Search

It has often been argued that Humean accounts of natural law cannot account for the role played by laws in scientific explanations. Loewer (Philosophical Studies 2012) has offered a new reply to this argument on behalf of Humean accounts—a reply that distinguishes between grounding (which Loewer portrays as underwriting a kind of metaphysical explanation) and scientific explanation. I will argue that Loewer’s reply fails because it cannot accommodate the relation between metaphysical and scientific explanation. This relation also resolves a puzzle about scientific explanation that Hempel and Oppenheim (Philosophy of Science 15:135–75, 1948) encountered.

This paper analyzes the logical truths as (very roughly) those truths that would still have been true under a certain range of counterfactual perturbations.What’s nice is that the relevant range is characterized without relying (overtly, at least) upon the notion of logical truth. This approach suggests a conception of necessity that explains what the different varieties of necessity (logical, physical, etc.) have in common, in virtue of which they are all varieties of necessity. However, this approach places the counterfactual conditionals in an unfamiliar foundational role.

Etude de la critique de la conception stratifiee de la science chez Sellars. Examinant les contreparties empiriques des lois theoriques, l'A. rapproche la philosophie de l'esprit de Sellars a la these du projectionnisme moral chez McDowell, concernant la problematique de la survenance naturaliste et de la survenance microphysique.

Examinant la these de l'exclusivite inductive concernant la confirmation d'une hypothese dans les cas actuels comme les cas contrefactuels, l'A. etudie le role de l'affirmation de la loi naturelle dans les generalisations du type de la loi et dans les generalisations accidentelles, ainsi que dans la reconstruction rationnelle de la science en general