Research Summary

My research primarily focuses on the intersection between philosophy of science and social epistemology. I am interested in how science does and ought to function as a social epistemic enterprise — Who is the proper bearer of scientific knowledge, the community or individuals? Who ought to be responsible for collective scientific work? How are scientific communities collectively justified in their claims? In answering these kinds of questions, I draw together several different areas of philosophy which have not been well connected in the extant literature: social ontology, metaethics, and traditional epistemology. By building bridges between these areas, I aim to provide a more complete account of how scientists know together and work together to generate scientific knowledge.

Epistemology of Disagreement in Science
​Scientists disagree with each other all the time. What we prima facie designate as disagreement in science actually masks a whole swath of rich epistemic issues over the nature of evidence and standards of evaluation. I am interested in characterizing these disagreements and I argue for their value to the success of scientific groups. This work focuses on disagreement beyond an idealized framework.
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Ethics and Responsibility in Science
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As science becomes more collaborative, the questions of who should be rewarded for scientific breakthroughs and who should be held responsible for misconduct become more difficult to discern. I argue that in order to think clearly about collective responsibility in science, we must first clarify the concept of epistemic responsibility. I build on recent work in metaethics on moral responsibility to arrive at a tripartite account of epistemic responsibility. I have a cluster of projects which applies the tripartite account to resolve problems in scientific practice and research ethics. especially the ethics of scientific co-authorship. Furthermore, I am interested in extending my analysis of responsibility to AI systems: fairness, accountability, and transparency (FAccT).
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Social Ontology of Epistemic Groups
It has often been claimed that scientific collaborations are the proper bearers of knowledge. I am developing a view of epistemic groups which has features of both reductive (e.g. summative) and inflationary (e.g. joint commitment) approaches. The problem is not to settle the debate between the reductive and inflationary views, but rather to investigate what these two approaches to group phenomena can tell us about the epistemic status of scientific knowledge. Right now, I am interested in how groups are formed and how we may understand this from individual interactions.
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Philosophy of Biology
​I am interested in the recent debate over biological individuality which deals with the question of whether biological aggregates like colonies and holobionts are proper biological individuals. Both biological individuality and social ontology are interested in the reality and status of collectives that make up either the biological world or the social world.
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Papers

Published

  • Forthcoming. "Scientific Conclusions Need Not be Accurate, Justified, or Believed by Their Authors" In Synthese (with Liam Kofi Bright). [online first] 
Abstract: We argue that the main results of scientific papers may appropriately be published even if they are false, unjustified, and not believed to be true or justified by their author. To defend this claim we draw upon the literature studying the norms of assertion, and consider how they would apply if one attempted to hold claims made in scientific papers to their strictures, as assertions and discovery claims in scientific papers seem naturally analogous. We first use a case study of William H. Bragg’s early twentieth century work in physics to demonstrate that successful science has in fact violated these norms. We then argue that features of the social epistemic arrangement of science which are necessary for its long run success require that we do not hold claims of scientific results to their standards. We end by making a suggestion about the norms that it would be appropriate to hold scientific claims to, along with an explanation of why the social epistemology of science—considered as an instance of collective inquiry—would require such apparently lax norms for claims to be put forward.​
  • ​(2019). "Do Collaborators in Science Need to Agree?" In Philosophy of Science. [download]
Abstract: I argue in this paper that collaborators do not, in fact, need to reach broad agreement over the justification of a consensus claim. This is because maintaining a diversity of justifiers within a scientific collaboration has important epistemic value. I develop a view of collective justification which depends on the diversity of epistemic perspectives present in a scientific group. I argue that a group can be collectively justified in asserting that P as long as the disagreement among collaborators over the reasons is itself justified. I outline two epistemic “mechanisms” which are sources of diversity of justifiers in a scientific collaboration. In conclusion, I make a case for multi-method collaborative research and work through an example in the social sciences.

* Awarded the 2018 Mary B. Hesse Graduate Student Essay Award by the Philosophy of Science Association.
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  • (2018). “A Role for Judgement Aggregation in Coauthoring Papers.” In Erkenntnis Vol. 83, No. 2; 231–252 (with Liam Kofi Bright and Remco Heesen). [download]​​​​
Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of judgment aggregation in science. How should scientists decide which propositions to assert in a collaborative document? We distinguish the question of what to write in a collaborative document from the question of collective belief. We argue that recent objections to the application of the formal literature on judgment aggregation to the problem of judgment aggregation in science apply to the latter, not the former question. The formal literature has introduced various desiderata for an aggregation procedure. Proposition-wise majority voting emerges as a procedure that satisfies all desiderata which represent norms of science. An interesting consequence is that not all collaborating scientists need to endorse every proposition asserted in a collaborative document.
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In Preparation

  • "Epistemic Responsibility in Science" [handout version here]
  • ​"Authorship, Collective Responsibility, and Collaboration in Science" [under review]
  • "What is a Biological Individual?" [old draft available here]

Drafts available on request.