Introduction The scientific realism debate is one of the main debates in the philosophy of science. The issue is old, and sometimes it seems difficult even to tell how to distinguish between realism and antirealism. In a relatively new area of debate, there have been attempts to resolve this stalemate by analyzing whether the positions […]

What should we do in science? This is a question about pursuitworthiness of research programs. The question concerns which research programs we should develop further, i.e. which programs are worthy of pursuit. Analyses of pursuitworthiness are motivated by the need for an ability to respond to possible future changes and demands. These changes and demands […]

1. Introduction In this post, I discuss how time and temporal scales in the study of the future are intertwined with notions of possibility. I point out that the choice and determination of meaningful temporal scales depend on what is possible and how possibilities can be tracked, and not the other way around. In other […]

Here you can find the preprint of the paper, forthcoming in Journal of the Philosophy of History

In order to understand futures research, it is necessary to have different notions of possibility at hand. In what follows, I identify different notions of possibility and explain what I mean by them and why I think they deserve to be identified. In other words, I provide one way to understand different notions of possibility. […]

Later addition: In short, if relation R holds between events E and E* (where E* is later than E), to say that E gains new property at the moment when E* happens is to say that the Earth gains the property of being 384 400 km from the Moon at the location where the Moon is located. […]

Here you can find my paper that has been accepted for publication in European Journal for Philosophy of Science http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21630/

It is often the case that, in historiography, we have two explanations for some outcome, and we wish to know when one is better than the other. We assume here that both explanations are true in the sense that they explain. Consider the following explanations: E1: Eddington observed gravitational deflection in 1919 because Einstein formulated […]

In this post, I explain how to explore issues in the philosophy of history. Here, I focus on the issue of causal explanation in historiography, the study of the past. I reserve the term “history” to the events, processes, and conditions in the past. The main question of such inquiry is what historiography needs to […]