I look at the ‘flavour-oscillation clocks’ proposed by D.V. Ahluwalia, and two arguments of his suggesting that such clocks might behave in a way that threatens the geometricity of general relativity (GR). The first argument states that the behaviour of these clocks in the vicinity of a rotating gravitational source implies a non-geometric element of gravity. I argue that the phenomenon is best seen as an instance of violation of the ‘clock hypothesis’, and therefore does not threaten the geometrical nature (...) of gravitation. Ahluwalia’s second argument, for the ‘incompleteness’ of general relativity, involves the idea that flavour-oscillation clocks can detect constant gravitational potentials. I argue that the purported ‘incompleteness-establishing’ result is in fact one that applies to all clocks. It is entirely derivable from GR, does not result in the observability of the potential, and is not at odds with any of GR’s foundations. (shrink)

This paper examines two mistakes regarding David Lewis' Principal Principle that have appeared in the recent literature. These particular mistakes are worth looking at for several reasons: the thoughts that lead to these mistakes are natural ones, the principles that result from these mistakes are untenable, and these mistakes have led to significant misconceptions regarding the role of admissibility and time. After correcting these mistakes, the paper discusses the correct roles of time and admissibility. With these results in hand, the (...) paper concludes by showing that one way of formulating the chance-credence relation has a distinct advantage over its rivals. (shrink)

I show that the two most devastating objections to Shogenji’s formal account of coherence necessarily involve information sets of cardinality n>2. Given this, I surmise that the problem with Shogenji’s measure has more to do with his means of generalizing the measure than with the measure itself. I defend this claim by offering an alternative generalization of Shogenji’s measure. This alternative retains the intuitive merits of the original measure while avoiding both of the relevant problems that befall it. In the (...) light of all of this, I suggest that there is new hope for Shogenji’s analysis; Shogenji’s early and influential attempt at measuring coherence, when generalized in a subset-sensitive way, is able to clear its most troubling objections. (shrink)

Some claim that Non-reductive Physicalism (NRP) is an unstable position, on grounds that NRP either collapses into reductive physicalism (contra Non-reduction), or expands into emergentism of a robust or \strong" variety (contra Physicalism). I argue that this claim is unfounded, by attention to the notion of a degree of freedom---roughly, an independent parameter needed to specify states upon which the law-governed properties and behavior of a given (type of) entity functionally depend. In particular, I argue that what I call "eliminations (...) in DOF"---when strictly fewer degrees of freedom are required to characterize certain special science entities than are required to characterize (systems consisting of) their composing physical (or physically acceptable) entities|provide a basis for making sense of how certain special science entities can be both physically acceptable and ontologically irreducible to physical entities. (shrink)