In philosophy of causation, the notion of proportionality is important. It came to the philosophical literature from Yablo (1992) and has been extensively discussed since then. Woodward (2021, 15-16) characterizes the notion as follows: “Proportionality concerns the extent to which there is a match between the variation in the cause and the variation in the […]

In this post, I claim that focusing on timespans shorter than the traditional ones sheds new light on the study of the future. I argue that a microperspective on time can shed new light on issues related to future and futures research. Here is a summary of the differences between a microperspective and more common […]

In this post, I discuss how to assess the nature of a field of research and its differences from other fields. I focus on futures studies and discuss whether the approaches of futures studies are intellectually unified and whether there is some minimal unity in the field. I use the term “intellectual” to highlight to […]

In this post, I introduce a distinction between first-order future possibilities and second-order future possibilities and discuss why it is important. There are two ways of mapping the space of future possibilities: (1) We can take some view on the world (for example, a theory about some domain or a personal idea of the workings […]

I received an insightful response to my previous post from Chiel van den Akker who disagrees on several issues and nicely discusses the shotcomings of my thinking. Below, I publish the comment (it is already publish in the previous post with a permission) and provide some quick though on it. “C” refers to Chiel van […]

”The world is a messy place” – Adrian Currie In this post, I reflect on the nature of philosophy of historiography. I discuss what I think are significant turns in the practice of the field. Last week, June 2022, we had a workshop “The Future of Philosophy of Historiography” at Oulu, Finland. During and after […]

Consider the following claims: (A) Had the weather been cloudy, Eddington would not have observed gravitational deflection in 1919. (B) Had Eddington not been a pacifist, gravitational deflection would never have been observed. Claim (A) implies that the weather was an explanatory cause of the observation in 1919, and claim (B) implies that the pacifism […]

There are two senses of *contrastive* explanation that are confused with each other too often. Consider we ask “Why did my friend buy a house?”. There are two types of contrast, one of which is at the conceptual core of explaining while the other is not, although the latter might be methodologically useful. The first […]

Introduction Science requires resources. This limits the number of research programs[1] that can be initiated and kept alive. Due to this, we have to make decisions concerning which research programs to pursue. This generates the problem of pursuitworthiness. We have to identify those research programs that are worthy of pursuit. On what criteria can the […]

In a recent paper “Selection, presentism, and pluralist history” (2022), Hakob Barseghyan discusses presentism from the perspective of selection criteria in historiography, i.e. how to choose what events, phenomena, processes, and so on are studied in historiography. Barseghyan argues that there are three basic criteria neither of which is essentially presentist. Barseghyan argues that the […]