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John D. Norton’s Homepage — University of Pittsburgh (capture)

Source: https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/jdnorton.html Captured: 2026-09-25. Lightly reformatted from the page’s table-based layout; navigation links and image links omitted. Page footer: “Updated May 2020 and possibly later too.”

John D. Norton — Distinguished Professor, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA USA 15260. jdnorton@pitt.edu

  • Lakatos Award winning works: The Material Theory of Induction; The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference.
  • Latest draft monograph manuscripts: small-e empiricism; Applications of small-e empiricism.

Latest (site entries)

  • small-e empiricism is a version of empiricism adapted to modern science. It abandons the inductive skepticism of Big-E Empiricism and represents experience as a physical process, human or instrumental, that connects continuously with the system of interest. (Book contents: Part I, A Selective History of Empiricism — the early empiricist tradition, logical positivism/empiricism, constructive empiricism, experience as sense perception, the ascendancy of “empirical science,” principles of empiricism; Part II, small-e empiricism — the propositional representation of experience, experience generalized, experience as a process, the terminal obsession, small-e empiricism defined and defended, why not Big-E empiricism; Afterword.)

  • Applications of small-e empiricism: “The consequences of small-e empiricism in philosophy of science and epistemology include: a favoring of the material theory of induction; that the fallibility of inductive inference makes truth opaque, which resolves Gettier problems; a version of realism that mediates between strong versions of scientific realism and antirealism; and the maintaining of traditional empiricist objections to non-empirical metaphysics.” (Contents: small-e empiricism, briefly; the material theory of induction; inductive fallibilism; empiricism, epistemology and the Gettier problem; Gettier-like cases as successes of scientific progress; small-r realism; the proliferation of scientific realisms; inductive skepticism in scientific antirealism; against metaphysics.)

  • “Claims that information is fundamental are mistaken: The thermodynamic myth at the heart of information theory,” IAI News, 10 July 2026. (Popular article explaining why information entropy is not thermodynamic entropy and reviewing the trouble that follows when the two are confused.)

  • “Small-r realism: How Scientific Realism can Accommodate Inductive Fallibility”: “Small-r realism accommodates the fallibility of inductive inference by positing, as a general principle, that inductive inferences from experience can provide strong support for the truth of the contingent propositions of a scientific theory, but that whether that support has been realized must be left to a case-by-case analysis of individual sciences.”

  • Book forum on The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference: replies to comments by Agnes Bolinska, Molly Kao and Raphael Scholl (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science).

  • “Science Progresses with Gettier-Like Cases”: “the fallibility of inductive inference in small-e empiricism makes truth opaque. Once truth is no longer a condition for knowledge, Gettier cases cease to be troublesome and turn out to be celebrated as important discoveries in the progress of science.”

  • “Einstein against black holes: Why Einstein thought what he thought,” IAI News, 29 August 2025: “Einstein insisted doggedly, but mistakenly, that there is a physical singularity at the event horizon of a Schwarzschild black hole. His insistence arose from his use of mathematical methods different from those we now use.” (Popular version of “Einstein against Singularities: Analysis versus Geometry.”)

  • “Common Origin Inferences and the Material Theory of Induction,” Philosophies 2025, 10(5), 94: “Common origin inferences allow us to infer from coincidental agreements to their common origin. The material theory of induction allows us to determine when such inferences are cogent and how strong they are.”

  • “Spacetime is not a substance,” IAI News, 9 March 2025: “Einstein’s hole argument, as adapted to more recent philosophy of science, provides a physically motivated guide for deciding which elements of a theory represent distinct realities in the world. Two theoretical structures do not represent different realities if the two do not differ in observables and if the prevailing theory cannot determine which will arise from the same boundary conditions.”

  • “The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference: A Précis,” Journal for General Philosophy of Science, online 8 December 2025; and “Replies to Barroso Rojo, de Grefte, and Tricard,” online 11 December 2025 (book symposium).

  • “The Block Stacking Problem” (in Goodies): “How far past the edge of a table can a stable stack of blocks extend? Just make the stack tall enough and it can extend as far as you like. What happens when you take the limit of an infinite stack? Not what you might expect!”

  • “Too Good to be True: Entropy, Information, Computation and the Uninformed Thermodynamics of Erasure,” Philosophy of Science, FirstView, 2026: “Nearly a century of efforts have failed to find a novel connection of foundational importance between thermodynamic entropy and notions of information and computation… It includes an account of how the Landauer principle conflates dynamic with static probabilities.”

  • “The Rise and Fall of Karl Popper’s Anti-inductivism”: “Popper’s bold attempt to find an account of the rationality of science that did not employ inductive inference was destined to fail from the start, since science is an ineliminably inductive venture.” (Plus the informal polemic “Why Falsifiability does not Demarcate Science from Pseudoscience.”)

  • “Einstein against Singularities: Analysis versus Geometry,” Philosophy of Physics 2(1): 13, 1–73. DOI: 10.31389/pop.91: “In his treatment of spacetime singularities, Einstein privileged analytic expressions over geometry. Modern relativists do the reverse and thus find Einstein’s discussion baffling.”

