In response to his message quoted below, I asked John Roberts if we would expand on why he thinks that even allowing the observability of singular causal facts, most leading anti-Humean accounts of laws remain incompatible with Earman and Roberts’ argument. At any rate, John Roberts wrote as follows (it would be interesting to know what supporters of anti-Humeanism about laws have to say about it):
In a previous post, I argued that Earman and Roberts, in their 2005 PPR articles on Humean Supervenience (HS) about laws of nature, were implicitly relying on the view that nomic facts (such as singular causal facts) are unobservable. There followed an interesting discussion. But the question that none of us could answer was, what do Earman and Roberts think about HS vis a vis the observability of nomic facts?
John Roberts wrote me as follows (reproduced by permission):
Women in philosophy are notorious underrepresented. Brit Brogaard has written a useful summary of a recent APA symposium on the status of women in the profession.You might notice that women are especially underrepresented on Brains. Out of 14 contributors (including me), only one is a woman. (Thank you, Anna-Mari.) This …
Recently I have been having a very interesting discussion with Ken about his and Carl’s views on Multiple Realization. On thing that has come up is the distinction between multiple realization and multiple instantiation. Here is what Ken says about the distinction you want to distinguish between multiple realization and …
The Department of Philosophy at Indiana University, Bloomington is hosting the conference “Agency and Responsibility: Perspectives from Metaphysics, Ethics, and the Emerging Sciences of Brain and Behavior” on September 13-15, 2007. Speakers include Richard Holton (MIT), Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck College), Al Mele (Florida State U), Shaun Nichols (U Arizona), Adina …
I recently received an anonymous email telling me that I was being rude by posting so much here and that if I wanted to post that much I should get my own blog. After thinking about it I decided that this anonymous person was right; so I am happy to …
The second annual Online Philosophy Conference (OPC2) is beginning in a week. There are two videotaped keynote addresses, one by Ernie Sosa and one by Jeff McMahan, and papers will be presented by (week one) Delia Graf, Shaun Nichols, Meredith Williams, and Juan Comesana, and (week two) Jonathan Dancy, Gillian Russell, …
