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Reuben Stern
Duke University
  1. Diachronic and Interpersonal Coherence.Kenny Easwaran & Reuben Stern - forthcoming - In A. K. Flowerree & Baron Reed (eds.), Towards an Expansive Epistemology: Norms, Action, and the Social Sphere. Routledge.
    Bayesians standardly claim that there is rational pressure for agents’ credences to cohere across time because they face bad (epistemic or practical) consequences if they fail to diachronically cohere. But as David Christensen has pointed out, groups of individual agents also face bad consequences if they fail to interpersonally cohere, and there is no general rational pressure for one agent's credences to cohere with another’s. So it seems that standard Bayesian arguments may prove too much. Here, we agree with Christensen (...)
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  2. Antireductionist Interventionism.Reuben Stern & Benjamin Eva - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Kim’s causal exclusion argument purports to demonstrate that the non-reductive physicalist must treat mental properties (and macro-level properties in general) as causally inert. A number of authors have attempted to resist Kim’s conclusion by utilizing the conceptual resources of Woodward’s (2005) interventionist conception of causation. The viability of these responses has been challenged by Gebharter (2017a), who argues that the causal exclusion argument is vindicated by the theory of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs). Since the interventionist conception of causation relies crucially (...)
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  3. Puzzles for ZFEL, McShea and Brandon’s zero force evolutionary law.Martin Barrett, Hayley Clatterbuck, Michael Goldsby, Casey Helgeson, Brian McLoone, Trevor Pearce, Elliott Sober, Reuben Stern & Naftali Weinberger - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (5):723-735.
    In their 2010 book, Biology’s First Law, D. McShea and R. Brandon present a principle that they call ‘‘ZFEL,’’ the zero force evolutionary law. ZFEL says (roughly) that when there are no evolutionary forces acting on a population, the population’s complexity (i.e., how diverse its member organisms are) will increase. Here we develop criticisms of ZFEL and describe a different law of evolution; it says that diversity and complexity do not change when there are no evolutionary causes.
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  4. An Interventionist’s Guide to Exotic Choice.Reuben Stern - 2021 - Mind 130 (518):537-566.
    In this paper, I use interventionist causal models to identify some novel Newcomb problems, and subsequently use these problems to refine existing interventionist treatments of causal decision theory. The new Newcomb problems that make trouble for existing interventionist treatments involve so-called ‘exotic choice’—that is, decision-making contexts where the agent has evidence about the outcome of her choice. I argue that when choice is exotic, the interventionist can adequately capture causal decision-theoretic reasoning by introducing a new interventionist approach to updating on (...)
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  5. Comparative Opinion Loss.Benjamin Eva & Reuben Stern - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    It is a consequence of the theory of imprecise credences that there exist situations in which rational agents inevitably become less opinionated toward some propositions as they gather more evidence. The fact that an agent's imprecise credal state can dilate in this way is often treated as a strike against the imprecise approach to inductive inference. Here, we show that dilation is not a mere artifact of this approach by demonstrating that opinion loss is countenanced as rational by a substantially (...)
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  6. Systems without a graphical causal representation.Daniel M. Hausman, Reuben Stern & Naftali Weinberger - 2014 - Synthese 191 (8):1925-1930.
    There are simple mechanical systems that elude causal representation. We describe one that cannot be represented in a single directed acyclic graph. Our case suggests limitations on the use of causal graphs for causal inference and makes salient the point that causal relations among variables depend upon details of causal setups, including values of variables.
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