This Talk has been postponed, date TBA.   Title: "The Concept of Control" Abstract: The talk will argue that control is a complex and inherently unclear inception ill suited to […]

Title: Gender and values at the intersection of molecular biology and psychiatry Abstract: This talk points to socio-political values that call for more integration between molecular and social-environmental approaches to […]

Title: Pattern Finding and Pattern Making Abstract: Human beings are proficient pattern finders (e.g., scientific laws), and pattern makers (e.g., art, architecture, political systems). According to philosophical tradition, going back […]

Title: The Bearable Thinness of Being: A Pragmatist Metaphysics of Affordances Abstract: Taking a pragmatist stance toward the practices and products of science shapes our answers to central philosophical questions. […]

Title: Essentially Dynamic Concepts Abstract: Important biological concepts often display unruly behavior: there is consensus that they designate something important, but not how that 'something' should be defined, identified, or theorized—and […]

Rules Made to be Broken: Calibrating Climate Proxies Abstract: Philosophical analysis of measurement in scientific practice often focuses on the development and use of measurement standards. However, when it comes […]

Title: Stating structural realism: mathematics-first approaches to physics and metaphysics Abstract: I respond to the frequent objection that structural realism fails to sharply state an alternative to the standard predicate-logic, […]

Title: Philosophy of the Cosmological Constant Abstract: The (re)introduction of lambda into cosmology has spurred debates that touch on central questions in philosophy of science, as well as the foundations […]

Title: Measurement in a network approach to psychopathology Abstract: In psychology, the standard model for measurement is the latent variable model. In a latent variable model of depression, the correlations […]

Title: Fringe theories and epistemic tolerance Abstract: In this talk, I push the upward bound of our epistemic tolerance in science to its reasonable limit. In particular, I support the […]

Title: Functionalism in physics and inter-theoretic relations   Abstract: Philosophers of physics appeal to functionalism in a variety of contexts. This talk will explore what kind of functionalism they should […]

Approximating Bayes? On The Role of Approximations in Bayesian Cognitive Science The Bayesian framework is prominent in contemporary cognitive science. Its key tenet is that many aspects of cognition can […]

Title: A Unified Theory of Probability Abstract: I defend a partial entailment/degree-of-support interpretation of probability as a unified theory of both physical and epistemic probability. On this interpretation, probabilities are […]

Title: “Control Problems.” Abstract: The concept of control plays a prominent role in pure and applied science. And it features prominently in ethics too. The paper’s issue is how these […]

Title:  Are the problems of neuroscience just like everyone else's? And what should philosophers do about them? Abstract:  Lately, there have been many papers criticizing various methods in neuroscience as […]

Title:  Richard Lewontin and the Complications of Linkage Abstract:  During the 1960s and 1970s population geneticists pushed beyond models of single genes to grapple with the effect on evolution of multiple […]

Title: Gricean inferentialism about scientific representation:  A framework and two applications. Abstract:  Traditional views of scientific representation are “referentialist.” They argue that a representation’s meaning is determined by a substantive […]

Title: People Prefer Moral Discretion to Algorithms: Algorithm Aversion Beyond Intransparency Abstract: We explore aversion to the use of algorithms in moral decision-making. So far, this aversion has been explained […]

Title:  Quantum Nanowires: A case study on reproducibility in natural sciences Abstract: Three years ago, I and a friend found major problems in a Nature paper in my field. The […]

Title:  How much are large language models narrowing the gap to human intelligence?   Abstract:  ChatGPT was released in late October 2022. It is a public interface to GPT-3, an artificial […]

Title: "A quantitative field theoretical for spontaneous collapse" Abstract: Any model of spontaneous collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics must involve alterations of the standard Schrödinger equation to […]

Title: From Epistemology to Quantum Mechanics: A Phenomenological Proposal Abstract: Contemporary epistemology is dominated by externalist approaches. In this picture, evidence is not constituted by our experiences but by facts […]

Title: The Sense of Commitment in Joint Action: Towards a Comparative Perspective Abstract: Recent research provides evidence that, in the context of joint action, individuals’ sense of commitment sustains their […]

Title: Inductive Risk and Value Freedom, Revisited Abstract: Work on the role of values in science has grown and diversified dramatically in the 21st century. But there is a near-consensus […]

Title: The Wordly Infrastructure of Causation Abstract: This talk  is based on joint work with Naftali Weinberger and Porter Williams. It will describe an alternative to currently dominant philosophical approaches […]

Title:  Replacing STEM with Natural Philosophy: Reconfiguring the Science/Philosophy Relationship Abstract: The idea of this project is to seek to replace the current notions of STEM with the classical ideal […]

Title: Spacetime, functionalism, and inertial frames Abstract: I advocate a form of spacetime functionalism that identifies spacetime with whatever picks out a structure of inertial frames. In this talk, I’ll […]

Title:  A Novel Perspective on Pluralism in Climate Modeling Abstract: Modeling the mass-extinction event at the Permian Triassic Boundary (PTB), which is believed to have followed a warming event triggered by […]

Title:  Renormalization group explanations in particle physics Abstract: Despite the highly analogous forms that renormalization group methods take in particle physics and condensed matter physics, there are key modal differences […]

Title: Crafting Scientific Narratives Abstract: How do particular sets of experimental data become evidence for particular scientific claims? In this talk I call attention to the narrative constraints that shape […]