  • “The Simply Uninformed Thermodynamics of Erasure,” Philosophy of Physics 3(1): 3, 1–21: “A purely thermodynamic argument precludes dissipationless erasure. Gibbs’ ‘-k p log p’ entropy formula, properly applied, does not assign an information entropy to pre-erasure states.”

  • “A Simple Minkowskian Time-Travel Spacetime,” American Journal of Physics 93(3), 2025, 241–249: “Adding a conical singularity to a Minkowski spacetime produces a temporally non-orientable spacetime… a traveler, passing the singularity, is returned to the traveler’s past where the traveler encounters the traveler’s past self.”

  • (With Wayne Myrvold) “On Norton’s ’…Shook…’ and Myrvold’s ‘Shakin’ …’,” Philosophy of Physics 1(1), Article 5, 2023.

  • “Lotteries, Bookmaking and Ancient Randomizers: Local and Global Analyses of Chance,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 95 (2022), 108–117.

  • “Chance Combinatorics: The Theory that History Forgot,” Perspectives on Science 31(6) (2023), 771–810.

  • The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference. BSPS open / University of Calgary Press, 2024: “In the material theory of induction, inductive inferences are warranted by domain specific facts. Those facts are in turn supported by further inductive inferences. This volume examines the large-scale structure of the resulting tangle of inductive inferences and relations of inductive support.” (Sequel to The Material Theory of Induction; book launch video, 4 December 2024.)

  • Metascience symposium on The Material Theory of Induction: commentaries by Mousa Mohammadian, William Peden and Elay Shech; “Author’s response to Mousa Mohammadian, William Peden and Elay Shech,” Metascience 31 (2022), 317–323.

  • The Material Theory of Induction. BSPS Open / University of Calgary Press, 2021. Open access, CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0. Description: “Which are the good inductive inferences or the proper relations of inductive support? We have sought for millennia to answer by means of universally applicable formal rules or schema. These efforts have failed. Background facts, not rules, ultimately determine which are the good inductive inferences. No formal rule applies universally. Each is confined to a restricted domain whose background facts there authorize them.” (Contents: Prolog; 1. The Material Theory of Induction Stated and Illustrated; 2. What Powers Inductive Inference?; 3. Replicability of Experiment; 4. Analogy; 5. Epistemic Virtues and Epistemic Values: A Skeptical Critique; 6. Simplicity as a Surrogate; 7. Simplicity in Model Selection; 8. Inference to the Best Explanation: The General Account; 9. Inference to the Best Explanation: Examples; 10. Why Not Bayes; 11. Circularity in the Scoring Rule Vindication of Probabilities; 12. No Place to Stand: the Incompleteness of All Calculi of Inductive Inference; 13. Infinite Lottery Machines; 14. Uncountable Problems; 15. Indeterministic Physical Systems; 16. A Quantum Inductive Logic; Epilog.)

  • Paradox: Puzzles of Chance and Infinity — online book for an introductory undergraduate course: “Infinity and chance are dangerous notions that can lead us to deep puzzlement and baffling paradoxes. Careful examination of them allows us to see past the paradoxes to a clear and controlled understanding of what was once perplexing and unapproachable.”

  • “The Metaphysics of Causation: An Empiricist Critique,” pp. 58–94 in Yafeng Shen (ed.), Alternative Approaches to Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024: “Contrary to Hume, science has found many ways in which things connect with other things in the world. Causal metaphysics, however, has failed to add anything factual to the relations discovered by science. It is at best an exercise in labeling that may have practical uses.”

Goodies (subsite)

“Some things are just too much fun” — explainers and applets: Einstein 1905 series (chasing the light; relativity of simultaneity; statistical physics; how big is an atom), Zurich Notebook peeks, “Einstein for Everyone” web book (nearly 40 chapters), “The Three Principal Problems of Philosophy of Modern Physics,” “Time Really Passes,” Maxwell’s demon exorcism, “You are not a Boltzmann Brain,” “Turtles all the way down,” “Castles in the air,” “The Dome: A Simple Violation of Determinism in Newtonian Mechanics” (“the mass on the dome may spontaneously be set in motion with no cause for the time or direction of the motion”; with an empirical “Dome Cam” test), “Induction without Probabilities” (“Must our degrees of belief be probabilities? I urge that if we are inferring inductively over indeterministic systems like the dome, then they cannot responsibly be probabilities.”), “How Not To Do Philosophy of Science,” “How Not To Think About Causation,” “Why Falsifiability does not Demarcate Science from Pseudoscience,” small-e empiricism, and more.

Bio

“I was born and grew up in Sydney Australia. I studied chemical engineering at the University of New South Wales (1971-74) and then worked for two years as a technologist at the Shell Oil Refinery at Clyde, Sydney. I then switched fields and began a doctoral program in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales (1978-1981). My dissertation was on the history of general relativity. When it was finished, I visited at the Einstein Papers Project (1982-83) when the Papers were located at Princeton University Press with John Stachel as editor. In September 1983, I came to Pittsburgh as a visitor in the Center for Philosophy of Science/visiting faculty member in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. I’ve been in the Department of HPS ever since. I was promoted to full professor in 1997, served as Chair in 2000-2005 and was promoted to Distinguished Professor in 2014. I served as the Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science, from September 2005 to August 2016.”

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