tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47185909415862692562011-12-13T13:48:32.933-05:00Reflections on philosophy, mathematics and science.Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.comBlogger1431100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-87812654548211046762011-12-01T10:46:00.000-05:002011-12-01T10:46:50.279-05:00

Despite not actually being in print, my forthcoming book can now be previewed on Google books here.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-49556352297801715632011-10-06T10:18:00.000-04:002011-10-06T10:18:47.451-04:00

My book Mathematics and Scientific Representation will soon be released. Here is the recently unveiled book cover: More substantial discussions of the book's contents will be added here soon!

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-22661625506903596772011-08-22T10:04:00.000-04:002011-08-22T10:04:18.287-04:00

Some inspiration to start the semester:

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-41783045961772094762011-07-14T16:26:00.003-04:002011-07-14T16:36:02.318-04:00

Peter Rowlett has assembled, with some other historians of mathematics, seven accessible examples of how theoretical work in mathematics led to unexpected practical applications. His discussion seems to be primarily motivated by the recent emphasis on the "impact" of research, both in Britain and in the US: There is no way to guarantee in advance what pure mathematics will later find application.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-14545624228649510102011-06-01T12:14:00.002-04:002011-06-01T12:16:36.907-04:00

The Stanford Encyclopedia Entry on "Mathematical Explanation" has just been updated and revised. Thanks to Paolo Mancosu for this important resource!

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-30349618554166926872011-05-27T14:24:00.001-04:002011-05-27T14:26:56.516-04:00

From the abstract of a recent paper in Science:When 12-month-old infants view complex displays of multiple moving objects, they form time-varying expectations about future events that are a systematic and rational function of several stimulus variables. Infants’ looking times are consistent with a Bayesian ideal observer embodying abstract principles of object motion. The model explains infants’

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-80816521196155379312011-05-08T14:12:00.003-04:002011-05-08T14:37:00.421-04:00

In an otherwise thoughtful piece in the New York Times on the reactions to Bin Laden's killing, Jonathan Haidt throws in a weird flourishThere’s the lower level at which individuals compete relentlessly with other individuals within their own groups. This competition rewards selfishness.But there’s also a higher level at which groups compete with other groups. This competition favors groups that

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-57418980019300519312011-04-27T10:16:00.003-04:002011-04-27T10:21:18.967-04:00

Those interested in mathematical explanations of physical phenomena should take note: May 15th is the predicted date for the emergence of swarms of the "Great Southern Brood" of cicadas, whose life cycle is 13 years. More details are provided by the Columbia Missourian:Periodical cicadas survive on a strategy of satiating their predators. They emerge in such large numbers that there will always

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-91787974342652091282011-04-19T09:22:00.003-04:002011-04-19T09:41:18.900-04:00

Yesterday Brian Leiter posted a long entry on his blog discussing the dispute surrounding a special issue of Synthese on "Evolution and Its Rivals". Leiter mentions several concerns, and I encourage anyone interested in the issue to read over what he has posted. The main problem he identifies is that journal editors inserted the following preface to the special issue:Statement from the

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-37069042011339863192011-04-04T12:55:00.003-04:002011-04-04T13:01:09.067-04:00

Alisa Bokulich and Peter Bokulich have edited a helpful new volume with the title Scientific Structuralism, as part of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. There are nine contributions, which approach structuralism in the philosophy of science from a variety of perspectives: ontological, epistemic, representational and even in connection with structural explanation.Here is the table

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-81156991793903010472011-03-18T18:51:00.001-04:002011-03-18T18:53:19.843-04:00

Here is another exciting opportunity for those working in logic or the philosophy of science!

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-20455214331800664182011-03-17T17:52:00.001-04:002011-03-17T17:53:55.810-04:00

If we can trust the journal Science, then the answer is "yes".

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-36616657121241337902011-03-09T10:04:00.002-05:002011-03-09T10:05:21.260-05:00

Here is an exciting, and rare, opportunity for students pursuing the philosophy of mathematics.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-27689206580449334632011-02-04T15:36:00.003-05:002011-02-04T15:56:07.667-05:00

Continuing the key claims of my book, once we have decided to individuate contributions by content, it is natural to consider several different contributions:3. A list of these contributions should include at least the following fi ve: concrete causal, abstract acausal, abstract varying, scaling and constitutive. The contrast between concrete causal and abstract acausal is perhaps the most

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-7166280111534728052011-01-28T15:14:00.002-05:002011-01-28T15:30:58.292-05:00

With the move to Missouri complete and my book safely in press, there is now an opportunity to continue blogging through the key claims of the book. The first key claim is that mathematics contributes many things to the success of science. Next comes 2. These contributions can be individuated in terms of the contents of mathematical scienti c representations. In principle, we might divide up the

