•  11
    As Nelson Goodman highlighted, there are two main senses of “abstract” that can be found in discussions about abstract art. On the one hand, a representation is abstract if it leaves out certain features of its target. On the other hand, something can be abstract to the extent that it does not represent a concrete subject. The first sense of “abstract” is well-known in philosophy of science. For example, philosophers discuss mathematical models of physical, biological, and economic systems as be…Read more
  •  24
    Scientists recognize the necessity of imagination for solving tough problems. But how does the cognitive faculty responsible for daydreaming help in solving scientific problems? Philosophers claim that imagination is informative only when it is constrained to be maximally realistic. However, using a case study from space science, we show that scientists use imagination intentionally to break reality-oriented constraints. To do this well, they first target low-confidence constraints, and then hig…Read more
  •  96
    Guilty Artificial Minds: Folk Attributions of Mens Rea and Culpability to Artificially Intelligent Agents
    with Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5 (CSCW2). 2021.
    While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible [1], a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts [2]. This is disconcerting: Blame might be shifted from the owners, users or designers of AI systems to the systems themselves, leading to the diminished accountability of the responsible human agents [3]. In this paper, we explore one of the potential underlying reasons for …Read more
  •  178
    Can an ugly experiment be a good experiment? Philosophers have identified many beautiful experiments and explored ways in which their beauty might be connected to their epistemic value. In contrast, the present chapter seeks out (and celebrates) ugly experiments. Among the ugliest are those being designed by AI algorithms. Interestingly, in the contexts where such experiments tend to be deployed, low aesthetic value correlates with high epistemic value. In other words, ugly experiments can be go…Read more
  •  96
    How to tame your Feyerabend (review)
    Metascience 32 (2): 173-176. 2023.
  •  14
    Feyerabend and the Philosophy of Physics
    with Jamie Shaw
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 35 (1): 1-4. 2022.
    In a reference letter for Feyerabend’s application to UC Berkeley, Carl Hempel writes that ‘Mr. Feyerabend combines a forceful and penetrating analytic mind with a remarkably thorough training and...
  •  52
    Inclusivity in the Education of Scientific Imagination
    with Hannah Sargeant
    In E. Hildt, K. Laas, C. Miller & E. Brey (eds.), Building Inclusive Ethical Cultures in STEM, Springer Verlag. pp. 267-288. 2024.
    Scientists imagine constantly. They do this when generating research problems, designing experiments, interpreting data, troubleshooting, drafting papers and presentations, and giving feedback. But when and how do scientists learn how to use imagination? Across 6 years of ethnographic research, it has been found that advanced career scientists feel comfortable using and discussing imagination, while graduate and undergraduate students of science often do not. In addition, members of marginalized…Read more
  •  31
    A counterpossible is a counterfactual whose antecedent is impossible. The vacuity thesis says all counterpossibles are true solely because their antecedents are impossible. Recently, some have rejected the vacuity thesis by citing purported non-vacuous counterpossibles in science. One limitation of this work, however, is that it is not grounded in experimental data. Do scientists actually reason non-vacuously about counterpossibles? If so, what is their basis for doing so? We presented biologist…Read more
  •  73
    Scientific Models and Thought Experiments: Same Same but Different
    In Handbook of Philosophy of Scientific Modeling, Routledge. forthcoming.
    The philosophical literatures on models and thought experiments have been developing exponentially, and independently, for decades. This independence is surprising, given how similar models and thought experiments are. They each have “lives of their own,” they sit between theory and experience, they are important for both pedagogy and cutting-edge science, they galvanize conceptual changes and paradigm shifts, and they involve entertaining imaginary scenarios and working out what happens. Recent…Read more
  •  42
    Sharpening the tools of imagination
    Synthese 200 (6): 1-22. 2022.
    Thought experiments, models, diagrams, computer simulations, and metaphors can all be understood as tools of the imagination. While these devices are usually treated separately in philosophy of science, this paper provides a unified account according to which tools of the imagination are epistemically good insofar as they improve scientific imaginings. Improving scientific imagining is characterized in terms of epistemological consequences: more improvement means better consequences. A distincti…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
  •  485
    Scientists are Epistemic Consequentialists about Imagination
    Philosophy of Science 1-22. forthcoming.
    Scientists imagine for epistemic reasons, and these imaginings can be better or worse. But what does it mean for an imagining to be epistemically better or worse? There are at least three metaepistemological frameworks that present different answers to this question: epistemological consequentialism, deontic epistemology, and virtue epistemology. This paper presents empirical evidence that scientists adopt each of these different epistemic frameworks with respect to imagination, but argues that …Read more
  •  38
    In the last decades it has become clear that medicine must find some way to combine its scientific and humanistic sides. In other words, an adequate notion of medicine requires an integrative position that mediates between the analytic-reductionist and the normative-holistic tendencies we find therein. This is especially important as these different styles of reasoning separate “illness” (something perceived and managed by the whole individual in concert with their environment) and “disease” (a …Read more
  •  8
    Correction to: Arnon Levy, Peter Godfrey‑Smith (Eds.): The Scientific Imagination: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (review)
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (4): 617-617. 2021.
