Philosophy of the Special Sciences
High-level laws, reduction, ceteris paribus laws, counterfactual support, high-level probability… see also explanation.
Published Work
- The Explanatory Role of Aggregate Properties
- The Whole Story: Explanatory Autonomy and Convergent Evolution
- Special-Science Autonomy and the Division of Labor
- Dappled Science in a Unified World
- Ontology, Complexity, and Compositionality
- The Reference Class Problem in Evolutionary Biology: Distinguishing Selection from Drift (philosophy of explanation and physical probability come together to account for a big distinction in the special sciences)
- High-Level Exceptions Explained (another aspect of
ceteris paribus
thinking in the special sciences, complementing the hedges paper below) - Ceteris Paribus Hedges: Causal Voodoo That Works
- Probability Out Of Determinism
- The Explanatory Role of Irreducible Properties
- Physically Contingent Laws and Counterfactual Support