge is to elucidate the norms and constraints for successfully performing such a communicative act. The view developed here has major consequences with regard to the standards for information disclosure as well as for the general scope of informed consent. (shrink)

In this paper we critically review Correia’s and Rosenkranz’s Nothing to Come. A Defence of the Growing Block Theory of Time, published by Springer in 2018. By taking into account the essential reliance of the book on tense logic, we bring out the existence of a conflict between their logical axioms, that presuppose truth bivalence even for statements concerning future contingents, and the principle of groundedness that they also advocate. According to this principle, a proposition Q is now groundedly true (...) as long as sometimes in the future it will be the case that there exists something that makes Q true. However, if the events that occur in 2060 do not exist unrestrictedly (for us, here in 2021), what, in reality, can possibly ground the truth (or falsity) of Q? In the second part of the paper, we concentrate on some conceptual difficulties raised by their brilliant attempt to adapt the growing block view of reality to a relativistic setting, based on what they call bow-tie presentism, according to which for each spacetime point s only s plus the spacelike-related region with respect to s exists. By extending temporal logic into a relativity-friendly spatiotemporal logic, we conclude by noting that Correia and Rosenkranz’s Nothing to Come makes very important strides in showing that there are technical ways to develop the growing block of reality into an ontology that coheres with relativity theories perfectly well, while retaining most of the distinctive content of classical growing block theory. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to sketch and defend a new interpretation or 'theory' of objective chance, one that lets us be sure such chances exist and shows how they can play the roles we traditionally grant them. The account is 'Humean' in claiming that objective chances supervene on the totality of actual events, but does not imply or presuppose a Humean approach to other metaphysical issues such as laws or causation. Like Lewis (1994) I take the Principal Principle (...) (PP) to be the key to understanding objective chance. After describing the main features of Humean objective chance (HOC), I deduce the validity of PP for Humean chances, and end by exploring the limitations of Humean chance. (shrink)

Classical statistical mechanics posits probabilities for various events to occur, and these probabilities seem to be objective chances. This does not seem to sit well with the fact that the theory’s time evolution is deterministic. We argue that the tension between the two is only apparent. We present a theory of Humean objective chance and show that chances thus understood are compatible with underlying determinism and provide an interpretation of the probabilities we find in Boltzmannian statistical mechanics.

The authors survey some debates about the nature and structure of physical theories and about the connections between our physical theories and naturalized metaphysics. The discussion is organized around an “ideal view” of physical theories and criticisms that can be raised against it. This view includes controversial commitments regarding the best analysis of physical modalities and intertheory relations. The authors consider the case in favor of taking laws as the primary modal notion, discussing objections related to alleged violations of the (...) laws, the apparent need to appeal to causality, and the status of probability. The “ideal view” includes a commitment that fundamental physical theories are explanatorily sufficient. The authors discuss several challenges to recovering the manifest image from fundamental physics, along with a distinct challenge to reductionism based on acknowledging the contributions of less fundamental theories in physical explanations. (shrink)

In recent years attacks on the Kripke-Putnam approach to natural kinds and natural kind terms have proliferated. In a recent paper, Häggqvist and Wikforss (The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1–23, 2017) attack the once-dominant essentialist account of natural kinds. Häggqvist & Wikforss also suggest that it is time to return to some sort of cluster-based descriptivist semantics for natural kind terms, thus targeting both the metaphysical and semantic tenets that underpin the Kripke-Putnam approach. In our paper we (...) want to challenge both parts of Häggqvist and Wikforss’ project. We will argue that the anti-essentialist considerations and arguments they raise against the Kripke-Putnam view are far from compelling in some cases, and certainly not decisive against a reasonable form of the view. On the semantic side, although Häggqvist and Wikforss give few details about what a viable cluster-based descriptivist theory should look like, we will argue that one can already see the approach to be a non-starter. Ignorance and error arguments of the kinds provided by Kripke and Putnam continue to be decisive objections. The only way we can see to save the cluster descriptivist approach is to make the essential properties postulated by Kripke and Putnam become essential features of the descriptive cluster. But this makes the success of the approach parasitic on the correctness of the Kripke-Putnam view. (shrink)

This book explains how we can understand objective chance in a metaphysically neutral way, as reducible to certain patterns that can be discerned in the actual events of our world.

