D. H. Mellor; VI*—Conscious Belief, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 78, Issue 1, 1 June 1978, Pages 87–102, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian.

The paper looks at the semantics and ontology of dispositions in the light of recent work on the subject. Objections to the simple conditionals apparently entailed by disposition statements are met by replacing them with so-called 'reduction sentences' and some implications of this are explored. The usual distinction between categorical and dispositional properties is criticised and the relation between dispositions and their bases examined. Applying this discussion to two typical cases leads to the conclusion that fragility is not a real (...) property and that, while both temperature and its bases are, this does not generate any problem of overdetermination. (shrink)

[D. H. Mellor] Kant's claim that our knowledge of time is transcendental in his sense, while false of time itself, is true of tenses, i.e. of the locations of events and other temporal entities in McTaggart's A series. This fact can easily, and I think only, be explained by taking time itself to be real but tenseless. /// [J. R. Lucas] Mellor's argument from Kant fails. The difficulties in his first Antinomy are due to topological confusions, not the (...) tensed nature of time. Nor are McTaggart' s difficulties due to the tensed nature of time. The ego-centricity of tensed discourse is an essential feature of communication between selves, each of whom refers himself as 'I', and is required for talking about time as well as experience and agency. Arguments based on the Special Theory are misconceived. Some rest on a confused notion of 'topological simultaneity'. In the General Theory a cosmic time is defined, as also in quantum mechanics, where a natural present is defined by a unique hyperplane of collapse into eigen-ness. (shrink)

This is a study of the nature of time. In it, redeploying an argument first presented by McTaggart, the author argues that although time itself is real, tense is not. He accounts for the appearance of the reality of tense - our sense of the passage of time, and the fact that our experience occurs in the present - by showing how time is indispensable as a condition of action. Time itself is further analysed, and Dr Mellor gives answers (...) to most of the metaphysical questions it provokes, concerning the relation of time to space, the dissection of time, and its relation to change and causation. (shrink)

D. H. Mellor; VI*—Conscious Belief, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 78, Issue 1, 1 June 1978, Pages 87–102, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian.

_Real Time II_ extends and evolves DH Mellor's classic exploration of the philosophy of time,_Real Time._ This new book answers such basic metaphysical questions about time as: how do past, present and future differ, how are time and space related, what is change, is time travel possible? His _Real Time_ dominated the philosophy of time for fifteen years. _Real TIme II_ will do the same for the next twenty. GET /english/edu/Studying_at_SU/History_of_Literature.html HTTP/1.0.

The Facts of Causation grapples with one of philosophy's most enduring issues. Causation is central to all of our lives. What we see and hear causes us to believe certain facts about the world. We need that information to know how to act and how to cause the effects we desire. D. H. Mellor, a leading scholar in the philosophy of science and metaphysics, offers a comprehensive theory of causation. Many questions about causation remain unsettled. In science, the indeterminism (...) of modern physics and genetics have made such questions considerably harder for philosophers to answer. While progress has been made, a complete account of the nature and cosequences of causation is long overdue. This major study provides that account. (shrink)

My object in this paper is to consider what relevance, if any, current analyses of probability have to problems of religious belief. There is no doubt that words such as ‘probable’ are used in this context; what is doubtful is that this use can be analysed as other major uses of such words can. I shall conclude that this use cannot be so analysed and hence, given the preponderance of the other uses that can, that it is misleading.

This book deals not so much with statistical methods as with the central concept of chance, or statistical probability, which statistical theories apply to nature.

D. H. Mellor; I *—The Presidential Address: Nothing Like Experience, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 93, Issue 1, 1 June 1993, Pages 1–16, https.

D. H. Mellor; VI*—I and Now, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 89, Issue 1, 1 June 1989, Pages 79–94, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/89.1.79.

Everything we do relies on causation. We eat and drink because this causes us to stay alive. Courts tell us who causes crimes, criminology tell us what causes people to commit them. D.H. Mellor shows us that to understand the world and our lives we must understand causation. _The Facts of Causation_, now available in paperback, is essential reading for students and for anyone interested in reading one of the ground-breaking theories in metaphysics. We cannot understand the world and (...) our place in it without understanding causation. Yet a complete account of the nature and implications of causation does not exist. D.H Mellor's new book is that account. (shrink)

Everything we do relies on causation. We eat and drink because this causes us to stay alive. Courts tell us who causes crimes, criminology tell us what causes people to commit them. D.H. Mellor shows us that to understand the world and our lives we must understand causation. _The Facts of Causation_, now available in paperback, is essential reading for students and for anyone interested in reading one of the ground-breaking theories in metaphysics. We cannot understand the world and (...) our place in it without understanding causation. Yet a complete account of the nature and implications of causation does not exist. D.H Mellor's new book is that account. (shrink)

Mellor's subject is singular causation between facts, expressed 'E because C'. His central requirement for causation is that the chance that E if C be greater than the chance that E if $\sim \text{C}\colon \ ch_{\text{C}}>ch_{\sim \text{C}}$. The book is as much about chance as it is about causation. I show that his way of distinguishing ch C from the traditional notion of conditional chance leaves him with a problem about the existence of ch Q when Q is false (...) ; and also that any notion of chance which conforms to the standard calculus has wider application than the causal instances to which Mellor's notion is restricted. Other topics discussed may be gleaned from the headings below. (shrink)

This book: * assumes no mathematical background and keeps the technicalities to a minimum * explains the most important applications of probability theory to ...

