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 […]