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Mechanism and Indeterminacy: Reply to MacIntosh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Ken Warmbród
Affiliation:
University of Manitoba

Extract

Jack Hack is a programmer responsible for writing portions of a popular commercial word-processing program. Hack has included the following harmless but insulting “bomb” in the program's input subroutine.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1990

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References

Notes

1 Behaviourism, Neuroscience and Translational Indeterminacy,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 69, 1 (1991).Google Scholar A short version of this paper was presented at the 1988 meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association and at the 1989 meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division.

2 Modality, Mechanism and Translational Indeterminacy,” Dialogue, 28, 3 (1989)Google Scholar.

3 See my “Behaviourism” for a more detailed characterization of the totality of relevant data in terms of the class of possible observations.

4 No claim is made here that every issue can be settled in this way. It may sometimes happen that, for certain questions, the totality of relevant inductive data is more or less equally supportive of more than one alternative.

5 Macintosh, “Modality,” p. 398.

6 Note that nothing of substance changes if we reword these indicative counterfactuals as subjunctives.

8 My thanks to an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions on a previous version.