Philosophy of Science
Philosophy of Science is a major strength of the UCSD Philosophy Department. Many of our faculty members are actively pursuing research in this broad field, especially in philosophy of psychology and neuroscience, philosophy of biology, philosophy of social science, philosophy of physics, and general methodological and philosophical issues in science. In addition to their research, faculty members teach a diverse selection of graduate and undergraduate courses in the subject and supervise many dissertations in the field.
Philosophy of science at UCSD benefits from the Department's close association with several other groups. If they wish, students pursuing a PhD in philosophy of science have the option of applying to do interdisciplinary degrees with either of the following:
UCSD Department of Cognitive Science
Naturally, our close ties to these two programs aid all the philosophers of science at UCSD, even if they are not in an interdisciplinary degree. In Science Studies, philosophers often co-teach graduate courses with members of different departments. Many speakers of great interest to philosophers come to the Science Studies weekly colloquia on Monday afternoons, too. Philosophers of psychology can take advantage of colloquia in Cognitive Science, special workshops and reading groups.
The Philosophy Department also has an official partnership in philosophy with
Logic and Philosophy of Science Department, UC-Irvine
Department of Logic, Philosophy & Scientific Method, LSE
UC-Irvine is a campus about an hour drive north of San Diego. It has many very distinguished philosophers of science. The London School of Economics is a much longer drive, but it is also filled with distinguished philosophers of science. The program with LSE is an exchange where graduate students can apply to go to LSE for a quarter during their study (and LSE students can apply to come here for a quarter). Philosophers of psychology and neuroscience also benefit from the Department's close association with the Salk Institute across the street from the campus, as do the philosophers of physics from the Physics Departments at UCSD and at USD.
Apart from contact in individual meetings, local conferences, colloquia and courses, philosophers of science also get together in two reading groups.
PhilSci Reading Group
The PhilSci Reading Group meets weekly to discuss current papers in general philosophy of science and the Experimental Philosophy Lab meets to discuss informally graduate student work in philosophy of psychology and neuroscience (see more below).
Faculty
William Bechtel moved to UCSD as of July 2002. Previously he was Director of the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis. His research addresses issues concerning cognitive neuroscience, cognitive science and parts of biology. His work with cognitive neuroscience examines the role of decomposition and localization as heuristics in developing brain-based models of cognitive function and epistemological issues concerning research techniques such as double dissociation and neuroimaging. He focuses primarily on historical and contemporary investigations of visual processing and memory. In cognitive science, he is especially interested in the use of connectionist and other dynamical systems to model cognition. In history and philosophy of biology, he is analyzing the development of mechanistic explanatory models, and the contribution of the development of research techniques and scientific institutions in constraining these models. This project is realized in a detailed case study of the development of modern cell biology in the period 1940-1965. He is author of Philosophy of Science: An Overview for Cognitive Science (Erlbaum, NJ, 1988), Connectionism and the Mind, (Blackwell, 1991; 2002) with A. Abrahamsen, Discovering Complexity (Princeton, 1993), with R.C. Richardson, How to Do Things with Logic, Erlbaum, NJ, 1994), with C. Grant Luckhardt, and is now writing Discovering Modern Cell Biology for CUP.
Craig Callender works in philosophy of physics, philosophy of time and the philosophy and metaphysics of science. He has worked on the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, especially Bohmian mechanics, philosophical issues confronting quantum gravity, the intersection of science and philosophy of time, philosophy of spacetime and Humean Supervenience. He is currently writing on Maxwell's Demon, the three-dimensionality of space, the boundary conditions of cosmology and the (non)passage of time-though not all in the same paper. He has published extensively in academic journals and is author of an introductory book, Introducing Time (Icon 2001), and editor of Time, Reality & Experience (CUP, 2002) and with Nick Huggett Physics Meets Philosophy at the Planck Length (CUP, 2001).
