Work in Progress
1.
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Uncomfortable Bedfellows? A Pragmatist Guide to Ground
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Under Review
Pragmatism is often taken to be synonymous with a deflationary attitude towards metaphysics. However, in this paper I show how (and why) someone sympathetic to the pragmatist's focus upon practical questions might justify an attraction to the 'strikingly inflationary' notion which, Dasgupta (2017) argues, has become characteristic of contemporary grounding-theoretic metaphysics. |
2.
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It Ain't That Deep: Metaphysics and the Problem of Progress
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Under Review
I follow a methodological framework recently put forward by Dellsén, Lawler & Norton (2021) to motivate a unified conception of scientific and metaphysical progress. On my depth-based account, progress is made when scientists or metaphysicians grasp an explanation which is invariant under a wider range of testing interventions than its predecessor; and correspondence is attained when this range contains those interventions under which the prior explanation was invariant. |
3.
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Interventionism, Explanation and Understanding
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Under Review
Despite widespread agreement among philosophers of science that understanding is constituted by explanatory knowledge, philosophical theories of explanation typically don't look much like theories of understanding, or accounts of a type of knowledge at all. In this paper, however, I argue that when evaluated explicitly with respect to how successfully they account for the connection between explanatory knowledge and understanding, it is the interventionist theory of explanation which emerges as a clear frontrunner. |