Dr. Alison Fernandes

  AGENCY   Causation   LAWS OF NATURE   PHILOSOPHY OF PHYSICS   TIME   Time Travel

I work in the metaphysics of science to develop accounts of scientific relations, including laws, causation and probabilities. My method of doing so is to think about why we reason about the world using these relations. In the case of causation, for example, we reason about the world using causal terms because doing so is essential in contexts where we must deliberate and decide what to do. So, even though causal relations don"t appear in how fundamental physical theories are formulated, they are a necessary part of our theorising. Using the function of scientific relations, I explain what these relations are and how they relate to the posits of fundamental physics. Considerations of agency also contribute to explaining temporal asymmetries in these relations, such as why causes come before their effects, or why we think of the past but not the future as 'chancy'. These asymmetries partly reflect the fact that we live our lives oriented in time"we make choices about the future and regarding the past as fixed"even if the orientation of our own lives should itself be explained in physical terms. Ultimately, considering our own needs as temporally oriented agents is essential for explaining our scientific view of the world. This approach to the metaphysics of science contributes to our understanding of the function of science, helps relate different scientific theories to one another and provides a unified picture of temporal asymmetries"explaining how they relate and how they might ultimately be traced back to entropic features of the universe. While these are longstanding projects in philosophy, what is particularly unusual in my approach combining a focus on physics and agency: using our relation to science to think through our scientific view of the world.