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 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)

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)

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)

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)

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 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)

This study of the workings of neural networks in perception and understanding of situations and simple sentences shows that, and how, distributed conceptual constituents are bound together in episodes within an interactive/dynamic architecture of sensorial and pre-motor maps, and maps of conceptual indicators (semantic memory) and individuating indicators (historical, episodic memory). Activation circuits between these maps make sensorial and pre-motor fields in the brain function as episodic maps creating representations, which are expressions in consciousness. It is argued that all consciousness (...) is episodic, consisting of situational or linguistic representations, and that the mind is the whole of all conscious manifestations of the brain. Thought occurs only in the form of linguistic or image representations. The book also discusses the role of consciousness in the relationship between causal and denotational semantics, and its role for the possibility of representations and rules. Four recent controversies in consciousness research are discussed and decided along this model of consciousness: • Is consciousness an internal or external monitoring device of brain states? • Do all conscious states involve thought and judgement? • Are there different kinds of consciousness? • Do we have a one-on-one correspondence between certain brain states and conscious states. The book discusses also the role of consciousness in the relationship between causal and denotational semantics, and its role for the possibility of representations and rules. (Series A). (shrink)

mechanism" is frequently encountered in the social science literature, but there is considerable confusion about the exact meaning of the term. The article begins by addressing the main conceptual issues. Use of this term is the hallmark of an approach that is critical of the explanatory deficits of correlational analysis and of the covering-law model, advocating instead the causal reconstruction of the processes that account for given macro-phenomena. The term "social mechanisms" should be used to refer to recurrent processes generating (...) a specific kind of outcome. Explanation of social macro-phenomena by mechanisms typically involves causal regression to lower-level elements, as stipulated by methodological individualism. While there exist a good many mechanism models to explain emergent effects of collective behavior, we lack a similarly systematic treatment of generative mechanisms in which institutions and specific kinds of structural configurations play the decisive role. Key Words: causal regression • correlational analysis • emergent effects • micro-macro processes • social mechanisms • structural determinants. (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)

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.

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)

We explore in this paper the relation between activities, communication channels and media, and common ground building in global teams. We define re-representation as a sequence of representations of the same concept using different communication channels and media. We identified the re - representation technique to build common ground that is used by team members during multimodal and multimedia communicative events in cross-disciplinary, geographically distributed settings. Our hypotheses are as follows: (1) Significant sources of information behind decisions and request for (...) actions are embedded within the fabric of communicative events in which participants use both informal and formal media to express their ideas. Capturing these information sources can facilitate common ground building and accelerate the execution of action requests. (2) Re-representations of concepts, i.e., sequences of representations using diverse media and communication channels, mediate and accelerate common ground building. (3) The use of intra- or interdisciplinary re-representations correlates with high team performance, i.e., effective team process and high product quality. We used AEC Global Teamwork course offered in 2008–2009 as the testbed for our study to validate our hypothesis. (shrink)

One currently popular view about the nature of objective probabilities, or objective chances, is that they – or some of them, at least – are primitive features of the physical world, not reducible to anything else nor explicable in terms of frequencies, degrees of belief, or anything else. In this paper I explore the question of what the semantic content of primitive chance claims could be. Every attempt I look at to supply such content either comes up empty-handed, or begs (...) important questions against the skeptic who doubts the meaningfulness of primitive chance claims. In the second half of the paper I show that, by contrast, there are clear, and clearly contentful, ways to understand objective chance claims if we ground them on deterministic physical underpinnings. (shrink)

Precision medicine and digital phenotyping are two prominent data-based approaches within digital medicine. While precision medicine historically used primarily genetic data to find targeted treatment options, digital phenotyping relies on the usage of big data deriving from digital devices such as smartphones, wearables and other connected devices. This paper first focusses on the aspect of data type to explore differences and similarities between precision medicine and digital phenotyping. It outlines different ways of data collection and production and the consequences thereof. (...) Second, it shows how these sorts of data influence dominant beliefs in the field: The field of precision medicine relying on the dominant understanding of ‘genetic determinism’ imported from genetics, digital phenotyping building on the logic of ‘data fundamentalism’. In the end, the analysis shows how digital data informs potentials as well as challenges of precision medicine and digital phenotyping: a better health care for individuals connected with individualisation and responsibilisation for all, with a prognosed shift from reactive to preventive medicine. Additionally, data-based approaches might facilitate epistemological and ontological redirections for the whole field of medicine that will also affect knowledge production and a reassessment of the value of different types of knowledge with all its consequences. Institutionally, it might lead to shifts in distribution of power to experts in big data related technologies, i.e. private companies. (shrink)

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 paper presents a new perspective of the impact of collaboration technology on the degrees of engagement and specific interaction zones in interactive workspaces. The study is at the intersection of the design of physical work spaces, i.e., bricks, rich electronic content such as video, audio, sketching, CAD, i.e., bits, and new ways people behave in communicative events, i.e., interaction. The study presents: (1) an innovative multi-modal collaboration technology, called RECALL (patented by Stanford University), that supports the seamless, real-time capture (...) of concept generation during project brainstorming and project review sessions, (2) the deployment of RECALL in an interactive workspace that supports real project review sessions, called FISHBOWL, and (3) the observations of the impact of RECALL and the interactive workspace on degrees of engagement and interaction zones as it is deployed in the specific FISHBOWL sessions. (shrink)

The epistemological problems of unification of two distinct theories are discussed. An approach related to the work of Soviet authors (Stepin, Podgoretzky and Smorodinsky) is used and developed. The notion of ‘crossbred objects’—theoretical objects with contradictory properties which are part of the domain of application of two independent theories—is introduced which helps to describe the dynamics of revolutionary theory change. The occurrence of the cross-contradiction of two theories is reconstructed and the reductionistic and the synthetic means of its elimination are (...) proposed. The results of the methodological analysis are applied to the paradox of equivalence. (shrink)

