Results for 'Seán Golden'

373 found
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  1. In What Sense Is the Early Universe Fine-Tuned?Sean M. Carroll - 2023 - In Barry Loewer, Brad Weslake & Eric B. Winsberg (eds.), The Probability Map of the Universe: Essays on David Albert’s _Time and Chance_. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
    It is commonplace in discussions of modern cosmology to assert that the early universe began in a special state. Conventionally, cosmologists characterize this fine-tuning in terms of the horizon and flatness problems. I argue that the fine-tuning is real, but these problems aren't the best way to think about it: causal disconnection of separated regions isn't the real problem, and flatness isn't a problem at all. Fine-tuning is better understood in terms of a measure on the space of trajectories: given (...)
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  2. Time Remains.Sean Gryb & Karim P. Y. Thébault - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (3):663-705.
    On one popular view, the general covariance of gravity implies that change is relational in a strong sense, such that all it is for a physical degree of freedom to change is for it to vary with regard to a second physical degree of freedom. At a quantum level, this view of change as relative variation leads to a fundamentally timeless formalism for quantum gravity. Here, we will show how one may avoid this acute ‘problem of time’. Under our view, (...)
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  3. The Dark Knowledge Problem: Why Public Justifications are Not Arguments.Sean Donahue - 2023 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 21 (3-4):298-332.
    According to the Public Justification Principle, legitimate laws must be justifiable to all reasonable citizens. Proponents of this principle assume that its satisfaction requires speakers to offer justifications that are representable as arguments that feature premises which reasonable listeners would accept. I develop the concept of dark knowledge to show that this assumption is false. Laws are often justified on the basis of premises that many reasonable listeners know, even though they would reject these premises on the basis of the (...)
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  4. What Emergence Can Possibly Mean.Sean M. Carroll & Achyuth Parola - manuscript
    We consider emergence from the perspective of dynamics: states of a system evolving with time. We focus on the role of a decomposition of wholes into parts, and attempt to characterize relationships between levels without reference to whether higher-level properties are “novel” or “unexpected.” We offer a classification of different varieties of emergence, with and without new ontological elements at higher levels. -/- Submitted to a volume on Real Patterns (Tyler Milhouse, ed.), to be published by MIT Press.
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  5. Consciousness and the Laws of Physics.Sean M. Carroll - 2021 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (9-10):16-31.
    We have a much better understanding of physics than we do of consciousness. I consider ways in which intrinsically mental aspects of fundamental ontology might induce modifications of the known laws of physics, or whether they could be relevant to accounting for consciousness if no such modifications exist. I suggest that our current knowledge of physics should make us skeptical of hypothetical modifications of the known rules, and that without such modifications it’s hard to imagine how intrinsically mental aspects could (...)
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  6. Why Boltzmann Brains Are Bad.Sean M. Carroll - 2017 - In Shamik Dasgupta, Brad Weslake & Ravit Dotan (eds.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. London: Routledge. pp. 7-20.
    Some modern cosmological models predict the appearance of Boltzmann Brains: observers who randomly fluctuate out of a thermal bath rather than naturally evolving from a low-entropy Big Bang. A theory in which most observers are of the Boltzmann Brain type is generally thought to be unacceptable, although opinions differ. I argue that such theories are indeed unacceptable: the real problem is with fluctuations into observers who are locally identical to ordinary observers, and their existence cannot be swept under the rug (...)
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  7. Many Worlds, the Born Rule, and Self-Locating Uncertainty.Sean M. Carroll & Charles T. Sebens - 2013 - In Daniele C. Struppa & Jeffrey M. Tollaksen (eds.), Quantum Theory: A Two-Time Success Story: Yakir Aharonov Festschrift. Milano: Springer. pp. 157-169.
    We provide a derivation of the Born Rule in the context of the Everett (Many-Worlds) approach to quantum mechanics. Our argument is based on the idea of self-locating uncertainty: in the period between the wave function branching via decoherence and an observer registering the outcome of the measurement, that observer can know the state of the universe precisely without knowing which branch they are on. We show that there is a uniquely rational way to apportion credence in such cases, which (...)
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  8. Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space.Sean M. Carroll - 2022 - In Valia Allori (ed.), Quantum Mechanics and Fundamentality: Naturalizing Quantum Theory between Scientific Realism and Ontological Indeterminacy. Cham: Springer. pp. 211-224.