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-7312611490210245272010-12-16T09:52:00.002-05:002010-12-16T10:01:13.997-05:00

On the weekend I was fortunate to attend the first meeting of a new group: the Association for the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice. This group aims to promote a somewhat different approach to the philosophy of mathematics than what has become standard. As the statement of purpose of the group puts it, Over the last few years approaches to the philosophy of mathematics that focus on

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-43240130417088926692010-12-15T17:53:00.004-05:002010-12-15T18:03:42.972-05:00

This week marks the official launch of the new Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy. I think it is a very exciting opportunity for scholars working in this field. I would emphasize the open access character of the journal. All articles will be freely available in electronic form. The hope is that the journal can provide a forum for rigorous scholarship for the broadly conceived

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-13868882668719197742010-12-02T09:56:00.003-05:002010-12-02T10:00:21.878-05:00

Many readers of this blog have surely already seen this, but for the rest, be sure to check out Graham Priest's wonderfully accessible take on "Paradoxical Truth" in the much criticized NYT philosophy blog.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-87653639949223462672010-11-15T08:50:00.002-05:002010-11-15T08:53:12.583-05:00

Has Roy Cook produced the first viral video for philosophers? You decide.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-84291536781706386572010-11-14T10:09:00.004-05:002010-11-14T10:26:59.764-05:00

In the next few weeks, I hope to go through 12 of the key claims which I try to defend in my book manuscript. At its most general, the topic of the book is how mathematics helps in science. I assume to start that science is quite successful. This success is not limited to its ability to generate consensus amongst its practitioners, but extends to its predictions and contributions to technological

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-21956121898662060142010-10-18T10:41:00.002-04:002010-10-18T10:44:39.334-04:00

Readers of this blog in the Toronto area may want to check out a workshop this Friday at the University of Toronto, IHPST. It is on the role of mathematics in science and the speakers are me, Margaret Morrison (Toronto), Steven French (Leeds), Alex Koo (Toronto) and Alan Baker (Swarthmore). The program is online here.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-68767291574818852492010-10-16T13:43:00.001-04:002010-10-16T13:46:37.377-04:00

The New York Times obituary gives a useful overview of his career and contributions to applications.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-17004932738256894582010-10-07T12:02:00.003-04:002010-10-07T12:11:22.494-04:00

In a helpful commentary in the current issue of Nature Samir Okasha summarizes the recent dispute about inclusive fitness. In an article from earlier this year E. O. Wilson and two collaborators argued that inclusive fitness (or kin selection) was dispensable from an explanation of altruistic behavior. For my purposes what is most interesting about this debate is that the Wilson argument depends

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-76279879448171231612010-09-30T10:42:00.002-04:002010-09-30T10:47:30.133-04:00

As readers of this blog are already aware, for some time now I have been working on a book called Mathematics and Scientific Representation which aims to say something useful about how mathematics helps in science. This is a project which combines elements of the philosophy of mathematics with the philosophy of science and so will hopefully be of interest to both communities.I have recently

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-64344071863686772032010-09-09T09:46:00.006-04:002010-09-09T10:00:50.333-04:00

As Jonathan Livengood helpfully pointed out in a comment on my last post, Bayle links Epimenides to the semantic paradoxes in his Dictionary entry for Euclid (1740, although perhaps also in an earlier edition). A modern source cited by Bayle is Gassendi, and when you track down that reference you indeed find a link between Epimenides and the semantic paradoxes:This comes from p. 40 of the first

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-27774288530046338372010-09-03T10:29:00.003-04:002010-09-03T10:57:40.307-04:00

As part of a philosophy of logic seminar on theories of truth I have developed an amateur interest in the history of discussions of logical and semantic paradoxes. As is well known, the Liar paradox can be traced to Epimenides and appears in the New Testament:It was one of them, their very own prophet, who said, 'Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.' That testimony is true. (

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-61785006674857568622010-08-30T13:45:00.003-04:002010-08-30T13:52:22.979-04:00

Benedikt Löwe and Thomas Müller have edited an interesting collection of papers from the collaborative PhiMSAMP project. They have taken the very welcome step of making all the papers freely available for download for research use at this address. As the related page makes clear, this group aims to "to bring young researchers with foundational and sociological attitudes together and discuss a

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-69648673606067596642010-08-10T11:03:00.002-04:002010-08-10T11:09:50.240-04:00

Congratulations to my Purdue colleagues Mike Bergmann and Pat Kain who have been awarded a major Templeton grant to study how knowledge works in morality and religion! The Purdue press release describes several upcoming conferences on the general theme of skepticism and disagreement and their implications for knowledge in these domains.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-84609184633513219792010-07-15T16:22:00.004-04:002010-07-15T16:29:04.310-04:00

