•  170
    How “weak” mindreaders inherited the earth
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2): 140-141. 2009.
    Carruthers argues that an integrated faculty of metarepresentation evolved for mindreading and was later exapted for metacognition. A more consistent application of his approach would regard metarepresentation in mindreading with the same skeptical rigor, concluding that the “faculty” may have been entirely exapted. Given this result, the usefulness of Carruthers’ line-drawing exercise is called into question
  •  52
    Can we tell whether philosophy is special?
    Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. 2022.
    In “Is Philosophy Exceptional? A Corpus-Based, Quantitative Study” (2022), Moti Mizrahi and Michael Adam Dickinson use corpus methods to determine the kinds of arguments that turn up in philosophical writing. They use the results to contribute to debates on philosophy’s “specialness” or “exceptionality”. To what extent is philosophy interestingly unlike other knowledge-making disciplines? Specifically, does it deploy different forms of argument than the sciences or other disciplines? These quest…Read more
  •  101
    On the nature of cross-disciplinary integration: A philosophical framework
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 56 (C): 62-70. 2016.
    Meeting grand challenges requires responses that constructively combine multiple forms of expertise, both academic and non-academic; that is, it requires cross-disciplinary integration. But just what is cross-disciplinary integration? In this paper, we supply a preliminary answer by reviewing prominent accounts of cross-disciplinary integration from two literatures that are rarely brought together: cross-disciplinarity and philosophy of biology. Reflecting on similarities and differences in thes…Read more
  •  34
    Improving philosophical dialogue interventions to better resolve problematic value pluralism in collaborative environmental science
    with Bethany K. Laursen and Chad Gonnerman
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 87 54-71. 2021.
    Environmental problems often outstrip the abilities of any single scientist to understand, much less address them. As a result, collaborations within, across, and beyond the environmental sciences are an increasingly important part of the environmental science landscape. Here, we explore an insufficiently recognized and particularly challenging barrier to collaborative environmental science: value pluralism, the presence of non-trivial differences in the values that collaborators bring to bear o…Read more
  •  50
    Using Bibliometrics to Support the Facilitation of Cross-Disciplinary Communication
    with Christopher J. Williams, Michael O'Rourke, Sanford D. Eigenbrode, and Ian O'Loughlin
    Journal of the American Society for Information Science 64 (9): 1768-1779. 2013.
    Given the importance of cross-disciplinary research, facilitating CDR effectiveness is a priority for many institutions and funding agencies. There are a number of CDR types, however, and the effectiveness of facilitation efforts will require sensitivity to that diversity. This article presents a method characterizing a spectrum of CDR designed to inform facilitation efforts that relies on bibliometric techniques and citation data. We illustrate its use by the Toolbox Project, an ongoing effort …Read more
  •  1037
    In Our Shoes or the Protagonist’s? Knowledge, Justification, and Projection
    with Chad Gonnerman, Lee Poag, Logan Redden, and Jacob Robbins
    In Tania Lombrozo, Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 3, Oxford University Press. pp. 189-212. 2020.
    Sackris and Beebe (2014) report the results of a series of studies that seem to show that there are cases in which many people are willing to attribute knowledge to a protagonist even when her belief is unjustified. These results provide some reason to conclude that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. In this paper, we report a series of results that can be seen as supporting this conclusion by going some way towards ruling out an alternati…Read more
  •  1
    Reflexivity is a complex phenomenon. In this chapter, we are primarily interested in reflexivity insofar as it is a process of discovering for oneself and one’s audiences the perspectival features (e.g., background assumptions, social positions, and biases) that shape one’s judgments, decisions, and behaviors. So understood, reflexivity isn’t always a good idea. Sometimes thinking can get in the way of doing. (Downhill ski racing springs to mind.) But for some activities, such as action research…Read more
  •  30
    Cross-disciplinary research as a platform for philosophical research
    with Chad Gonnerman and Michael O'rourke
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (2): 344-363. 2016.
