John T. Roberts, Research Page
Last
updated: January 23, 2009
My
book, The Law-Governed Universe has
been published by Oxford University Press (UK)
If you want the short version, click here:
A Precis
(Ha!) of The Law-Governed Universe (.doc file)
Here is a shorter paper, written to be used as a talk, which
serves as an introduction to the project of the book:
The Measurability Account of
Laws of Nature (.doc file)
Some
Published Papers:
A Puzzle about
Laws, Symmetries, and Measurable Quantities: In British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, June 2008,
Volume 59, Number 2, pp. 143-168
Contact with the Nomic: A Challenge for Deniers of Humean
Supervenience. Part 1: by John Earman and John T. Roberts. In Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, Volume 71, No, 2
(2005).
Conact
with the Nomic: A Challenge for Deniers of Humean Supervenience. Part
2: by John Earman and John T.
Roberts. Forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 71, No, 3 (2005).
Leibniz on
Force and Absolute Motion: Philosophy of Science 70"
553-573. (2003).
Some Works in Progress:
(All comments welcome but please do not quote or cite any of the following
without permission.)
Chance without
Credence (RTF FILE)
It
is a standard view that the concept of chance is inextricably related to the
concept of credence via the so-called Principal Principle. If this view is right, then one cannot
coherently affirm that there are chance processes in the physical world while
rejecting the theoretical framework within epistemology and decision theory in
which credence is defined. This is
surprising; why should adopting a theory that says there are chances at work in
nature put any particular constraints on our theorizing about epistemology and
rational choice? I propose and defend a
replacement for the Principal Principle which makes no use of the concept of
credence.
Beyond
Humean and Non-Humean:
The Measurability Account of Laws of Nature (.DOC FILE)
In this paper I distinguish a few different dimensions of the "Humean"/"Non-Humean" debate concerning laws of nature -- that is, four distinct debates that often lumped together under the heading "the dispure between Humeans and Non-Humeans.". I argue that it is possible to be a "Humean" in some of these debates and a "Non-Humean" in others. In particular, I argue that the best way (perhaps the only way) to mount a successful defense of "Non-Humeanism" about the relation between laws and counterfactuals is to adopt a view that commits one to "Humeanism" about the supervenience of the laws on the non-nomic facts. Moreover, it turns out that it involves commitment to a particular philosophical theory of laws of nature that I call "the Measurability Account of Laws." I defended an earlier (and, I think, slightly inferior) version of the MAL in my "Measurability and Physical Law" (which is forthcoming in Synthese).
The
Semantic Novelty of Theoretical Terms (.DOC FILE)
In this paper I take on David Lewis's claim that theoretical
terms can always be explicitly defined. I argue that, on the contrary, it
is possible for a new theory to introduce new terms that are semantically
novel -- that, is, terms that do not share their intensions with any
expressions that could have been formulated in our language prior to the
introduction of that theory. Furthermore, some of the most interesting
and influential physical theories have done just that. I argue that the
way in which theoretical terms can be semantically novel cannot be adequately
represented by either a Ramsey-Lewis approach ot theoretical terms or a causal-historical account
of reference. A new approach to the semantics of theoretical terms is
needed. The needed new approach does not provoke the demons of
incommensurability. It does, however, have interesting implications for
scientific realism and theoretical identifications.