I wrote a short paper for the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC), the digital wing of the journal Social Epistemology. “Critical Appreciations” are a new format they’ve adopted recently, where scholars are invited to contribute short critical essays on classic Social Epistemology articles.

SERRC is not a peer-reviewed journal, but it is something more than a mere blog as well. My paper is “A Critical Appreciation of Ronald N. Giere’s ‘Distributed Cognition without Distributed Knowing’.” You can even cite it thusly:

Brown, Matthew J. “A Critical Appreciation of Ronald N. Giere’s ‘Distributed Cognition without Distributed Knowing’.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4, no. 6 (2015): 45-51.

A quick update: a couple of weeks back, my first article for 2015 came out in the journal Metaphilosophy. In “The Functional Complexity of Scientific Evidence,” I present a model of evidence based on a pragmatist and contextualist model of inquiry. This paper presents some key ideas at the center of my work in a new way, so I am glad to have it out there.

Interestingly, the same issue of Metaphilosophy contains an article by Geoff Pynn, “Pragmatic Contextualism,” though it is a contribution to analytic epistemology, and a couple of book reviews about pragmatist aesthetics and pragmatist philosophy of nature.

Lately, besides my work on engineering ethics, I have been focusing on issues of science, values, and politics in global climate change. I started working on this topic a couple of years ago when Shane Ralson invited me to write a paper for his volume on pragmatism and international relations. I have been very lucky to have a collaborator on the project now, the wonderful and talented Joyce C. Havstad, currently the philosopher-in-residence (!!) at The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

The short version of our approach is that there is a major disconnect between science and policy in this area, an inevitable result of the inadequacy of our models of science-based policy and science-policy interaction. On the science side, this disconnect manifests in the erroneous belief that science can be simultaneously policy-relevant and policy- or value-neutral. On the policy side, this manifests as a failure to see that climate policy must be pursued as an evidence-driven, tentative, hypothesis-testing, problem-solving practice. More broadly, the failure lies in models which treat science and policy as wholly heterogenous processes. To resolve the disconnect problem, we propose a new model that treats science and policy as partners in interdisciplinary inquiry and call for tighter integration of science and policy.

We’ve had the opportunity to present aspects of this research on several occasions this year. First, at the SRPoiSE / Communities of Integration conference in May, we argued against the IPCC’s presentation of its work as value- and policy-neutral. Then, at the FEMMSS/CSWIP conference on “Science, Technology, and Gender”, we presented our critique of existing models of science-based policy and offered a preliminary sketch of our new model. In November, we will be presenting at the Philosophy of Science Association, and the disconnect problem itself will be at the center of our focus. Hope to see you there!

(N.B. This news item prepared without feedback from Joyce. So while she deserves a lot of the credit for this awesome project, any errors and infelicities in this quick summary are surely my fault.)

Good news! Several papers that have been forthcoming are now officially out:

• “Values in Science beyond Undetermination and Inductive Risk,” just came out a few days ago, in the most recent issue of Philosophy of Science.
• “The Democratic Control of the Scientific Control of Politics” just arrived in the mail as well, and can now be had online.
• “Quantum Frames” is available in an issue of Studies B that isn’t out yet, but is “in progress!” Weird.

These are all behind some form of paywall, but you can find them on my publications page as well.