Mary Leng's book is now out! From the back cover: Mary Leng offers a defence of mathematical fictionalism, arguing that we have no reason to believe that there are any mathematical objects. In mounting this defence, she responds to the indispensability argument for the existence of mathematical objects ... In response to this argument, Leng offers an account of the role of mathematics in

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-61090449494123251522010-07-14T12:15:00.003-04:002010-07-14T12:29:34.498-04:00

Although I noted the appearance of this book back when it came out, it is only recently that I have had the chance to read Jenkins' Grounding Concepts. I agree with the conclusion of Schechter's review that "Anyone interested in the epistemology of arithmetic or the nature of a priori knowledge would profit from reading it." But at one point Schechter asks In supporting Jenkins' view, it would be

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-1762646306864546272010-06-12T09:32:00.003-04:002010-06-12T09:38:48.480-04:00

Here is a short review of van Fraassen's 2008 book Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective. It will eventually appear in the BJPS. I found the book to be very impressive, although I had trouble understanding the way in which van Fraassen deploys indexical judgment to avoid problems like the Newman problem which have sunk some versions of structuralism. As I put it in the review,The

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-42932099367588503532010-06-07T16:13:00.003-04:002010-06-07T16:20:50.264-04:00

I have written a short discussion note of Batterman's recent article on mathematical explanation in science. If you have looked at the article, you may recall that he criticizes my "mapping account" as an account of how mathematics helps in explanation, especially the sorts of explanations using asymptotic reasoning which Batterman himself has spent so much time on. The basic point I make in my

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-22685468239606981592010-04-28T09:12:00.004-04:002010-04-28T09:36:36.376-04:00

In his recent review of Dawkins' Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing Jeremy Bernstein characterizes one entry as follows: W.D. Hamilton’s mathematical explanation of the tendency of animals to cluster when attacked by predators. The article in question is "Geometry for the Selfish Herd", Journal of Theoretical Biology 31 (1971): 295-311. (Online here.) Given the ongoing worries about the

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-13620925918645786982010-04-24T10:06:00.003-04:002010-04-24T10:13:38.167-04:00

The Southern Journal of Philosophy has relaunched with a new publishing agreement with Wiley, a new webpage and a new editorial board (including me). As the webpage indicatesThe Southern Journal of Philosophy has long provided a forum for the expression of philosophical ideas and welcomes articles written from all philosophical perspectives, including both the analytic and continental traditions,

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-92136988574941786412010-04-12T11:41:00.003-04:002010-04-12T11:52:30.380-04:00

Under the editorial guidance of Roy Cook a number of new entries in philosophy of mathematics have appeared on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. As I understand it, the aim of this site is to present relatively short summaries which are accessible to a wider audience, esp. undergraduate students, than some other options.Check out these recent entries:Bolzano's Philosophy of Mathematical

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-66130210291343897502010-04-06T13:32:00.003-04:002010-04-06T13:36:57.257-04:00

Here. There are some useful quotations from scientists, including:If the models are as flawed as critics say, Schmidt said, "You have to ask yourself, 'How come they work?'" What is missing from the article, though, is any discussion of the more or less risky claims which we might derive from examining a model or computer simulation. It seems that even though the models are highly detailed, most

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-34960854195127890972010-04-05T10:32:00.004-04:002010-04-05T10:51:32.701-04:00

Following up my last post, I want to outline an argument for why a reasonable restriction on IBE will block the use of IBE to provide much justification for mathematical claims. The main "mathematical explanations" which are discussed by advocates of this sort of justification, like Baker and Colyvan, involve explanations of patterns observed in the physical world. These examples include the

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-2962854583290900162010-04-02T09:36:00.003-04:002010-04-02T09:48:40.342-04:00

Philosophers of science have focused on inference to the best explanation (IBE) as the sort of inference that stands the best chance of ultimately justifying our belief in unobservable entities like atoms and electrons. More recently philosophers of mathematics like Colyvan and Baker have tried to given an explanatory indispensability argument in support some of our mathematical beliefs. The

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-84640926584872935552010-04-02T09:27:00.002-04:002010-04-02T09:33:30.713-04:00

For those few readers tracking my ongoing book project on Mathematics and Scientific Representation some recent good news is that I have signed a contract with Oxford University Press. The delivery date in the contract is Nov. 2010, so over the next six months I will posting some of the key ideas, and eventually the near-final versions of the chapters, for comments and discussion. The manuscript

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-79875776235468452172010-03-06T10:19:00.002-05:002010-03-06T10:25:22.090-05:00

2010 marks the 100th year since the publication of the first volume of Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. A major conference on Principia is scheduled for late May at McMaster University, in conjunction with the yearly meeting of the Bertrand Russell Society. The PM at 100 abstracts were recently posted here. It looks like a great lineup and I expect a great conference!

