Harjit Bhogal

About me

I'm an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. I work mainly in philosophy of science and metaphysics.

I'm currently working on projects about the value of the special sciences in a world of physics, about the Humean approach to laws of nature, and about explanation as unification.

I also have research interests in philosophy of economics, philosophy of physics, and epistemology.

Before coming to Maryland I received my PhD from NYU in 2017. My thesis was about explanation in the special sciences. Before that I did a B.Phil in Philosophy and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, both at the University of Oxford.

My email is bhogal@umd.edu.

Here is a CV.

Publications

• “Coincidences and the Grain of Explanation”
  Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Forthcoming (Abstract) (PDF)
  

  
  I give an account of what makes an event a coincidence.

  I start by critically discussing a couple of other approaches to the notion of coincidence -- particularly that of Lando (2017) -- before developing my own view. The central idea of my view is that the correct understanding of coincidences is closely related to our understanding of the correct 'level' or 'grain' of explanation. Coincidences have a kind of explanatory deficiency — if they did not have this deficiency they would not be coincidences. This deficiency, I claim, is the same explanatory deficiency as when we give low-level explanations of special science phenomena. Such explanations are typically too specific and not robust enough. I claim that there is this same badness in purported explanations of coincidences.

  I cash out this idea sketching an account of explanatory goodness — an account of what makes explanations better or worse -- and using that to give a more precise account of coincidences.

• “Nomothetic Explanation and Humeanism about Laws of Nature”
  Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Forthcoming (Abstract) (PDF)
  Winner of the 2018 Sanders Prize in Metaphysics

  
  Humeanism about laws of nature — the view that the laws reduce to the Humean mosaic — is a popular view, but currently existing versions face powerful objections. The non-supervenience objection, the non-fundamentality objection and the explanatory circularity objection have all been thought to cause problems for the Humean. However, these objections share a guiding thought — they are all based on the idea that there is a certain kind of divergence between the practice of science and the metaphysical picture suggested by Humeanism.

  I suggest that the Humean can respond to these objections not by rejecting this divergence, but by arguing that is appropriate. In particular the Humean can, in the spirit of Loewer (2012), distinguish between scientific and metaphysical explanation — this is motivated by differing aims of explanation in science and metaphysics. And they can further leverage this into distinctions between scientific and metaphysical fundamentality and scientific and metaphysical possibility. We can use these distinctions to respond to the objections that the Humean faces.

• “What the Humean should say about Entanglement” (with Zee R Perry)
  Noûs, 2017 (Abstract) (PDF) (Published Version)

  
  Tim Maudlin has influentially argued that Humeanism about laws of nature stands in conflict with quantum mechanics. Specifically Humeanism implies the principle Separability: the complete physical state of a world is determined by the intrinsic physical state of each space-time point. Maudlin argues Separability is violated by the entangled states posited by QM.

  We argue that Maudlin only establishes that a stronger principle, which we call Strong Separability, is in tension with QM. Separability is not in tension with QM. Moreover, while the Humean requires Separability to capture the core tenets of her view, there's no Humean-specific motivation for accepting Strong Separability.

  We go on to give a Humean account of entangled states which satisfies Separability. The core idea is that certain quantum states depend upon the Humean mosaic in much the same way as the laws do. In fact, we offer a variant of the Best System account on which the systemization procedure that generates the laws also serves to ground these states.

  We show how this account works by applying it to the example of Bohmian Mechanics. The 3N-dimensional configuration space, the world particle in it and the wave function on it are part of the best system of the Humean mosaic, which consists of N particles moving in 3-dimensional space. We argue that this account is superior to the Humean account of Bohmian Mechanics defended by Loewer and Albert, which takes the 3N-dimensional space, and its inhabitants, as fundamental.

• “Minimal Anti-Humeanism”
  Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2017 (Abstract) (PDF) (Published Version)

  
  I argue that there is a tension in our theorizing about laws of nature. We have powerful reasons to think that laws are not universal generalizations -- if they are we would face the problem of explanatory circularity. But we have powerful reasons, stemming from our practice of using and reasoning with laws of nature, to think that laws are universal generalizations.

  I start by elucidating this tension. I then suggest a view of laws that avoids this tension -- I call it Minimal anti-Humeanism. The view says that the laws are the universal generalizations that are not grounded in their instances. This view has advantages in addition to avoiding the tension -- for example, it is ontologically minimal and provides clear answers to the classic identification and inference problems for accounts of law. I end by locating the view in the Humean versus anti-Humean debate. The view turns out to be not easy to classify in these terms -- as the name suggests, I think it is best understood as an anti-Humean view, but reasonable people could disagree. Either way, the view is one which could be attractive to people with both Humean and anti-Humean inclinations.

Under Review (titles suppressed for blind review)

• A paper about natural properties in the special sciences (PDF)
• A paper about primitive modal facts, the pattern subsumption conception of explanation, and the “postmodal” approach to metaphysics (PDF)

In Progress

• “Making Enough of a Difference: Graded Difference-Making and Levels of Explanation” (PDF)
• A short paper discussing some putative counterexamples to Humeanism (PDF)
• “Neuroeconomics and Special Science Autonomy”
• “Humean Nomic Essentialism” (with Zee R Perry)
• A paper about quasi-realism in metaethics and disingenuousness (with Martín Abreu Zavaleta, Dan Waxman, and Mike Zhao)
• A paper about why there are stable macrolevel regularities when the microlevel is a blooming, buzzing confusion.