I am a distinguished professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.  My research has concerned understanding the assumptions and structure of scientific explanations of complex systems and their behavior.  How does division of labor arise in a honey bee colony?  What are the genetic contributions to psychiatric disorders?  How do scientists generate predictions of protein structure?  And how do natural and social systems interact in a complex feedback web of mutual influence?  These explorations have led me to introduce a theory of Integrative Pluralism to describe and explain the relationships among multiple models, explanations and entire disciplines.  In my 2009 book Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity and Policy I offer detailed arguments for how and why understanding the science of complexity changes our views of knowledge of nature, how we obtain such knowledge, and how we use that knowledge to pursue our human interests.   On the way I have thought and written about different types of explanations in biology, the role of social values in science, emergence and robustness and how standards for reliability for scientific instruments might help us understand why we should or shouldn't trust new artificial intelligence learning algorithms.  Recent publications include The Pragmatist Challenge: Pragmatist Metaphysics for Philosophy of Science (with H. K. Andersen), Oxford University Press, 2023, 2023 “The Landscape of Integrative Pluralism” Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science 38(3), 261-297.
2023 “The Bearable Thinness of Being: A Pragmatist Metaphysics of Affordances" In: H. K. Andersen and S. D. Mitchell (eds): The Pragmatist Challenge: Pragmatist Metaphysics for Philosophy of Science: 103-132.

Recent and Upcoming Talks and News

  • Durham University, Conference to Celebrate Nancy Cartwright's 80th Birthday "Role Obligations and Complex Social Systems", June 22, 2024
  • Center for the Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Conference on Revitalizing
  • Science and Values, April 5-7, 2024 Presented “Scientific Role obligations and the Social Normativity of Human Institutions”
  • MIT Workshop on Complexity Theory, Social Ontology and Social Change, Keynote Lecture: “Complexity, Perspectivism and Pragmatist Realism”, October 6-7, 2023.
  • American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) Meeting, “Inconsistent models and unstable phenomena” Author-Meets-Critics for M. Massimi Perspectival Realism, San Francisco, CA, April 6, 2023
  • PhilBioInMed Conference, “AlphaFold and RoseTTAFold: Does AI solve the “problem of protein structure prediction” for biology and medicine? jointly with Angela Gronenborn. Pittsburgh, PA November 14, 2022.
  • Instruct-ERIC online training course: Instruct-ing Structural Biologists Towards Integration, “Why integration can provide more accurate models of nature”, (zoom) July 21, 2022
Carl Hempel's 80th birthday present, Pittsburgh 1985. A model of Flagpole/Shadow counterexample, but here - changing the length of the shadow DOES change the height of the flagpole.