5 found
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  1. Humeanism and the Pragmatic Turn.Michael Townsen Hicks, Siegfried Jaag & Christian Loew - 2023 - In Christian Loew, Siegfried Jaag & Michael Townsen Hicks (eds.), Humean Laws for Human Agents. Oxford: Oxford UP. pp. 1-15.
    A central question in the philosophy of science is: What is a law of nature? Different answers to this question define an important schism: Humeans, in the wake of David Hume, hold that the laws of nature are nothing over and above what actually happens and reject irreducible facts about natural modality (Lewis, 1983, 1994; cf. Miller, 2015). According to Non-Humeans, by contrast, the laws are metaphysically fundamental (Maudlin, 2007) or grounded in primitive modal structures, such as dispositional essences of (...)
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  2. Counterparts and Counterpossibles: Impossibility without Impossible Worlds.Michael Townsen Hicks - 2022 - Journal of Philosophy 119 (10):542-574.
    Standard accounts of counterfactuals with metaphysically impossible antecedents take them to by trivially true. But recent work shows that nontrivial countermetaphysicals are frequently appealed to in scientific modeling and are indispensable for a number of metaphysical projects. I focus on three recent discussions of counterpossible counterfactuals, which apply counterpossibles in both scientific and metaphysical modeling. I show that a sufficiently developed modal counterpart theory can provide a semantics for a wide range of counterpossibles without any inconsistent possibilities or other forms (...)
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  3. How chance explains.Michael Townsen Hicks & Alastair Wilson - 2021 - Noûs 57 (2):290-315.
    What explains the outcomes of chance processes? We claim that their setups do. Chances, we think, mediate these explanations of outcome by setup but do not feature in them. Facts about chances do feature in explanations of a different kind: higher-order explanations, which explain how and why setups explain their outcomes. In this paper, we elucidate this 'mediator view' of chancy explanation and defend it from a series of objections. We then show how it changes the playing field in four (...)
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  4. Making Fit Fit.Michael Townsen Hicks - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (5):931-943.
    Reductionist accounts of objective chance rely on a notion of fit, which ties the chances at a world to the frequencies at that world. Here, I criticize extant measures of the fit of a chance system and draw on recent literature in epistemic utility theory to propose a new model: chances fit a world insofar as they are accurate at that world. I show how this model of fit does a better job of explaining the normative features of chance, its (...)
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  5. What Chance Doesn’t Know.Harjit Bhogal & Michael Townsen Hicks - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    Humean accounts of chance have a problem with undermining futures: they have to accept that some series of events are physically possible and have a nonzero chance but are inconsistent with the chances being what they are. This contradicts basic platitudes about chances (such as those given by Bigelow et al. (1993) and Schaffer (2007)) and leads to inconsistency between plausible constraints on credences. We show how Humeans can avoid these contradictions by drawing on metaphysically impossible worlds that are, nevertheless, (...)
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