Many people believe that the social world is “made by” individual people. But there are two entirely different ways philosophers have thought about the relation between individuals and the social world, without really keeping the two separate. Here is a draft of a paper, in...
Recently Harold Noonan published a very interesting paper about criteria of identity. There is a traditional distinction, going back to Frege, between the application conditions of a sortal term like ‘tiger’ and its criterion of identity. Noonan argues that this long tradition has made a...
Anyone who has written a simulation (or any kind of model) knows that the first attempt never works. Models are built iteratively — you build the model, run it, see what happens, then tweak the model, run it, tweak the model, run it, etc. Is...
This is a review of a collection of papers on artifacts, edited by Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence. Although I’ve thought a lot about artifacts — objects like screwdrivers, chairs, and dollar bills — I haven’t written much about them directly. This review was a...