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-19475843728370262602010-02-24T09:40:00.002-05:002010-02-24T09:45:41.685-05:00

Details courtesy of Soul Physics.From the press release:Eminent, esteemed, wide-ranging, prolific-these are adjectives that have been aptly used to describe Nicholas Rescher and his contributions to the field of philosophy in a career that spans six decades, with nearly a half century of those years devoted to teaching and research at the University of Pittsburgh. In acknowledgement of his

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-74587536899391828592010-02-08T21:07:00.003-05:002010-02-08T21:21:19.922-05:00

While there has been a lot of misleading coverage of the stolen e-mails from East Anglia, the Guardian offers an intriguing look inside the fallout from the more significant retraction of the 2007 IPCC report claims about the Himalayan icepack: Speaking on condition of anonymity, several lead authors of the working group one (WG1) report, which produced the high-profile scientific conclusions

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-60452287771883888022010-01-21T10:19:00.003-05:002010-01-21T10:35:08.658-05:00

NDPR has an instructive review by Bernard Linsky of Omar Nasim's 2008 book on Russell and his 'Edwardian' philosophical contemporaries like Stout, Nunn and Alexander. I haven't read this book yet, but it seems to mark a new level of scholarship on Russell's external world program and its relationship to Russell's intellectual context. As Linsky summarizes things, Nasim argues that Russell took

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-43785222249877714382009-12-26T09:45:00.002-05:002009-12-26T09:52:57.998-05:00

On the first night of the APA in New York City I will be participating in a session designed to unveil the book New Waves in the Philosophy of Mathematics. We are scheduled for Sunday, December 27 from 6:30 to 9:30 pm (GI-8: Society for Realist/Antirealist Discussion). Perhaps not the ideal time, but we will have papers by Otavio Bueno, Oystein Linnebo, Roy Cook, Agustin Rayo and me. Come by to

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-83479851119752950752009-12-17T19:13:00.003-05:002009-12-17T19:23:40.398-05:00

The results that prompted the rumors noted in an earlier post have now been unveiled. They involve the detection of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) which are predicted by some theories of dark matter. The group has provided a helpful two-page summary, with the key paragraph:In this new data set there are indeed 2 events seen with characteristics consistent with those expected from

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-50157783112465052412009-12-17T08:48:00.003-05:002009-12-17T09:00:01.272-05:00

From this week's Nature:The researchers collected data on the timing of attacks and number of casualties from more than 54,000 events across nine insurgent wars, including those fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2008 and in Sierra Leone between 1994 and 2003. By plotting the distribution of the frequency and size of events, the team found that insurgent wars follow an approximate power law, in

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-45608443363560722352009-12-13T16:52:00.003-05:002009-12-13T16:55:25.781-05:00

Philosophers interested in tracking how scientists argue for the existence of novel entities might want to stay tuned this week. Rumors of a big announcement, centered largely around the blog Resonances and this post, continue.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-65964481133094283032009-12-10T10:57:00.003-05:002009-12-10T11:05:38.214-05:00

One of the surprises in the recently unveiled results of the PhilPapers Survey of philosophers is the popularity of nominalism:Target responsesAbstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?Accept or lean toward: Platonism 366 / 931 (39.3%)Accept or lean toward: nominalism 351 / 931 (37.7%)Other 214 / 931 (22.9%)All responsesAbstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?Accept or lean toward: nominalism

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-54702418084803917982009-11-13T15:30:00.003-05:002009-11-13T15:39:30.348-05:00

If Macmillan's web page is to be believed, the anthology New Waves in Philosophy of Mathematics, edited by Bueno and Linnebo, is now out: In this book, thirteen promising young researchers write on what they take to be the right philosophical account of mathematics and discuss where the philosophy of mathematics ought to be going. New trends are revealed, such as an increasing attention to

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-87401569269057924292009-11-04T10:29:00.003-05:002009-11-04T10:35:19.369-05:00

Princeton University Press has recently reissued Weyl's classic Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science along with a collection of essays by Weyl. Brandon Fogel reviews the latter in NDPR, notingPeter Pesic's collection is the latest, and to date most significant, salvo in the effort to bring long overdue attention to Weyl's philosophical ideas, particularly those regarding science and its

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-75096646453169968262009-10-26T13:16:00.004-04:002011-02-17T13:58:02.359-05:00

More than a year ago I posted a fairly vague description of a book project on the ways in which mathematics contributes to the success of science. I have made some progress on bringing together this material and thought it would be useful to post a summary of the chapters of the book along with an introductory chapter where I give an overview of the main conclusions of the book. Hopefully this is

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-9732680566697586242009-10-15T13:27:00.003-04:002009-10-15T13:37:11.948-04:00

