Publications

I try to archive my work here and make it as accessible as publishing contracts will allow. However, because the internet is vast and smart and has more time than I do to refresh lists, my Google Scholar profile and my PhilPapers profile might have more up-to-date lists of my most recent publications.

Forth. (with Catherine Kendig) Digging Deep in the Sociality of Interaction: Knowledge-Making in Agricultural Science. In S. Richardson, M. Dietrich, H. Grasswick and C. Fehr, eds. Interactions: Feminism, Science, and Knowledge – Engagements with the Philosophy of Helen Longino. PhilSci-Archive Preprint.

Sociality of science has long been the topic of investigation in science studies and the social constructivist approaches advanced within critical race theory and feminist epistemology. Helen Longino’s career has provided a number of canonical and crucial advances in philosophical understanding of the sociality of science, and recently, she has argued that it is the sociality of interaction within scientific groups that makes them knowledge producing. In this article, forthcoming in a volume dedicated to the work of Longino's career, we use case studies in potato science research to offer a friendly but important amendment to Longino's recent analysis of the sociality of interaction.

2024. (with Rebekah Duke, Ryan McCoy, and Chad Risko) Promises and Perils of Big Data: Philosophical Constraints on Chemical Ontologies. Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Chemistry is experiencing a paradigm shift in the way it interacts with data. So-called “big data” are collected and used at unprecedented scales with the idea that algorithms can be designed to aid in chemical discovery. As data-enabled practices become ever more ubiquitous, chemists must consider the organization and curation of their data, especially as it is presented to both humans and increasingly intelligent algorithms. One of the most promising organizational schemes for big data is a construct termed an ontology. In data science, ontologies are systems that represent relations among objects and properties in a domain of discourse. As chemistry encounters larger and larger data sets, the ontologies that support chemical research will likewise increase in complexity, and the future of chemistry will be shaped by the choices made in developing big data chemical ontologies. How such ontologies will work should therefore be a subject of significant attention in the chemical community. Now is the time for chemists to ask questions about ontology design and use: How should chemical data be organized? What can be reasonably expected from an organizational structure? Is a universal ontology tenable? As some of these questions may be new to chemists, we recommend an interdisciplinary approach that draws on the long history of philosophers of science asking questions about the organization of scientific concepts, constructs, models, and theories. This Perspective presents insights from these long-standing studies and initiates new conversations between chemists and philosophers.

2023. Philosophy of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Nanoscience and nanotechnology are two interrelated fields of study centred on designing, synthesising, analysing, and investigating nanoscale materials, their properties, and their behaviours. The unusual and scale-dependent properties and behaviours of matter at the nanoscale are the main source of scientific interest in nanoscale materials. These changes also raise a variety of puzzles within the philosophy of science and technology. These puzzles are united by a common interest in reckoning with the very basic challenge of trying to make sense of what nanoscale materials are and how they fit into the existing fabric of scientific thought about the nature and behaviour of matter. The very act of shrinking a material down to the nanoscale can profoundly change its physical and chemical properties. This challenges a widely held scientific and philosophical assumption that the composition of a material dictates its properties. As such, nanoscale materials can inspire thought experiments and examples relevant to a wide range of areas of philosophical thought even outside the philosophy of science and technology, including metaphysics and the philosophy of language.

2023. (with Kelle Dhein) Multiscale Modeling in Neuroethology: The Significance of the Mesoscale. Philosophy of Science. PhilSci-Archive Preprint.

Recent accounts of multiscale modeling investigate ontic and epistemic constraints imposed by relations between component models at varying relative scales (macro, meso, micro). These accounts often focus especially on the role of the meso, or intermediate, relative scale in a multiscale model. We aid this effort by highlighting a novel role for mesoscale models: functioning as a focal point, and explanation, for disagreement between researchers who otherwise share theoretical commitments. We present a case study in multiscale modeling of insect behavior to illustrate, arguing that the cognitive map debate in neuroethology research is best understood as a mesoscale disagreement.

2023. Anti-Fundamentalist Lessons for Scientific Representation from Scientific Metaphysics. In E. Shech, K. Khalifa and I. Lawler, eds., Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences. PhilSci-Archive Preprint.

