•  234
    Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi stud…Read more
  • Not Pictured
    In George Dunn & James South (eds.), Veronica Mars and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2014.
    There's so much more to being a detective than just seeing the clues right in front of your eyes. What makes a detective great is that she can figure out the truth she's not seeing—the hidden explanation behind an otherwise scattered array of facts and appearances. She can puzzle through the observed facts to get at the hidden truth. That's where Veronica Mars excels, and that's what makes her special. Veronica is, of course, no stranger to fieldwork. Being a detective is more than just being a …Read more
  •  83
    Ethical Concerns with Applied Behavior Analysis for Autism Spectrum "Disorder"
    Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 30 (1): 31-69. 2020.
    This paper has both theoretical and practical ambitions. The theoretical ambitions are to explore what would constitute both effective and ethical treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder.1 However, the practical ambition is perhaps more important: we argue that a dominant form of Applied Behavior Analysis, which is widely taken to be far-and-away the best “treatment”2 for ASD, manifests systematic violations of the fundamental tenets of bioethics. Moreover, the supposed benefits of the treatment n…Read more
  •  8
    Diagrams, images and conceptual maps in nursing education
    with Christine Durmis
    Nursing Philosophy 24 (3). 2023.
    The way in which one understands information and concepts, and the way a student works to develop this, is an individual aspect of learning that cannot be universally defined as (at least manifested) the same for everyone. ‘Understanding’ is a broad term, and the way one achieves understanding is dependent on the way that material is presented. In this article, we argue that the philosophy of science can be important to nursing education—in particular, by showing that the way we imbue understand…Read more
  •  8
    Understanding Necessarily and Understanding Actually
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 54 (2): 287-303. 2023.
    In this paper, I consider the relationship between coming to understand why something must be the case and coming to understand why it actually is the case in some particular instance. Peter Lipton uses the possibility of coming to understand a phenomenon via a necessity proof as an argument that there can be understanding with no explanation. Lipton’s argument has come under criticism, at least partially because one might think that understanding why something must be the case has a different o…Read more
  •  11
    Increasing emphasis on patient self-management, including having patients advocate for their needs and priorities, is generally a good thing, but it is not always wanted or attainable by patients. The aim of this critical ethical review is to deepen the current discourse in patient self-advocacy by exposing various situations in which patients struggle to self-advocate. Using examples from oncology patient populations, we disambiguate different notions of self-advocacy and then present limits to…Read more
  •  31
    Understanding metaphorical understanding (literally)
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (3): 1-20. 2022.
    Metaphors are found all throughout science: in published papers, working hypotheses, policy documents, lecture slides, grant proposals, and press releases. They serve different functions, but perhaps most striking is the way they enable understanding, of a theory, phenomenon, or idea. In this paper, we leverage recent advances on the nature of metaphor and the nature of understanding to explore how they accomplish this feat. We attempt to shift the focus away from the epistemic value of the cont…Read more
  •  10
    When law and ethics come apart: Constraints versus guidance
    with Christine Durmis
    Nursing Ethics 29 (6): 1430-1440. 2022.
    The generally agreed upon principle that legality and ethics can come apart is frequently overlooked in our professional ethics education and decision-making procedures. The crux of the issue is that we teach in our philosophy classes that the law can sometimes be unethical, but then clearly state in nursing codes of ethics that students should always follow the law. The law could no doubt give us some reason to choose action A over action B, but in professional contexts we frequently treat the …Read more
  •  51
    This article will focus on the ethical issues of vaccine mandates and stake claim to the relatively extreme position that outright requirements for people to receive the vaccine are ethically correct at both the governmental and institutional levels. One novel strategy employed here will be to argue that deontological considerations pertaining to consent rights cut as much in favor of mandating vaccines as against them. The presumption seems to be that arguments from consent speak semi-definitiv…Read more
  •  40
    Transformative Understanding Acquisition
    Res Philosophica 94 (1): 67-93. 2017.
    Some experiences change who we are in ways we cannot understand until we have that very experience. In this paper I argue that so-called “transformative experiences” can not only bring about new understanding, but can actually be brought out by the gain of understanding itself. Coming to understand something new can change you. I argue that not only is understanding acquisition potentially a kind of transformative experience; given some of the recent philosophy of the phenomenology of understand…Read more
  •  187
    In this chapter we explain what experimental philosophy of science is, how it relates to the philosophy of science, and STS more broadly, and what sorts of contributions is can make to ongoing research in the philosophy of science.