Gowers and Nielsen offer in the current issue of Nature a report on the online collaboration in mathematics known as the Polymath Project. It is hard to know what to make of it all without delving into the details and trying to understand if there is anything special about this problem which lends itself to collaboration. But two passages jump out for the philosopher:This theorem was already

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-1863364872435238932009-10-09T18:35:00.004-04:002009-10-09T18:39:11.161-04:00

One of the core ideas driving the derivation of the Black-Scholes model is the efficient markets hypothesis. Exactly what this comes to is hopefully something I'll post on next week. But for now I'll pass on this from NPR's Marketplace:Kai Ryssdal's final note.Not so much news as a commentary on the state of the economic profession. The Nobel Prize in economics comes out Monday morning. I

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-14136515601045782882009-10-06T16:21:00.003-04:002009-10-06T16:42:37.655-04:00

In a recent post I noted Krugman's point about economics being seduced by attractive mathematics. Since then there have been many debates out there in the blogosphere about the failures of financial economics, but little discussion of the details of any particular case. I want to start that here with a summary of how the most famous model in financial economics is derived. This is the

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-64402731568024096932009-09-30T11:01:00.005-04:002011-03-03T09:58:22.909-05:00

I have posted a long critical notice of Mark Wilson's amazing book Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior. It will eventually appear in Philosophia Mathematica. My impression is that even though the book came out in 2006 and is now available in paperback, it has not really had the impact it should in debates about models and idealization. I think this is partly because the book

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-16344554007447385392009-09-15T13:02:00.003-04:002009-09-15T13:21:03.454-04:00

Julian Cole's "Creativity, Freedom and Authority: A New Perspective on the Metaphysics of Mathematics" is now available via the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Cole develops what seems to me to be the most careful version of a social constructivist metaphysics for mathematics. Basically the idea is that the activities of mathematics constitute the mathematical entities as abstract entities.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-34467670996096913372009-09-09T11:06:00.002-04:002009-09-09T11:12:11.100-04:00

Readers of this blog should check out the fall meeting of the Indiana Philosophical Association:Call for Papers Mathematical and Scientific Philosophywith a special session on the Darwin Bicentenary Indiana Philosophical Association Fall Meeting Invited Speakers: Colin Allen, Elisabeth Lloyd, Larry Moss Saturday AND Sunday, 5-6 December 2009 Indiana Memorial Union, IU Bloomington We invite

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-57424474562544775402009-09-08T10:18:00.003-04:002009-09-08T10:34:32.467-04:00

Probably anyone who is interested in this article has already seen it, but Paul Krugman put out an article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine called "How Did Economics Get It So Wrong?". The article is very well-written, but a bit unsatisfying as it combines Krugman's more standard worries about macroeconomics with a short attack on financial economics. I am trying to write something right now

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-8797565442833483552009-08-31T11:24:00.003-04:002009-08-31T11:35:06.872-04:00

I have just completed a review of the relatively new collection, edited by Bonnie Gold and Roger Simons, called Proof and Other Dilemmas: Mathematics and Philosophy. The review will appear eventually in SIGACT News. I think everyone who is interested in the interaction between mathematics and philosophy should be encouraged by the volume. The editors have brought together philosophers and

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-30704504250031813772009-08-14T13:05:00.005-04:002009-08-14T13:32:01.314-04:00

The current issue of Nature contains an exciting case of the productive interaction of mathematics and physics. As Cohn summarizes here, Torquato and Jiao use computer simulations and theoretical arguments to determine the densest way to pack different sorts of polyhedra together in three-dimensional space:To find their packings, Torquato and Jiao use a powerful simulation technique. Starting

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-74677928569689616602009-07-27T14:01:00.002-04:002009-07-27T14:09:50.053-04:00

My colleague Jan Cover appears in the latest edition of Percontations, a Bloggingheads series which has in the past tackled other philosophical topics like the nature of time. This time the nature of evil is discussed, with special reference to God and Leibniz.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-75121763247069898702009-07-25T14:13:00.004-04:002009-07-25T14:28:26.618-04:00

Following up my earlier post, and in line with Kenny’s perceptive comment, I wanted to raise two sorts of objections to the explanatory power of the Honeycomb Conjecture. I call them the problem of weaker alternatives and the bad company problem (in line with similar objections to neo-Fregeanism).(i) Weaker alternatives: When a mathematical result is used to explain, there will often be a weaker

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-45701391082137861022009-07-24T11:11:00.003-04:002009-07-24T11:15:06.715-04:00

Over at Choice and Inference, Jonah Schupbach has initiated a discussion of my PSA 2008 paper on mathematics, science and confirmation theory. Readers of this blog may be interested in how it is going ...

