•  18
    Roald Hoffmann on the Philosophy, Art, and Science of Chemistry (edited book)
    with Jeffrey Kovac
    Oxford University Press USA. 2012.
    Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann's contributions to chemistry are well known. Less well known, however, is that over a career that spans nearly fifty years, Hoffmann has thought and written extensively about a wide variety of other topics, such as chemistry's relationship to philosophy, literature, and the arts, including the nature of chemical reasoning, the role of symbolism and writing in science, and the relationship between art and craft and science. In Roald Hoffmann on the Philosophy, Art, a…Read more
  •  324
    Who is a Modeler?
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58 (2): 207-233. 2007.
    Many standard philosophical accounts of scientific practice fail to distinguish between modeling and other types of theory construction. This failure is unfortunate because there are important contrasts among the goals, procedures, and representations employed by modelers and other kinds of theorists. We can see some of these differences intuitively when we reflect on the methods of theorists such as Vito Volterra and Linus Pauling on the one hand, and Charles Darwin and Dimitri Mendeleev on the…Read more
  •  105
    Qualitative theory and chemical explanation
    Philosophy of Science 71 (5): 1071-1081. 2004.
    Roald Hoffmann and other theorists claim that we ought to use highly idealized chemical models (“qualitative models”) in order to increase our understanding of chemical phenomena, even though other models are available which make more highly accurate predictions. I assess this norm by examining one of the tradeoffs faced by model builders and model users—the tradeoff between precision and generality. After arguing that this tradeoff obtains in many cases, I discuss how the existence of this trad…Read more
  •  216
    Forty years of 'the strategy': Levins on model building and idealization
    Biology and Philosophy 21 (5): 623-645. 2006.
    This paper is an interpretation and defense of Richard Levins’ “The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology,” which has been extremely influential among biologists since its publication 40 years ago. In this article, Levins confronted some of the deepest philosophical issues surrounding modeling and theory construction. By way of interpretation, I discuss each of Levins’ major philosophical themes: the problem of complexity, the brute-force approach, the existence and consequence of tra…Read more
  •  246
    Scientific research is almost always conducted by communities of scientists of varying size and complexity. Such communities are effective, in part, because they divide their cognitive labor: not every scientist works on the same project. Philip Kitcher and Michael Strevens have pioneered efforts to understand this division of cognitive labor by proposing models of how scientists make decisions about which project to work on. For such models to be useful, they must be simple enough for us to und…Read more
  •  65
    Scientific Collaboration and Collective Knowledge (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2017.
    Current scientific research almost always requires collaboration among several (if not several hundred) specialized researchers. When scientists co-author a journal article, who deserves credit for discoveries or blame for errors? How should scientific institutions promote fruitful collaborations among scientists? In this book, leading philosophers of science address these critical questions.
  •  217
    The Robust Volterra Principle
    Philosophy of Science 75 (1): 106-131. 2008.
    Theorizing in ecology and evolution often proceeds via the construction of multiple idealized models. To determine whether a theoretical result actually depends on core features of the models and is not an artifact of simplifying assumptions, theorists have developed the technique of robustness analysis, the examination of multiple models looking for common predictions. A striking example of robustness analysis in ecology is the discovery of the Volterra Principle, which describes the effect of …Read more
  •  143
    Modeling in biology and economics
    Biology and Philosophy 26 (5): 613-615. 2011.
    Much of biological and economic theorizing takes place by modeling, the indirect study of real-world phenomena by the construction and examination of models. Books and articles about biological and economic theory are often books and articles about models, many of which are highly idealized and chosen for their explanatory power and analytical convenience rather than for their fit with known data sets. Philosophers of science have recognized these facts and have developed literatures about the n…Read more
  •  16
    Editorial
    Biology and Philosophy 1-2. forthcoming.
  •  166
    Evolutionary biology – or, more precisely, two (purported) applications of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, namely, evolutionary psychology and what has been called human behavioral biology – is on the cusp of becoming the new rage among legal scholars looking for interdisciplinary insights into the law. We argue that as the actual science stands today, evolutionary biology offers nothing to help with questions about legal regulation of behavior. Only systematic misrepresentati…Read more
  • In defending semantic externalism, philosophers of language have often assumed that there is a straightforward connection between scientific kinds and the natural kinds recognized by ordinary language users.1 For example, the claim that water is H2O assumes that the ordinary language kind water corresponds to a chemical kind, which contains all the molecules with molecular formula H2O as its members. This assumption about the coordination between ordinary language kinds and scientific kinds is imp…Read more
  •  52
    Richard Levins' philosophy of science
    Biology and Philosophy 21 (5): 603-605. 2006.
  •  155
    Getting Serious about Similarity
    Philosophy of Science 79 (5): 785-794. 2012.
    Although most philosophical accounts about model/world relations focus on structural mappings such as isomorphism, similarity has long been discussed as an alternative account. Despite its attractions, proponents of the similarity view have not provided detailed accounts of what it means that a model is similar to a real-world target system. This article gives the outlines of such an account, drawing on the work of Amos Tversky.
  •  50
    Group-level traits are not units of selection
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (3): 271-272. 2014.
  •  195
    Idealization
    Philosophy Compass 9 (3): 176-185. 2014.
    This article reviews the recent literature on idealization, specifically idealization in the course of scientific modeling. We argue that idealization is not a unified concept and that there are three different types of idealization: Galilean, minimalist, and multiple models, each with its own justification. We explore the extent to which idealization is a permanent feature of scientific representation and discuss its implications for debates about scientific realism
  •  417
    Despite their best efforts, scientists may be unable to construct models that simultaneously exemplify every theoretical virtue. One explanation for this is the existence of tradeoffs: relationships of attenuation that constrain the extent to which models can have such desirable qualities. In this paper, we characterize three types of tradeoffs theorists may confront. These characterizations are then used to examine the relationships between parameter precision and two types of generality. We sh…Read more
  •  79
    This article is an overview of some of the contemporary debates in philosophy of chemistry. We discuss the nature of chemical substances, the individuation of chemical kinds, the relationship between chemistry and physics, and the nature of the chemical bond.