Tempo & Mode

I am doing a PhD in philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, with a background in clinical medicine. My thesis is regarding scientific models, especially the trade-offs between different modeling desiderata and the limits that they place on a model’s explanatory power. I think that there are certain features of target systems that make these trade-offs more costly, regardless of our computational and cognitive limitations. Additionally, it appears that biological systems exhibit these features a lot. If these two facts are true, then together they give us a principled reason to approach biological sciences differently to the other natural sciences. Other principle areas of philosophical interest at the moment include mechanism-based explanations, the medical sciences and ecology.

Link to my CV.

Link to “The Structure of Tradeoffs in Model Based Science”, co-authored with Michael Weisberg, in Synthese.

Link to “Trade-offs in model-building: A more target-oriented approach”, in Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A

Link to “Mechanistic models of population phenomena”, co-authored with Brett Calcott, online and forthcoming in print in Biology and Philosophy.

Link to my review of Ecological Orbits by Lev Ginzberg and Mark Colyvan in the AJP.

The model I currently like the most is here.