Unification, explanation, and the composition of causes in Newtonian mechanics
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Cited by (44)
Convergence strategies for theory assessment
2024, Studies in History and Philosophy of ScienceColligation in modelling practices: From Whewell's tides to the San Francisco Bay Model
2021, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part ACitation Excerpt :Her contributions chiefly consisted in situating his thought in the tradition of British empiricism4 and effectively brought a reappraisal of Whewell as a historical figure. The connection between Whewell’s studies of tides and his account of colligation was noticed also by Forster (1988), who remarks that “because Whewell himself did some important empirical work on the tides […] he frequently uses this as an illustration of how the colligation of facts works” (Forster, 1988, p 67). More recently, Ducheyne (2010a) emphasizes the “close intertwinement” of Whewell’s “actual scientific practice” on tides and his “philosophical views on scientific methodology” (2010a, p 27), drawing attention to a letter of Whewell to Richard Jones written in October 1833:
How we load our data sets with theories and why we do so purposefully
2016, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part ACitation Excerpt :In that sense our final data set can be said to be theory-laden. This kind of inferential practice has already been noted by philosophers (see Forster, 1988 for example). At this juncture, however, I wish to discuss a very different phenomenon.
Quantitative realizations of philosophy of science: William Whewell and statistical methods
2011, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part ACitation Excerpt :Here one might credit Whewell to the extent that he saw that they reflect an important and central aspect of science, as opposed to a more ‘local’ technique that really only applied to the methodological tools of the day. For example, minimizing the ordinary least squared deviation between a model and the data is still a common optimization criterion (cf. Forster, 1988); it is, however, by no means the only one (e.g., for non-Gaussian distributions, it differs from the maximum likelihood estimate, and the latter is often to be preferred). A more critical evaluation, of course, would come from those aspects that Whewell incorrectly deemed unimportant or central to scientific activity.
The Debate between Whewell and Mill on the Nature of Scientific Induction
2011, Handbook of the History of LogicGeneral Relativity and the Standard Model: Why evidence for one does not disconfirm the other
2009, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B - Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics
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Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, U.S.A.