    I defend the extremist position that the fundamental ontology of the world consists of a vector in Hilbert space evolving according to the Schrödinger equation. The laws of physics are determined solely by the energy eigenspectrum of the Hamiltonian. The structure of our observed world, including space and fields living within it, should arise as a higher-level emergent description. I sketch how this might come about, although much work remains to be done.
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  9. Does the Universe Need God?Sean Carroll - 2012 - In J. B. Stump & Alan G. Padgett (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 185-197.
    I ask whether what we know about the universe from modern physics and cosmology, including fine-tuning, provides compelling evidence for the existence of God, and answer largely in the negative.
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  10. Every Man Has His Price.Sean Capener - 2023 - Philosophy Today 67 (4):889-905.
    Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy is organized around an exclusive disjunction of dignity or price, equality or equivalence. In his 1797 Doctrine of Right, however, Kant places enslaved black people on the wrong side of this disjunction when he speculates that their status as currency may offer insight into the origins of money. Recent work in black studies has begun to speculate on the link between blackness and money in modernity, and this paper draws attention to Kant’s role as an unlikely (...)
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  11. Beyond Falsifiability: Normal Science in a Multiverse.Sean M. Carroll - 2019 - In Dawid Richard, Dardashti Radin & Thebault Karim (eds.), Epistemology of Fundamental Physics: Why Trust a Theory? Cambridge University Press.
    Cosmological models that invoke a multiverse - a collection of unobservable regions of space where conditions are very different from the region around us - are controversial, on the grounds that unobservable phenomena shouldn't play a crucial role in legitimate scientific theories. I argue that the way we evaluate multiverse models is precisely the same as the way we evaluate any other models, on the basis of abduction, Bayesian inference, and empirical success. There is no scientifically respectable way to do (...)
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  12. Is One More Powerful with Numbers on One's Side?Sean Ingham & Niko Kolodny - 2023 - Journal of Political Philosophy 31 (4):452-469.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  13. Propositional or Non-Propositional Attitudes?Sean Crawford - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 168 (1):179-210.
    Propositionalism is the view that intentional attitudes, such as belief, are relations to propositions. Propositionalists argue that propositionalism follows from the intuitive validity of certain kinds of inferences involving attitude reports. Jubien (2001) argues powerfully against propositions and sketches some interesting positive proposals, based on Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment, about how to accommodate “propositional phenomena” without appeal to propositions. This paper argues that none of Jubien’s proposals succeeds in accommodating an important range of propositional phenomena, such as the (...)
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  14. Energy Non-conservation in Quantum Mechanics.Sean M. Carroll & Jackie Lodman - 2021 - Foundations of Physics 51 (4):1-15.
    We study the conservation of energy, or lack thereof, when measurements are performed in quantum mechanics. The expectation value of the Hamiltonian of a system changes when wave functions collapse in accordance with the standard textbook treatment of quantum measurement, but one might imagine that the change in energy is compensated by the measuring apparatus or environment. We show that this is not true; the change in the energy of a state after measurement can be arbitrarily large, independent of the (...)
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  15. Taking Our Selves Too Seriously: Commitment, Contestation, and the Dynamic Life of the Self.Christian M. Golden - 2019 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 57 (4):505-538.
    In this article, I distinguish two models of personal integrity. The first, wholeheartedness, regards harmonious unity of the self as psychologically healthy and volitional consistency as ethically ideal. I argue that it does so at the substantial cost of framing ambivalence and conflict as defects of character and action. To avoid these consequences, I propose an alternate ideal of humility that construes the self as multiple and precarious and celebrates experiences of loss and transformation through which learning, growth, innovation, and (...)
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  16. What documents cannot do: Revisiting Polanyi and the tacit knowledge dilemma.Sean Burns - 2021 - Information and Culture 56 (1).
    Our culture is dominated by digital documents in ways that are easy to overlook. These documents have changed our worldviews about science and have raised our expectations of them as tools for knowledge justification. This article explores the complexities surrounding the digital document by revisiting Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge—the idea that “we can know more than we can tell.” The theory presents to us a dilemma: if we can know more than we can tell, then this means that (...)
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  17. Physics and the Principle of Sufficient Reason.Sean M. Carroll - manuscript
    The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) holds that, for everything that exists or occurs or holds true, there is a reason why that is the case. I consider three possible ways of relating physics to the PSR: past states as reasons for present states, reasons why the laws of physics take the form that they do, and reasons why there is anything at all. In each case I suggest that the PSR is not the best way of thinking about how (...)
