Wayne Myrvold
Professor
Acting Undergraduate Chair
Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science
BSc McGill,
Office: Stevenson Hall 4143
E-mail: wmyrvold@uwo.ca
I am a philosopher of science, with emphasis on philosophy of physics. Much of my work has focused on the uses of probability in its various guises in science. This is the topic of by forthcoming book, Beyond Chance and Credence, in which I argue that the familiar dichotomy of two senses of “probability”—degree of belief, or credence, and physical chance—is too restrictive, and that there is an important role to play for a hybrid concept that combines both epistemic and physical considerations.
I am Subject Editor for Quantum Mechanics for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
A continually updated list of my publications can be found on my .
Recent Publications
Book
Beyond Chance and Credence: A theory of hybrid probabilities. Oxford University Press, 2021.
Articles
The Science of Θ Δ cs.” In Foundations of Physics. Available at
“‘—It would be possible to do a lengthy dialectical number on this;’,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. Available online at
“Explaining Thermodynamics: What remains to be done?” in Valia Allori, ed., Statistical Mechanics and Scientific Explanation: Determinism, Indeterminism and Laws of Nature, (World Scientific, 2020).
“Subjectivists about Probability Should be Realists about Quantum States,” in Meir Hemmo and Orly Shenker, eds., Quantum, Probability, Logic: The Work and Influence of Itamar Pitowsky, (Springer Nature, 2020), 449–465.
“On the Status of Quantum State Realism,” in Juha Saatsi and Stephen French, eds., Scientific Realism and the Quantum(Oxford University Press, 2020), 229–251.
“How Could Relativity be Anything Other Than Physical?” Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 67 (August 2019), 137–143.
“Learning is a Risky Business.” Erkenntnis 84 (June 2019), 577–584.
“Ontology for Relativistic Collapse Theories.” In Olimpia Lombardi, Sebastian Fortin, Cristian López and Federico Holik, eds., Quantum Worlds (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 9–31.
(with Marco Genovese and Abner Shimony) “Bell’s Theorem,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), .
ψ-ontology result without the Cartesian Product Assumption.” Physical Review A 97 (May 2018), 052109.
“Ontology for Collapse Theories,” in Shan Gao, ed., The Collapse of the Wave Function (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 97–123.
“Relativistic Markovian dynamical collapse theories must employ nonstandard degrees of freedom,” Physical Review A 96 (December 2017), 062116.
“On the Evidential Import of Unification.” Philosophy of Science 84 (January 2017), 92–114.
“Lessons of Bell’s Theorem: Nonlocality, yes; Action at a distance, not necessarily.” In Shan Gao and Mary Bell, eds., Quantum Nonlocality and Reality: 50 Years of Bell's Theorem (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 238–260.
“Probabilities in Statistical Mechanics.” In Christopher Hitchcock and Alan Hájek, eds., Oxford Handbook of Probability and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2016), 573–600.
“Quantum Mechanics and Narratability.” Foundations of Physics 46 (July 2016), 759-775.
“What is a Wavefunction?” Synthese 192 (October 2015), 3247–3274.
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Some Considerations Regarding Conditional Probabilities.” Erkenntnis 80 (June 2015), 573–603.
"Probabilities in Statistical Mechanics." The Oxford Handbook of Probability and Philosophy (2016): 573-600.
Myrvold, Wayne C., and Joy Christian. Quantum Reality, Relativistic Causality, and Closing the Epistemic Circle. Berlin: Springer, 2009.
