•  222
    Susan Stebbing on Logical Positivism and Communication
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (48). 2023.
    In this paper, I look at Susan Stebbing’s articles and reviews that critically engage logical positivism. These appeared before the publication of A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic and helped shape the early British reception of logical positivism. I highlight Stebbing’s adoption of G.E. Moore’s tripartite distinction between knowing a proposition, understanding it, and giving an analysis of it and, in light of this distinction, her focus on whether the principle of verifiability can ground …Read more
  •  87
    Speech Act Theory and the Multiple Aims of Science
    Philosophy of Science 86 (5): 1005-1015. 2019.
    I draw upon speech act theory to understand the speech acts appropriate to the multiple aims of scientific practice and the role of nonepistemic values in evaluating speech acts made relative to those aims. First, I look at work that distinguishes explaining from describing within scientific practices. I then argue speech act theory provides a framework to make sense of how explaining, describing, and other acts have different felicity conditions. Finally, I argue that if explaining aims to conv…Read more
  •  79
    Hans Reichenbach's and C.I. Lewis's Kantian philosophies of science
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 80 62-71. 2020.
    Recent work in the history of philosophy of science details the Kantianism of philosophers often thought opposed to one another, e.g., Hans Reichenbach, C.I. Lewis, Rudolf Carnap, and Thomas Kuhn. Historians of philosophy of science in the last two decades have been particularly interested in the Kantianism of Reichenbach, Carnap, and Kuhn, and more recently, of Lewis. While recent historical work focuses on recovering the threatened-to-be-forgotten Kantian themes of early twentieth-century phil…Read more
  •  76
    Ordinary Language Criticisms of Logical Positivism
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (1): 157-190. 2018.
    In this paper, I fill out the received view of logical positivism within professional philosophy against which Thomas Kuhn’s Structure appeared. To do this, I look at the methodological dimensions of ordinary language criticisms of logical positivist analysis from P.F. Strawson and J.L. Austin. While no one would confuse Strawson and Austin for philosophers of science, I look to their criticisms given the general porousness of sub-disciplinary boundaries in mid-20th century philosophy, the promi…Read more
  •  60
    Ordinary Language Philosophy, Explanation, and the Historical Turn in Philosophy of Science
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 90 (December 2021). 2021.
    Taking a cue from remarks Thomas Kuhn makes in 1990 about the historical turn in philosophy of science, I examine the history of history and philosophy of science within parts of the British philosophical context in the 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, ordinary language philosophy's influence was at its peak. I argue that the ordinary language philosophers' methodological recommendation to analyze actual linguistic practice influences several prominent criticisms of the deductive-nomolog…Read more
  •  56
    Are Kant’s Concepts and Methodology Inconsistent with Scientific Change? Constitutivity and the Synthetic Method in Kant
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 2 (2): 321-353. 2012.
    Sympathetic commentators on Kant’s account of physical knowledge agree that while philosophy of science has much to gain from Kant’s notion of constitutive a priori principles, Kant’s conceptual and methodological resources are inconsistent with the possibility of scientific change. In this article, I argue that this received view is lacking since Kant’s claim that a unique set of a priori principles structures our knowledge for all time is not central to his account of the constitutive a priori…Read more
  •  40
    Assertion, Nonepistemic Values, and Scientific Practice
    Philosophy of Science 84 (1): 160-180. 2017.
    This article motivates a shift in certain strands of the debate over legitimate roles for nonepistemic values in scientific practice from investigating what is involved in taking cognitive attitudes like acceptance toward an empirical hypothesis to looking at a social understanding of assertion, the act of communicating that hypothesis. I argue that speech act theory’s account of assertion as a type of doing makes salient legitimate roles nonepistemic values can play in scientific practice. The …Read more
  •  37
    Review of Pragmatism in Transition: Contemporary Perspectives on C.I. Lewis ed. by Peter Olen and Carl Sachs (review)
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 54 (2): 273-280. 2018.
    In this review, I talk about the essays dealing with C.I. Lewis's place in the history of analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy of science.
  •  12
    Behavior, valuation, and pragmatism in C.I. Lewis and W.V. Quine
    Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1): 1-10. 2023.
    I explore three points about the relationship between C.I. Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism and W.V. Quine’s naturalized epistemology inspired by Robert Sinclair’s Quine, Conceptual Pragmatism, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction. First, I highlight Lewis’s long-standing commitment to Platonism about meaning and its connection to his reflective philosophical method and rejection of a linguistic account of analyticity. Second, I consider Sinclair’s claim that “Lewis’s epistemology provides no ind…Read more