-
474The Validity of the Argument from Inductive RiskCanadian Journal of Philosophy 53 (2): 187-190. 2023.Havstad (2022) argues that the argument from inductive risk for the claim that non-epistemic values have a legitimate role to play in the internal stages of science is deductively valid. She also defends its premises and thus soundness. This is, as far as we are aware, the best reconstruction of the argument from inductive risk in the existing literature. However, there is a small flaw in this reconstruction of the argument from inductive risk which appears to render the argument invalid. This f…Read more
-
13Reply by the Author (review)Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 89 (C): 301-303. 2021.I am grateful to Joyce Havstad, Nancy McHugh, and Sarah Wieten for their thoughtful, generous, and challenging engagements with my book. It has been an honor for me to read their perspectives on my book, to learn from their reactions and concerns, and to continue the discussion. It is my hope that this dialogue will continue to push the conversation about science and values forward.
-
Matthew Brown : against expertise : a lesson from Feyerabend's Science in a free society?In Karim Bschir & Jamie Shaw (eds.), Interpreting Feyerabend: Critical Essays, Cambridge University Press. 2021.
-
86The Descriptive, the Normative, and the Entanglement of Values in ScienceIn Heather Douglas & Ted Richards (eds.), Science, Values, and Democracy: The 2016 Descartes Lectures, Consortium For Science, Policy & Outcomes, Arizona State University. pp. 51-65. 2021.Heather Douglas has helped to set the standard for twenty-first century discussions in philosophy of science on the topics of values in science and science in democracy. Douglas’s work has been part of a movement to bring the question of values in science back to center of the field and to focus especially on policy-relevant science. This first chapter, on the pervasive entanglement of science and values, includes an improved and definitive statement of the argument from inductive risk, which sh…Read more
-
27Mary Parker Follett as Integrative Public PhilosopherHypatia 36 (2): 425-436. 2021.Mary Parker Follett was a feminist-pragmatist American philosopher, a social-settlement worker, a founding figure in the community centers movement, a mediator of labor disputes, and a theorist of political and social organization and management. I argue that she is a model for a certain kind of public philosopher, and I unpack the respects in which she serves as such a model. I emphasize both her virtues as a public thinker and the role played in her work by the process of integration and the c…Read more
-
16Philosophical Pragmatism and International Relations: Essays for a Bold New WorldLexington Books. 2013.Philosophical Pragmatism and International Relations bridges the gap between philosophical pragmatism and international relations, two disciplinary perspectives that together shed light on how to advance the study and conduct of foreign affairs. Authors in this collection discuss a broad range of issues, from policy relevance to peacekeeping operations, with an eye to understanding how this distinctly American philosophy, pragmatism, can improve both international relations research and foreign …Read more
-
68Science and Moral Imagination: A New Ideal for Values in ScienceUniversity of Pittsburgh Press. 2020.The idea that science is or should be value-free, and that values are or should be formed independently of science, has been under fire by philosophers of science for decades. Science and Moral Imagination directly challenges the idea that science and values cannot and should not influence each other. Matthew J. Brown argues that science and values mutually influence and implicate one another, that the influence of values on science is pervasive and must be responsibly managed, and that science …Read more
-
20Guiding Engineering Student Teams’ Ethics Discussions with Peer AdvisingScience and Engineering Ethics 26 (3): 1743-1769. 2020.This study explores how peer advising affects student project teams’ discussions of engineering ethics. Peer ethics advisors from non-engineering disciplines are expected to provide diverse perspectives and to help engineering student teams engage and sustain ethics discussions. To investigate how peer advising helps engineering student teams’ ethics discussions, three student teams in different peer advising conditions were closely observed: without any advisor, with a single volunteer advisor,…Read more
-
38Pluralism and Perspectivism in the American Pragmatist TraditionIn Michela Massimi (ed.), Knowledge From a Human Point of View, Springer Verlag. 2019.This chapter explores perspectivism in the American Pragmatist tradition. On the one hand, the thematization of perspectivism in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science can benefit from resources in the American Pragmatist philosophical tradition. On the other hand, the Pragmatists have interesting and innovative, pluralistic views that can be illuminated through the lens of perspectivism. I pursue this inquiry primarily through examining relevant sources from the Pragmatist traditio…Read more
-
51Models and perspectives on stage: remarks on Giere’s Scientific perspectivismStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40 (2): 213-220. 2009.Ron Giere’s recent book Scientific perspectivism sets out an account of science that attempts to forge a via media between two popular extremes: absolutist, objectivist realism on the one hand, and social constructivism or skeptical anti-realism on the other. The key for Giere is to treat both scientific observation and scientific theories as perspectives, which are limited, partial, contingent, context-, agent- and purpose-dependent, and pluralism-friendly, while nonetheless world-oriented and …Read more
-
547Weaving Value Judgment into the Tapestry of SciencePhilosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 10 (10). 2018.I critically analyze Kevin Elliott’s A Tapestry of Values in order to tease out his views on the nature and status of values or value judgments in the text. I show there is a tension in Elliott’s view that is closely connected to a major lacuna in the philosophical literature on values in science: the need for a better theory of values.