Scientific metaphysics can inform discussions of scientific representation in a number of ways. For instance, even a relatively generic commitment to some minimal form of scientific realism suggests that the targets of scientific representations should serve as source material for one's scientifically-informed ontology. Historical connections between commitments to realism and commitments to reductive approaches in scientific metaphysics further inform a persistent strain of reductive approach to generating scientific representations. In this discussion, I examine two recent challenges to reductive scientific metaphysics from philosophers working across a variety of scientific domains and philosophical traditions: C. Kenneth Waters' ``No General Structure Thesis'' and Robert Batterman's account of scientific metaphysics built on many-body physics.

Each of these accounts has what I shall call ``anti-fundamentalist'' leanings: they reject the premise that fundamental physical theory is the appropriate or best source material for scientific metaphysics. Following Waters, I contrast these leanings with the methodological approach of contemporary structural realism. Additionally, both Waters' and Batterman's accounts foreground the role of scale in defining ontological categories, and both reject the reductionist ideal that the stuff at the smallest scale is the most fundamental, the most general, or the most real. I discuss the implications for scientific representation imparted by anti-fundamentalist approaches that emphasize the role of scale in building a scientifically-informed ontology.

2021. (with Josiah Roberts and Chad Risko) Genetic Algorithms and Machine Learning for Predicting Surface Composition, Structure, and Chemistry: A Historical Perspective and Assessment. Chemistry of Materials.

Genetic algorithms (GA) and machine learning (ML) have a long history of development and use in chemistry. Recent algorithmic and computational advances, however, have brought these methods to the forefront of chemical research, and chemistry is experiencing a transformation in the way that machines and humans interact to pursue scientific advances. The field of materials chemistry, in particular, has witnessed a considerable expansion in the maturity of GA and ML approaches, as machine-based materials design ushers in a new era of materials development, discovery, and deployment. In addition to predicting new compositions and properties of bulk materials, GA and ML have also guided new insights into the structure, composition, and chemistry of materials surfaces. In this review, we focus on how GA and ML have been used in conjunction with chemical simulation techniques to advance understanding of surface chemistry, examining the history, recent work, and overall success of these applications.

2021. (with Matthew Strandmark) Better Learning Through History: Using Archival Resources to Teach Healthcare Ethics to Science Students. European Journal for the Philosophy of Science. PhilSci-Archive Preprint.

While the use of archives is common as a research methodology in the history and philosophy of science (HPS), training in archival methods is more often encountered as part of graduate-level training than in the undergraduate curriculum. Because many HPS instructors are likely to have encountered archival methods during their own research training, they are uniquely positioned to make effective pedagogical use of archives in classes comprised of undergraduate science students. Further, because doing this may require changing the way HPS instructors think about the aims and varieties of archival research, archivists themselves can be valuable resources in developing archives-based learning activities for science students in HPS classrooms. In this article, we describe an archives-based learning activity developed for a population of primarily pre-medical students in a healthcare ethics class and discuss the pedagogical benefits of this activity. This activity was developed via a collaboration between an HPS instructor (Bursten) and an education archivist (Strandmark). Our hope is that this discussion may serve both as a proof of concept for the use of archives-based learning activities as tools for teaching HPS to science students, and as an argument for the unique benefits that archival engagement can impart to science students.

2021. (with Catherine Kendig) Growing Knowledge: Epistemic Objects in Agricultural Science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. PhilSci Archive Preprint

We introduce a novel form of experimental knowledge that is the result of institutionally structured communication practices between farmers and university- and local community-based agronomists (agricultural extension specialists). This form of knowledge is exemplified in these communities’ uses of the concept of grower standard. Grower standard is a widely used but seldom discussed benchmark concept underpinning protocols used within agricultural experiments. It is not a one-size-fits-all standard but the product of local and active interactions between farmers and agricultural extension specialists. Grower standard is in some ways similar to more familiar epistemic objects discussed in philosophy of experiment, such as controls or background conditions. However, we argue that grower standard is epistemically novel, due to how knowledge arising from it is coproduced by farmers and agricultural extension specialists. Further, in the United States, this knowledge coproduction is institutionally structured by federal legislature dating back to the 19th century. We use our analysis of grower standard to focus a discussion of the positionality of the coproducers as well as the epistemic products of this form of knowledge coproduction, and we explore the role extension work plays in shaping agricultural science more broadly.

2021. (with Monika Chao) Girl Talk: Understanding Negative Reactions to Female Vocal Fry. Hypatia.