This paper continues the defense of a version of scientific realism, Tautological Scientific Realism, that rests on the claim that, excluding some areas of fundamental physics about which doubts are entirely justified, many areas of contemporary science cannot be coherently imagined to be false other than via postulation of radically skeptical scenarios, which are not relevant to the realism debate in philosophy of science. In this paper we discuss, specifically, the threats of meaning change and reference failure associated with the (...) Kuhnian tradition, which depend on a descriptivist approach to meaning, and we argue that descriptivism is not the right account of the meaning and reference of theoretical terms. We suggest that an account along the lines of the causal-historical theory of reference provides a more faithful picture of how terms for unobservable theoretical entities and properties come to refer; we argue that this picture works particularly well for TSR. In the last section we discuss how our account raises concerns specifically for perspectival forms of scientific realism. (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright is one of the most distinguished and influential contemporary philosophers of science. Despite the profound impact of her work, there is neither a systematic exposition of Cartwright’s philosophy of science nor a collection of articles that contains in-depth discussions of the major themes of her philosophy. This book is devoted to a critical assessment of Cartwright’s philosophy of science and contains contributions from Cartwright's champions and critics. Broken into three parts, the book begins by addressing Cartwright's views on (...) the practice of model building in science and the question of how models represent the world before moving on to a detailed discussion of methodologically and metaphysically challenging problems. Finally, the book addresses Cartwright's original attempts to clarify profound questions concerning the metaphysics of science. With contributions from leading scholars, such as Ronald N. Giere and Paul Teller, this unique volume will be extremely useful to philosophers of science the world over. (shrink)

On the face of it ‘deterministic chance’ is an oxymoron: either an event is chancy or deterministic, but not both. Nevertheless, the world is rife with events that seem to be exactly that: chancy and deterministic at once. Simple gambling devices like coins and dice are cases in point. On the one hand they are governed by deterministic laws – the laws of classical mechanics – and hence given the initial condition of, say, a coin toss it is determined whether (...) it will land heads or tails.2 On the other hand, we commonly assign probabilities to the different outcomes a coin toss, and doing so has proven successful in guiding our actions. The same dilemma also emerges in less mundane contexts. Classical statistical mechanics (which is still an important part of modern physics) assigns probabilities to the occurrence of certain events – for instance to the spreading of a gas that is originally confined to the left half of a container – but at the same time assumes that the relevant systems are deterministic. How can this apparent conflict be resolved? (shrink)

GRW Theory postulates a stochastic mechanism assuring that every so often the wave function of a quantum system is `hit', which leaves it in a localised state. How are we to interpret the probabilities built into this mechanism? GRW theory is a firmly realist proposal and it is therefore clear that these probabilities are objective probabilities (i.e. chances). A discussion of the major theories of chance leads us to the conclusion that GRW probabilities can be understood only as either single (...) case propensities or Humean objective chances. Although single case propensities have some intuitive appeal in the context of GRW theory, on balance it seems that Humean objective chances are preferable on conceptual grounds because single case propensities suffer from various well know problems such as unlimited frequency tolerance and lack of a rationalisation of the principal principle. (shrink)

The topics of gravitational field energy and energy-momentum conservation in General Relativity theory have been unjustly neglected by philosophers. If the gravitational field in space free of ordinary matter, as represented by the metric g ab itself, can be said to carry genuine energy and momentum, this is a powerful argument for adopting the substantivalist view of spacetime.This paper explores the standard textbook account of gravitational field energy and argues that (a) so-called stress-energy of the gravitational field is well-defined neither (...) locally nor globally; and (b) there is no general principle of energy-momentum conservation to be found in General Relativity. I discuss the nature and justification of the zero-divergence law for ordinary stress-energy, and its possible connection with the failure of General Relativity to realise Mach's principle. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to analyse compactness properties of nonmonotonic inference operations within the framework of model theory. For this purpose the concepts of a deductive frame and its semantical counterpart, a semantical frame are introduced. Compactness properties play a fundamental in the study of non-monotonic inference, and in the paper several new versions of compactness are studied.

The underdetermination of theory by evidence must be distinguished from holism. The latter is a doctrine about the testing of scientific hypotheses; the former is a thesis about empirically adequate logically incompatible global theories or "systems of the world". The distinction is crucial for an adequate assessment of the underdetermination thesis. The paper shows how some treatments of underdetermination are vitiated by failure to observe this distinction, and identifies some necessary conditions for the existence of multiple empirically equivalent global theories. (...) We consider how empiricists should respond to the possibility of such systems of the world. (shrink)

In this paper I defend fundamental physical laws from the arguments mounted by Nancy Cartwright in her (1999) book The Dappled World (and other publications). I argue, positively, that we have a good deal of evidence for mathematical laws—not just causal capacities—underlying many natural phenomena. I also argue, negatively, that Cartwright's main arguments unfairly demand that a fundamentalist be a strong reductionist.

