Philosophy of Science

My research in the philosophy of science currently consists of making portions of my dissertation suitable for publication as journal articles.

General Relativity and the Standard Model: Why Evidence for One Does Not Disconfirm the Other, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, forthcoming [penultimate version]

General Relativity and the Standard Model often are touted as the most rigorously and extensively confirmed scientific hypotheses of all time. Nonetheless, these theories appear to have consequences that are inconsistent with evidence about phenomena for which, respectively, quantum effects and gravity matter. This paper suggests an explanation for why the theories are not disconfirmed by such evidence. The key to this explanation is an approach to scientific hypotheses that allows their actual content to differ from their apparent content. This approach does not appeal to ceteris-paribus qualifiers or counterfactuals or similarity relations. And it helps to explain why some highly idealized hypotheses are not treated in the way that a thoroughly refuted theory is treated but instead as hypotheses with limited domains of applicability.

Is All Abstracting Idealizing? The Reasoner 2:4 (April 2008): 4-5 [PDF]

Abstracting from a property of a physical system involves not including that property in a model of that system, whereas idealizing from a property of a physical system involves both not including that property in a model of that system and including a different property that the system does not have.  I argue that there is a significant distinction between abstracting and idealizing only if omitting a property from a model of a system need not involve including the contradictory of that property in that model.  (For any property P, I call not-P the contradictory of P.)  I also suggest that David Armstrong's account of the nature of properties, according to which a property is whatever plays some sort of causal role (or would play such a role in the right circumstances), supports a significant distinction between abstracting and idealizing.

Against Pluralistic and Inexact Ontologies

The ontologies of scientific theories include a variety of objects: point-mass particles, rigid rods, frictionless planes, flat and curved spacetimes, perfectly spherical planets, continuous fluids, ideal gases, nonidentical but indistinguishable electrons, atoms, quarks and gluons, strong and weak nuclear forces, ideally rational agents, and so on. But the scientific community currently regards only some of these objects as real. According to Paul Teller, a group sometimes can be justified in regarding competing ontologies as real and the ontologies we are justified in regarding as real are inexact, because the theories that give those ontologies characterize what things are like rather than what they are. In this paper, I argue that Teller's view is incomplete and suggest that one way to remove this incompleteness is to adopt a criterion for when we are justified in regarding a theory's ontology as real that is based upon a theory's comparative degree of confirmation. I argue that this criterion is prima-facie plausible and that Teller's view is false if this criterion is correct.


Ineliminable Idealizations, Phase Transitions, and Irreversible Behavior

¤ Chapter 1: Introductory Remarks on Explanation, Idealization, and Ineliminability [PDF, nonofficial version]

This is my dissertation.  It focuses on scientific explanations of phase transitions--like the melting of ice--and irreversible behavior--like a puff of smoke diffusing throughout a room but never forming into a puff again.  Part of the reason these explanations are interesting is that they are idealized--they appeal to descriptions that are not entirely true, and there is no general agreement on how scientific accounts can be explanatory despite being idealized.  But the reason I'm interested in these accounts, the reason these accounts highlight new philosophical issues, is that some of the idealizations they invoke are ineliminable: some of their idealizing assumptions are necessary, in principle, for the explanations to work.

Extant philosophical accounts of explanation--and even accounts of idealized explanation--do not allow for explanations that are ineliminably idealized. One thing I do in my dissertation is show why these philosophical accounts go wrong, and how to think about idealization and explanation in a way that allows the scientific accounts of phase transitions and irreversible behavior to be explanatory.  I do this by developing a way of understanding idealizations that fits with scientific practice and allows for them to be ineliminable in scientific explanations.  A second thing I do in my dissertation is show how this new understanding of idealizations helps us to better understand how idealized hypotheses can be guides to the way the world is, and how they can be confirmed despite being idealized. 


Asian Philosophy

The guiding theme of my researches in Asian philosophy is to show that Asian philosophies are not irrational or (intentionally) contradictory, and to do so in a way that makes those philosophies intelligible to contemporary ways of thinking.  This theme contrasts with earlier research methodologies that too-readily invoke violations of the principle of non-contradiction in attempting to understand Asian philosophies or that cleave too much to the way in which Asian philosophers present their ideas and the arguments they give for them.  My conviction in the rationality of Asian philosophies is based upon the impression that Asian philosophers are able to converse with each other in intelligible ways, and my belief that such conversations would be difficult or impossible for philosophers not concerned with preserving the consistency of their philosophical systems.  My willingness to introduce heuristic devices for understanding Asian philosophies is based upon a belief that heuristic reconstructions of philosophical positions can be just as valuable as interpretative reconstructions, and that doing so can promote inter-cultural philosophical dialogue.