Vocal fry is a phonation, or voicing, in which an individual drops their voice below its natural register and consequently emits a low, growly, creaky tone of voice. Media outlets have widely acknowledged it as a generational vocal style characteristic of millennial women. Critics of vocal fry often claim that it is an exclusively female vocal pattern, and some say that the voicing is so distracting that they cannot understand what is being said under the phonation. Claiming that a phonation is so distracting as to prevent uptake of the semantic content of an utterance associated with it is an extreme reaction, especially when accompanied by demands for women to change their phonation. We argue that this reaction limits women's communicative autonomy. We analyze the extreme reaction to female vocal fry, which we characterize as a non-content-based response, from the perspectives of philosophy of language, feminist epistemology, and linguistics. We argue that when fry is heard as annoying and distracting, it is because the hearer interprets the speaker as echoing an utterance from a position of authority to which she is not entitled. We show that this reaction encodes conscious or unconscious sexist attitudes toward women's voices.

2021. The Function of Boundary Conditions in the Physical Sciences. Philosophy of Science.

Early philosophical accounts of explanation mistook the function of boundary conditions for that of contingent facts. I diagnose where this misunderstanding arose and establish that it persists. I disambiguate between uses of the term "boundary conditions" and argue that boundary conditions are explanatory via their roles as components of models. Using case studies from fluid mechanics and the physics of waves, I articulate four explanatory functions for boundary conditions in physics: specifying the scope of a model, enabling stable descriptions of phenomena in the model, generating descriptions of novel phenomena, and connecting models from differing theoretical backgrounds.

2020. Classifying and Characterizing Active Materials. Synthese.

This article examines the distinction between active matter and active materials, and it offers foundational remarks toward a system of classification for active materials. Active matter is typically identified as matter that exhibits two characteristic features: self-propelling parts, and coherent dynamical activity among the parts. These features are exhibited across a wide range of organic and inorganic materials, and they are jointly sufficient for classifying matter as active. Recently, the term “active materials” has entered scientific use as a complement, supplement, and extension of “active matter.” At the same time, new work in the philosophy of science has considered the problem of how to classify the products of synthetic and laboratory processes, and the extent to which the aims of classifying natural kinds compare and contrasts with the aims of classifying these synthetic kinds. In this article, I apply those considerations to the problems of classifying and characterizing active materials. In doing so, I also argue for a conception of active materials’ coherent dynamical activity as multiscale, rather than emergent, and I discuss how the special non-equilibrium status of active materials factors in to classificatory concerns.

2020. (with C. Grimsley and E. Mayfield) Why Attention is Not Explanation: Surgical Intervention and Causal Reasoning about Neural Models. Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.

As the demand for explainable deep learning grows in the evaluation of language technologies, the value of a principled grounding for those explanations grows as well. Here we study the state-of-the-art in explanation for neural models for NLP tasks from the viewpoint of philosophy of science. We focus on recent evaluation work that finds brittleness in explanations obtained through attention mechanisms. We harness philosophical accounts of explanation to suggest broader conclusions from these studies. From this analysis, we assert the impossibility of causal explanations from attention layers over text data. We then introduce NLP researchers to contemporary philosophy of science theories that allow robust yet non-causal reasoning in explanation, giving computer scientists a vocabulary for future research.

2020. Computer Simulations. In Between Making and Knowing: Tools in the History of Materials Research, ed. C. Mody and J. Martin. World Scientific.

The relationship between computer simulation and materials science is complex, intimate, and symbiotic. One of the most important fields of study within materials science has been the study of semiconducting materials, which are precisely those materials used to build computer processors. Likewise, many early developments in computer simulation techniques arose initially as solutions to problems of modeling the physical and electronic behaviors of materials. This entry chronicles the joint evolution of computational techniques and theories of materials from the mid-twentieth century through the early twenty-first century.

2020. Lab Report: Lessons from a Multi-Year Collaboration Between Nanoscience and Philosophy of Science. In A Guide to Field Philosophy, ed. E. Brister and R. Frodeman. Routledge.

