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Peter Tan [10]Peter Tagore Tan [2]
  1. Counterpossible Non-vacuity in Scientific Practice.Peter Tan - 2019 - Journal of Philosophy 116 (1):32-60.
    The longstanding philosophical orthodoxy on counterfactuals holds, in part, that counterfactuals with metaphysically impossible antecedents are indiscriminately vacuously true. Drawing on a number of examples from across scientific practice, I argue that science routinely treats counterpossibles as non-vacuously true and also routinely treats other counterpossibles as false. In fact, the success of many central scientific endeavors requires that counterpossibles can be non-vacuously true or false. So the philosophical orthodoxy that counterpossibles are indiscriminately vacuously true is inconsistent with scientific practice. I (...)
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  2. Epistemic Akrasia and Belief‐Credence Dualism.Elizabeth Jackson & Peter Tan - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (3):717–727.
    We call attention to certain cases of epistemic akrasia, arguing that they support belief-credence dualism. Belief-credence dualism is the view that belief and credence are irreducible, equally fundamental attitudes. Consider the case of an agent who believes p, has low credence in p, and thus believes that they shouldn’t believe p. We argue that dualists, as opposed to belief-firsters (who say credence reduces to belief) and credence-firsters (who say belief reduces to credence) can best explain features of akratic cases, including (...)
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  3. Two epistemological challenges regarding hypothetical modeling.Peter Tan - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6).
    Sometimes, scientific models are either intended to or plausibly interpreted as representing nonactual but possible targets. Call this “hypothetical modeling”. This paper raises two epistemological challenges concerning hypothetical modeling. To begin with, I observe that given common philosophical assumptions about the scope of objective possibility, hypothetical models are fallible with respect to what is objectively possible. There is thus a need to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate hypothetical modeling. The first epistemological challenge is that no account of the epistemology of (...)
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  4. Inconsistent idealizations and inferentialism about scientific representation.Peter Tan - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 89 (C):11-18.
    Inferentialists about scientific representation hold that an apparatus’s representing a target system consists in the apparatus allowing “surrogative inferences” about the target. I argue that a serious problem for inferentialism arises from the fact that many scientific theories and models contain internal inconsistencies. Inferentialism, left unamended, implies that inconsistent scientific models have unlimited representational power, since an inconsistency permits any conclusion to be inferred. I consider a number of ways that inferentialists can respond to this challenge before suggesting my own (...)
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  5. Ideal Laws, Counterfactual Preservation, and the Analyses of Lawhood.Peter Tan - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (3):574-589.
    This paper presents a unified argument against three widely held contemporary analyses of lawhood—Humean reductionism about laws, the dispositionalist view of laws, and the view of laws as relation...
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    Interventions and Counternomic Reasoning.Peter Tan - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (5):956-969.
    Counternomics—counterfactuals whose antecedents run contrary to the laws of nature—are commonplace in science but have enjoyed relatively little philosophical attention. This article discusses a puzzle about our counternomic epistemology, focusing on cases in which experimental observations are used as evidence for counternomic claims. I show that these cases resist being characterized in familiar interventionist lines, and I suggest a characterization of my own.
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    The Growing Block and What was Once Present.Peter Tan - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (6):2779-2800.
    According to the growing block ontology of time, there (tenselessly and unrestrictedly) exist past and present objects and events, but no future objects or events. The growing block is made attractive not just because of the attractiveness of its ontological basis for past-tensed truths, the past’s fixity, and future’s openness, but by underlying principles about the right way to fill in this sort of ontology. I shall argue that given these underlying views about the connection between truth and ontology, growing (...)
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    Interdisciplinary model transfer and realism about physical analogy.Peter Tan - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-27.
    Model transfer is the scientific practice of taking a model which was initially applied in one particular kind of target system in some particular scientific domain and applying it to represent a novel target system in a novel scientific domain. This paper motivates a realist interpretation of empirically successful model transfers and the implications of such an interpretation for the metaphysics of science. The paper uses two examples of empirically successful model transfer, the first of which is a strikingly successful (...)
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    Myth, Power, and Gun-Related Intimate Partner Violence Against Women.Peter Tagore Tan - 2019 - In Wanda Teays (ed.), Analyzing Violence Against Women. Cham: Springer. pp. 177-188.
    This chapter examines the tragedy of gun-related intimate partner violence against women. In that guns are minimally regulated in the United States, it is a uniquely American tragedy whose full scale is hidden by a lack of exact numbers that frustrates a proper account of its extent. This chapter adopts a Nietzschean genealogical approach to uncover two myths that explain the persistence of GIPVW. The myth of masculine priority is traced to its Hellenic roots, and the myth of firearms in (...)
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    Global Bioethics and Human Rights: Contemporary Issues.Robert Baker, Tom L. Beauchamp, Michael Boylan, Bernard Gert, Lawrence O. Gostin, Akiko Ito, Peter Tan & Rosemarie Tong (eds.) - 2014 - Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
    Editors Wanda Teays, John-Stewart Gordon, and Alison Dundes Renteln have assembled the works of an interdisciplinary, international team of experts in bioethics into a comprehensive, innovative and accessible book. Topics covered range from torture and lethal injection to euthanasia, sex selection, vulnerable human subjects, to health equity, safety and public health, and environmental disasters like Bhopal, Fukushima, and more.
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  11. An Energetic Interpretation of Whitehead's Actual Entity.Peter Tagore Tan - 2002 - Dissertation, Fordham University
    This dissertation is meant to interpret Whitehead's basic unit of ontology in energetic terms. The actual entity is to be understood as an oscillating unit of existence that is nothing other than its oscillatory activity. There is nothing substantial underlying it: it is essentially a vibrating entity that has nothing more primary appended to it. Through such vibratory activity, it realizes itself out of its own conative drive and its deeply interrelated adventures with other entities and objects. Energizing actuality makes (...)
     
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  12. A virtuous reading of health equity under thre Affordable Care Act.Peter Tan - 2014 - In Wanda Teays, John-Stewart Gordon & Alison Dundes Renteln (eds.), Global Bioethics and Human Rights: Contemporary Issues. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
     
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