John Matthewson
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, forthcoming in Synthese.
Link to my review of Ecological Orbits by Lev Ginzberg and Mark Colyvan in the AJP.
Link to “Mechanistic Explanation without Mechanisms”, co-authored with Brett Calcott, currently under review.
The model I currently like the most is here.