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  18. Schlick, Carnap and Feigl on the Mind-Body Problem.Sean Crawford - 2022 - In Christoph Limbeck & Thomas Uebel (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Logical Empiricism. Routledge. pp. 238-247.
    Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and Herbert Feig are the most prominent of the positivists to formulate views on the mind-body problem (aside from Hempel’s one-off treatment in 1935). While their views differed from each other and changed over time they were all committed to some form of scientific physicalism, though a linguistic or conceptual rather than ontological form of it. In focus here are their views during the heyday of logical positivism and its immediate aftermath, though some initial scene-setting of (...)
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  19. Demographic Objections to Epistocracy: A Generalization.Sean Ingham & David Wiens - 2021 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 49 (4):323-349.
    Several scholars have recently entertained proposals for "epistocracy," a political regime in which decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a society's most informed and competent citizens. These proposals rest on the claim that we can expect better political outcomes if we exclude incompetent citizens from participating in political decisions because competent voters are more likely to vote "correctly" than incompetent voters. We develop what we call the objection from selection bias to epistocracy: a procedure that selects voters on (...)
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  20. Living by Algorithm: Smart Surveillance and the Society of Control.Sean Erwin - 2015 - Humanities and Technology Review 34:28-69.
    Foucault’s disciplinary society and his notion of panopticism are often invoked in discussions regarding electronic surveillance. Against this use of Foucault, I argue that contemporary trends in surveillance technology abstract human bodies from their territorial settings, separating them into a series of discrete flows through what Deleuze will term, the surveillant assemblage. The surveillant assemblage and its product, the socially sorted body, aim less at molding, punishing and controlling the body and more at triggering events of in- and ex-clusion from (...)
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  21. A solution for Russellians to a puzzle about belief.Sean Crawford - 2004 - Analysis 64 (3):223-29.
    According to Russellianism (or Millianism), the two sentences ‘Ralph believes George Eliot is a novelist’ and ‘Ralph believes Mary Ann Evans is a novelist’ cannot diverge in truth-value, since they express the same proposition. The problem for the Russellian (or Millian) is that a puzzle of Kaplan’s seems to show that they can diverge in truth-value and that therefore, since the Russellian holds that they express the same proposition, the Russellian view is contradictory. I argue that the standard Russellian appeal (...)
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  22. The Myth of Logical Behaviourism and the Origins of the Identity Theory.Sean Crawford - 2013 - In Michael Beaney (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of The History of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    The identity theory’s rise to prominence in analytic philosophy of mind during the late 1950s and early 1960s is widely seen as a watershed in the development of physicalism, in the sense that whereas logical behaviourism proposed analytic and a priori ascertainable identities between the meanings of mental and physical-behavioural concepts, the identity theory proposed synthetic and a posteriori knowable identities between mental and physical properties. While this watershed does exist, the standard account of it is misleading, as it is (...)
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  23. Complex Experience, Relativity and Abandoning Simultaneity.Sean Enda Power - 2010 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (3-4):231-256.
    Starting from the special theory of relativity it is argued that the structure of an experience is extended over time, making experience dynamic rather than static. The paper describes and explains what is meant by phenomenal parts and outlines opposing positions on the experience of time. Time according to he special theory of relativity is defined and the possibility of static experience shown to be implausible, leading to the conclusion that experience is dynamic. Some implications of this for the relationship (...)
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  24. Republican Freedom, Popular Control, and Collective Action.Sean Ingham & Frank Lovett - forthcoming - American Journal of Political Science.
    Republicans hold that people are dominated merely in virtue of others' having unconstrained abilities to frustrate their choices. They argue further that public officials may dominate citizens unless subject to popular control. Critics identify a dilemma. To maintain the possibility of popular control, republicans must attribute to the people an ability to control public officials merely in virtue of the possibility that they might coordinate their actions. But if the possibility of coordination suffices for attributing abilities to groups, then, even (...)
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  25. Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?Sean M. Carroll - 2022 - In Eleanor Knox & Alastair Wilson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics. London, UK: Routledge.
    It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists. I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation.
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  26. Pure Russellianism.Sean Crawford - 2004 - Philosophical Papers 33 (2):171-202.
    Abstract According to Russellianism, the content of a Russellian thought, in which a person ascribes a monadic property to an object, can be represented as an ordered couple of the object and the property. A consequence of this is that it is not possible for a person to believe that a is F and not to believe b is F, when a=b. Many critics of Russellianism suppose that this is possible and thus that Russellianism is false. Several arguments for this (...)