-
220Picky eating is a moral failingIn Dave Monroe & Fritz Allhoff (eds.), Food & Philosophy: Eat, Think, and Be Merry, Blackwell. 2007.Common wisdom includes expressions such as “there is no accounting for taste'’ that express a widely-accepted subjectivism about taste. We commonly say things like “I can’t stand anything with onions in it'’ or “Oh, I’d never eat sushi,'’ and we accept such from our friends and associates. It is the position of this essay that much of this language is actually quite unacceptable. Without appealing to complete objectivism about taste, I will argue that there are good reasons to think that there w…Read more
-
161The source and status of values for socially responsible sciencePhilosophical Studies 163 (1): 67-76. 2013.Philosophy of Science After Feminism is an important contribution to philosophy of science, in that it argues for the central relevance of advances from previous work in feminist philosophy of science and articulates a new vision for philosophy of science going in to the future. Kourany’s vision of philosophy of science’s future as “socially engaged and socially responsible” and addressing questions of the social responsibility of science itself has much to recommend it. I focus the book articul…Read more
-
74Science and Experience: A Deweyan Pragmatist Philosophy of ScienceDissertation, University of California, San Diego. 2009.I resolve several pressing and recalcitrant problems in contemporary philosophy of science using resources from John Dewey's philosophy of science. I begin by looking at Dewey's epistemological and logical writings in their historical context, in order to understand better how Dewey's philosophy disappeared from the limelight, and I provide a reconstruction of his views. Then, I use that reconstruction to address problems of evidence, the social dimensions of science, and pluralism. Generally, m…Read more
-
174In the first part of this paper, I will sketch the main features of traditional models of evidence, indicating idealizations in such models that I regard as doing more harm than good. I will then proceed to elaborate on an alternative model of evidence that is functionalist, complex, dynamic, and contextual, which I will call DYNAMIC EVIDENTIAL FUNCTIONALISM. I will demonstrate its application to an illuminating example of scientific inquiry, and defend it from some likely objections. In the sec…Read more
-
44The Democratic Control of the Scientific Control of DemocracyIn Dennis Dieks & Vassilios Karakostas (eds.), Recent Progress in Philosophy of Science: Perspectives and Foundational Problems, Springer. pp. 479--491. 2013.I discuss two popular but apparently contradictory theses: -/- T1. The democratic control of science – the aims and activities of science should be subject to public scrutiny via democratic processes of representation and participation. T2. The scientific control of policy, i.e. technocracy – political processes should be problem-solving pursuits determined by the methods and results of science and technology. Many arguments can be given for (T1), both epistemic and moral/political; I will focus…Read more
-
48On what Quine is: A review of the cambridge companion to Quine (review)Mind, Culture, and Activity 13 (4): 339-343. 2006.A book review from the Quine volume of The Cambridge Companions to Philosophy series.