  •  19
    Arnon Levy, Peter Godfrey-Smith (Eds.): The Scientific Imagination: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (review)
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (3): 493-499. 2021.
    This is a review of Arnon Levy and Peter Godfrey-Smith's book, The Scientific Imagination
  •  818
    When philosophers discuss the possibility of machines making scientific discoveries, they typically focus on discoveries in physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics. Observing the rapid increase of computer-use in science, however, it becomes natural to ask whether there are any scientific domains out of reach for machine discovery. For example, could machines also make discoveries in qualitative social science? Is there something about humans that makes us uniquely suited to studying humans?…Read more
  •  34
    Motivating the History of the Philosophy of Thought Experiments
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11 (1): 212-221. 2021.
    This is the introduction to a special issue of HOPOS on the history of the philosophy of thought experiments.
  •  476
    Playing the Blame Game with Robots
    In Companion of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’21 Companion), . 2021.
    Recent research shows – somewhat astonishingly – that people are willing to ascribe moral blame to AI-driven systems when they cause harm [1]–[4]. In this paper, we explore the moral- psychological underpinnings of these findings. Our hypothesis was that the reason why people ascribe moral blame to AI systems is that they consider them capable of entertaining inculpating mental states (what is called mens rea in the law). To explore this hypothesis, we created a scenario in which an AI system ru…Read more
  •  40
    Telling Stories in Science: Feyerabend and Thought Experiments
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11 (1): 262-281. 2021.
    The history of the philosophy of thought experiments has touched on the work of Kuhn, Popper, Duhem, Mach, Lakatos, and other big names of the 20th century, but so far, almost nothing has been written about Paul Feyerabend. His most influential work was Against Method, 8 chapters of which concern a case study of Galileo with a specific focus on Galileo’s thought experiments. In addition, the later Feyerabend was very interested in what might be called the epistemology of drama, including stories…Read more
  •  44
    The Productive Anarchy of Scientific Imagination
    Philosophy of Science 87 (5): 968-978. 2020.
    Imagination is important for many things in science: solving problems, interpreting data, designing studies, etc. Philosophers of imagination typically account for the productive role played by imagination in science by focusing on how imagination is constrained, e.g., by using self-imposed rules to infer logically, or model events accurately. But the constraints offered by these philosophers either constrain too much, or not enough, and they can never account for uses of imagination that are ne…Read more
  •  438
    The material theory of induction and the epistemology of thought experiments
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 83 (C): 17-27. 2020.
    John D. Norton is responsible for a number of influential views in contemporary philosophy of science. This paper will discuss two of them. The material theory of induction claims that inductive arguments are ultimately justified by their material features, not their formal features. Thus, while a deductive argument can be valid irrespective of the content of the propositions that make up the argument, an inductive argument about, say, apples, will be justified (or not) depending on facts about …Read more
  •  72
    In this article, we analyse the evidential value of the corpus of experimental philosophy. While experimental philosophers claim that their studies provide insight into philosophical problems, some philosophers and psychologists have expressed concerns that the findings from these studies lack evidential value. Barriers to evidential value include selection bias and p-hacking. To find out whether the significant findings in x-phi papers result from selection bias or p-hacking, we applied a p-cur…Read more
  •  587
    Imagination is necessary for scientific practice, yet there are no in vivo sociological studies on the ways that imagination is taught, thought of, or evaluated by scientists. This article begins to remedy this by presenting the results of a qualitative study performed on two systems biology laboratories. I found that the more advanced a participant was in their scientific career, the more they valued imagination. Further, positive attitudes toward imagination were primarily due to the perceived…Read more
  •  520
    Computational systems biologists create and manipulate computational models of biological systems, but they do not always have straightforward epistemic access to the content and behavioural profile of such models because of their length, coding idiosyncrasies, and formal complexity. This creates difficulties both for modellers in their research groups and for their bioscience collaborators who rely on these models. In this paper we introduce a new kind of visualization that was developed to add…Read more
  •  766
    Sometimes we learn through the use of imagination. The epistemology of imagination asks how this is possible. One barrier to progress on this question has been a lack of agreement on how to characterize imagination; for example, is imagination a mental state, ability, character trait, or cognitive process? This paper argues that we should characterize imagination as a cognitive ability, exercises of which are cognitive processes. Following dual process theories of cognition developed in cognitiv…Read more
  •  208
    Thought experiments are a means of imaginative reasoning that lie at the heart of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to the modern era, and they also play central roles in a range of fields, from physics to politics. The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments is an invaluable guide and reference source to this multifaceted subject. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion covers the following important areas: · the history of thought experiments, fro…Read more
  •  807
    The Content-Dependence of Imaginative Resistance
    In Réhault Sébastien & Cova Florian (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics, Bloomsbury. pp. 143-166. 2018.
    An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we …Read more