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17Isabelle F. Peschard and Bas C. van Fraassen (Eds.): The Experimental Side of Modeling: (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol 21). University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 2018, 336 pp., $ 40,00 (Paperback), ISBN: 978-1-5179-0534-7 (review)Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 51 (3): 499-502. 2020.
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12Big dragons on small islands: generality and particularity in science: Review of Angela Potochnik’s idealization and the aims of science (review)Biology and Philosophy 33 (3-4): 1-12. 2018.Angela Potochnik’s Idealization and the Aims of Science (Chicago) defends an ambitious and systematic account of scientific knowledge: ultimately science pursues human understanding rather than truth. Potochnik argues that idealization is rampant and unchecked in science. Further, given that idealizations involve departures from truth, this suggests science is not primarily about truth. I explore the relationship between truths about causal patterns and scientific understanding in light of this,…Read more
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14Oren harman and michael r. dietrich (eds). Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018, 336 pp (review)History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (2): 1-3. 2020.
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20Isabelle F. Peschard and Bas C. van Fraassen (Eds.): The Experimental Side of ModelingJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 51 (3): 499-502. 2020.
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115Why experiments matterInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (9-10): 1066-1090. 2019.ABSTRACTExperimentation is traditionally considered a privileged means of confirmation. However, why and how experiments form a better confirmatory source relative to other strategies is unclear, and recent discussions have identified experiments with various modeling strategies on the one hand, and with ‘natural’ experiments on the other hand. We argue that experiments aiming to test theories are best understood as controlled investigations of specimens. ‘Control’ involves repeated, fine-graine…Read more
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42Creativity and PhilosophyBritish Journal of Aesthetics 60 (2): 225-229. 2020.Creativity and PhilosophyBerys Gaut and Matthew Kieran Routledge. 2018. pp. 394. £30.99.
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31Scientific Knowledge and the Deep Past: History MattersCambridge University Press. 2019.Historical sciences like paleontology and archaeology have uncovered unimagined, remarkable and mysterious worlds in the deep past. How should we understand the success of these sciences? What is the relationship between knowledge and history? In Scientific Knowledge and the Deep Past: History Matters, Adrian Currie examines recent paleontological work on the great changes that occurred during the Cretaceous period - the emergence of flowering plants, the splitting of the mega-continent Gondwana…Read more
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37Epistemic Optimism, Speculation, and the Historical SciencesPhilosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 11. 2019.Here’s something I’m willing to claim we know: Homo sapiens, in particular the Polynesian settlers who first arrived in Aotearoa around the twelfth century, take the lion’s share of causal blame for the extinction of a lineage of enormous flightless birds: the moa. Stretching to three metres at their tallest, moa were a distinctive and remarkable feature of Aotearoa’s primeval forests, playing the main browser and grazer role in this unique bird-based ecosystem. Once humans turned up forests wer…Read more
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65Paleobiology and philosophyBiology and Philosophy 34 (2): 31. 2019.I offer four ways of distinguishing paleobiology from neontology, and from this develop a sketch of the philosophy of paleobiology. I then situate and describe the papers in the special issue Paleobiology and Philosophy, and reflect on the value and prospects of paleontology-focused philosophy.
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59Simplicity, one-shot hypotheses and paleobiological explanationHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 41 (1): 10. 2019.Paleobiologists often provide simple narratives to explain complex, contingent episodes. These narratives are sometimes ‘one-shot hypotheses’ which are treated as being mutually exclusive with other possible explanations of the target episode, and are thus extended to accommodate as much about the episode as possible. I argue that a provisional preference for such hypotheses provides two kinds of productive scaffolding. First, they generate ‘hypothetical difference-makers’: one-shot hypotheses h…Read more
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54Bottled Understanding: The Role of Lab Work in EcologyBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (3): 905-932. 2020.It is often thought that the vindication of experimental work lies in its capacity to be revelatory of natural systems. I challenge this idea by examining laboratory experiments in ecology. A central task of community ecology involves combining mathematical models and observational data to identify trophic interactions in natural systems. But many ecologists are also lab scientists: constructing microcosm or ‘bottle’ experiments, physically realizing the idealized circumstances described in math…Read more
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42Creativity, conservativeness & the social epistemology of scienceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 76 1-4. 2019.
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46Introduction: Creativity, Conservatism & the Social Epistemology of ScienceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science A. forthcoming.
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58Existential risk, creativity & well-adapted scienceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 76 39-48. 2019.
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42Existential Risk, Creativity & Well-Adapted ScienceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
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66Mass extinctions as major transitionsBiology and Philosophy 34 (2): 29. 2019.Both paleobiology and investigations of ‘major evolutionary transitions’ are intimately concerned with the macroevolutionary shape of life. It is surprising, then, how little studies of major transitions are informed by paleontological perspectives and. I argue that this disconnect is partially justified because paleobiological investigation is typically ‘phenomena-led’, while investigations of major transitions are ‘theory-led’. The distinction turns on evidential relevance: in the former case,…Read more
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106Frameworks for Historians & PhilosophersHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 9 (1): 1-34. 2018.The past can be a stubborn subject: it is complex, heterogeneous and opaque. To understand it, one must decide which aspects of the past to emphasise and which to minimise. Enter frameworks. Frameworks foreground certain aspects of the historical record while backgrounding others. As such, they are both necessary for, and conducive to, good history as well as good philosophy. We examine the role of frameworks in the history and philosophy of science and argue that they are necessary for both for…Read more
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47Philosophy of Science and the Curse of the Case StudyIn Christopher Daly (ed.), Palgrave Handbook on Philosophical Methods, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 553-572. 2015.
