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1“A Troubled Area”. Understanding the Controversy over Screening Mammography for Women Aged 40-49In Christoph Jäger & Winfried Löffler (eds.), Epistemology: Contexts, Values, Disagreement. Papers of the 34th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg, 2011, The Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. pp. 271-284. 2007.
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Social epistemology in practiceIn Nancy Cartwright & Eleonora Montuschi (eds.), Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction, Oxford University Press. 2014.
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Expert consensusIn Miriam Solomon, Jeremy R. Simon & Harold Kincaid (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine, Routledge. 2016.
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13On Validators for Psychiatric CategoriesPhilosophy of Medicine 3 (1). 2022.The concept of a “validator” as a unit of evidence for the validity of a psychiatric category has been important for more than fifty years. Validator evidence is aggregated by expert committees (for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), these are referred to as “workgroups”), which use the results to make nosological decisions. Through an examination of the recent history of psychiatric research, this paper argues that it is time to reassess this traditional practice. …Read more
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17Taking the High Road: Comments on Maya J. Goldenberg, Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on ScienceInternational Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 15 (2): 100-107. 2022.This is an excellent book. It is written at the intersection of philosophy of medicine, social epistemology, science and technology studies, and public policy. It conceptualizes the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy as an understandable attitude that, when sizeable enough, causes vaccine refusal. Its focus is on pre-COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and primarily on parental decisions about childhood vaccinations. Its publication, one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, comes at a fortuitous time because it…Read more
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19Who Owns the Concept of Psychiatric Disorder?Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 28 (4): 349-351. 2021.About ten years ago, I participated in a consensus process on migraine nomenclature. Participants used a modified Delphi technique to explore their views about what migraine is. Candidate concepts included an illness, disease, syndrome, condition, disorder, or susceptibility. Initially, there was a wide range of views about which concept best fits our concept of migraine. Migraine—in common with many psychiatric disorders—is poorly understood by neuroscience. On scientific grounds, participants …Read more
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26On the Concept of "Psychiatric Disorder": Incorporating Psychological InjuryPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 28 (4): 329-339. 2021.ARRAY
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42Trust: The Need for Public Understanding of How Science WorksHastings Center Report 51 (S1): 36-39. 2021.General science literacy contributes to good public decision‐making about technology and medicine. This essay explores the kinds of science literacy currently developed by public education in the United States of America. It argues that current curricula on “science as inquiry” (formerly the “nature of science”) need to be brought up to date with the inclusion of discussion of social epistemological concepts such as trust and scientific authority, scientific disagreement versus science denialism…Read more
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12Book ForumStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 81 101271. 2020.
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73Enlightened Empiricism: An Examination of W. V. Quine's Theory of Knowledge (review)Philosophical Review 100 (3): 484-487. 1991.
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70Review of Anya Plutynski’s Explaining cancer: finding order in disorder (review)Biology and Philosophy 34 (3): 37. 2019.Anya Plutynski’s Explaining Cancer extends the insights of contemporary philosophy of biology to research on cancer and cancer treatment. Cancer is conceptualized as a complex process for which a pluralist theoretical approach is the most appropriate. This review essay explores implications for philosophy of science and cancer research.
