Department of Philosophy
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Departmental Publications, Philosophy [13]
Newsletters, annual reports, and other departmental publications -
Scholarly Works, Philosophy [38]
Research articles, presentations, and other scholarship
Recent Submissions
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Anti-Metaphysical Arguments in the Anticipations of Perception
(Editura Academiei Romane/Publishing House of the Romanian Academy, 2022-12-22)In the Anticipations, Kant defends the claim that all sensations must register on a purely subjective scale of response to stimuli, in order for sensation to be a possible source of knowledge. In this paper, I argue that ... -
Million dollar questions: why deliberation is more than information pooling
(Springer, 2022-03-29)Models of collective deliberation often assume that the chief aim of a deliberative exchange is the sharing of information. In this paper, we argue that an equally important role of deliberation is to draw participants’ ... -
Forced Changes Only: A New Take on the Law of Inertia
(Cambridge University Press, 2022-02-10)Newton’s First Law of Motion is typically understood to govern only the motion of force-free bodies. This paper argues on textual and conceptual grounds that the law is in fact a stronger, more general principle. The First ... -
Reichenbach’s empirical axiomatization of relativity
(Springer, 2022-12-01)A well known conception of axiomatization has it that an axiomatized theory must be interpreted, or otherwise coordinated with reality, in order to acquire empirical content. An early version of this account is often ... -
A new well-being atomism
(Wiley, 2022-06)Many philosophers reject the view that well-being over a lifetime is simply an aggregation of well-being at every moment of one's life, and thus they reject theories of well-being like hedonism and concurrentist desire ... -
Statistical significance and its critics: practicing damaging science, or damaging scientific practice?
(Springer, 2022-05-12)While the common procedure of statistical significance testing and its accompanying concept of p-values have long been surrounded by controversy, renewed concern has been triggered by the replication crisis in science. ... -
Questions in Action
(Journal of Philosophy, 2022-03-31)Choices confront us with questions. How we act depends on our answers to those questions. So the way our beliefs guide our choices is not just a function of their informational content, but also depends systematically on ... -
Editor’s note
(University of Chicago Press, 2021-09-01) -
Editor’s note
(University of Chicago Press, 2021-09-01) -
Forced Changes Only: A New Take on the Law of Inertia
(2021-12-04)Newton's First Law of Motion is typically understood to govern only the motion of force-free bodies. This paper argues on textual and conceptual grounds that it is in fact a stronger, more general principle. The First Law ... -
Chance and the Continuum Hypothesis
(2021-12-06)This paper presents and defends an argument that the continuum hypothesis is false, based on considerations about objective chance and an old theorem due to Banach and Kuratowski. More specifically, I argue that the ... -
Scientific Variables
(MDPI, 2021-12-13)Despite their centrality to the scientific enterprise, both the nature of scientific variables and their relation to inductive inference remain obscure. I suggest that scientific variables should be viewed as equivalence ... -
Loose Talk, Scale Presuppositions and QUD
(2019-12-19)I present a new pragmatic theory of loose talk, focussing on the loose use of numbers and measurement expressions. The account explains loose readings as arising from a pragmatic mechanism aimed at restoring relevance to ... -
A General Metric for the Similarity of Both Stochastic and Deterministic System Dynamics
(MDPI, 2021-09-09)Many problems in the study of dynamical systems—including identification of effective order, detection of nonlinearity or chaos, and change detection—can be reframed in terms of assessing the similarity between dynamical ... -
Data models, representation and adequacy-for-purpose
(2021-03)We critically engage two traditional views of scientific data and outline a novel philosophical view that we call the pragmatic-representational (PR) view of data. On the PR view, data are representations that are the ... -
Expanding theory testing in general relativity: LIGO and parametrized theories
(2020-02)The multiple detections of gravitational waves by LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), operated by Caltech and MIT, have been acclaimed as confirming Einstein's prediction, a century ago, that ... -
Egalitarianism under Severe Uncertainty
(2018-06) -
Philosophy @ VT, Spring 2015
(Virginia Tech, 2015)As a way to keep in touch with alumni, the Department published a regular newsletter with the latest news about the philosophy community at Virginia Tech. -
Department of Philosophy Alumni Newsletter, Spring 2014
(Virginia Tech, 2014)As a way to keep in touch with alumni, the Department published a regular newsletter with the latest news about the philosophy community at Virginia Tech.