Sunday, November 20, 2011

And the Winner of the 2011 (Unofficial) IOAT Readers' Choice Book Award is...

With 139 votes cast and 14 more preferences than its closest competitor, the inaugural (unofficial) It's Only A Theory Readers' Choice Book Award goes to (drumroll):

Tim Maudlin!

for his 2007 book 'The Metaphysics Within Physics'!

Congratulations, Tim!!! Unfortunately for Tim, the Award is just for the glory (and I'm afraid not even much of that. I bet he won't put it on his CV.)


(For those of you without any sense of humor or much common sense, please let me clarify that I do realize that this is not a serious book award and that I do not mean our little poll to replace the judgement of the Lakatos Award's committee. Also, I'd like to apologize again to the many people whose books I failed to include in the poll (and, in particular, to fellow bloggers Steven French (for his 2006 book with Decio Krause Identity in Physics) and Eric Winsberg (for his 2010 book Science in the Age of Computer Simulations [shoot!!! this is worse than teaching logic! How many parentheses do I need to close now???]))) [That should do it. Can't be bothered to check :-)] 

For the record, these were the numbers (the percentages don't add up because voters could choose multiple options):
1. Maudlin (2007)  38 (27%)
2. Wimsatt (2007)  24 (17%)
3. Ladyman & Ross (2007) 22 (15%)
4. van Fraassen (2009) 20 (14%)
5. Wilson (2006) 17 (12%)
6.  Bokulich (2008) 13 (9%)
7. Chakravartty (2007) 10 (7%), Craver (2007) 10 (7%) Douglas (2009) 10 (7%)
8. Mitchell (2009) 7 (5%)
9. Snyder (2006) 2 (1%)
























1 comment:

  1. I'm posting the following comment on behalf of Tim Maudlin:

    "I would like to thank everyone who took the trouble to vote: it is gratifying and encouraging to know that one's work is being read! But more important than the particular outcome, which is likely to be just a random fluctuation, thanks to Gabriele for reminding us of the breadth of interesting work being done in the field."

    ReplyDelete

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