Probability and Informed Consent [Published] [Preprint]
Communicating uncertainty is difficult. In this paper, Nir Ben-Moshe, Ben Levinstein, and I consider some challenges for informing people about uncertain risks in a clinical setting. We argue that physicians ought to indicate how they interpret their probability claims and also what the quantity and quality of the evidence for their probability claims is.
Calibrating Chromatography [Published] [Preprint]
In this paper, Adam Edwards and I propose a new account of calibration according to which calibrating a technique shows that the technique does what it is supposed to do. To motivate our account, we examine an early 20th century debate about chlorophyll chemistry and Mikhail Tswett’s use of chromatographic adsorption analysis to study it. We argue that Tswett’s experiments established that his technique was reliable in the special case of chlorophyll without assuming a theory of the instrument or conducting a standard calibration experiment. We suggest that Tswett broke the Experimenters’ Regress by appealing to material facts in the common ground for chemists at the time.
Causal Attributions and the Trolley Problem [Published] [Preprint]
In this paper, Justin Sytsma and I use trolley dilemmas in order to investigate two competing theories of ordinary causal attributions: the counterfactual view and our own responsibility view.
Debunking Material Induction [Published] [Preprint]
In this paper, Dan Korman and I raise a genealogical, debunking challenge for John Norton's material theory of induction, understood as a solution to roughly Humean skepticism.
Actual Causation and Compositionality [Published] [Preprint]
In this paper, Justin Sytsma and I describe a plausible and (implicitly) widely-endorsed condition on actual causation, which we call compositionality. We present some experimental results challenging the claim that compositionality is a satisfied by the ordinary, default concept of actual causation.
Counting Experiments [Published] [Preprint]
In this paper, I show how one might resist two influential arguments for the Likelihood Principle by appealing to the ontological significance of creative intentions. The first argument for the Likelihood Principle that I consider is the argument from intentions. After clarifying the argument, I show how the key premiss in the argument may be resisted by maintaining that creative intentions sometimes independently matter to what experiments exist. The second argument that I consider is Gandenberger’s (2015) rehabilitation of Birnbaum’s (1962) proof of the Likelihood Principle from the (supposedly) more intuitively obvious principles of conditionality and sufficiency. As with the argument from intentions, I show how Gandenberger’s argument for his Experimental Conditionality Principle may be resisted by maintaining that creative intentions sometimes independently matter to what experiments exist.
Selected works in progress:
In this paper, I develop an explicitly normativist account of logic, according to which logic directs agents to means that are optimal relative to their ends and evaluates agents with respect to their cognitive performances. I hope to illuminate the nature of logic and advance debates about the normativity of logic by taking seriously the idea that logic is analogous to ethics, as suggested by Frege and Peirce. I describe and respond to anti-normativist arguments from Harman (1984, 1986), Russell (2020), and Tajer (2022).
In this paper co-authored with graduate students in one of my seminars on the history of research on induction, we offer a new reading of Quine's classic paper, "Epistemology Naturalized." Quine asserted that there had been no progress on the doctrinal side since Hume and that the Humean predicament is the human predicament. We argue that while the second assertion might be correct, the first is assertion is not. We suggest that Quine's proposal to naturalize epistemology was misunderstood because he didn't adequately address the doctrinal side.
How Good Was Bayes' Response to Hume?
In this paper with Travis Tanner, we evaluate Bayes' 1763 paper as a response to Hume's arguments for inductive skepticism in his Enquiry. We draw out some nuances in both Hume's skeptical position and in Bayes' reply, ultimately arguing that Hume should have accepted Bayes' mathematical work as a precise, Newtonian formulation of Hume's own skeptical solution.
In this paper, I consider goodness of fit measures in statistics, and I argue that every justification for a goodness of fit measure is ultimately pragmatic.
Variable Choice and the Multiple Partitions Problem
In this paper, Adam Edwards and I relate the problem of variable choice in causal modeling to the problem of choosing a prior probability distribution. We argue that there is no purely epistemic route to variable choice.