DrB Research

My research in the history and philosophy of science, logic, and computational epistemology has been done, and continues to be done, as a branch of the philosophy of science. From the very beginning, epistemological concerns have been central to my research program. In my undergraduate work, I was interested in how rethinking fundamental assumptions about the nature of cognitive processes would lead to a rethinking of fundamental issues in epistemology. Combined with my undergraduate training in mathematics and logic, I began to see how traditional epistemological questions might be answered mathematically and computationally. In graduate school, I continued to develop my research program in epistemology and philosophy of science and, at the Master’s level, did extensive work in logic and artificial intelligence. A question that arose for me, and one which I carried into my doctoral studies, revolved around modelling theory choice in science. More specifically, I was interested in the semantics of choice and I developed a Bayesian approach to answer this question. The motivation for this approach, oddly enough, came from the work of Newton, and in my dissertation, From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science: The Entrenchment of Newton’s Ideal of Empirical Success, I show that aside from having a rich physics, Newton offered a rich logical methodology which, in the hands of mathematicians like Euler, Clairaut, and Laplace, led to what we now call science and scientific methodology. This work laid the foundation for further exploring issues in computational epistemology. Most notably, I should mention that my interest in Probabilistic Reasoning (Bayesian Inferencing) and Common-Sense Reasoning comes directly from this foundational work.

Currently, I am working on a project that explores neural nets and theories of coherence. Paul Thagard, a cognitive scientist at Waterloo, has a model of Explanatory Coherence by Harmony Optimization, which is implemented in Lisp. My own research in foundations of theory choice argues that his coherence modelling is flawed historically and cognitively. This is a project which has been submitted for publication and which will be expanded. As part of my research program in epistemology and philosophy of mind, I plan to continue doing work on historical subjects. In particular, I will explore the history of the conflict between naturalized approaches to epistemology (those that make use of psychology or cognitive modelling) and those approaches that reject the view that psychological science is useful for doing epistemology. One paper that I have been developing with Dr. Marcello Guarini has been accepted for an international conference in Italy and will be published as a book chapter.

My research program crosses not only the sub-disciplinary boundaries of philosophy; it also crosses the disciplinary boundaries between philosophy and the cognitive sciences. Contemporary work in epistemology and philosophy of mind/science is of interest to computer scientists, psychologists, linguists, biologists, and engineers. While teaching at the University of Windsor, I regularly attended Seminars in Artificial INTelligence (SAINT) – an interdisciplinary meeting place for those interested in the study of knowledge and cognition ¬ – and have taken on the responsibility of organizing the meetings for 2004-2005. As well, I have entered discussions with Dr. Alioune Ngom to explore possible collaborative work in Multi-Valued Logic and Combinatorics, fields closely related to my graduate work at UWO and to the many courses in logic, which I have taught.

Professor Dale Rajacich and I have a paper which has been published in the Nursing journal, Guidance and Counselling. This paper explores how models of scientific decision making and research have both shaped and hindered nursing research and its development as a profession. I was also the featured speaker at the Ontario Libraries Association SuperConference (January 2004) where I gave a presentation on Privacy and Technology. The research for this presentation, which I am currently writing for journal publication and Conference presentation (AAAI Fall 2005 Symposium on Machine Ethics), is derived from the research I have conducted in the development of the CyberEthics course in the School of Computer Science at the University of Windsor.