Curriculum Vita of John Thomas Roberts April 3, 2013

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1 Curriculum Vita of John Thomas Roberts April 3, 2013 Professor Department of Philosophy University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC EDUCATION Ph.D., Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, M.A., Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, B.S., Physics (with Highest Honors), Georgia Institute of Technology, ACADEMIC POSITIONS Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Fall 2011-present). Visiting Fellow, DFG Research Group Causation and Explanation at the University of Cologne (January-March 2012). Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Fall, 2005-Spring 2011). Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Texas A&M University (Spring 2005). Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1999-Spring, 2005). Visiting Fellow, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh ( ). Teaching Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh ( ). Teaching Assistant, Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh ( ). 1

2 FELLOWSHIPS AND HONORS Philosophy of Science Association award for best article by a recent PhD published in the journal Philosophy of Science, 2003 (for Leibniz on Force and Absolute Motion ). Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, (awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies). Jacob K. Javits Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, (awarded by the United States Department of Education). Alan Ross Anderson Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh, Provost Humanities Fellowship, PUBLICATIONS BOOK The Law-Governed Universe. Oxford University Press (2009). ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS Fine-Tuning and the Infra-Red Bull s Eye, Philosophical Studies 160(2), , Chance without Credence, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 64(1), 33-59, Extra-Physical Structure in a Physical World; or, Is the Study of Life Provincial? Monist 94(2), , Some Laws of Nature are Metaphysically Contingent, Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 88(3), pp , A Puzzle about Laws, Symmetries and Measurable Quantities, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 59(2), pp , Reply to Skow, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 75(1), ,

3 Is Logical Empiricism Committed to the Ideal of Value-Free Science? in Value- Free Science: Ideal or Illusion?, edited by Harold Kincaid, John Dupre, and Allison Wylie, Oxford University Press, Contact with the Nomic: A Challenge for Deniers of Humean Supervenience (Part One), (with John Earman), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 71(1), Contact with the Nomic: A Challenge for Deniers of Humean Supervenience (Part Two), (with John Earman), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71(2), Measurability and Physical Laws, Synthese 144(3), Determinism, in The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, edited by Jessica Pfeifer and Sahotra Sarkar, Routledge, There Are No Laws of the Social Sciences, in Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Science, edited by Christopher Read Hitchock, Blackwell, Leibniz on Force and Absolute Motion, Philosophy of Science, 70, , Ceteris Paribus Lost, (with John Earman and Sheldon Russell Smith), Erkenntnis 57(3), , Undermining Undermined: Why Humean Supervenience Never Needed to be Debugged (Even if it s a Necessary Truth), Philosophy of Science 68 (3, supplement), S98-S Laws of Nature as an Indexical Term: A Reinterpretation of the Best-System Analysis, Philosophy of Science 66 3(supplement), S502-S511, Ceteris Paribus, There is No Problem of Provisos, (with John Earman) Synthese 118, , Lewis, Carroll, and Seeing through the Looking Glass, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76, , BOOK REVIEWS Gordon Belot, Geometric Possiblity, forthcoming in Review of Metaphysics. 3

4 Mauro Dorato, The Software of the Universe: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Laws of Nature, in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, PRESENTATIONS Frequencies, Law-Governed Frequencies, and Ranges of Values, Johannes von Kries Conception of Probability, its Roots and Impact, University of Bonn, September 13th 14th, A Simple Theory of Causation in the Agency/Manipulationist Tradition; or, Is Causation Normative? Yes, and How! Triangle Area Philosophy Symposium, August 31, Sampling Inference, Theoretical Inference, and the Scientific Realism Debate, Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association, Stirling, Scotland, July 8, An Old Solution to the Old Riddle of Induction Yields a New Solution to the New Riddle of Induction, Annual Conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, Stirling, Scotland, July 5, An Old Solution to the Old Riddle of Induction Yields a New Solution to the New Riddle of Induction, paper presented to the Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, June 8, Comments on Ken Gemes on Nietzsche on Free Will, comments delivered at the conference Free Will: Then and Now, Institute of Philosophy, London, April Normativism about Counterfactuals, Nomic Necessity, and Perhaps Dispositions, paper presented at the conference Causation, Modality, Dispositions at the University of Cologne, March Laws about Frequencies? paper presented at the conference Laws and Chances at the University of Cologne, March Direct Inference and the New Riddle of Induction, paper presented to the Department of Philosophy, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, November Measurement, Counterfactuals, Laws, and Fine-Tuning, paper presented at the conference Laws of Nature: Their Nature and Knowability, at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario, May

