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• Nicholaos Jones (2009). Fazang's Total Power Mereology: An Interpretive Analytic Reconstruction. Asian Philosophy 19 (3):199-211.
  In his Treatise on the Golden Lion, Fazang says that wholes are in each of their parts and that each part of a whole is every other part of the whole. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of these remarks according to which they are not obviously false, and I use this interpretation in order to rigorously reconstruct Fazang's arguments for his claims. On the interpretation I favor, Fazang means that the presence of a whole's part suffices for the (...) presence of the whole and that the presence of any such part is both necessary and sufficient for the presence of any other part. I also argue that this interpretation is more plausible than its extant competitors. (shrink)

  Chinese Philosophy in Asian Philosophy

  Mereology in Metaphysics

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• Nicholaos Jones (2009). General Relativity and the Standard Model: Why Evidence for One Does Not Disconfirm the Other. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 40 (2):124-132.
  General Relativity and the Standard Model often are touted as the most rigorously and extensively confirmed scientific hypotheses of all time. Nonetheless, these theories appear to have consequences that are inconsistent with evidence about phenomena for which, respectively, quantum effects and gravity matter. This paper suggests an explanation for why the theories are not disconfirmed by such evidence. The key to this explanation is an approach to scientific hypotheses that allows their actual content to differ from their apparent content. This (...) approach does not appeal to ceteris-paribus qualifiers or counterfactuals or similarity relations. And it helps to explain why some highly idealized hypotheses are not treated in the way that a thoroughly refuted theory is treated but instead as hypotheses with limited domains of applicability. (shrink)

  Confirmation, Misc in General Philosophy of Science

  General Relativity in Philosophy of Physical Science

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• Nicholaos Jones, Against Pluralistic and Inexact Ontologies.
  The ontologies of scientific theories include a variety of objects: point-mass particles, rigid rods, frictionless planes, flat and curved spacetimes, perfectly spherical planets, continuous fluids, ideal gases, nonidentical but indistinguishable electrons, atoms, quarks and gluons, strong and weak nuclear forces, ideally rational agents, and so on. But the scientific community currently regards only some of these objects as real. According to Paul Teller, a group sometimes can be justified in regarding competing ontologies as real and the ontologies we are justified (...) in regarding as real are inexact, because the theories that give those ontologies characterize what things are like rather than what they are. In this paper, I argue that Teller's view is incomplete and suggest that one way to remove this incompleteness is to adopt a criterion for when we are justified in regarding a theory's ontology as real that is based upon a theory's comparative degree of confirmation. I argue that this criterion is prima-facie plausible and that Teller's view is false if this criterion is correct. (shrink)

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• Nicholaos Jones (2008). Evidence and Falsification: Challenges to Gregory Peterson. Zygon 43 (3):599-604.
  In this reply to Gregory Peterson's essay "Maintaining Respectability," which itself is a response to my "Is Theology Respectable as Metaphysics?" I elaborate upon my claims that theology treats God's existence as an absolute certainty immune to refutation and that modern science constitutes the canons of respectable reasoning for metaphysical disciplines. I conclude with some comments on Peterson's "In Praise of Folly? Theology and the University.".

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• Nicholaos Jones (2008). Is Theology Respectable as Metaphysics? Zygon 43 (3):579-592.
  Theology involves inquiry into God's nature, God's purposes, and whether certain experiences or pronouncements come From God. These inquiries are metaphysical, part of theology's concern with the veridicality of signs and realities that are independent from humans. Several research programs concerned with the relation between theology and science aim to secure theology's intellectual standing as a metaphysical discipline by showing that it satisfies criteria that make modern science reputable, on the grounds that modern science embodies contemporary canons of respectability for (...) metaphysical disciplines. But, no matter the ways in which theology qua metaphysics is shown to resemble modern science, these research programs seem destined for failure. For, given the currently dominant approaches to understanding modern scientific epistemology, theological reasoning is crucially dissimilar to modern scientific reasoning in that it treats the existence of God as a certainty immune to refutation. Barring the development of an epistemology of modern science that is amenable to theology, theology as metaphysics is intellectually disreputable. (shrink)

  Epistemology of Religion, Misc in Philosophy of Religion

  Religious Studies in Arts and Humanities

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• Nicholaos Jones, Resolving the Bayesian Problem of Idealization.
  In "Bayesian Confirmation of Theories that Incorporate Idealizations", Michael Shaffer argues that, in order to show how idealized hypotheses can be confirmed, Bayesians must develop a coherent proposal for how to assign prior probabilities to counterfactual conditionals. This paper develops a Bayesian reply to Shaffer's challenge that avoids the issue of how to assign prior probabilities to counterfactuals by treating idealized hypotheses as abstract descriptions. The reply allows Bayesians to assign non-zero degrees of confirmation to idealized hypotheses and to capture (...) the intuition that less idealized hypotheses tend to be better confirmed than their more idealized counterparts. (shrink)

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• Nicholaos Jones & Kevin Coffey, Synopsis of the Robert and Sarah Boote Conference in Reductionism and Anti-Reductionism in Physics.
  This document is a synopsis of discussions at the workshop prepared by Nicholaos Jones and Kevin Coffey, with remarks added by by Chuang Liu, John D. Norton, John Earman, Gordon Belot, Mark Wilson, Bob Batterman and Margie Morrison. The program is included in an appendix.

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• Nicholaos John Jones (2004). The Logic of Soku in the Kyoto School. Philosophy East and West 54 (3).
  : Can contradictions be meaningful? How can one assert 'P soku not-P' or 'P and yet not-P' without sacrificing intelligibility? Expanding on previous attempts, mainly by Dilworth and Heisig, to demystify the soku connective, a formal system is presented here for the logic of soku. Through a formal distinction between internal and external negation, grammatical features of the soku connective are shown to be logically irrelevant, and the principle of non-contradiction is preserved. Disparities with traditional logic are noted, with a (...) focus on negation rather than 'soku'. The formal examination of the logic of soku is intended to present the logic in a way acceptable to more analytically minded philosophers and thereby enhance East-West and Japanese-Anglo-American interaction and criticism. (shrink)

  Japanese Philosophy in Asian Philosophy

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