•  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.
  •  11
    Editorial
    Biology and Philosophy 32 (2): 147-148. 2017.
  •  285
    Robustness Analysis
    Philosophy of Science 73 (5): 730-742. 2006.
    Modelers often rely on robustness analysis, the search for predictions common to several independent models. Robustness analysis has been characterized and championed by Richard Levins and William Wimsatt, who see it as central to modern theoretical practice. The practice has also been severely criticized by Steven Orzack and Elliott Sober, who claim that it is a nonempirical form of confirmation, effective only under unusual circumstances. This paper addresses Orzack and Sober's criticisms by g…Read more
  •  62
    Interpreting Aristotle on mixture: problems about elemental composition from Philoponus to Cooper
    with Rega Wood
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 35 (4): 681-706. 2004.
    Aristotle’s On generation and corruption raises a vital question: how is mixture, or what we would now call chemical combination, possible? It also offers an outline of a solution to the problem and a set of criteria that a successful solution must meet. Understanding Aristotle’s solution and developing a viable peripatetic theory of chemical combination has been a source of controversy over the last two millennia. We describe seven criteria a peripatetic theory of mixture must satisfy: uniformi…Read more
  •  188
  •  386
    Contemporary literature in philosophy of science has begun to emphasize the practice of modeling, which differs in important respects from other forms of representation and analysis central to standard philosophical accounts. This literature has stressed the constructed nature of models, their autonomy, and the utility of their high degrees of idealization. What this new literature about modeling lacks, however, is a comprehensive account of the models that figure in to the practice of modeling.…Read more
  •  88
    Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World is an account of modeling in contemporary science. Modeling is a form of surrogate reasoning where target systems in the natural world are studied using models, which are similar to these targets. My book develops an account of the nature of models, the practice of modeling, and the similarity relation that holds between models and their targets. I also analyze the conceptual tools that allow theorists to identify the trustworthy as…Read more
  •  23
    Agriculture increases individual fitness
    with Karen Kovaka, Carlos Santana, Raj Patel, and Erol Akçay
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39. 2016.
  •  52
    Proponents of individual-based modeling in ecology claim that their models explain the emergence of population-level behavior. This article argues that individual-based models have not, as yet, provided such explanations. Instead, individual-based models can and do demonstrate and explain the emergence of population-level behaviors from individual behaviors and interactions
  •  97
    Philosophy of chemistry
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2011.
    Chemistry is the study of the structure and transformation of matter. When Aristotle founded the field in the 4th century BCE, his conceptual grasp of the nature of matter was tailored to accommodate a relatively simple range of observable phenomena. In the 21st century, chemistry has become the largest scientific discipline, producing over half a million publications a year ranging from direct empirical investigations to substantial theoretical work. However, the specialized interest in the con…Read more
  •  443
    Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor
    Philosophy of Science 76 (2): 225-252. 2009.
    Because of its complexity, contemporary scientific research is almost always tackled by groups of scientists, each of which works in a different part of a given research domain. We believe that understanding scientific progress thus requires understanding this division of cognitive labor. To this end, we present a novel agent-based model of scientific research in which scientists divide their labor to explore an unknown epistemic landscape. Scientists aim to climb uphill in this landscape, where…Read more
  •  90
    Segregation That No One Seeks
    Philosophy of Science 79 (1): 38-62. 2012.
    This paper examines a series of Schelling-like models of residential segregation, in which agents prefer to be in the minority. We demon- strate that as long as agents care about the characteristics of their wider community, they tend to end up in a segregated state. We then investigate the process that causes this, and conclude that the result hinges on the similarity of informational states amongst agents of the same type. This is quite dierent from Schelling-like behavior, and sug- gests (in …Read more
  •  320
    one takes to be the most salient, any pair could be judged more similar to each other than to the third. Goodman uses this second problem to showthat there can be no context-free similarity metric, either in the trivial case or in a scientifically ...
  •  929
    Three Kinds of Idealization
    Journal of Philosophy 104 (12): 639-659. 2007.
    Philosophers of science increasingly recognize the importance of idealization: the intentional introduction of distortion into scientific theories. Yet this recognition has not yielded consensus about the nature of idealization. e literature of the past thirty years contains disparate characterizations and justifications, but little evidence of convergence towards a common position
  •  31
    Modeling herding behavior and its risks
    Journal of Economic Methodology 20 (1). 2013.
    (2013). Modeling herding behavior and its risks. Journal of Economic Methodology: Vol. 20, Methodology, Systemic Risk, and the Economics Profession, pp. 6-18. doi: 10.1080/1350178X.2013.774843
  •  143
    Challenges to the Structural Conception of Chemical Bonding
    Philosophy of Science 75 (5): 932-946. 2008.
    The covalent bond, a difficult concept to define precisely, plays a central role in chemical predictions, interventions, and explanations. I investigate the structural conception of the covalent bond, which says that bonding is a directional, submolecular region of electron density, located between individual atomic centers and responsible for holding the atoms together. Several approaches to constructing molecular models are considered in order to determine which features of the structural conc…Read more
  •  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