5 Measurement, Counterfactuals, and Laws, presented at the conference Metaphysics of Science 09, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, England, September Measurement, Counterfactuals, and Laws, paper presented to the Graduate Student Research Colloquium, Department of Philosophy, King s College, London, March Measurement, Counterfactuals, and Laws, paper presented to the Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario, February Why Do Laws of Nature Support Counterfactual Conditionals? paper presented to the Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College, July Comments on Harman, presented at conference The War on Induction, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, April Laws, Theories, Measurements, Counterfactuals, and how Those Things are All Related to One Another, presented at the Annual Meeting of the North Carolina Philosophical Society, High point University, high point, NC, February The Meta-Theoretic Conception of Laws of Nature, presented to the Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College, July Coping With Severe Test Anxiety: Problems and Prospects for an Error- Statistical Approach to the Testing of High-Level Theories, ERROR 06 Conference, Virginia Polytechnic and State University, Blacksburg, VA, June Comments on Roland, Annual Meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, Chicago, IL, April Laws, Counterfactuals, and Measurement, presented to the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University, August Comments on Sickler, presented at Annual Meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, Chicago, IL, April Comments on Kronz, presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Durham, NC, February

6 The Meta-Theoretic Conception of Laws of Nature, presented to the Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, December Sellars, van Fraassen, Layer Cakes, and Scientific Realism, presented to the Department of Philosophy, Florida State University, February, A Puzzle About Symmetries, Laws, and Measurable Quantities, presented to the Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas, December Comments on Schneider (a reply to Are the Intuitions that the Laws of Nature Govern Misleading? by Susan Schneider), presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, December 2002 in Philadelphia. What Interpretation Might Be, presented at the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, September Scientific Images, and Why They re Good Things to Try to Get; or, Scientific Realism without Convergent Realism, colloquium paper, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, September Reliabilist Verificationism and Underdetermination, colloquium paper, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, April New and Improved Humean Supervenience, colloquium paper, Department of History and Philosophy, Montana State University, March Is Logical Empiricism Committed to the Ideal of Value-Free Science? presented at the conference Value-Free Science: Ideal or Illusion? Center for Science and Human Values, University of Alabama at Birmingham, February Undermining Undermined: Why Humean Supervenience Never Needed to be Debugged (Even If It s a Necessary Truth), presented at the Philosophy of Science Association Biennial Meeting, Vancouver, British Columbia, November Undermining Undermined, presented at the North Carolina / South Carolina Philosophical Society, Duke University, February Laws of Nature as an Indexical Term: A Reinterpretation of Lewis s Best- System Analysis, presented at the Philosophy of Science Association Biennial Meeting, Kansas City, Missouri, October

7 Leibniz s Newtonianism, presented at HOPOS 98 (Second International History of Philosophy of Science Conference), University of Notre Dame, March

8 TEACHING RECORD Undergraduate Courses Taught: Introduction to Philosophy through Great Works Introduction to Philosophy of Science Thinking about Time (a First-Year Seminar) Is Free Will and Illusion? (a First-Year Seminar) Experience and Reality Symbolic Logic Metaphysical Systems Philosophy of Physics Mixed (Undergraduate and Graduate) Course Taught: Philosophy and Physics of Space and Time (co-taught with Professor H. van Dam, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) Graduate Courses Taught: Philosophy of Science Seminar on Laws of Nature Seminar on Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics The Metaphysics of Time Recent Work on Scientific Realism Past Three Years: Fall 2008: PHIL 110 (Introduction to Philosophy: Great Works) Fall 2008: PHIL 850 (Seminar in Philosophy of Science: Laws of Nature) Spring 2009: Fall 2009: PHIL 450 (Philosophy of Natural Science) Fall 2009: PHIL 110H (Introduction to Philosophy: Great Works, Honors Section) Spring 2010: PHIL 076 (First-Year Seminar: Is Free Will an Illusion?) Fall 2010: PHIL 076H (First-Year Seminar: Is Free Will an Illusion? Honors Section) Spring 2011: PHIL 750 (Advanced Studies in Philosophy of Science: Recent Work on Scientific Realism) Spring 2011: PHIL 994 (Dissertation Research Seminar) Undergraduate Honors Projects Supervised 8

