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516Maps and ModelsIn Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Scientific Modeling, . forthcoming.Maps and mapping raise questions about models and modeling and in science. This chapter archives map discourse in the founding generation of philosophers of science (e.g., Rudolf Carnap, Nelson Goodman, Thomas Kuhn, and Stephen Toulmin) and in the subsequent generation (e.g., Philip Kitcher, Helen Longino, and Bas van Fraassen). In focusing on these two original framing generations of philosophy of science, I intend to remove us from the heat of contemporary discussions of abstraction, represent…Read more
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Philosophical cartographyIn Inkeri Koskinen, David Ludwig, Zinhle Mncube, Luana Poliseli & Luis Reyes-Galindo (eds.), Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science, Routledge. 2021.
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14Remapping Race in a Global Context (edited book)Routledge. 2021.Investigating the reality and significance of racial categories, Remapping Race in a Global Context examines the role of race in human genomics, biomedicine, and struggles for social justice around the world. In this book, biologists, anthropologists, historians, and philosophers inspect critical questions around the biological reality of race and how it has been understood in different national and regional contexts. The essays also examine debates on the usefulness of race in medical and epide…Read more
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4931James and Dewey on AbstractionThe Pluralist 9 (2): 1-28. 2014.Reification is to abstraction as disease is to health. Whereas abstraction is singling out, symbolizing, and systematizing, reification is neglecting abstractive context, especially functional, historical, and analytical-level context. William James and John Dewey provide similar and nuanced arguments regarding the perils and promises of abstraction. They share an abstraction-reification account. The stages of abstraction and the concepts of “vicious abstractionism,” “/the/ psychologist’s fallac…Read more
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41Rasmus G. Winther, Review of Ants at Work: How an Insect Society Is Organized by Deborah Gordon (review)Philosophy of Science 68 (2): 268-270. 2001.
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29Phylogenetic Inference, Selection Theory, and History of Science: Selected Papers of A. W. F. Edwards with Commentaries.Cambridge University Press. 2018.A. W. F. Edwards is one of the most influential mathematical geneticists in the history of the discipline. One of the last students of R. A. Fisher, Edwards pioneered the statistical analysis of phylogeny in collaboration with L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, and helped establish Fisher's concept of likelihood as a standard of statistical and scientific inference. In this book, edited by philosopher of science Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, Edwards's key papers are assembled alongside commentaries by leading sc…Read more
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306Mapping the Deep Blue OceansIn Timothy Tambassi (ed.), The Philosophy of GIS. pp. 99-123. 2019.The ocean terrain spanning the globe is vast and complex—far from an immense flat plain of mud. To map these depths accurately and wisely, we must understand how cartographic abstraction and generalization work both in analog cartography and digital GIS. This chapter explores abstraction practices such as selection and exaggeration with respect to mapping the oceans, showing significant continuity in such practices across cartography and contemporary GIS. The role of measurement and abstraction—…Read more
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447Cutting the Cord: A Corrective for World Navels in Cartography and ScienceCartographic Journal 57 (2): 147-159. 2019.A map is not its territory. Taking a map too seriously may lead to pernicious reification: map and world are conflated. As one family of cases of such reification, I focus on maps exuding the omphalos syndrome, whereby a centred location on the map is taken to be the world navel of, for instance, an empire. I build on themes from my book _When Maps Become the World_, in which I analogize scientific theories to maps, and develop the tools of assumption archaeology and integration platforms. Here …Read more
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31When Maps Become the WorldUniversity of Chicago Press. 2020.Map making and, ultimately, _map thinking_ is ubiquitous across literature, cosmology, mathematics, psychology, and genetics. We partition, summarize, organize, and clarify our world via spatialized representations. Our maps and, more generally, our representations seduce and persuade; they build and destroy. They are the ultimate record of empires and of our evolving comprehension of our world. This book is about the promises and perils of map thinking. Maps are purpose-driven abstractions, dis…Read more
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21A Beginner’s Guide to the New Population Genomics of Homo sapiensThe Harvard Review of Philosophy 26 135-151. 2019.It is important to understand the science underlying philosophical debates. In particular, careful reflection is needed on the scientific study of the origins of Homo sapiens, the division of current human populations into ethnicities, populations, or races, and the potential impact of genomics on personalized medicine. Genomic approaches to the origins and divisions of our species are among the most multi-dimensional areas of contemporary science, combining mathematical modeling, computer scien…Read more
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556Race and BiologyIn Linda Alcoff, Luvell Anderson & Paul Taylor (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, Routledge. forthcoming.The ontology of race is replete with moral, political, and scientific implications. This book chapter surveys proposals about the reality of race, distinguishing among three levels of analysis: biogenomic, biological, and social. The relatively homogeneous structure of human genetic variation casts doubt upon the practice of postulating distinct biogenomic races that might be mapped onto socially recognized race categories.
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35Prediction in Selectionist Evolutionary TheoryPhilosophy of Science 76 (5): 889-901. 2009.Selectionist evolutionary theory has often been faulted for not making novel predictions that are surprising, risky, and correct. I argue that it in fact exhibits the theoretical virtue of predictive capacity in addition to two other virtues: explanatory unification and model fitting. Two case studies show the predictive capacity of selectionist evolutionary theory: parallel evolutionary change in E. coli, and the origin of eukaryotic cells through endosymbiosis.
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2Ontologies and Politics of Biogenomic'Race'Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 60 (136): 54-80. 2013.