  •  16
    This volume gathers together leading philosophers of science and cognitive scientists from around the world to provide one of the first book-length studies of this important and emerging field. Specific topics considered include learning and the nature of scientific knowledge, the cognitive consequences of exposure to explanations, climate change, and mechanistic reasoning and abstraction. Chapters explore how experimental methods can be applied to questions about the nature of science and show …Read more
  •  53
    Moral understanding and moral illusions
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (1): 25-33. 2020.
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  270
    Objectually Understanding Informed Consent
    Analytic Philosophy 62 (1): 33-56. 2021.
    Analytic Philosophy, Volume 62, Issue 1, Page 33-56, March 2021.
  •  20
    Living with Autism: Quus-ing in a Plus-ers World
    Res Philosophica 97 (1): 53-68. 2020.
    In this paper, I explore the possibility that the point Kripke (1982) made about understanding meaning also applies to understanding social interaction. This understanding involves extending what one has learned from a finite number of past observations to provide normative guidance for an indefinitely complicated future. Kripke argues (to my mind correctly) that what one should do in the future is inevitably underdetermined by the infinite possible interpretations of the past. Moreover, no matt…Read more
  •  28
    Understanding for Hire
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 50 (3): 389-405. 2019.
    In this paper, we will explore one way in which understanding can—and, we will argue, should—be valuable. We will do this by drawing on what has been said about the different ways knowledge can be valuable. Our main contribution will be to identify one heretofore undiscussed way knowledge could be valuable, but isn’t—specifically, having value to someone other than the understander. We suggest that it is a desideratum on an account of understanding that understanding have the specified type of v…Read more
  •  117
    Understanding as compression
    Philosophical Studies 176 (10): 2807-2831. 2019.
    What is understanding? My goal in this paper is to lay out a new approach to this question and clarify how that approach deals with certain issues. The claim is that understanding is a matter of compressing information about the understood so that it can be mentally useful. On this account, understanding amounts to having a representational kernel and the ability to use it to generate the information one needs regarding the target phenomenon. I argue that this ambitious new account can accommoda…Read more
  •  134
    MUDdy understanding
    Synthese 194 (4). 2017.
    This paper focuses on two questions: Is understanding intimately bound up with accurately representing the world? Is understanding intimately bound up with downstream abilities? We will argue that the answer to both these questions is “yes”, and for the same reason-both accuracy and ability are important elements of orthogonal evaluative criteria along which understanding can be assessed. More precisely, we will argue that representational-accuracy and intelligibility are good-making features of…Read more
  •  96
    Understanding beyond grasping propositions: A discussion of chess and fish
    with Jennifer K. Hellmann
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 48 46-51. 2014.
    In this paper, we argue that, contra Strevens (2013), understanding in the sciences is sometimes partially constituted by the possession of abilities; hence, it is not (in such cases) exhausted by the understander’s bearing a particular psychological or epistemic relationship to some set of structured propositions. Specifically, the case will be made that one does not really understand why a modeled phenomenon occurred unless one has the ability to actually work through (meaning run and grasp at…Read more
  •  120
    In this paper, I argue that explanations just ARE those sorts of things that, under the right circumstances and in the right sort of way, bring about understanding. This raises the question of why such a seemingly simple account of explanation, if correct, would not have been identified and agreed upon decades ago. The answer is that only recently has it been made possible to analyze explanation in terms of understanding without the risk of collapsing both to merely phenomenological states. For …Read more
  •  67
    Modeling Authenticity
    Res Philosophica 93 (1): 245-268. 2016.
    In this paper, we explore the link between understanding and transformative decisions. Paul (2014) suggests that one important aspect of making some decisions is that we make them not just on the basis of what data from other people tell us, but based on our own acquaintance with how the decision affects us. In this paper, we draw out a parallel between the sort of reasoning that Paul argues is required for authentic decision making and the sort of epistemic grasp of a subject matter that is req…Read more
  •  251
    Understanding as representation manipulability
    Synthese 190 (6): 997-1016. 2013.
    Claims pertaining to understanding are made in a variety of contexts and ways. As a result, few in the philosophical literature have made an attempt to precisely characterize the state that is y understanding x. This paper builds an account that does just that. The account is motivated by two main observations. First, understanding x is somehow related to being able to manipulate x. Second, understanding is a mental phenomenon, and so what manipulations are required to be an understander must on…Read more