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. 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.