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77Legend naturalism and scientific progress: An essay on Philip Kitcher'sStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 26 (2): 205-218. 1995.Philip Kitcher's The Advancement of Science sets out, programmatically, a new naturalistic view of science as a process of building consensus practices. Detailed historical case studies—centrally, the Darwinian revolutio—are intended to support this view. I argue that Kitcher's expositions in fact support a more conservative view, that I dub ‘Legend Naturalism’. Using four historical examples which increasingly challenge Kitcher's discussions, I show that neither Legend Naturalism, nor the less …Read more
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59Quine's point of viewJournal of Philosophy 86 (3): 113-136. 1989.Quine claims to be "working from within" our conceptual scheme and proceeding scientifically. This description makes his views of interest to those who are skeptical of traditional metaphysical projects and to those with confidence in science. This study examines whether Quine is in fact starting within ordinary language and proceeding scientifically and, if not, how his views are to be best understood. I proceed by exploring some central doctrines in Quine's writing, most notably indeterminacy …Read more
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28Social EmpiricismMIT Press. 2001.For the last forty years, two claims have been at the core of disputes about scientific change: that scientists reason rationally and that science is progressive. For most of this time discussions were polarized between philosophers, who defended traditional Enlightenment ideas about rationality and progress, and sociologists, who espoused relativism and constructivism. Recently, creative new ideas going beyond the polarized positions have come from the history of science, feminist criticism of …Read more
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34Born to Rebel. Frank SullowayPhilosophy of Science 65 (1): 171-181. 1998.Born to Rebel is an innovative and important work with much to say to philosophers of science, as well as historians and sociologists of science. Sulloway uses, successfully, quantitative statistical methods that others have despaired of using to analyze the complexities of historical change. In particular, he investigates scientific decision-making during scientific controversies with a multivariate analysis. The goal is to discern, precisely, the contribution of factors such as religious belie…Read more
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89A Critical Context For Longino’s Critical Contextual EmpiricismStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 36 (1): 211-222. 2005.
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8Information and the ethics of information control in sciencePerspectives on Science 4 (2): 195-206. 1996.This article examines some current U.S. policies regarding the ethics of information control in scientific research, such as the requirements for “timely” publication and information sufficient for replication. The appropriateness of these policies is called into question by recent work in science studies, which suggest the importance of informal and nonlinguistic channels of information and the impossibility of exact replication of experiments. Policy change is recommended, but it needs to take…Read more
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43The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine (edited book)Routledge. 2016._The_ _Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine _is a comprehensive guide to topics in the fields of epistemology and metaphysics of medicine. It examines traditional topics such as the concept of disease, causality in medicine, the epistemology of the randomized controlled trial, the biopsychosocial model, explanation, clinical judgment and phenomenology of medicine and emerging topics, such as philosophy of epidemiology, measuring harms, the concept of disability, nursing perspectives, ra…Read more
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16Naturalism and generalityPhilosophical Psychology 8 (4). 1995.Naturalistic epistemologists frequently assume that their aim is to identify generalities (i.e. general laws) about the effectiveness of particular reasoning processes and methods. This paper argues that the search for this kind of generality fails. Work that has been done thus far to identify generalities (e.g. by Goldman, Kitcher and Thagard) overlooks both the complexity of reasoning and the relativity of assessments to particular contexts (domain, stage and goal of inquiry). Examples of huma…Read more
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2Group Judgment and the Medical Consensus ConferenceIn Fred Gifford (ed.), Philosophy of Medicine, Elsevier. 2011.
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39Apriority and metajustification in BonJour's structure of empirical knowledgePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (4): 767-777. 1990.
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59Commentary on Alison Gopnik's "the scientist as child"Philosophy of Science 63 (4): 547-551. 1996.None
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36The whiptail lizard reconsideredPerspectives on Science 11 (3): 318-325. 2003.: Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch's introductory text, The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science (1993), includes a controversy about the significance of pseudosexual behavior in the parthenogenetic whiptail lizard. Collins and Pinch, basing their account on the work of Greg Myers (1990), claim that "in this area of biology, experiments are seldom possible" and that the debate has "battled to an honorable draw." I argue that a closer look at the publications of the scientists involved sh…Read more
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147Social empiricismNoûs 28 (3): 325-343. 1994.A new, social epistemology of science that addresses practical as well as theoretical concerns.
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250Norms of epistemic diversityEpisteme 3 (1-2): 23-36. 2006.Epistemic diversity is widely approved of by social epistemologists. This paper asks, more specifi cally, how much epistemic diversity, and what kinds of epistemic diversity are normatively appropriate? Both laissez-faire and highly directive approaches to epistemic diversity are rejected in favor of the claim that diversity is a blunt epistemic tool. There are typically a number of diff erent options for adequate diversifi cation. The paper focuses on scientifi c domains, with particular attent…Read more
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