This essay describes a successful ongoing collaboration between myself and Dr. Jill Millstone, a nanochemist. My aim in documenting this collaboration is not to present an instance of qualitative research on the phenomenon of collaboration nor a philosophical argument for collaboration as a preferred methodology in philosophy of science. Rather, what follows is a personal narrative of my collaboration with a chemistry laboratory as a graduate student in the history and philosophy of science, a discussion of how this unusual undertaking has informed my research career, and a set of lessons I have carried forward into other collaborations. My hope is that highlighting both the successes and failures of this collaboration will provide insight for other philosophers of science aiming to begin and sustain collaborations with scientists, and perhaps also for scientists aiming to collaborate with philosophers.

2020, edited volume. Perspectives on Classification in the Synthetic Sciences. Routledge.

This volume launches a new series of contemporary conversations about scientific classification. Most philosophical conversations about kinds have focused centrally or solely on natural kinds, that is, kinds whose existence is not dependent on the scientific process of synthesis. This volume refocuses conversations about classification on unnatural, or synthetic, kinds via extensive study of three paradigm cases of unnatural kinds: nanomaterials, stem cells, and synthetic biology.

2019. Field Notes on Conference Climate: A Decade with the Philosophy of Science Association Women’s Caucus. APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 19(1): 36–37.

2019. Review of Macroscopic Metaphysics: Middle-sized Objects and Longish Processes, by Paul Needham. International Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. 32 (1): 63-64.

2018. Conceptual Strategies and Inter-Theory Relations: The Case of Nanoscale Cracks. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics.

This paper introduces a new account of inter-theory relations in physics, which I call the conceptual strategies account. Using the example of a multiscale computer simulation model of nanoscale crack propagation in silicon, I illustrate this account and contrast it with existing reductive, emergent, and handshaking approaches. The conceptual strategies account develops the notion that relations among physical theories, and among their models, are constrained but not dictated by limitations from physics, mathematics, and computation, and that conceptual reasoning within those limits is required both to generate and to understand the relations between theories. Conceptual strategies result in a variety of types of relations between theories and models. These relations are themselves epistemic objects, like theories and models, and as such are an under-recognized part of the epistemic landscape of science.

2018. Smaller than a Breadbox: Scale and Natural Kinds. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 

I propose a division of the literature on natural kinds into metaphysical worries about essences, semantic worries about referents, and methodological worries about how classification influences scientific practice. I argue that the latter set of worries should occupy center stage in philosophy-of-science discussions about natural kinds, and I apply this methodological framework to the problem of classifying nanomaterials. I show that classification in nanoscience differs from classification in chemistry because the latter relies heavily on compositional identity, whereas the former must consider additional properties, namely size, shape, and surface chemistry. I use this difference to argue for a scale-dependent theory of classification, and I show that the multi-valued approach to classification in this theory supports the differing goals of different scientific projects.

2018. (with S. Finkelstein) Promoting Cognitive Conflict In Health Care Ethics: Moral Reasoning With Boundary Cases. Proceedings of the International Conference on the Learning Sciences, RIPI-ICLS 2128.

As many college students are at a time of tremendous personal and academic growth, introductory philosophy courses have the potential to equip students with practical critical reasoning skills. Despite this, many introductory courses in this domain emphasize students’ learning about pre-existing dialectics in the abstract, rather than over self-reflection and development of personal philosophical perspectives. In doing so, we may be failing to support the needs of pre-professional students looking to prepare themselves for their careers ahead. In this practitioner paper, we report our efforts as a practicing philosophy instructor (Bursten) and a learning scientist (Finkelstein) to iterate on the design of a student-centered instrument for moral reasoning in medical contexts within an introductory Health Care Ethics course. We identified the positive role that providing boundary cases played in helping students’ experience productive cognitive conflict, and, in turn, how these experiences improved critical self-reflection and moral reasoning.

2016.  (with M. Roco, J. Schummer, P. Weiss, et al.) Nano on Reflection. Nature Nanotechology 11 (10), 828–834.

In the past decade, nano has shown definitively that scale constrains scientific activity from the conception and carrying-out of an experiment to the choice of theories, models and simulations used to predict and explain those experimental results. In the decades to come, nano will reshape the structure of scientific knowledge as scientists and philosophers recognize the import of systematically scale-dependent investigations on our conceptual understanding of the material world.

2016. (With J. Millstone and M. Hartmann) Conceptual Analysis for Nanoscience. Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 7 (10), 1917–1918.