9 Kenneth Silver (Honors Thesis Completed April, Thesis title: Chairs Exist, and That s no Trivial Matter. Graduate Students Supervised Sarah Scott (PhD completed?? thesis title:??) Jamin Asay (MA completed April 2007; thesis title:??) GRANTS Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, (awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies), $60,000. Junior Faculty Development Grant, UNC-Chapel Hill (2002). PROFESSIONAL SERVICE TO DISCIPLINE Referee for the journals Australasian Journal of Philosophy, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, International Studies in Philosophy of Science, Nous, Philosopher s Imprint, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy of Science, Synthese. Chair of session on The Problem of A Priori Knowledge. (Speaker: Nick Zangwill; Commentator: David Sanford.) Annual Meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, Minneapolis, Minnesota, May Chair of session on A Bayesian Account of Severity. (Speaker: Prasanta Bandyopadhyay; commentator: Deborah Mayo.) Annual Meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, Chicago, Illinois, May Participant, Philosophy of Experimental Inference: Induction, Reliability, and Error, an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers. June 14-July 23, Director: Deborah G. Mayo. WITHIN UNC-CHAPEL HILL Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Philosophy: 2005-present.. Member, Graduate Admissions Committee, Department of Philosophy: , ,

10 Member, Placement Committee, Department of Philosophy: Member, Undergraduate Committee, Department of Philosophy: , Member, Graduate Committee, Department of Philosophy: , Member, Hiring Committee, Department of Philosophy: Member, Colloquium Committee, Department of Philosophy: RESEARCH STATEMENT Most of my research is located in the intersection of philosophy of science and metaphysics, though recently I have begun branching out into the epistemology of science and philosophy of religion. I recently published a book, The Law-Governed Universe, which presented and defended a new theory of what laws of nature are. Since then I have spent a lot of time thinking about the treatment of counterfactual conditionals in that book, and even more time thinking about what the theory of laws I defended implies about objective probability and probabilistic laws of nature. I developed an account of probabilistic laws, and realized that it is actually independent of everything I defended in the book; you could combine it with any other general philosophical approach to laws of nature, and the result would be an account of the objective probabilities that occur in scientific theories that has some unique advantages over other accounts defended by contemporary philosophers. My most ambitious current project is that of writing a book developing and defending this account of objective probability. A second line of research I am pursuing now concerns the idea that a very simple and streamlined account of sampling inferences (inferences that draw a conclusion about a population from properties of a sample drawn from that population) might provide new answers to a range of the core problems in philosophy of science. I am currently finishing a paper that applies this idea to one of the old chestnuts, Hempel s paradox of confirmation (a.k.a. the paradox of the ravens), yielding a novel resolution of the paradox with some important advantages over the standard Bayesian resolution. At an earlier stage of development is a paper on the scientific realism debate, arguing that it is legitimate to think of high-level theoretical inferences as special kinds of sampling inference, and that when we do, the question of whether we ought to be realists or instrumentalists about a particular scientific theory becomes much more tractable. Finally, as I mentioned above, I have started doing some work in philosophy of religion. I have published one paper in this area, on the topic of the so-called fine-tuning argument for the existence of God. I argue that the way this argument is usually formalized in the existing philosophical literature is flawed, and that a better formalization is available which evades all of the standard philosophical objections to that argument. But I also argue that the conclusion of this argument is quite limited: It is only that certain apparent features of the physical universe provide some evidence in favor of a designer; the argument does not tell us how strong this evidence is, nor does it 10