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-71886860227968934892009-07-23T23:28:00.003-04:002009-07-23T23:42:27.109-04:00

Following up the intense discussion of an earlier post on Colyvan and mathematical explanation, I would like to discuss in more detail another example that has cropped up in two recent papers (Lyon and Colyvan 2008, Baker 2009). This is the Honeycomb Conjecture:Any partition of the plane into regions of equal area has perimeter at least that of the regular hexagonal honeycomb tiling (Hales 2000,

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-48658593686992396332009-07-19T15:14:00.003-04:002009-07-19T15:31:21.818-04:00

I have posted preliminary drafts of two survey articles that are hopefully of interest to readers of this blog. The first is for the Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Science, edited by French and Saatsi, on "Philosophy of Mathematics":In this introductory survey I aim to equip the interested philosopher of science with a roadmap that can guide her through the often intimidating terrain of

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-66719133159408761522009-07-18T12:17:00.003-04:002009-07-18T12:26:13.785-04:00

Topoi has a fun series of "untimely reviews" of classic works in philosophy commissioned with the following aim: "We take a classic of philosophy and ask an outstanding scholar in the same field to review it as if it had just been published. This implies that the classical work must be contrasted with both past and current literature and must be framed in the wider cultural context of the present

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-27934923003983855102009-07-16T10:18:00.003-04:002009-07-16T10:46:44.653-04:00

According to Nature the lastest El Niño has begun in the Pacific. I got interested in this meteorological phenomenon back when I was living in California and coincidentally read Mike Davis' polemic Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World . While a bit over the top, it contains a great section on the history of large-scale meteorology including the discovery of

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-49499314117901316792009-07-09T14:16:00.003-04:002009-07-09T14:30:04.244-04:00

Over at Cosmic Variance Sean Carroll has initiated an ongoing discussion of the following passage from Feyerabend:The withdrawal of philosophy into a “professional” shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrodinger,

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-77891661878889594022009-07-09T10:58:00.003-04:002009-07-09T11:16:21.134-04:00

In a paper posted on his webpage listed as forthcoming in Mind, Mark Colyvan launches a new offensive against fictionalists like Azzouni, Melia and Yablo. They present a non-platonist interpetation of the language of mathematics and science that, they argue, does not require the "hard road" that Field took. Recall that Field tried to present non-mathematical versions of our best scientific

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-76212318665866460242009-07-07T11:13:00.003-04:002009-07-07T11:19:08.481-04:00

Paolo Mancosu continues his innovative work in the philosophy of mathematics with a thought-provoking survey article on Mathematical Style for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. From the introductory paragraph:The essay begins with a taxonomy of the major contexts in which the notion of ‘style’ in mathematics has been appealed to since the early twentieth century. These include the use of

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-3168655039547716642009-06-20T15:07:00.003-04:002009-06-20T15:12:54.410-04:00

Here is the latest version of my paper from the PSA. As noted earlier, the goal of the session was to establish some links between philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. My aim was to make the connection through confirmation, although all I have done so far in this paper is raised the issue in what is hopefully a useful and novel way. This part of an ongoing project, so comments are

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-9296108733529952582009-06-17T17:21:00.003-04:002009-06-17T17:28:17.676-04:00

Richardson has a review in NDPR of Carus' recent book on Carnap. It is fairly sympathetic, but I think it strikes the right note of skepticism about Carus' attempts to extract an Enlightenment project from Carnap's work that will not only rescue some notion of explication in the service of clarifying scientific knowledge, but will also relate scientific knowledge to normative disputes in ethics

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-39977147169507028642009-06-16T10:43:00.004-04:002009-06-16T10:53:16.699-04:00

On the beach I finally got a chance to start (if not finish) Nahin’s When Least is Best: How Mathematicians Discovered Many Clever Ways to Make Things as Small (or as Large) as Possible. So far it is an engrossing survey of work on maximum/minimum problems that leads one gently into the mathematical intricacies of the history without being overly technical.One of the first examples that Nahin

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-23447862087086928732009-06-04T22:15:00.003-04:002009-06-04T22:37:31.829-04:00

Following up the previous post, here is the list of lectures that I gave here in Taiwan, with the readings for each lecture. I had 22 sessions, with an hour and a half per session, but pressed into four weeks. I ended up with only 18 lectures, with some sessions having more reading than others. An introductory course in deductive logic was presupposed.1 What is analytic philosophy? What is the

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-22998940089065364202009-06-03T22:25:00.003-04:002009-06-03T22:46:02.274-04:00

Rather than worrying about the nature of analytic philosophy or taking a poll on who the most important philosophers are, I wanted to raise the issue of how we should structure an introductory course on the history of analytic philosophy. It seems to me that history of analytic has reached a kind of maturity that we associate with other areas of history like modern or Kant. With these topics,

