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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
[*]Drafts available upon request.[*]