Bio:
Nick Tosh is a philosophy lecturer at NUI Galway (Ireland). He received his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science in 2008 from the University of Cambridge. His early work focused on methodological issues in the history of science. More recently, he has become interested in the metaphysics of objective chance.
Dates of Visit:
September 2015 - November 2015
Project Title:
Ensemble realism: A new approach to statistical mechanical probability.
Project Description:
“What we know about a body can generally be described most accurately and most simply by saying that it is one taken at random from a great number (ensemble) of bodies which are completely described.” So wrote Willard Gibbs in 1902, but with his fingers crossed, for he regarded ensembles as convenient fictions. A century later, they are still convenient, and we still have no settled account of the literal meaning of statistical mechanical probability assignments. The aim of this project is to show how talk of ensembles might be taken seriously. (The project builds on, and seeks to generalise, the frequentist analysis presented in bjps.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/12/11/bjps.axu027.)