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-43582063976586804862009-06-02T21:47:00.005-04:002009-06-02T22:05:36.954-04:00

As part of my course here in Taiwan I have been trying to read Glock's 2008 book What is Analytic Philosophy? (reviewed here). I am only about half-way through, but it is already one of the most encouraging contributions to the field in recent years. To start, Glock shows an in-depth knowledge of the many different aspects of analytic philosophy, from its earliest stages to its contemporary

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-34590187038786141182009-06-01T23:01:00.002-04:002009-06-01T23:19:58.408-04:00

Apologies to the few regular readers of this blog for my lack of posts through May. I finished up my sabbatical visit at the Center for the Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh at the beginning of May. I highly recommend it for anybody at any rank whose work intersects with the philosophy of science. Among other things, John Norton organized a reading group for the visiting fellows where we read

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-26355402299953379352009-04-29T13:38:00.003-04:002009-04-29T13:42:28.595-04:00

According to this note from Scientific American, IBM scientists are aiming to unveil a computer that can compete against humans on the game-show Jeopardy. Following up the success with chess, and the claimed success with poker, seems to me a bit of a stretch. A "final showdown" is planned for some time in 2010.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-84503652065120783072009-04-27T13:34:00.002-04:002009-04-27T13:42:32.393-04:00

Columbia Professor of Religion Mark C. Taylor offers a fairly bizarre series of recommendations for reforming universities in today's New York Times. He starts by making the well-known point that many graduate programs are larger than they should be because graduate student teaching saves universities money. This is true, but unrelated to his "reforms", which include abolishing traditional

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-39003626671011115372009-04-11T16:32:00.005-04:002010-09-30T10:48:56.339-04:00

Here is a recent draft of a paper I have been working on throughout my year at the Pittsburgh Center for the Philosophy of Science. It corresponds roughly to chapters III and IV of my book project where I go into more detail with examples and the significance for confirmation. I hope to post a more comprehensive overview of the project soon, but for now this may interest those working on both

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-87363991153616352272009-04-09T10:29:00.003-04:002009-04-09T10:46:49.328-04:00

In a letter to Nature, John Dupré and Paul Griffiths argue that Harry Collins' recent note in Nature is a mischaracterization of the current state of science studies.One amusing feature of Collins' note is that he only cites work by himself. So, the second and third waves of science studies that he discusses coincide with the change in his own focus. This reinforces Dupré and Griffiths' point

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-83149428084279781892009-04-07T08:24:00.002-04:002009-04-07T08:29:02.226-04:00

What grade would you give this David Brooks essay in a freshman philosophy course? Perhaps a C for effort:Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-15234282185170315592009-04-02T19:01:00.003-04:002009-04-02T19:07:13.298-04:00

Philip Ball offers an entertaining summary of a recent paper in Science on how data can be analyzed to propose laws. The kinds of examples discussed, from physics through biology, show the need for some philosophical clarification: As Schmidt and Lipson point out, some of the invariants embedded in natural laws aren't at all intuitive because they don't actually relate to observable quantities.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-66724810078781364962009-03-24T19:56:00.001-04:002009-03-24T19:58:08.143-04:00

At least according to this IBM ad.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-51328311265303886612009-03-18T08:54:00.003-04:002009-03-18T09:42:00.017-04:00

One of the highlights of the recent workshop on Models and Fiction hosted by the Institute of Philosophy in London was Deena Skolnick Weisberg's presentation on her recent psychological study of how the imagination is deployed in fiction. One fairly robust finding for adults is that we tend to 'import' claims that we believe into the fiction even when they are not mentioned in a story. For

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-92228236045494408192009-02-25T13:47:00.002-05:002009-02-25T13:51:15.305-05:00

See here for more.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-77302355642692272892009-02-22T11:56:00.004-05:002009-02-23T17:13:58.232-05:00

The Central APA in Chicago this past weekend seemed fairly empty, although I heard from one of the organizers that registrations this year were about the same as last year. One of the more interesting sessions was in the very last time slot, and had Dennett commenting on Plantinga's "Science and Religion: Where the Conflict Really Lies". Partly what was remarkable about the session was how many

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-5363400398504768092009-02-17T16:13:00.003-05:002009-02-17T16:20:51.364-05:00

Readers of this blog might be interested in checking out a session this Thursday night, 7:30-10:30pm, at the Central APA on the topic of idealization. The lineup:Robert Batterman (University of Western Ontario), “Explanatorily Essential Idealizations”Otávio A. Bueno (University of Miami), “Idealization in Science: An InferentialConception”Christopher Pincock (Purdue University), "How to Avoid

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-48865156037162610882009-02-08T11:53:00.002-05:002009-02-08T12:03:45.679-05:00

In “Determinism and the Mystery of the Missing Physics” (BJPS Advance Access) Mark Wilson uses the debate about determinism and classical physics to make the more general point about “the unstable gappiness that represents the natural price that classical mechanics must pay to achieve the extraordinary success it achieves on the macroscopic level” (3). Wilson focuses mostly on Norton’s “dome”

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-34775555042809649392009-02-04T11:02:00.003-05:002009-02-04T11:35:08.749-05:00

As promised earlier, here is a draft of a survey article on Carnap's Logical Structure of the World or Aufbau. The article will eventually be submitted to Philosophy Compass. Comments welcome, although please bear in mind that it is hard to summarize 80 years of discussion in 6000 words!

