1921
in The Reign of Relativity
February 2005; published online April 2005.
Chapter. Subjects: philosophy of science. 15815 words.
Mortiz Schlick’s article of this title was highly influential in convincing several generations of philosophers that GTR outrightly falsified any variety of Kantian epistemology. In fact, the...
A ‘Nudge’ for Public Health Ethics: Libertarian Paternalism as a Framework for Ethical Analysis of Public Health Interventions?
in Public Health Ethics
November 2010; published online October 2010.
Journal Article. Subjects: philosophy of science; medical ethics. 6096 words.
Is it possible to interfere with individual decision-making while preserving freedom of choice? The purpose of this article is to assess whether ‘libertarian paternalism’, a set of political and...
A Bouquet of Scientific Values
in Scientific Values and Civic Virtues
July 2005; published online July 2005.
Chapter. Subjects: philosophy of science. 7911 words.
This chapter reviews the attempts of sociologists of science such as Parsons and Merton, and philosophers of science such as Kuhn, Lakatos, and Popper, to characterize the norms that guide the...
‘A New Species of Logic’
in Hume's Problem
November 2000; published online November 2003.
Chapter. Subjects: philosophy of science. 19621 words.
This is the central chapter of the book. It contains an extended argument to show that in formal probability theory we have an authentic logic of uncertain inference, of the same species as deductive...
Abduction, Reason, and Science: Processes of Discovery and Explanation
in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
June 2003; published online June 2003.
Journal Article. Subjects: philosophy of science; science and technology. 0 words.
Abortion Revisited
in The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics
February 2009; published online September 2009.
Article. Subjects: philosophy; philosophy of science. 10605 words.
The three major classical accounts of the morality of abortion are all subject to at least one major problem. Can we do better? This article aims to discuss three accounts that purport to be superior...
Absolute Quantum Mechanics
in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
March 2001; published online March 2001.
Journal Article. Subjects: philosophy of science; science and technology. 0 words.
Whereas one can conceive of a relational classical mechanics in which absolute space and time do not play a fundamental role, quantum mechanics does not readily admit any such relational...
Absolute versus Relational Spacetime: For Better or Worse, the Debate Goes On
in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
September 1998; published online September 1998.
Journal Article. Subjects: philosophy of science; science and technology. 0 words.
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...
Absorber and Entropy Theories of Radiation
in Inconsistency, Asymmetry, and Non-Locality
May 2005; published online April 2005.
Chapter. Subjects: philosophy of science. 12589 words.
This chapter criticizes absorber accounts of radiation asymmetry in the tradition of Wheeler and Feynman’s time-symmetric action-at-a-distance theory, and ‘pure entropy accounts’ of the asymmetry....
Abstract and Concrete
in Nature's Capacities and Their Measurement
April 1994; published online November 2003.
Chapter. Subjects: philosophy of science. 19851 words.
Modern science relies heavily on Galilean idealization, which establishes ceteris paribus laws—laws about what happens when a factor operates unimpeded. But these laws are of little direct use since...