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65Method Pluralism, Method Mismatch, & Method BiasPhilosophers' Imprint 19. 2019.Pluralism about scientific method is more-or-less accepted, but the consequences have yet to be drawn out. Scientists adopt different methods in response to different epistemic situations: depending on the system they are interested in, the resources at their disposal, and so forth. If it is right that different methods are appropriate in different situations, then mismatches between methods and situations are possible. This is most likely to occur due to method bias: when we prefer a particular…Read more
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45Geoengineering TensionsFutures. forthcoming.There has been much discussion of the moral, legal and prudential implications of geoengineering, and of governance structures for both the research and deployment of such technologies. However, insufficient attention has been paid to how such measures might affect geoengineering in terms of the incentive structures which underwrite scientific progress. There is a tension between the features that make science productive, and the need to govern geoengineering research, which has thus far gone un…Read more
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66Big dragons on small islands: generality and particularity in science: Review of Angela Potochnik’s idealization and the aims of scienceBiology and Philosophy 33 (3-4): 20. 2018.Angela Potochnik’s Idealization and the Aims of Science defends an ambitious and systematic account of scientific knowledge: ultimately science pursues human understanding rather than truth. Potochnik argues that idealization is rampant and unchecked in science. Further, given that idealizations involve departures from truth, this suggests science is not primarily about truth. I explore the relationship between truths about causal patterns and scientific understanding in light of this, and sugge…Read more
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122In defence of story-tellingStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 62 14-21. 2017.We argue that narratives are central to the success of historical reconstruction. Narrative explanation involves tracing causal trajectories across time. The construction of narrative, then, often involves postulating relatively speculative causal connections between comparatively well-established events. But speculation is not always idle or harmful: it also aids in overcoming local underdetermination by forming scaffolds from which new evidence becomes relevant. Moreover, as our understanding …Read more
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38From Models-as-Fictions to Models-as-ToolsErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4. 2017.Many accounts of scientific modeling conceive of models as fictions: scientists interact with models in ways analogous to various aesthetic objects. Fictionalists follow most other accounts of modeling by taking them to be revelatory of the actual world in virtue of bearing some resemblance relation to a target system. While such fictionalist accounts capture crucial aspects of modelling practice, they are ill-suited to some design and engineering contexts. Here, models sometimes serve to underw…Read more
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41From Models-as-Fictions to Models-as-ToolsErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4. 2017.Many accounts of scientific modeling conceive of models as fictions: scientists interact with models in ways analogous to various aesthetic objects. Fictionalists follow most other accounts of modeling by taking them to be revelatory of the actual world in virtue of bearing some resemblance relation to a target system. While such fictionalist accounts capture crucial aspects of modelling practice, they are ill-suited to some design and engineering contexts. Here, models sometimes serve to underw…Read more
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68Newton on Islandworld: Ontic-Driven Explanations of Scientific MethodPerspectives on Science 26 (1): 119-156. 2018.. Philosophers and scientists often cite ontic factors when explaining the methods and success of scientific inquiry. That is, the adoption of a method or approach is explained in reference to the kind of system in which the scientist is interested: these are explanations of why scientists do what they do, that appeal to properties of their target systems. We present a framework for understanding such “Opticks to his Principia. Newton’s optical work is largely experiment-driven, while the Princi…Read more
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56The argument from surpriseCanadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (5): 639-661. 2018.I develop an account of productive surprise as an epistemic virtue of scientific investigations which does not turn on psychology alone. On my account, a scientific investigation is potentially productively surprising when results can conflict with epistemic expectations, those expectations pertain to a wide set of subjects. I argue that there are two sources of such surprise in science. One source, often identified with experiments, involves bringing our theoretical ideas in contact with new em…Read more
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40Forces, friction and fractionation: Denis Walsh’s Organisms, agency, and evolution: 294 pp, Hardcover, ISBN: 1107122104 (review)Biology and Philosophy 32 (6): 1341-1353. 2017.In Denis Walsh’s Organisms, Agency, and Evolution, he argues that new developments in the science of biology motivate a radical change to our metaphysical picture of life: what he calls ‘Situated Darwinism’. The central claim is that we should take the biological world to be at base about organisms, and organisms in a fundamentally teleological sense. We critically examine Walsh’s arguments and suggest further developments.
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98The Mystery of the Triceratops’s Mother: How to be a Realist About the Species CategoryErkenntnis 81 (4): 795-816. 2016.Can we be realists about a general category but pluralists about concepts relating to that category? I argue that paleobiological methods of delineating species are not affected by differing species concepts, and that this underwrites an argument that species concept pluralists should be species category realists. First, the criteria by which paleobiologists delineate species are ‘indifferent’ to the species category. That is, their method for identifying species applies equally to any species c…Read more
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116Narratives, mechanisms and progress in historical scienceSynthese 191 (6): 1-21. 2014.Geologists, Paleontologists and other historical scientists are frequently concerned with narrative explanations targeting single cases. I show that two distinct explanatory strategies are employed in narratives, simple and complex. A simple narrative has minimal causal detail and is embedded in a regularity, whereas a complex narrative is more detailed and not embedded. The distinction is illustrated through two case studies: the ‘snowball earth’ explanation of Neoproterozoic glaciation and rec…Read more
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Cambridge UniversityPost-doctoral fellow
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Cambridge, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |
PhilPapers Editorships
Philosophy of Archaeology |