The traditional absolutist-relationist debate is still clearly formulable in the context of General Relativity Theory (GTR), despite the important differences between Einstein's theory and the earlier context of Newtonian physics. This paper answers recent arguments by Robert Rynasiewicz against the significance of the debate in the GTR context. In his (1996) (‘Absolute vs. Relational Spacetime: An Outmoded Debate?’), Rynasiewicz argues that already in the late nineteenth century, and even more so in the context of General Relativity theory, the terms of (...) the original Descartes–Newton–Leibniz dispute about space are not to be found. Nineteenth-century ether theories of electromagnetism, and the metric field of GTR, he claims, do not lend themselves to being interpreted clearly as either absolute space à la Newton, or relational structures à la either Descartes or Leibniz. I argue that, while in some imaginable theories Rynasiewicz's claim that the classical debate dissolves would be correct, in fact in the most important historical theories he discusses, this is not the case. In particular, I argue that in both Lorentz's ether theory and General relativity theory, there is a clear and compelling way to establish connections to the classical absolutist-relationist disputes, and that in both these theories it is the absolutist position that is prima facie victorious. To support my arguments and give a clear overview of the whole debate, I end by offering definitional sketches of relationism and absolutism (substantivalism) about spacetime in the context of contemporary physics. The sketches show the clear connections between these views today and their ancestors in Newton and Leibniz. But at the same time, they indicate how both views are not just claims about existing physical theories, but rather also bets about how future physics will clarify the ontological picture. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Relationism, Substantivalism and Space‐time Conventionalism about Space‐time Black Holes and Singularities Horizons and Uniformity Conclusion.

The story of Einstein's struggle to create a general theory of relativity, and his early discontentment with the final form of the theory , is well known in broad outline. Thanks to the work of John Norton and others, much of the fine detail of the story is also now known. One aspect of Einstein's work in this period has, however, been relatively neglected: Einstein's commitment to Mach's ideas on inertia, and the influence this commitment had on Einstein's work on (...) general relativity from 1907 to 1918. In this paper published writings and archival material are examined, to try to reconstruct the details of Einstein's thinking about inertia and gravitation, and the role that Mach's ideas played in Einstein's crucial work on the general theory. By the end, a clear picture of Einstein's conceptions of Mach's ideas on inertia, and their philosophical motivations, will emerge. Several surprising conclusions also emerge: Einstein's desire for a Machian gravitation theory was the central force driving his work from 1912 to 1915, keeping him going despite numerous frustrating setbacks; Einstein's continued commitment to Mach's ideas in 1916–1917 kept him at work trying various strategies of modification of the field equations, in order to exclude anti-Machian solutions ; and as late as early 1918, Einstein was ready to call the whole General Theory a failure if no way of squaring it with Mach's ideas on inertia could be found. But by 1920 Einstein advocated a view that granted spacetime independent existence with physical qualities of its own, a complete break with his earlier Machian views. (shrink)

This paper outlines a new interpretation of an argument of Kant's for the existence of absolute space. The Kant argument, found in a 1768 essay on topology, argues for the existence of Newtonian-Euclidean absolute space on the basis of the existence of incongruous counterparts (such as a left and a right hand, or any asymmetrical object and its mirror-image). The clear, intrinsic difference between a left hand and a right hand, Kant claimed, cannot be understood on a relational view of (...) space - for in terms of the spatial relations of their parts, there is no difference to be found. Kant's argument has been interpreted by, among others, Graham Nerlich (in 1973, Hands, Knees and Absolute Space, The Journal of Philosophy). I briefly discuss Nerlich, and then offer a different reconstruction of the argument, one that appears to be closer to Kant's text. The reconstruction, however, essentially involves ascription of primitive identity to parts of space. Comparing the Kantian absolutist account of incongruous counterparts using primitive identity to the correct relationist account, I conclude that the absolutist account pays a heavy metaphysical price, without buying any genuine explanatory advantage over the relationist. I go on to examine recent suggestions that parity-non-conservation phenomena in quantum physics allow a stronger version of Kant's challenge to relationism. On closer examination, it turns out that here too the absolutist or substantivalist must be appealing to space parts with primitive identity in order to claim an advantage over relationists; and here too, I argue the substantivalist story really has no advantage over the correct relationist account. (shrink)