_Probability: A Philosophical Introduction_ introduces and explains the principal concepts and applications of probability. It is intended for philosophers and others who want to understand probability as we all apply it in our working and everyday lives. The book is not a course in mathematical probability, of which it uses only the simplest results, and avoids all needless technicality. The role of probability in modern theories of knowledge, inference, induction, causation, laws of nature, action and decision-making makes an understanding of (...) it especially important to philosophers and students of philosophy, to whom this book will be invaluable both as a textbook and a work of reference. In this book D. H. Mellor discusses the three basic kinds of probability – physical, epistemic, and subjective – and introduces and assesses the main theories and interpretations of them. The topics and concepts covered include: * chance * frequency * possibility * propensity * credence * confirmation * Bayesianism. _Probability: A Philosophical Introduction_ is essential reading for all philosophy students and others who encounter or need to apply ideas of probability. (shrink)

The paper argues that very different part-whole relations hold between different kinds of entities. While these relations share most of their formal properties, they need not share all of them. Nor need other mereological principles be true of all kinds of part–whole pairs. In particular, it is argued that the principle of unrestricted composition, that any two or more entities have a mereological sum, while true of sets and propositions, is false of things and events.

Entities of many kinds, not just material things, have been credited with parts. Armstrong , for example, has taken propositions and properties to be parts of their conjunctions, sets to be parts of sets that include them, and geographical regions and events to be parts of regions and events that contain them. The justification for bringing all these diverse relations under a single ‘part–whole’ concept is that they share all or most of the formal features articulated in mereology . But (...) the concept has also prompted an ontological thesis that has been expressed in various ways: that wholes are ‘no ontological addition’ to their parts ; that to list both a whole and its parts is ‘double counting’; and that there is ‘no more’ to a whole than its parts: for example, that there is no more to a conjunction than the conjuncts that are its parts, and whose truth or falsity determines whether it is true or false. For brevity, I shall express the thesis in the last of these ways, as the claim that entities with parts are ‘nothing but’ those parts. (shrink)

The view is advocated that to preserve a deductivist account of science against recent criticism, it is necessary to incorporate experimental error, or imprecision, in the deductive structure. The sources of imprecision in empirical variables are analyzed, and the notion of conceptual imprecision introduced and illustrated. This is then used to clarify the notion of the acceptable range of a functional law. It is further shown that imprecision may be ascribed to parameters in laws and theories without rendering the deductive (...) structure untestable. It is claimed that this analysis explicates the relation between laws and theories in a way that invalidates certain arguments against its deductive nature. (shrink)

This selection of D. H. Mellor's work demonstrates the wide ranging originality of his work. It gathers together sixteen major papers on related topics. Together they form a complete modern metaphysics. The first five papers are on aspects of the mind: on our 'selves', their supposed subjectivity and how we refer to them, on the nature of conscious belief and on computational and physicalist theories of the mind. The next five papers deal with dispositions, natural kinds, laws of nature (...) and how they involve natural necessity, universals and objective chances, and the relation between properties and predicates. Then follow three papers about the relations between time, change and causation, the nature of individual causes and effects and of the causal relation between them, and how causation depends on chance. The last three papers discuss the relation between chance and degrees of belief, give a solution to the problem of induction, and argue for an objective interpretation of decision theory. (shrink)

D. H. Mellor; VI*—I and Now, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 89, Issue 1, 1 June 1989, Pages 79–94, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/89.1.79.

This article is the text of an interview with D. H. Mellor conducted by Andrew Pyle and first published in the Spring 1993 issue of the philosophical journal Cogito.

The paper discusses the problems raised by the inexactness of experiential concepts for a deductivist account of theoretical explanation. The process of theoretical explanation is explicated in terms of the devising of exact forms of inexact concepts. Analysis of the adjustments of concepts and their exact forms to each other reveals an implicit criterion of adequacy for theories which is related to the principle of connectivity.

The paper, analyses the role of measurable concepts in deductive explanation. It is shown that such concepts are, although imprecise in a defined sense, exact in that neutral candidates to them do not arise. An analysis is given of the way in which imprecision is related to generalisation, and it is shown how imprecise concepts are incorporated in testable deductive explanations.

Many philosophers are impressed by the progress achieved by physical sciences. This has had an especially deep effect on their ontological views: it has made many of them physicalists. Physicalists believe that everything is physical: more precisely, that all entities, properties, relations and facts are those which are studied by physics or other physical sciences...

Mind, Meaning, and Reality presents fifteen philosophical papers in which D. H. Mellor explores some of the most intriguing questions in philosophy. These include: what determines what we think, and what we use language to mean; how that depends on what there is in the world and why there is only one universe; and the nature of time.