Collaboration between scientists and philosophers of science reveals new domains for conceptual analysis and new research opportunities for both philosophers and scientists. 

2015. Surfaces, Scales, and Synthesis: Scientific Reasoning at the Nanoscale. Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.

Philosophers interested in scientific methodology have focused largely on physics, biology, and cognitive science. They have paid considerably less attention to sciences such as chemistry and nanoscience, where not only are the subjects distinct, but the very aims differ: chemistry and nanoscience center around synthesis. Methods associated with synthesis do not fit well with description, explanation, and prediction that so dominate aims in philosophers’ paradigm sciences. In order to synthesize a substance or material, scientists need different kinds of information than they need to predict, explain, or describe. Consequently, they need different kinds of models and theories. Specifically, chemists need additional models of how reactions will proceed. In practice, this means chemists must model surface structure and behavior, because reactions occur on the surfaces of materials.

Physics, and by extension much of philosophy of science, ignores the structure and behavior of surfaces, modeling surfaces only as “boundary conditions” with virtually no influence on material behavior. Such boundary conditions are not seen as part of the physical laws that govern material behavior, so little consideration has been given to their roles in improving scientists’ understanding of materials and aiding synthesis. But especially for theories that are used in synthesis, such neglect can lead to catastrophic modeling failures. In fact, as one moves down toward the nanoscale, the very concept of a material surface changes, with the consequence that nanomaterials behave differently than macroscopic materials made up of the same ele- ments. They conduct electricity differently, they appear differently colored, and they can play different roles in chemical reactions. This dissertation develops new philosophical tools to deal with these changes and give an account of theory and model use in the synthetic sciences. Particularly, it addresses the question of how models of materials at the nanoscale fit together with models of those very same materials at scales many orders of magnitude larger. To answer this and related questions, strict attention needs to be paid to the ways boundaries, surfaces, concepts, models, and even laws change as scales change.

2014. Microstructure without Essentialism: A New Perspective on Chemical Classification. Philosophy of Science 81 (4), 633–653.

Recently, macroscopic accounts of chemical kind individuation have been proposed as alternatives to the microstructural essentialist account advocated by Kripke, Putnam, and others. These accounts argue that individuation of chemical kinds is based on macroscopic criteria such as reactivity or thermodynamics, and they challenge the essentialism that grounds the Kripke-Putnam view. Using a variety of chemical examples, I argue that microstructure grounds these macroscopic accounts, but that this grounding need not imply essentialism. Instead, kinds are individuated on the basis of similarity of reactivity between substances, and microstructure explains similarity of reactivity. 

2012. Pauling's Defence of Bent Equivalent Bonds: A View of Evolving Explanatory Demands in Modern Chemistry. Annals of Science 69 (1), pp. 69–90.

Linus Pauling played a key role in creating valence-bond theory, one of two competing theories of the chemical bond that appeared in the first half of the 20th century. While the chemical community preferred his theory over molecular-orbital theory for a number of years, valence-bond theory began to fall into disuse during the 1950s. This shift in the chemical community's perception of Pauling's theory motivated Pauling to defend the theory, and he did so in a peculiar way. Rather than publishing a defence of the full theory in leading journals of the day, Pauling published a defence of a particular model of the double bond predicted by the theory in a revised edition of his famous textbook, The Nature of the Chemical Bond. This paper explores that peculiar choice by considering both the circumstances that brought about the defence and the mathematical apparatus Pauling employed, using new discoveries from the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers archive.

2011. Review of The Disappearing Spoon, by Sam Kean. Spontaneous Generations 5(1), pp. 100–102.

2009. The Space Between and the Space Within: On The Definition, Conception, and Function of Space in Leibniz's Late Metaphysics. Think: The West Virginia University Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy 1, pp. 17–31.

Manuscripts

2012. Reconsidering Explanation: Lessons from Nanosynthesis. Read for the Philosophy of Science Association 2012 biennial meeting.

Nanosynthesis forces a reevaluation of received views on scientific explanation. I discuss the synthesis of anisotropic metal nanoparticles, a typical nanosynthesis research program, in order to demonstrate the failure of standard philosophical accounts of explanation to capture the dynamics of information exchange in synthetic sciences. I argue that using the language of effective heuristics, coupled with attention to changes in the meanings of concepts across different length scales, is a more promising means of capturing how information is obtained from the study of nanosynthesis systems.