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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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22Who 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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44Trust: 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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76Enlightened Empiricism: An Examination of W. V. Quine's Theory of Knowledge (review)Philosophical Review 100 (3): 484-487. 1991.
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71Review 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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60Quine'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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92A 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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9Information 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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258Groupthink_ versus _The Wisdom of Crowds: The Social Epistemology of Deliberation and DissentSouthern Journal of Philosophy 44 (S1): 28-42. 2006.Trust in the practice of rational deliberation is widespread and largely unquestioned. This paper uses recent work from business contexts to challenge the view that rational deliberation in a group improves decisions. Pressure to reach consensus can, in fact, lead to phenomena such as groupthink and to suppression of relevant data. Aggregation of individual decisions, rather than deliberation to a consensus, surprisingly, can produce better decisions than those of either group deliberation or in…Read more
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143Consensus in ScienceThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 10 193-204. 2001.Because the idea of consensus in contemporary philosophy of science is typically seen as the locus of progress, rationality, and, often, truth, Mill’s views on the undesirability of consensus have been largely dismissed. The historical data, however, shows that there are many examples of scientific progress without consensus, thus refuting the notion that consensus in science has any special epistemic status for rationality, scientific progress (success), or truth. What needs to be developed ins…Read more
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83Review of Martin carrier, Don Howard, Janet Kourany (eds.), The Challenge of the Social and the Pressure of Practice: Science and Values Revisited (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (6). 2008.
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24Making Medical KnowledgeOxford University Press. 2015.How is medical knowledge made? There have been radical changes in recent decades, through new methods such as consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and narrative medicine. Miriam Solomon explores their origins, aims, and epistemic strengths and weaknesses; and she offers a pluralistic approach for the future
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61Extensionality, underdetermination and indeterminacyErkenntnis 33 (2). 1990.A development of Quine's views took place between the denial of analyticity (in "Two Dogmas") and the doctrine of indeterminacy (in Word and Object). Quine argues for the inscrutability of extensional as well as intensional content. The debate with Carnap in the mid-fifties pushes Quine to argue for full indeterminacy. Quine initially resists arguing for indeterminacy because the doctrine seems to lead to general skepticism, not just to skepticism about meanings. Quine draws on Tarski's work on …Read more
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170Scientific rationality and human reasoningPhilosophy of Science 59 (3): 439-455. 1992.The work of Tversky, Kahneman and others suggests that people often make use of cognitive heuristics such as availability, salience and representativeness in their reasoning and decision making. Through use of a historical example--the recent plate tectonics revolution in geology--I argue that such heuristics play a crucial role in scientific decision making also. I suggest how these heuristics are to be considered, along with noncognitive factors (such as motivation and social structures) when …Read more
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38Norms of Epistemic DiversityEpisteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 3 (1): 23-36. 2006.Epistemic diversity is widely approved of by social epistemologists. This paper asks, more specifically, how much epistemic diversity, and what kinds of epistemic diversity are normatively appropriate? Bothlaissez-faireand 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 different options for adequate diversification. The paper focuses on scientific domains, with particular attention to…Read more
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CSW Jobs for Philosophers Employment StudyApa Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 8 (2): 3-6. 2009.
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9The pragmatic turn in naturalist philosophy of sciencePerspectives on Science 3 (2): 206-230. 1995.Creative approaches in recent work in science studies can be usefully connected with ideas from the pragmatic tradition. This article both criticizes and builds on the contemporary pragmatic views of Hacking, Stich, and others. It selects a theme from the work of James and Dewey as a heuristic for a new, and necessary, pragmatic epistemology of science.
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