Solving the Problem of the One Over the Many: Nyāya-Vaisheshika Inherence, Indian Buddhist Reduction, and Huayan Total Power

Pulling a cart's handle suffices for pulling the cart itself.  The Nyāya-Vaisheshika School treats this as evidence for the reality of wholes.  But taking wholes and their parts to be equally real seems to violate the general principle that distinct entities cannot occupy the same space at the same time: this is the Problem of the One over the Many.  Nyāya-Vaisheshika attempts to solve this problem by positing that wholes are contained in their parts in virtue of the presence of an eternally-existing inherence relation.  Yet, since Nyāya-Vaisheshika understands the inherence relation as an entity that exists eternally and independently of a whole's parts, their solution violates one of Buddhism's basic commitments.  Accordingly, most Indian Buddhists infer that wholes and their parts are not equally real--and, in particular, that wholes are unreal.  Huayan Buddhists, in contrast, develop a solution to the Problem of the One over the Many that preserves the reality of wholes without treating the whole-part inherence relation as eternal. 

Fazang: Hermeneutics, Causation, and Mereology, in Dao Companion to Chinese Buddhist Philosophy, ed. Sandra A. Wawrytko (Springer: 2009), forthcoming

Fazang (643-712) ranks among the preeminent Buddhists of medieval China.  His writings reveal an innovative vision of the world that reconciles Buddhist philosophy to traditional Chinese values.  This chapter focuses on his hermeneutics, accompanying theories of causation, and the teaching of the six characteristics that results from his theory of causation.  The chapter begins by showing how Fazang's commitment to an ideal of inclusivity motivates (one of) his schemes for classifying the diverse schools of Buddhism.  Next, the chapter surveys four different theories of causation and shows how Fazang's commitment to Huayan Buddhism as the maximally inclusive form of Buddhism motivates his theory of dharmadhatu causation.  The chapter then explains how this theory motivates Fazang's mereology in his teaching of the six characteristics, and it evaluates extant proposals about what justifies this mereology.  This sets the stage for a comparison between Fazang's mereology and the mereological commitments of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.  The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of whether Fazang's metaphysics is paradoxical.

Mereological Heuristics for Huayan Buddhism, Philosophy East and West 60:3 (July 2010), forthcoming

This paper attempts to explain, in a way familiar to contemporary ways of thinking about mereology, why someone might accept some prima-facie puzzling remarks by the Chinese Buddhist philosopher Fazang, such as his claims that the eye of a lion is its ear and that a rafter of a building is identical to the building itself.  These claims are corollaries of the Huayan Buddhist thesis that everything is part of everything else, and an aim of this paper is to show that there is a rational basis for this thesis that involves a non-standard notion of parthood and, importantly, that does not involve any violation of the principle of non-contradiction.

The Logic of Soku in the Kyoto School, Philosophy East and West 54:3 (July 2004), 302-321  [PDF via Project MUSE or JSTOR]

Can contradictions be meaningful?  How can one assert 'P soku not-P', or 'P and yet not-P' without sacrificing intelligibility?  Expanding upon previous attempts to demystify the soku connective, this paper presents a formal system for the logic of soku.  Through a formal distinction between internal and external negation, the grammatical features of the  connective can be shown to be irrelevant to its logical meaning, and the principle of non-contradiction is preserved.  Disparities with traditional logic are noted, with a focus on negation rather than 'soku'.  The formal examination of the logic of soku is intended to present the logic in a way that is acceptable to more analytically-minded philosophers, and thereby enhance East/West and Japanese/Anglo-American interaction and criticism.

Epistemology

There is no rhyme or reason to my researches concerning epistemology, apart from the fact that I work on issues that I find interesting and about which I have something original to say.

Is Theology Respectable as Metaphysics?, Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science 42:3 (September 2008), 579-592

Theology involves inquiry into God's nature, God's purposes, and whether certain experiences or pronouncements come from God.  These inquiries are metaphysical, part of theology's concern with the veridicality of signs and realities that are independent from humans.  Several research programs concerned with the relation between theology and science aim to secure theology's intellectual standing as a metaphysical discipline by showing it to satisfy those criteria that make modern science reputable, on the grounds that modern science embodies contemporary canons of respectability for metaphysical disciplines.  But no matter the ways in which theology can be shown to resemble modern science, these research programs seem to be destined for failure.  For, given the currently dominant approaches to understanding modern scientific epistemology, theological reasoning is crucially dissimilar to modern scientific reasoning in virtue of treating the existence of God as an absolute certainty immune to refutation.  Barring the development of an epistemology of modern science that is amenable to theology, theology as metaphysics is intellectually disreputable.

Evidence and Falsification: Challenges to Gregory Peterson, Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science 42:3 (September 2008), 599-604

This is a reply to Gregory Peterson's "Maintaining Respectability," which itself is a response to my "Is Theology Respectable as Metaphysics?"  Here I elaborate upon the claims, in the latter article, that theology treats God's existence as an absolute certitude immune to refutation and that modern science constitutes the canons of respectable reasoning for metaphysical disciplines.  I conclude with some brief comments on Peterson's "In Praise of Folly? Theology to the University" (Zygon 42:3 (September 2008), forthcoming).