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-15801701434791645932009-02-01T15:05:00.003-05:002009-02-01T15:17:29.123-05:00

Anyone who enjoyed the old cellular automata game of Life will have fun with the Java application that Michael Weisberg has made available on his webpage. Here Weisberg gives a small piece of the broader research project that he has been carrying out with Ryan Muldoon concerning how to understand the division of labor in successful scientific communities. As explained here the approach adopts a

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-3006345379098387642009-01-31T10:13:00.004-05:002009-01-31T10:27:50.243-05:00

In a forthcoming paper "Models and Fiction", Roman Frigg gives an argument for the view that scientific models are best understood as fictional entities whose metaphysical commitments are “none” (17). I think this argument is a new and important one, but I don’t agree with it. Frigg first considers the view that models are abstract structures. He points out that an abstract mathematical structure

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-30073747452761611382009-01-29T10:49:00.003-05:002009-01-29T10:53:34.924-05:00

Gabriele Contessa has come up with a great idea: a group blog for general philosophy of science. Check it out at It's Only A Theory. So far the other bloggers are Marc Lange, Otavio Bueno and myself. But I expect the list and the range of topics addressed there to grow quickly!

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-419567257913900712009-01-23T08:46:00.004-05:002009-01-23T10:14:22.291-05:00

In the long tradition of negative book reviews, Peter Sullivan launches a fairly sustained attack on Macbeth's book on Frege's logic. Some highlights or lowlights, depending on your taste for such things:In the short term, this book will probably make quite a stir; one hopes that in the longer term, it will be seen to have done no lasting damage to Frege studies. It is an extraordinary work,

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-17857376357423084222009-01-14T15:08:00.003-05:002009-01-14T15:15:48.456-05:00

Here is a preliminary bibliography of places to look for focused discussions of the Aufbau since 1990. I have not always given the titles of papers in a collection if that collection has several different papers. Suggestions welcome! Please also let me know if you have a view about the most important issues for our understanding and interpretation of the Aufbau. This is for a Philosophy Compass

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-7936883588399129372009-01-13T13:07:00.005-05:002009-01-13T13:09:54.041-05:00

A rare glimpse of how someone became a philosopher of mathematics: Maddy describes the route from being a Westinghouse finalist to philosopher. Strangely, the profile does not mention her most recent book.

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-85786818972639467642009-01-13T10:27:00.004-05:002009-01-13T10:37:39.793-05:00

C. S. Jenkins' relatively new book looks like an exciting contribution to the epistemology of mathematics that aims to relate debates in the philosophy of mathematics to some more recent work on concepts and the a priori. Based on the title and on her earlier paper, I had expected that Jenkins aimed to defend some kind of neo-Millian view of arithmetic, in line with Kitcher. But this seems to

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-4453805962531310432009-01-04T12:01:00.003-05:002009-01-04T12:14:27.008-05:00

After a bit of the delay, the program for the Models and Simulations 3 conference is now online. The conference will be held at the University of Virginia and will run all day on March 6th and 7th and the morning of March 8th.Obvious highlights of the program are the two keynote speakers: Mark Bedau and Patrick Suppes. But there are about 50 other speakers, making this one of the larger

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-32157430674709925402008-12-19T11:34:00.003-05:002008-12-19T12:02:52.683-05:00

Glen Meyer offers an in-depth discussion of Field's program to nominalize science with special emphasis on the challenges encountered with classical equilibrium statistical mechanics (CESM). He makes a number of excellent points along the way, but what I like most is his focus on the prevalence of an appeal to what some call "surplus" mathematical structure, i.e. mathematics that has no natural

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4718590941586269256.post-39378847774145703542008-12-16T09:39:00.006-05:002008-12-16T21:41:16.910-05:00

Woodward's interventionist conception of causal explanation is perhaps the most expansive and well-worked out view on the market. He conceives of a causal explanation as providing information about how the explanandum would vary under appropriate possible manipulations. Among other things, this allows an explanatory role to phenomenological laws or other generalizations that support the right

Chris Pincockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10838633162146762394noreply@blogger.com0