    It is argued that core areas of philosophy can benefit from reflection on cross-disciplinary research (CDR). We start by giving a brief account of CDR, describing its variability and some of the ways in which philosophers can interact with it. We then provide an argument in principle for the conclusion that CDR is philosophically fecund, arguing that since CDR highlights fundamental differences among disciplinary research worldviews, it can be used to motivate new philosophical problems and supp…Read more
  •  95
    Intuition & calibration
    with Jonathan M. Weinberg, Chad Gonnerman, Ian Vandewalker, and Stacey Swain
    Essays in Philosophy 13 (1): 15. 2012.
    The practice of appealing to esoteric intuitions, long standard in analytic philosophy, has recently fallen on hard times. Various recent empirical results have suggested that philosophers are not currently able to distinguish good intuitions from bad. This paper evaluates one possible type of approach to this problematic methodological situation: calibration. Both critiquing and building on an argument from Robert Cummins, the paper explores what possible avenues may exist for the calibration o…Read more
  •  56
    Enhancing Communication & Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research (edited book)
    with Michael O'Rourke, Sanford D. Eigenbrode, and J. D. Wulfhorst
    SAGE Publications. 2013.
    Enhancing Communication & Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research, edited by Michael O'Rourke, Stephen Crowley, Sanford D. Eigenbrode, and J. D. Wulfhorst, is a volume of previously unpublished, state-of-the-art chapters on interdisciplinary communication and collaboration written by leading figures and promising junior scholars in the world of interdisciplinary research, education, and administration. Designed to inform both teaching and research, this innovative book covers the spectrum o…Read more
  •  419
    Animal Behavior
    In Michael Ruse (ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of biology, Oxford University Press. pp. 327--348. 2008.
    Few areas of scientific investigation have spawned more alternative approaches than animal behavior: comparative psychology, ethology, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, behavioral endocrinology, behavioral neuroscience, neuroethology, behavioral genetics, cognitive ethology, developmental psychobiology---the list goes on. Add in the behavioral sciences focused on the human animal, and you can continue the list with ethnography, biological anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology (c…Read more
  •  141
    Loose Constitutivity and Armchair Philosophy
    Studia Philosophica Estonica 2 (2): 177-195. 2009.
    Standard philosophical methodology which proceeds by appeal to intuitions accessible "from the armchair" has come under criticism on the basis of empirical work indicating unanticipated variability of such intuitions. Loose constitutivity---the idea that intuitions are partly, but not strictly, constitutive of the concepts that appear in them---offers an interesting line of response to this empirical challenge. On a loose constitutivist view, it is unlikely that our intuitions are incorrect acro…Read more
  •  134
    In this article we argue that philosophy can facilitate improvement in cross-disciplinary science. In particular, we discuss in detail the Toolbox Project, an effort in applied epistemology that deploys philosophical analysis for the purpose of enhancing collaborative, cross-disciplinary scientific research through improvements in cross-disciplinary communication. We begin by sketching the scientific context within which the Toolbox Project operates, a context that features a growing interest in…Read more
  •  24
    The Power of Positive Thinking
    Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 7 (3): 126-128. 2004.
  •  47
    The x-phi(les): unusual insights into the nature of inquiry
    with Jonathan M. Weinberg
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40 (2): 227-232. 2009.
    Experimental philosophy is often regarded as a category mistake. Even those who reject that view typically see it as irrelevant to standard philosophical projects. We argue that neither of these claims can be sustained and illustrate our view with a sketch of the rich interconnections with philosophy of science.Keywords: Science; Philosophy; Experimental Philosophy.
  •  3011
  •  21
    Review of Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Science, Politics, and Evolution (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (10). 2008.
  •  21
    Cross-disciplinary research (CDR) is an increasingly important part of the contemporary research 'landscape'. Despite its growing importance there remain a large number of barriers to successful CDR and many of these barriers are poorly understood. In particular there are challenges at the conceptual and communicative levels that have received relatively little attention. In this paper it is argued that these challenges are appropriate topics of analysis for philosophers. Appropriate methodologi…Read more