▽Simplicity ●12/21 04:40 First published Fri Oct 29, 2004; substantive revision Tue Dec 20, 2016 Most philosophers believe that, other things being equal, simpler theories are better. But what exactly does theoretical simplicity amount to? Syntactic simplicity, or elegance, measures the number and conciseness of the theory’s basic principles. Ontological simplicity,or parsimony, measures the number of kinds of entities po
▽The Uncertainty Principle ●07/13 08:32 First published Mon Oct 8, 2001; substantive revision Tue Jul 12, 2016 One striking aspect of the difference between classical and quantum physics is that whereas classical mechanics presupposes that exact simultaneous values can be assigned to all physical quantities,quantum mechanics denies this possibility, the prime example being the position and momentum of a particle. According to quantum me
▽Platonism in Metaphysics ●03/10 06:37 First published Wed May 12, 2004; substantive revision Wed Mar 9, 2016 Platonism is the view that there exist such things as abstract objects — where an abstract object is an object that does not exist in space or time and which is therefore entirely non-physical and non-mental. Platonism in this sense is a contemporary view.It is obviously related to the views of Plato in important ways, bu
▽Causal Determinism ●01/22 11:15 First published Thu Jan 23, 2003; substantive revision Thu Jan 21, 2016 In most of what follows, I will speak simply of determinism,rather than of causal determinism. This follows recent philosophical practice of sharply distinguishing views and theories of what causation is from any conclusions about the success or failure of determinism (cf. Earman, 1986; an exception is Mellor 1994). For the mo
▽Holism and Nonseparability in Physics ●01/06 13:45 First published Thu Jul 22, 1999; substantive revision Tue Jan 5, 2016 It has sometimes been suggested that quantum phenomena exhibit a characteristic holism or nonseparability, and that this distinguishes quantum from classical physics. One puzzling quantum phenomenon arises when one performs measurements on certain separated quantum systems. The results of some such measurements regularly exhibi