11 support any interesting assumptions about the attributes of the designer (if there is one). In the near future, I hope to return to issues in the intersection of philosophy of science and philosophy of religion, and in particular to investigate the question of whether there is a conception of divine action in the created world that does not come into conflict with accepted contemporary scientific views about explanation. TEACHING STATEMENT Taking a philosophy course in college ought to be interesting and challenging. But more importantly, it ought to be relevant to your life, even if you are not going to pursue a career in philosophy. It should expose you to ideas and arguments that you find yourself thinking about again years later. It should help you develop skills for doing things like analyzing and evaluating chains of reasoning, and identifying and articulating implicit presuppositions standing behind ideas and actions, both your own and others. It should enable you to live more reflectively, in ways that make a difference to the quality of your own life and to the contributions you make to the lives of others. It isn t easy for a philosophy teacher make courses do all this. Perhaps this is especially difficult for a teacher who, like me, teaches outside the areas of ethics and political philosophy. How can philosophizing about matters other than how we ought to live and how we ought to order our society make any real difference in the lives of students who are going to pursue practical careers over and above the pleasant recreation that it provides for those who happen to think it s fun? This is the problem I have struggled with the most in my undergraduate teaching. I think I have made significant progress, but I still find it very challenging and I don t expect ever to stop being challenged. The approach I take is to look at an undergraduate philosophy course as an opportunity to help students learn how to take apparently intractable questions and make them tractable. For example, in my First-Year Seminar Is Free Will an Illusion? I spend a great deal of time on a preliminary question: What exactly do people mean when they talk about free will? Is there anything that would be worth having that can reasonably be called by that name, and if so, then precisely what is it? These are questions that appeals to the imagination, but is very difficult to pin down exactly what they are asking. It is also very hard to see how there could be any legitimate way of defending an answer to the question. How can we respond to the question at all except by unfettered speculation? It is tempting to answer like this: Well, there is no possibility of objectively establishing the superiority of either answer, so in the end any opinion is just as valid as any other. There is no point in trying to figure out what the right answer is. If you feel the need to answer the question, then pick whichever answer is most congenial to you, and rest assured that no one can show that you are wrong but remember that you can t show that anyone who disagrees with you is wrong either. I try to show my students that, contrary to appearances, we do not have to leave the matter at that. There are ways of refining the question of the reality of the flow of time, making it more precise, that make it possible to give good reasons for one answer or the other. These ways involve introducing new concepts, making those concepts as precise as possible, and learning how to reformulate the original question with the help of these concepts. There is not a formula or algorithm that can be applied automatically to yield 11

12 an uncontestable result; even after the question is made precise, there are reasons that can be offered for both answers. But it is possible to adjudicate the dispute in a rational way. Though the course is about free will, the most important thing I try to teach my students is not about free will in particular. It is that there are ways of taking deep and apparently unanswerable questions and making them more precise, in such a way that we can see what sorts of things might count as reasons for answering them one way rather than another. The trick is to replace the original question by another question, subject to two constraints: First, it must be reasonably clear that the second question is a plausible candidate for what the original question is really getting at; second, it must be easier to figure out how to go about answering the second question than the original question. This is something philosophers do all the time, but it is relevant even when the task at hand is not that of answering some abstract philosophical question. It is a valuable skill to have whenever one confronts fundamental questions about one s own life and choices. Having this skill enables one to resist the intellectually lazy relativism widespread in our culture, which says that any question that cannot be answered by a calculation or a scientific experiment is a question we must each simply answer according to our own tastes, which there is no disputing. I sometimes teach the undergraduate introduction to philosophy of science. Here there are more specific aims that I believe the course ought to serve. Science has become a pervasive feature of modern life, and the institutions of science are invested with a tremendous amount of intellectual authority. I try to teach students that just as our political institutions wield a kind of authority that requires a critical justification, so do our scientific institutions. Even if our political institutions are just, we are not being citizens in the fullest sense if we do not consider the basis of their authority with a critical eye. Analogously, even if scientific knowledge is perfectly well-founded, we are not being citizens of our intellectual community in the fullest sense if we do not critically scrutinize the basis of science s claim to authority. The traditional justification of the intellectual authority of science is, of course, an appeal to the scientific method. My primary goal in teaching introductory philosophy of science is to encourage and enable students to think about what this method is, and what reasons can be given for thinking that it is capable of legitimizing scientific knowledge. At the graduate level, I mostly teach seminars in the philosophy of science to graduate students who specialize in some other branch of philosophy. This suits me well, for I pursue philosophy of science with an eye toward its connections with other branches of philosophy. I believe that a graduate seminar should be an extended conversation, and I try to make my seminars function in that way. Since I have been at Chapel Hill, there have been few graduate students specializing in philosophy of science, but many excellent students with particular interests in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. The topics I have taught and hope to teach in graduate seminars have lent themselves well to conversation across these fields. In the future, there are good prospects of attracting more students who wish to focus on philosophy of science, but I hope to retain the inter-field character of my seminars. 12