We prove completeness and decidability results for a family of combinations of propositional dynamic logic and unimodal doxastic logics in which the modalities may interact. The kind of interactions we consider include three forms of commuting axioms, namely, axioms similar to the axiom of perfect recall and the axiom of no learning from temporal logic, and a Church–Rosser axiom. We investigate the influence of the substitution rule on the properties of these logics and propose a new semantics for the test (...) operator to avoid unwanted side effects caused by the interaction of the classic test operator with the extra interaction axioms. (shrink)

Much is asked of the concept of chance. It has been thought to play various roles, some in tension with or even incompatible with others. Chance has been characterized negatively, as the absence of causation; yet also positively—the ancient Greek τυχη´ reifies it—as a cause of events that are not governed by laws of nature, or as a feature of the laws themselves. Chance events have been understood epistemically as those whose causes are unknown; yet also objectively as a distinct (...) ontological kind, sometimes called ‘pure’ chance events. Chance gives rise to individual unpredictability and disorder; yet it yields collective predictability and order—stable long-run statistics, and in the limit, aggregate behavior susceptible to precise mathematical theorems. Some authors believe that to posit chances is to abjure explanation; yet others think that chances are themselves explanatory. During the Enlightenment, talk of ‘chance’ was regarded as unscientific, unphilosophical, the stuff of superstition or ignorance; yet today it is often taken to be a fundamental notion of our most successful scientific theory, quantum mechanics, and a central concept of contemporary metaphysics. Chance has both negative and positive associations in daily life. The old word in English for it, hazard, which derives from French and originally from Arabic, still has unwelcome connotations of risk; ‘chance’ evokes uncertainty, uncontrollability, and chaos. Yet chance is also allied with luck, fortune, freedom from constraint, and diversity. And it apparently has various practical uses and benefits. It forms the basis of randomized trials in statistics, and of mixed strategies in decision theory and game theory; it is appealed to in order to resolve problems of fair division and other ethical.. (shrink)

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)

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)

In this paper I shall compare two models of concept formation, both inspired by basic convictions of philosophical empiricism. The first, the connectionist model, will be exemplified by Kohonen maps, and the second will be my own dynamic theory of concept formation. Both can be understood in probabilistic terms, both use a notion of convergence or stabilization in modelling how concepts are built up. Both admit destabilization of concepts and conceptual change. Both do not use a notion of representation in (...) some pregiven language, such as a language of thought or some logical language. Representation in a formal language only plays a role on the meta-level, namely within the theory about concept formation. (shrink)

Looking out of the window of a speeding car, receiving photographs of Earth from outer space, watching the flickering images of the TV screen, scrolling through a text, zooming in on a location in Google Earth, or sending images via mobile ...

Our beliefs can have, or fail to have, a significant epistemic virtue: they can be true. What about our partial beliefs – that is, credences or subjective probabilities? Is there an epistemic virtue that credences can have or fail to have, whose nature or role with respect to credences is analogous to the role that truth has with respect to full beliefs? Van Fraassen argued in the 1980s that there is indeed such an analog virtue, and he claimed that it (...) is calibration: our credences should match, or be in tune with, some appropriately chosen frequencies of events. For example, if your credence in the proposition ‘It will rain today’ is 0.3 for any day that starts out like today did, and in fact it does rain on approximately 30% of such days, then your credence level is well‐calibrated, and is vindicated by the actual frequency of rain.In an unpublished paper Alan Hájek rejects this calibrationist answer, and proposes instead that having credences in agreement with the relevant objective chances is what it is to have vindicated credences, in the relevant sense analogous to truth for full beliefs. Although there are problems that afflict both van Fraassen's and Hájek's proposals, I will argue that Hájek and the calibrationist are both largely right – although the calibrationist answer is at bottom more right. In section I will propose an account of being in tune with the world that divides types of propositions into a few different classes; for one of those classes, Hájek's answer is exactly right, while for the others the calibrationist account gives the right answer. (shrink)

This dissertation takes up the project of showing that, in the context of the general theory of relativity , spacetime relationism is not a refuted or hopeless view, as many in the recent literature have maintained . Most of the challenges to the relationist view in General Relativity can be satisfactorily answered; in addition, the opposing absolutist and substantivalist views of spacetime can be shown to be problematic. The crucial burden for relationists concerned with GTR is to show that the (...) realistic cosmological models, i.e. those that may be roughly accurate representations of our universe, satisfy Mach's ideas about the origin of inertia. This dissertation clears the way for and begins such a demonstration. ;After a brief discussion of the problem of the nature of spacetime and its history in the Introduction, chapters 2 and 3 provide conceptual analysis and criticism of contemporary philosophical arguments about relationism, absolutism, and particularly substantivalism. The current best arguments in favor of substantivalism are shown to be flawed, with the exception of the argument from inertial and metrical structure; and on this issue, it is shown that both relationism and substantivalism need to argue for modifications of GTR in order to have a non-trivial explanation of inertial and metrical structure. For relationists, a Machian account of the origin of inertia in some models of GTR is required. Chapter 4 demonstrates that such a Machian account is equivalent to the demand for a truly general relativity of motion. Chapter 5 explores the history of Einstein's commitment to Mach's ideas in his work on GTR. Through an examination of the history of Einstein's attempts to impose Machian constraints on the models of General Relativity, further insight into the nature of this problem is obtained, as are reasons to believe that the project is by no means hopeless. (shrink)