Early philosophical accounts of explanation mistook the function of boundary conditions for that of contingent facts. I diagnose where this misunderstanding arose and establish that it persists. I...

Researchers often pursue proof of concept research, but criteria for evaluating such research remain poorly specified. This article proposes a general framework for proof of concept research that k...

For computer simulation models to usefully inform climate risk management, uncertainties in model projections must be explored and characterized. Because doing so requires running the model many ti...

In many ways, entropy and probability are two concepts that complement each other. But it has been argued that there is no ‘straightforward connection’ between them with a no-go thesis from Kevin D...

If ontic dependence is the basis of explanation, there cannot be mathematical explanations. Accounting for the explanatory dependency between mathematical properties and empirical phenomena poses i...

A new justification of probabilism is developed that pays close attention to the structure of the underlying space of possibilities. Its central assumption is that rational numerical degrees of bel...

The universal optimality theorem for metainduction works for epistemic agents faced with a choice among finitely many prediction methods. Eckhart Arnold and Tom Sterkenburg objected that it breaks...

The thermal time hypothesis is a proposed solution to the problem of time: a coarse-grained state determines a thermal dynamics according to which it is in equilibrium, and this defines the f...

Cognitive scientists often describe the mind as constructing and using models of aspects of the environment, but it is not obvious what makes something a model as opposed to a mere representation....

Conventional wisdom holds that the von Neumann entropy corresponds to thermodynamic entropy, but Hemmo and Shenker (2006) have recently argued against this view by attacking von Neumann's (1955) argument. I argue that Hemmo and Shenker's arguments fail due to several misunderstandings: about statistical-mechanical and thermodynamic domains of applicability, about the nature of mixed states, and about the role of approximations in physics. As a result, their arguments fail in all cases: in the single-particle case, the finite particles case, and the (...) infinite particles case. (shrink)

Since the discovery of dark matter in the 1980s, multiple experiments have been set up to detect dark matter particles through some other mode than gravity. Particle physicists provide detailed jus...

In “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism,” I went against the consensus in the philosophy of biology by arguing that a Linnaean taxon, including a species, has an essence that is, at least partly,...

Kirsten Walsh has criticized my interpretation of Newton’s view on the certainty of his new science of color, namely, that it shifted through his long career from one of certainty to probabilism. I...

Kinds that share historical properties are dubbed “historical kinds” or “etiological kinds,” and they have some distinctive features. I will try to characterize etiological kinds in general terms a...

Daniel Dennett distinguishes real patterns from bogus patterns by appeal to compressibility. As information theorists have shown, data are compressible if and only if those data exhibit a pattern....

Humans are often altruistic in a variety of contexts, even toward strangers they may never meet again. What explains this behavior? Many argue that kin selection cannot explain it but group selecti...

This article offers a characterization of what I call multiple-models juxtaposition, a strategy for managing trade-offs among modeling desiderata. MMJ displays models of distinct phenomena to...