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"Strevens, Michael"
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Dynamic probability and the problem of initial conditions
Dynamic approaches to understanding probability in the non-fundamental sciences turn on certain properties of physical processes that are apt to produce “probabilistically patterned” outcomes. The dynamic properties on their own, however, seem not quite sufficient to explain the patterns; in addition, some sort of assumption about initial conditions must be made, an assumption that itself typically takes a probabilistic form. How should such a posit be understood? That is the problem of initial conditions. Reichenbach, in his doctoral dissertation, floated a Kantian solution to the problem. In this paper I provide a Reichenbachian alternative.
Journal Article
Thinking off your feet : how empirical psychology vindicates armchair philosophy
In an original defense of armchair philosophy, Michael Strevens seeks to restore philosophy to its traditional position as an essential part of the quest for knowledge, by reshaping debates about the nature of philosophical thinking. His approach explores experimental philosophy's methodological implications and the cognitive science of concepts.-- Provided by publisher
Book
The structure of asymptotic idealization
Robert Batterman and others have argued that certain idealizing explanations have an asymptotic form: they account for a state of affairs or behavior by showing that it emerges \"in the limit\". Asymptotic idealizations are interesting in many ways, but is there anything special about them as idealizations? To understand their role in science, must we augment our philosophical theories of idealization? This paper uses simple examples of asymptotic idealization in population genetics to argue for an affirmative answer and proposes a general schema for asymptotic idealization, drawing on insights from Batterman's treatment and from John Norton's subsequent critique.
Journal Article
The causes of characteristic properties: Insides versus categories
Cimpian & Salomon (C&S) propose that the inherence heuristic, a tendency to explain the behavior and other properties of things in terms of their intrinsic characteristics, precedes and explains “essentialist thinking” about natural kinds. This commentary reviews evidence that it is rather essentialism (or something like it) that precedes the assumption of inherence, and suggests that essentialism can do without the inherence heuristic altogether.
Journal Article
Causality Reunified
Hall has recently argued that there are two concepts of causality, picking out two different kinds of causal relation. McGrath, and Hitchcock and Knobe, have recently argued that the facts about causality depend on what counts as a \"default\" or \"normal\" state, or even on the moral facts. In the light of these claims you might be tempted to agree with Skyrms that causal relations constitute, metaphysically speaking, an \"amiable jumble\", or with Cartwright that 'causation', though a single word, encompasses many different kinds of things. This paper argues, drawing on the author's recent work on explanation, that the evidence adduced in support of causal pluralism can be accommodated easily by a unified theory of causality—a theory according to which all singular causal claims concern the same fundamental causal network.
Journal Article
Tychomancy : inferring probability from causal structure
Michael Strevens makes three claims about rules for inferring physical probability. They are reliable. They constitute a key part of the physical intuition that allows us to navigate the world safely in the absence of scientific knowledge. And they played a crucial role in scientific innovation, from statistical physics to natural selection.
eBook
High-Level Exceptions Explained
Why are causal generalizations in the higher-level sciences \"inexact\"? That is, why do they have apparent exceptions? This paper offers one explanation: many causal generalizations cite as their antecedent—the F in F s are G—a property that is not causally relevant to the consequent, but which is rather \"entangled\" with a causally relevant property. Entanglement is a relation that may exist for many reasons, and that allows of exceptions. Causal generalizations that specify entangled but causally irrelevant antecedents therefore tolerate exceptions.
Journal Article
\CETERIS PARIBUS\ HEDGES: CAUSAL VOODOO THAT WORKS
Strevens talks about ceteris paribus. A ceteris paribus hedge restricts the scope of the hypothesis to those cases where nothing undermines, interferes with, or undoes the effect of the mechanism in question, even if the hypothesis's own formulator is otherwise unable to specify fully what might constitute such undermining or interference. A law statement's conditions of application are partly opaque if they are not all known to the scientists who are testing or otherwise putting the statement to use. If the addition of a ceteris paribus hedge to a law statement amounts to a requirement that the causal mechanism operate unimpeded, it will in almost every case add opaque content to the statement, because the statement's user--a scientist who is perhaps just beginning to investigate the nature of the mechanism in question--will normally be unable to specify explicitly a complete set of conditions sufficient for the mechanism to function, or roughly equivalently, will be unable to recognize in all cases whether or not such conditions hold.
Journal Article
Stochastic Independence and Causal Connection
Assumptions of stochastic independence are crucial to statistical models in science. Under what circumstances is it reasonable to suppose that two events are independent? When they are not causally or logically connected, so the standard story goes. But scientific models frequently treat causally dependent events as stochastically independent, raising the question whether there are kinds of causal connection that do not undermine stochastic independence. This paper provides one piece of an answer to this question, treating the simple case of two tossed coins with and without a midair collision.
Journal Article