Kareem Khalifa
Much of my work has focused on the topic of scientific understanding. I have recently completed a book manuscript, tentatively titled, Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge. Its central thesis is that scientific understanding is a species of explanatory knowledge. In the process of defending this thesis, I discuss how scientific practice should inform philosophical accounts of explanation, truth, epistemic luck, and epistemic value.
I have some collaborations on different topics in the philosophy of science.
I am beginning a new project (with Jared Millson and Mark Risjord) that develops and defends an inferentialist account of explanation.
I have written a few papers in the philosophy of social science, on the topics of explanation, as well as different ways in which social sciences depart from the truth.
I have also dabbled in social epistemology.
I also have an interest in cultivating a community around the "epistemology of science."
Below are links to drafts of several papers. Go to my CV to see a complete list of publications with links to the "official" versions of my work.
Understanding:
In the past decade, both epistemologists and philosophers of science have taken up the issue of how we understand empirical phenomena. Frequently, their foil has been a “Received View” of understanding, which holds that understanding is nothing more than knowledge of an explanation. Often the new “friends of understanding” find some fault with the Received View as the impetus for their own positions. I have developed a descendant to the Received View. I defend this account of understanding against the latter’s extant challenges. In the process, I thereby undercut much of the motivation for recent claims about the nature and value of understanding. However, far from being an exclusively critical work, I also clarify and answer the most central questions in this up-and-coming field of philosophical research: What kinds of cognitive abilities are involved in understanding? What is the relationship between the understanding that explanations provide and the understanding that experts have of broader subject matters? Can there be understanding without explanation? How can one understand something on the basis of falsehoods? Is understanding a species of knowledge? What is the value of understanding?
under contract. Understanding, explanation, and scientific knowledge. (book manuscript) [Précis]2016. Must understanding be coherent? in Explaining understanding: new perspectives from epistemology and philosophy of science, edited by S. Grimm, C. Baumberger, and S. Ammon (London: Routledge).
2015. EMU defended: reply to Newman (2013). European Journal for Philosophy of Science. 5 (3): 377-385.
(with Michael Gadomski) 2013. Understanding as explanatory knowledge: the case of Bjorken scaling. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (3): 384-392.
2013c. Understanding, grasping, and luck. Episteme 10(1): 1-17.
2013b. Is understanding explanatory or objectual? Synthese 190(6): 1153-1171.
2013a. The role of explanation in understanding. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64(1): 161-187.
2012. Inaugurating understanding or repackaging explanation? Philosophy of Science 79(1): 15-37.
2011. Understanding, knowledge, and scientific antirealism. Grazer Philosophische Studien 83 (1): 93-112.
Collaborations in philosophy of science:
(with Randall Harp) 2015. Why pursue unification? a social-epistemological puzzle. Theoria 30 (3): 431-447.
(with José Díez and Bert Leuridan) 2013. General theories of explanation: buyer beware. Synthese 190(3): 379-396.
Papers on inferentialism and explanation:
My next book project will present a new account of explanation, and will trace its implications for perennial debates in the philosophy of science. Marshaling resources from logic and linguistics, and using over ten case studies involving explanations ranging from cultural anthropology to particle physics, I have recruited two collaborators (Jared Millson and Mark Risjord) whose expertise complements my own.The core idea is to provide an inferentialist semantics for explanatory vocabulary, which will be supplemented by a fairly standard (Gricean) pragmatics. We have already developed a formal model that can solve many of the standard problems in the explanation literature (asymmetry, relevance, etc.). Future research will address the following questions: What are the defining features of an explanation? For instance, what distinguishes it from mere description, correlation, prediction, or classification? What makes one explanation better than another? Is Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) a fundamental kind of inference, or is it derivative of other kinds of inference? Are our best scientific explanations a trustworthy guide to the truth? How can an inferentialist approach to explanation dissolve or deflate various kinds of metaphysical debates?