-
57A Companion to Pragmatism, ed. John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis (review)The Pluralist 6 (2): 101-103. 2011.
-
2Reappraising FeyerabendStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 57 00-000. 2016.This volume is devoted to a reappraisal of the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. It has four aims. The first is to reassess his already well-known work from the 1960s and 1970s in light of contemporary developments in the history and philosophy of science. The second is to explore themes in his neglected later work, including recently published and previously unavailable writings. The third is to assess the contributions that Feyerabend can make to contemporary debate, on topics such as perspectivi…Read more
-
131Science as Socially Distributed Cognition: Bridging Philosophy and Sociology of ScienceIn Karen François, Benedikt Löwe, Thomas Müller & Bart van Kerkhove (eds.), Foundations of the Formal Sciences VII, Studies in Logic, College Publications. 2011.I want to make plausible the following claim:Analyzing scientific inquiry as a species of socially distributed cognition has a variety of advantages for science studies, among them the prospects of bringing together philosophy and sociology of science. This is not a particularly novel claim, but one that faces major obstacles. I will retrace some of the major steps that have been made in the pursuit of a distributed cognition approach to science studies, paying special attention to the promise…Read more
-
114Introduction: Reappraising Paul FeyerabendStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 57 1-8. 2016.This volume is devoted to a reappraisal of the philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. It has four aims. The first is to reassess his already well-known work from the 1960s and 1970s in light of contemporary developments in the history and philosophy of science. The second is to explore themes in his neglected later work, including recently published and previously unavailable writings. The third is to assess the contributions that Feyerabend can make to contemporary debate, on topics such as perspectivi…Read more
-
127n 1909, the 50th anniversary of both the publication of Origin of the Species and his own birth, John Dewey published "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy." This optimistic essay saw Darwin's advance not only as one of empirical or theoretical biology, but a logical and conceptual revolution that would shake every corner of philosophy. Dewey tells us less about the influence that Darwin exerted over philosophy over the past 50 years and instead prophesied the influence it would take in the fut…Read more
-
431The Disconnect Problem, Scientific Authority, and Climate PolicyPerspectives on Science 25 (1): 67-94. 2017.The disconnect problem arises wherever there is ongoing and severe discordance between the scientific assessment of a politically relevant issue, and the politics and legislation of said issue. Here, we focus on the disconnect problem as it arises in the case of climate change, diagnosing a failure to respect the necessary tradeoff between authority and autonomy within a public institution like science. After assessing the problematic deployment of scientific authority in this arena, we offer su…Read more
-
84Quantum framesStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 45 1-10. 2014.The framework of quantum frames can help unravel some of the interpretive difficulties i the foundation of quantum mechanics. In this paper, I begin by tracing the origins of this concept in Bohr's discussion of quantum theory and his theory of complementarity. Engaging with various interpreters and followers of Bohr, I argue that the correct account of quantum frames must be extended beyond literal space–time reference frames to frames defined by relations between a quantum system and the exosy…Read more
-
27
-
37The Roles of Implicit Understanding of Engineering Ethics in Student Teams’ DiscussionScience and Engineering Ethics 23 (6): 1755-1774. 2017.Following previous work that shows engineering students possess different levels of understanding of ethics—implicit and explicit—this study focuses on how students’ implicit understanding of engineering ethics influences their team discussion process, in cases where there is significant divergence between their explicit and implicit understanding. We observed student teams during group discussions of the ethical issues involved in their engineering design projects. Through the micro-scale disco…Read more
-
97Genuine Problems and the Significance of ScienceContemporary Pragmatism 7 (2): 131-153. 2010.This paper addresses the political constraints on science through a pragmatist critique of Philip Kitcher’s account of “well-ordered science.” A central part of Kitcher’s account is his analysis of the significance of items of scientific research: contextual and purpose-relative scientific significance replaces mere truth as the aim of inquiry. I raise problems for Kitcher’s account and argue for an alternative, drawing on Peirce’s and Dewey’s theories of problem-solving inquiry. I conclude by s…Read more