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1187Varieties of Modules: Kinds, Levels, Origins, and BehaviorsJournal of Experimental Zoology 291 116-129. 2001.This article began as a review of a conference, organized by Gerhard Schlosser, entitled “Modularity in Development and Evolution.” The conference was held at, and sponsored by, the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, Germany in May, 2000. The article subsequently metamorphosed into a literature and concept review as well as an analysis of the differences in current perspectives on modularity. Consequently, I refer to general aspects of the conference but do not review particular presentat…Read more
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759Mathematical Modeling in Biology: Philosophy and PragmaticsFrontiers in Plant Evolution and Development 2012 1-3. 2012.Philosophy can shed light on mathematical modeling and the juxtaposition of modeling and empirical data. This paper explores three philosophical traditions of the structure of scientific theory—Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic—to show that each illuminates mathematical modeling. The Pragmatic View identifies four critical functions of mathematical modeling: (1) unification of both models and data, (2) model fitting to data, (3) mechanism identification accounting for observation, and (4) pre…Read more
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560Estilos de investigación científica, modelos e insectos socialesIn Edna Suárez Díaz (ed.), Variedad Infinita. Ciencia y representación. Un enfoque histórico y filosófico, Unam and Editorial Limusa, Mexico. 2007.
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691Schaffner’s Model of Theory Reduction: Critique and ReconstructionPhilosophy of Science 76 (2): 119-142. 2009.Schaffner’s model of theory reduction has played an important role in philosophy of science and philosophy of biology. Here, the model is found to be problematic because of an internal tension. Indeed, standard antireductionist external criticisms concerning reduction functions and laws in biology do not provide a full picture of the limits of Schaffner’s model. However, despite the internal tension, his model usefully highlights the importance of regulative ideals associated with the search for…Read more
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1099Alternative Definitions of Epistasis: Dependence and InteractionTrends in Ecology and Evolution 16 (9): 498-504. 2001.Although epistasis is at the center of the Fisher-Wright debate, biologists not involved in the controversy are often unaware that there are actually two different formal definitions of epistasis. We compare concepts of genetic independence in the two theoretical traditions of evolutionary genetics, population genetics and quantitative genetics, and show how independence of gene action (represented by the multiplicative model of population genetics) can be different from the absence of gene inte…Read more
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51Ontologies and Politics of Biogenomic 'Race'Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 60 (136): 54-80. 2013.
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4690The Genetic Reification of 'Race'? A Story of Two Mathematical MethodsCritical Philosophy of Race 2 (2): 204-223. 2014.Two families of mathematical methods lie at the heart of investigating the hierarchical structure of genetic variation in Homo sapiens: /diversity partitioning/, which assesses genetic variation within and among pre-determined groups, and /clustering analysis/, which simultaneously produces clusters and assigns individuals to these “unsupervised” cluster classifications. While mathematically consistent, these two methodologies are understood by many to ground diametrically opposed claims about t…Read more
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1476Introduction: Genomics and Philosophy of RaceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 52 1-4. 2015.This year’s topic is “Genomics and Philosophy of Race.” Different researchers might work on distinct subsets of the six thematic clusters below, which are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive: (1) Concepts of ‘Race’; (2) Mathematical Modeling of Human History and Population Structure; (3) Data and Technologies of Human Genomics; (4) Biological Reality of Race; (5) Racialized Selves in a Global Context; (6) Pragmatic Consequences of ‘Race Talk’ among Biologists.
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1495Tom Stoppard’s 1966 play (and 1990 movie) /Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead/ is a metatext – as a text, it interprets, builds upon, and refers to another text, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Similarly, David N. Reznick’s /The Origin then and now: An interpretative guide to the Origin of Species/ (Princeton UP, 2010) is also a metatext. In this review, I turn to the history of science to evaluate whether Reznick’s book shares three families of virtues with Stoppard’s play: (i) brevity and precision, …Read more
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263Part-whole scienceSynthese 178 (3): 397-427. 2011.A scientific explanatory project, part-whole explanation, and a kind of science, part-whole science are premised on identifying, investigating, and using parts and wholes. In the biological sciences, mechanistic, structuralist, and historical explanations are part-whole explanations. Each expresses different norms, explananda, and aims. Each is associated with a distinct partitioning frame for abstracting kinds of parts. These three explanatory projects can be complemented in order to provide an…Read more
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728Determinism and Total Explanation in the Biological and Behavioral SciencesEncyclopedia of Life Sciences. 2014.Should we think of our universe as law-governed and “clockwork”-like or as disorderly and “soup”-like? Alternatively, should we consciously and intentionally synthesize these two extreme pictures? More concretely, how deterministic are the postulated causes and how rigid are the modeled properties of the best statistical methodologies used in the biological and behavioral sciences? The charge of this entry is to explore thinking about causation in the temporal evolution of biological and behavio…Read more
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6755Prisoners of Abstraction? The Theory and Measure of Genetic Variation, and the Very Concept of 'Race'Biological Theory 7 (1): 401-412. 2013.It is illegitimate to read any ontology about "race" off of biological theory or data. Indeed, the technical meaning of "genetic variation" is fluid, and there is no single theoretical agreed-upon criterion for defining and distinguishing populations (or groups or clusters) given a particular set of genetic variation data. Thus, by analyzing three formal senses of "genetic variation"—diversity, differentiation, and heterozygosity—we argue that the use of biological theory for making epistemic cl…Read more
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698Ontologies and Politics of Biogenomic 'Race'Theoria. A Journal of Social and Political Theory (South Africa) 60 (3): 54-80. 2013.All eyes are turned towards genomic data and models as the source of knowledge about whether human races exist or not. Will genomic science make the final decision about whether racial realism (e.g., racial population naturalism) or anti-realism (e.g., racial skepticism) is correct? We think not. We believe that the results of even our best and most impressive genomic technologies underdetermine whether bio-genomic races exist, or not. First, different sub-disciplines of biology interested …Read more
Santa Cruz, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |