Papers Forthcoming

• The Pragmatic and the Religious Functions of Science in Science and Humanism (ed. Anjan Chakravartty)
• For Values in Science: Assessing Recent Arguments for the Ideal of Value-Free Science, forthcoming in Synthese
• Foreword to the Paperback Edition, The Poems of John Dewey (SIU Press, coming Nov. 2024)

Draft Papers in Progress

Trust, Expertise, and Scientific Authority in a Democracy: A Pragmatist Approach

In this paper, I take a pragmatist approach to addressing problems under the headings of “the erosion of scientific authority,” “the war on science,” or “the death of expertise.” I argue that we should not simply be trying to convince the public to trust science as it currently stands, nor should we be asking wholesale questions about whether we should trust science as such. Rather, we should admit that, given the current state of science, society, and science-society relations, there are many good reason for the public to distrust aspects of science that are most relevant to them. The restoration of public trust in science will require major reforms to how science is pursued and how it is embedded in democratic institutions, and pragmatist philosophies of science and democracy can help us see the path forward.

(with Sabrina Starnaman) “‘Unless we Americanize them they will foreignize us’: Pragmatism, Progressivism, and Americanization”

The ideas and social work of pragmatist progressives John Dewey and Jane Addams have long been misrepresented by left multiculturalists, American literary and cultural studies scholars, and others. This is unfortunate, because Dewey and Addams have nuanced and interesting views on questions of immediate and significant importance, such as race relations, relations with immigrant communities, and their effect on democracy. We trace the history of a particular citation error that is the centerpiece of an attempt to paint Dewey and Addams as cultural assimilationists who urged the “Americanization” of immigrants and non-whites. We set the record straight through a careful look at the textual record and drawing the crucial distinction between the ideal of social integration versus the ideal of cultural assimilation. This story has lessons not only for the historiography of the Progressive Era but for citation and research ethics for humanities and historical scholars.

Papers in Active Development

• What Philosophy of Science Can Learn from Sociology of Science, and What It Can Teach
• Nancy Cartwright’s Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

When a readable version is available, it will be linked here. Please cite with extreme caution, as these are not stable versions of these papers.

The rest of the papers on this page are in one sense or another works in progress, though most of them are not in active development. I hope one day to get back to them and whip them into publishable shape. I post them here primarily to share my thoughts on topics that I’ve worked carefully on but have not managed to publish, and also because I am eager for feedback on my thoughts as they develop. If you are considering citing these, please be aware that they have not passed peer review, nor are they likely to be stable versions relative to later publications.

Archived Working Papers

“Inquiry and Evidence: A Pragmatist Philosophy of Scientific Practice”

In the first part of this paper, I will sketch the main features of traditional models of evidence, indicating idealizations in such models that I regard as doing more harm than good. I will then proceed to elaborate on an alternative model of evidence that is functionalist, complex, dynamic, and contextual, which I will call dynamic evidential functionalism. I will demonstrate its application to an illuminating example of scientific inquiry, and defend it from some likely objections. In the second part, I will use that alternative to solve a variety of classic and contemporary problems in the literature on scientific evidence having to do with the empirical basis of science and the use of evidence in public policy. (An extract of the first part of this was published in 2015 in Metaphilosophy as “The Functional Complexity of Scientific Evidence.” The paper is a long-term labor of love going back to my dissertation, but it hasn’t gone well trying to get it published. Perhaps I will revisit it again eventually.)

“The Concept of ‘Situation’ in John Dewey’s Logic and Philosophy of Science”

This paper attempts to resolve a vexed interpretive problem for scholars of John Dewey’s logic, epistemology, and philosophy of science; namely, what is a “situation,” and what role does it play in Dewey’s theory of inquiry? I argue that these questions properly belong to the history of logic as well as epistemology and philosophy of science, and that scholars who have ventured interpretations of these ideas, from Dewey’s contemporaries to today, have misunderstood Dewey’s ideas. I provide an alternative interpretation of Dewey’s “situation” concept and the situational theory of inquiry that makes use of it, and I briefly trace some implications of these interpretations for thinking about the philosophy of scientific inquiry in particular. (Prepared for a presentation at the UCSD History of Philosophy Roundtable (HoPR) in Winter 2017.)

“Cognition as Situational Problem Solving: John Dewey Meets Jean Lave”

For John Dewey and Jean Lave, the concept “situation” figures prominently in their theories of cognition. In comparing Lave’s work on situated learning and cognition with John Dewey’s situational theory of thinking and inquiry and his anti-Cartesian theory of mind, I show that there is a fruitful convergence and complementarity between these two major theorists of mind, culture, and activity. Their work shows that “situation” remains an important way of thinking about cognition in ecological and cultural context.

“A Centennial Retrospective of John Dewey’s ‘The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy'”

In 1909, the 50th anniversary of both the publication of Origin of the Species and his own birth, John Dewey published “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy.” This optimistic essay saw Darwin’s advance not only as one of empirical or theoretical biology, but a logical and conceptual revolution that would shake every corner of philosophy. Dewey tells us less about the influence that Darwin exerted over philosophy over the past 50 years and instead prophesied the influence it would (or should) take in the future. I will discuss this landmark paper and the key lessons Dewey draws from Darwinism for philosophy, and give a preliminary assessment of how well we’ve done so far. (Dewey would be largely disappointed.)

“John Dewey is First and Foremost a Philosopher of Science”

Unfinished draft for a symposium on pragmatism and philosophy of science.

“Quine is Not a (Deweyan) Pragmatist”

Outline of a response to Don Howard’s “Quine, Dewey, and the Pragmatist Tradition in American Philosophy of Science.”

“The Holloway-Byrne-Marston Feminist-Scientific Critique of Freud”

In this talk, I explicate the critique of Freudian psychoanalysis developed by Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Olive Byrne, and William Moulton Marston, and I argue that this critique is unique for its blending of feminism, science, and popular culture. I make this argument through the lens of feminist epistemology, particularly standpoint theory, as well as through the connections between intellectual production, science in particular, and popular culture.