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  27.  57
    Implanting a Discipline: The Academic Trajectory of Nuclear Engineering in the USA and UK.Sean F. Johnston - 2009 - Minerva 47 (1):51-73.
    The nuclear engineer emerged as a new form of recognised technical professional between 1940 and the early 1960s as nuclear fission, the chain reaction and their applications were explored. The institutionalization of nuclear engineering—channelled into new national laboratories and corporate design offices during the decade after the war, and hurried into academic venues thereafter—proved unusually dependent on government definition and support. This paper contrasts the distinct histories of the new discipline in the USA and UK (and, more briefly, Canada). In (...)
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  28. The Future for Fixing.Sean F. Johnston - 2020 - In Techno-Fixers: Origins and Implications of Technological Faith. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
    This concluding chapter of _Techno-Fixers: Origins and Implications of Technological Faith_ examines the widespread overconfidence in present-day and proposed 'technological fixes', and provides guidelines - social, ethical and technical - for soberly assessing candidate technological solutions for societal problems.
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  29. Logicism, Interpretability, and Knowledge of Arithmetic.Sean Walsh - 2014 - Review of Symbolic Logic 7 (1):84-119.
    A crucial part of the contemporary interest in logicism in the philosophy of mathematics resides in its idea that arithmetical knowledge may be based on logical knowledge. Here an implementation of this idea is considered that holds that knowledge of arithmetical principles may be based on two things: (i) knowledge of logical principles and (ii) knowledge that the arithmetical principles are representable in the logical principles. The notions of representation considered here are related to theory-based and structure-based notions of representation (...)
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  30. Quantifiers and propositional attitudes: Quine revisited.Sean Crawford - 2008 - Synthese 160 (1):75 - 96.
    Quine introduced a famous distinction between the ‘notional’ sense and the ‘relational’ sense of certain attitude verbs. The distinction is both intuitive and sound but is often conflated with another distinction Quine draws between ‘dyadic’ and ‘triadic’ (or higher degree) attitudes. I argue that this conflation is largely responsible for the mistaken view that Quine’s account of attitudes is undermined by the problem of the ‘exportation’ of singular terms within attitude contexts. Quine’s system is also supposed to suffer from the (...)
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  31. Why Delight in Screamed Vocals? Emotional Hardcore and the Case Against Beautifying Pain.Sean T. Murphy - 2024 - British Journal of Aesthetics 64 (4):625-646.
    Emotional hardcore and other music genres featuring screamed vocals are puzzling for the appreciator. The typical fan attaches appreciative value to musical screams of emotional pain, all the while acknowledging it would be inappropriate to hold similar attitudes towards their sonically similar everyday counterpart: actual human screaming. Call this the screamed vocals problem. To solve the problem, I argue we must attend to the anti-sublimating aims that get expressed in the emotional hardcore vocalist’s choice to scream the lyrics. Screamed vocals (...)
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  32. A historian's view of holography.Sean F. Johnston - 2008 - In H. J. Caulfield & L. Vikram (eds.), New Directions in Holography and Speckle. pp. 3-15.
    On problems and assumptions in the historiography of holography for distinctive social groups engaged in the practice.
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  33. Quantum Mereology: Factorizing Hilbert Space into Subsystems with Quasi-Classical Dynamics.Sean M. Carroll & Ashmeet Singh - 2021 - Physical Review A 103 (2):022213.
    We study the question of how to decompose Hilbert space into a preferred tensor-product factorization without any pre-existing structure other than a Hamiltonian operator, in particular the case of a bipartite decomposition into "system" and "environment." Such a decomposition can be defined by looking for subsystems that exhibit quasi-classical behavior. The correct decomposition is one in which pointer states of the system are relatively robust against environmental monitoring (their entanglement with the environment does not continually and dramatically increase) and remain (...)
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  34. Militarizing radiometry.Sean F. Johnston - 2001 - Bristol, UK: Institute of Physics Press.
    The measurement of light and colour has always been a peripheral science. Light became a 'disciplined' quantity over the period of a century, but the specialist communities that measured it did not. The quantification of visible light (photometry), colour (colorimetry), and radiant intensity (radiometry) involved distinct communities of physicists, psychologists, technicians and engineers. -/- This chapter of _Science in the Shadows_ examines how the measurement of non-visible light became the domain of post Second World War military engineers and classified development (...)
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  35. The Stability of the Just Society: Why Fixed Point Theorems Are Beside The Point.Sean Ingham & David Wiens - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 23 (2):312-319.