(with Jared Millson and Mark Risjord). forthcoming. Inference to the best explanation: fundamentalism's failures. in Best explanations: new essays on inference to the best explanation, edited by K. McCain and T. Poston. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
2011. Contrastive explanations as social accounts. Social Epistemology. 24 (4): 265-286.
2010a. Default privilege and bad lots: underconsideration and explanatory inference. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 24 (1): 91-105.
Papers in philosophy of social science:
I tend to think of philosophy of social science as my “white whale”—since graduate school, I’ve been eager to immerse myself in it, but I’m frequently thwarted by my other projects in general philosophy of science. Nevertheless, I have an ambitious project that is a bit longer-term with respect to its deadlines. Its impetus is a certain frustration with the growing number of analytic social metaphysicians who largely disregard the empirical track records of their conjectures in the social sciences. Its key questions are: (1) Do theories that posit irreducibly social entities fare especially poorly at the empirical level? (2) What does general philosophy of science--especially the debate concerning scientific realism--tell us about the ontological commitments we should adopt towards the posits of our best social-scientific theories? (3) Conversely, what do the social sciences tell us about the nature of scientific realism and (especially) empiricism?
(with Randall Harp) 2016. Realism and antirealism. in Rosenberg, A. and L. McIntyre (eds.), Routledge companion to philosophy of social science (London: Routledge).
(with Leticia Arroyo Abad) 2015. What are stylized facts? Journal of Economic Methodology 22 (2): 143-156.
2004. Erotetic contextualism, data-generating procedures, and sociological explanations of social mobility. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34 (1): 38-54.
Papers in social epistemology:
Much as my work in philosophy of social science aims for a more empirically informed social ontology, my interest in social epistemology (also a white whale) is in a more naturalistic approach. How might social-scientific work on topics such as disagreement, testimony, an epistemic community’s incentive structures, etc. fruitfully inform parallel discussions in epistemology? To that end, I am in the preliminary stages of putting social epistemologists into more extensive conversation with social scientists and philosophers of social science working on related topics. This is part of a larger goal of fostering a community around the "epistemology of science."
(with Randall Harp) 2015. Why pursue unification? a social-epistemological puzzle. Theoria 30 (3): 431-447.
2013. Review of Haddock, Millar, and Pritchard (eds.) Social Epistemology. Mind 122 (486): 535-540.
2010c. Contrastive explanations as social accounts. Social Epistemology. 24 (4): 265-286.
2010b. Social constructivism and the aims of science. Social Epistemology. 24 (1): 45–61.
Epistemology of science:
In writing the understanding book, I employed a philosophical methodology that integrated ideas and approaches from epistemology and philosophy of science. Case studies from physics and biology, as well as more general points about experimental design and causal inference, were used to adjudicate between different epistemological theses. This raises a number of broader questions at the interface between epistemology and philosophy of science that I did not address in the book. Just as there is burgeoning metaphysics of science community that has formed interesting links between analytic metaphysicians and philosophers of science, my goal is to build an analogous “epistemology of science” community. I am in the preliminary stages of organizing a conference on this theme, which would ideally result in an edited collection of essays. Potential questions include: What differences are there in the ways that epistemologists and philosophers of science use and analyze certain shared terms, e.g. “knowledge,” “understanding,” “evidence,” etc.? Where might a more thoroughgoing integration of these differences be beneficial? How do scientists’ use of non-propositional representations (most notably models) challenge or enrich epistemologists’ focus on true beliefs as a basic epistemic good? How does scientific practice accord with various epistemological proposals about what, in addition to true belief, is required for knowledge? What can scientists’ more concrete goals tell us about epistemic value? Conversely, what can discussions of epistemic value tell us about scientific realists and their critics’ differing conceptions of science’s aims? How might epistemologists’ focus on the “folk” conception of knowledge help more policy-oriented philosophers of science in thinking about the public understanding of scientific knowledge?