Nancy Cartwright works in the history and philosophy of science (especially physics and economics), causal inference, and objectivity in science. She has a joint appointment with UCSD and the London School of Economics. Major publications include: Measuring Causes: Invariance, Modularity and the Causal Markov Condition (London:CPNSS, 2000), The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science, (CUP, 2000); Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics (CUP, 1995); Nature's Capacities and their Measurement (OUP, 1989), co-authors Thomas Uebel et. al., and How the Laws of Physics Lie (OUP, 1983).
Patricia Churchland works on the conceptual and theoretical foundations of neuroscience and psychology, and on the nature of the theoretical interface between neuroscience and psychology. She is concerned to examine how empirical research in these sciences helps to solve, or to restructure, traditional problems in the philosophy of mind, and to explore the changes in our self-conception that such research may provoke. She si the author of Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain (MIT Press, 1986), The Computational Brain, with T. J. Sejnowski (MIT Press, 1992), The Mind-Brain Continuum, ed. by R. R. Llinas & P. S. Churchland (MIT Press, 1996).
Paul Churchland is currently interested in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence and cognitive neurobiology, epistemology, and perception. He is the author of The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (MIT Press, 1995), A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science, (MIT Press, 1989), Images of Science: Scientific Realism versus Constructive Empiricism, (University of Chicago Press, 1985), Matter and Consciousness, (MIT Press, 1984), and Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1979).
Jonathan Cohen works and teaches on topics at the intersection of philosophy of mind, language, and perception, particularly as these are informed by psychology, linguistics, and vision science. Much of his work in recent years has concerned color and color vision.
Gerald Doppelt is principally interested in two areas of philosophy, philosophy of science and political theory. In philosophy of science, in his Ph.D. thesis and subsequent research, he has been concerned with the conflicts between empiricist, historicist, and pragmatic conceptions of science (including social science), especially concerning the role of observational data in validation. As a teacher, he has been concerned to develop a humanistic way of teaching philosophy that helps students understand and think critically about their society, and their lives within it. He tries to explicate that dimension of philosophical theories which reflects and bears on concrete problems in a society's form of culture, political organization, and daily social life.
Rick Grush works primarily in theoretical cognitive science and the metaphysics of mind and representation. He has explored the application of tools from control theory and signal processing, especially Kalman filters, in understanding various aspects of neurocognitive function (e.g. 'An introduction to the main principles of emulation: motor control, imagery, and perception' (under review); and 'The Architecture of Representation', Philosophical Psychology). He also has an interest in developing basis-function models of the egocentric spatial representing capacities of the posterior parietal cortex, and in the relation between spatial representation and objectivity (see, e.g. 'Self, world and space', Brian and Mind). He is currently editing a volume of essays on the work of Gareth Evans for Oxford University Press, and is hammering away on his own book, The Machinery of Mindedness.
Jay Odenbaugh works in the philosophy of biology (especially ecology) and environmental ethics. Presently, he is working on methodological issues concerning mathematical modeling in population and community ecology and how these models are used in environmental policy.
Reading Groups
Experimental Philosophy Lab. The EPL forum is highly interactive, informal, constructive in spirit, and essentially an institution for graduate students to try their stuff -- both in presentation and in discussion. Everyone is more than welcome to come: the talks range in content from new results in cognitive neuroscience to historical overviews of various philosophical accounts of the mind.
PhilSci Reading Group. The summer of 2002 sees the first anniversary of this weekly reading group. Due to the diverse interests of the group (which includes many non-philosophers of science), we try to spend our time reading recent works in general philosophy of science that overlap interests. We have read many recent journal articles and books on the topic of scientific realism and anti-realism, as well as associated work on laws of nature, causation, explanation, truth, etc. Often the topics discussed are a kind of random distribution over what looks interesting in the latest journals, but sometimes the group has focused on various themes, e.g., structural realism, Friedman's relative a priori, and deduction from the phenomena.
Conferences
Color Perception: Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives, 11-12 October 2002
University of British Columbia, October 2003. [link]
Philosophy of Science Conference (tba), organized by Craig Callender, Winter 2003, jointly with UCI.