    Political theorists study the attributes of desirable social-moral states of affairs. Schaefer (forthcoming) aims to show that "static political theory" of this kind rests on shaky foundations. His argument revolves around an application of an abstruse mathematical theorem -- Kakutani's fixed point theorem -- to the social-moral domain. We show that Schaefer has misunderstood the implications of this theorem for political theory. Theorists who wish to study the attributes of social-moral states of affairs should carry on, safe in the knowledge (...)
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  36. Making light work: Practices and practitioners of photometry.Sean F. Johnston - 1996 - History of Science 34 (3):273-302.
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  37.  51
    Vaunting the independent amateur: Scientific American and the representation of lay scientists.Sean F. Johnston - 2018 - Annals of Science 75 (2):97-119.
    This paper traces how media representations encouraged enthusiasts, youth and skilled volunteers to participate actively in science and technology during the twentieth century. It assesses how distinctive discourses about scientific amateurs positioned them with respect to professionals in shifting political and cultural environments. In particular, the account assesses the seminal role of a periodical, Scientific American magazine, in shaping and championing an enduring vision of autonomous scientific enthusiasms. Between the 1920s and 1970s, editors Albert G. Ingalls and Clair L. Stong (...)
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  38. The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes.Sean M. Carroll - 2022 - In Meir Hemmo, Stavros Ioannidis, Orly Shenker & Gal Vishne (eds.), Levels of Reality in Science and Philosophy: Re-Examining the Multi-Level Structure of Reality. Springer. pp. 27-46.
    Effective Field Theory (EFT) is the successful paradigm underlying modern theoretical physics, including the "Core Theory" of the Standard Model of particle physics plus Einstein's general relativity. I will argue that EFT grants us a unique insight: each EFT model comes with a built-in specification of its domain of applicability. Hence, once a model is tested within some domain (of energies and interaction strengths), we can be confident that it will continue to be accurate within that domain. Currently, the Core (...)
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  39. Representative Democracy and Social Equality.Sean Ingham - 2021 - American Political Science Review:1-13.
    When are inequalities in political power undemocratic, and why? While some writers condemn any inequalities in political power as a deviation from the ideal of democracy, this view is vulnerable to the simple objection that representative democracies concentrate political power in the hands of elected officials rather than distributing it equally among citizens, but they are no less democratic for it. Building on recent literature that interprets democracy as part of a broader vision of social equality, I argue that concentrations (...)
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  40. Making Fair Comparisons in Political Theory.Sean Ingham & David Wiens - forthcoming - American Journal of Political Science.
    Normative political theorists frequently compare hypothetical scenarios for the purpose of identifying reasons to prefer one kind of institution to alternatives. We examine three types of "unfair" comparisons and the reasoning errors associated with each. A theorist makes an _obscure comparison_ when one (or more) of the alternatives under consideration is underspecified; a theorist makes a _mismatched comparison_ when they fail to hold fixed the relevant contextual factors while comparing alternatives; and a theorist makes an _irrelevant comparison_ when they compare (...)
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  41. An unconvincing transformation? Michelson's interferential spectroscopy.Sean F. Johnston - 2003 - Nuncius 18 ( 2):803-823.
    Albert Abraham Michelson (1852-1931), the American optical physicist best known for his precise determination of the velocity of light and for his experiments concerning aether drift, is less often acknowledged as the creator of new spectroscopic instrumentation and new spectroscopies. He devised a new method of light analysis relying upon his favourite instrument – a particular configuration of optical interferometer – and published investigations of spectral line separation, Doppler-broadening and simple high-resolution spectra (1887-1898). Contemporaries did not pursue his method. Michelson (...)
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  42.  66
    The Construction of Colorimetry by Committee.Sean F. Johnston - 1996 - Science in Context 9 (4):387-420.
    The ArgumentThis paper explores the confrontation of physical and contextual factors involved in the emergence of the subject of color measurement, which stabilized in essentially its present form during the interwar period. The contentions surrounding the specialty had both a national and a disciplinary dimension. German dominance was curtailed by American and British contributions after World War I. Particularly in America, communities of physicists and psychologists had different commitments to divergent views of nature and human perception. They therefore had to (...)
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  43. On the Logical Positivists' Philosophy of Psychology: Laying a Legend to Rest.Sean Crawford - 2014 - In Thomas Uebel (ed.), New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. Cham: Springer. pp. 711-726.