The paper investigates the kind of dependence relation that best portrays Machian frame-dragging in general relativity. The question is tricky because frame-dragging relates local inertial frames to distant distributions of matter in a time-independent way, thus establishing some sort of non-local link between the two. For this reason, a plain causal interpretation of frame-dragging faces huge challenges. The paper will shed light on the issue by using a generalized structural equation model analysis in terms of manipulationist counterfactuals recently applied in (...) the context of metaphysical enquiry by Schaffer (2016) and Wilson (2017). The verdict of the analysis will be that frame-dragging is best understood in terms of a novel type of dependence relation that is half-way between causation and grounding. (shrink)

Since the death of strong reductionism, philosophers of science have expanded the horizons of their understandings of the physical, mental, and social worlds, and the complex relations among them. To give one interesting example, John Dupre has endorsed a notion of downward causation: ‘higher-level’ events causing events at a ‘lower’ ontological level. For example, my intention to type the letter ‘t’ causes the particular motions experienced by all the atoms in my left forefinger as I type it. The proper explanation (...) of the motions of an atom at the tip of my forefinger primarily involves my intentions, rather than the immediately preceding motions of other nearby atoms, or any other such particle–level events. (shrink)

Examines the diverse cultural influences which have shaped the basic philosophical traditions of India "Indian philosophy was at the heart of Zimmer's interest..

Biomedical research, especially pharmaceutical research, has been criticised for engaging in practices that lead to over-estimations of the effectiveness of medical treatments. A central issue concerns the reporting of absolute and relative measures of medical effectiveness. In this paper we critically examine proposals made by Jacob Stegenga to (a) give priority to the reporting of absolute measures over relative measures, and (b) downgrade the measures of effectiveness (effect sizes) of the treatments tested in clinical trials (Stegenga, 2015a). After exposing significant (...) flaws in a central case study used by Stegenga to bolster his first proposal (a), we go on to argue that neither of these proposals is defensible (a or b). We defend the practice, in line with the New England Journal of Medicine, of reporting both absolute and relative measures whenever feasible. (shrink)

As the discoverer of electromagnetic waves, Hertz is one of the most important figures in the history of physics. In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of his death, this volume ties together his personal and professional life. It contains 11 of Hertz's most important papers, seven accounts of his life by renowned contemporaries, and a biographical introduction. A bibliography of Hertz's scientific papers, a general bibliography of books and articles about his contributions to physics, and a comprehensive index round out (...) the coverage. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Lange vergriffen ' jetzt als Neuausgabe:Heinrich Barths Philosophie der Praktischen VernunftHeinrich Barths Philosophie der Praktischen Vernunft ist zugleich eine gründliche Analyse von Immanuel Kants Kritik der praktischen Vernunft und die Grundlegung einer eigenständigen Philosophie der existentiell begründeten Vernunft. Ausgehend von den Marburger Philosophen Hermann Cohen und Paul Natorp, vertieft Barth deren transzendentalen Systemgedanken zu einem radikalen Prinzip, das die Wirklichkeitsfrage neu aufwirft. Letztere wird zwar auch in Kants zweiter Kritik gestellt, doch nicht im Sinne einer Handlungstheorie, sondern mit der (...) Absicht aufzuweisen, dass es so etwas wie praktische Vernunft überhaupt «gibt». Genau darin aber erkennt Barth den Kern der Philosophie der Existenz, wodurch sich seine Philosophie der Praktischen Vernunft ' wie Sein und Zeit 1927 erschienen ' in einer noch zu erhellenden Verwandtschaft zu Martin Heidegger befindet. Dennoch könnte die Ausgangslage beider Philosophen verschiedener nicht sein. Weder Sein noch Tod geben die Leitlinien von Barths Interpretation vor, vielmehr die transzendental verstandene Vernunft und der Mensch, der wesensmässig vom Anspruch praktischer Verwirklichung herausgefordert ist. Grundsätzlicher als ethische Normen und Regeln werden hier die Grundlagen der praktischen Vernunft erachtet, die im Horizont von Platons «Idee des Guten» und Kants Begriff der «Pflicht» eine eigenständige Wirklichkeit beansprucht. Dass der Philosoph Barth auch offen ist für die Dimension der Glaubenswahrheiten zeigte sich schon bei seiner Mitarbeit an der «Dialektischen Theologie» in den frühen Zwanzigerjahren des 20. Jahrhunderts. (shrink)