    The received view in the history of the philosophy of psychology is that the logical positivists—Carnap and Hempel in particular—endorsed the position commonly known as “logical” or “analytical” behaviourism, according to which the relations between psychological statements and the physical-behavioural statements intended to give their meaning are analytic and knowable a priori. This chapter argues that this is sheer legend: most, if not all, such relations were viewed by the logical positivists as synthetic and knowable only a posteriori. It then (...)
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  44. A moral basis for prohibiting performance enhancing drug use in competitive sport.Sean McKeever - 2017 - Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 44 (2):243-257.
    A strong moral reason for prohibiting doping in sport is to be found in the bad choices that would be faced by clean athletes in a sporting world that tolerated doping. The case against doping is not, however, to be grounded in the concept of coercion. Instead, it is grounded in a general duty of sport to afford fair opportunity to the goods that are distinctively within sport's sphere of control. The moral reason to prohibit doping need not be balanced (...)
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  45. Pneuma and the Pneumatist School of Medicine.Sean Coughlin & Orly Lewis - 2020 - In Sean Coughlin, David Leith & Orly Lewis (eds.), The Concept of Pneuma after Aristotle. Berlin: Edition Topoi. pp. 203-236.
    The Pneumatist school of medicine has the distinction of being the only medical school in antiquity named for a belief in a part of a human being. Unlike the Herophileans or the Asclepiadeans, their name does not pick out the founder of the school. Unlike the Dogmatists, Empiricists, or Methodists, their name does not pick out a specific approach to medicine. Instead, the name picks out a belief: the fact that pneuma is of paramount importance, both for explaining health and (...)
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  46. Creating a Canadian profession: the nuclear engineer, c. 1940-1968.Sean F. Johnston - 2009 - Canadian Journal of History 44 (3):435-466.
    Canada, as one of the three Allied nations collaborating on atomic energy development during the Second World War, had an early start in applying its new knowledge and defining a new profession. Owing to postwar secrecy and distinct national aims for the field, nuclear engineering was shaped uniquely by the Canadian context. Alone among the postwar powers, Canadian exploration of atomic energy eschewed military applications; the occupation emerged within a governmental monopoly; the intellectual content of the discipline was influenced by (...)
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  47. From white elephant to Nobel Prize: Dennis Gabor's wavefront reconstruction.Sean F. Johnston - 2005 - Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 36:35-70.
    Dennis Gabor devised a new concept for optical imaging in 1947 that went by a variety of names over the following decade: holoscopy, wavefront reconstruction, interference microscopy, diffraction microscopy and Gaboroscopy. A well-connected and creative research engineer, Gabor worked actively to publicize and exploit his concept, but the scheme failed to capture the interest of many researchers. Gabor’s theory was repeatedly deemed unintuitive and baffling; the technique was appraised by his contemporaries to be of dubious practicality and, at best, constrained (...)
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  48. The psychophysics of order and anisotropy: Comment on Riemer.Sean Enda Power - 2015 - Consciousness and Cognition 38:198-204.
    Riemer’s recent paper on the perception of time discusses a neglected yet important topic in the psychological literature: the consequences for psychology (and psychophysics) from the ‘anisotropy’ of time. The paper presents an argument that there are unique kinds of challenges for psychophysics from such temporal anisotropy: (a) Challenges because the psychological experience of time has temporal anisotropy and the physical concept of time does not have temporal anisotropy. (b) Challenges for experimental research which are unique to temporal anisotropy. -/- (...)
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  49. Political Technique, the Conflict of Umori, and Foucault’s Reading of Machiavelli in Sécurité, Territoire, Population.Sean Erwin - 2015 - Foucault Studies 19:172-190.
    For those familiar with Machiavelli’s texts, Foucault’s interpretation of Macchiavelli in his 1978 lecture series Sécurité, Territoire, Population1 is surprising. Although Machiavelli figures prominently in five of the thirteen lectures,2 Foucault treats Machiavelli as if he were the author of only one book—The Prince—and his reading treats this complex text as if it covered only one topic: how to guarantee the security of the Prince. Clearly Foucault did not intend his interpretation of Machiavelli as a close exegesis. Other discussions of (...)
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  50. Reality Realism.Sean M. Carroll - manuscript
    In Morality & Mathematics, Justin Clarke-Doane argues that it is hard to imagine being "a realist about, for example, the standard model of particle physics, but not about mathematics." I try to explain how that seems very possible from the perspective of a physicist. What is real is the physical world; mathematics starts from descriptions of the natural world and extrapolates from there, but that extrapolation does not imply any independent reality. -/- Submitted to an Analysis Reviews symposium on Clarke-Doane's (...)
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