Peter M. Ainsworth

Recently, structural realism has become a very hot topic in the philosophy of science, and many people view it as the most defensible form of scientific realism. Structural realism comes in principally two forms: epistemic structural realism (ESR) and ontic structural realism (OSR). The former is often characterised as the view our knowledge of the world is limited to knowledge of the structural properties of the world; the latter as the view that the world is just a structure (and so has no non-structural properties). I investigated ESR in my PhD thesis. I am currently investigating OSR. Although OSR has now achieved a degree of notoriety many people remain confused as to what exactly the doctrine amounts. Indeed, it appears that different OSRists have different (sometimes very different) positions in mind. The aims of my research are: (i) to provide a clear statement of the different forms of OSR in the literature and (ii) to investigate whether any of these forms of OSR is tenable. Proponents of OSR often claim that it is a "naturalistic" metaphysics, arguing that OSR is supported by contemporary physics, while more traditional metaphysical views are undermined. Part of my research will thus involve investigating whether quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and general relativity really have the metaphysical implications that OSRists claim.

Marilena DiBuccianico

This philosophical enquiry into the distinction between science and art will flesh out the role of concept and skills formation, of judgment, and of consensus and dissent within the distinct communities. This is best pursued by following the evolution of the guidelines that have defined what is or what has been taken to be “good explanation” and the changing role assigned to evidence in practice. This in turn requires a focus on the actual practices of scientists, artists and their respective communities.
The relationship between theory and experiment in science, arguably its most significant point of departure from the arts, will be explored through a set of key case studies.
In my doctoral research I argued that this relationship is marked by complexity. Recognising this is a promising path towards a fruitful dialogue between science and art.
Cases of acute scientific controversies are particularly useful for highlighting the aspects of concept formation, consensus reaching and evaluation of hypotheses that usually play a silent role in less controversial cases or in ‘normal’ science.
Parallel to this I will explore the way in which works of art not only engender beliefs about the world but can also provide knowledge about it.
The upshot of exploring the supposed separation of scientific and artistic endeavours explored through the lens of actual practices will reveal blurry boundaries.

Michael Fuerstein

"Political Knowledge and the Division of Cognitive Labor "

Social organization is crucial to the development of knowledge because most significant inquiry requires a large-scale division of cognitive labor across the community of inquirers. Political institutions are particularly interesting in this regard, since they are perhaps the most morally significant form of social organization in existence, and since their success requires the assimilation of normative and natural or scientific forms of knowledge. During my year at the CCA, I will be exploring the special kinds of challenges that this assimilation poses through three inter-related questions:

First: what is the relationship between moral and epistemic trust, and how does it bear on the organization of democratic inquiry? I want to argue that these two notions of trust are far more intertwined than has typically been thought. One important implication of this is that effective political deliberation will depend on the establishment of social and moral bonds among citizens as much as the development of effective tools of communication and rational reflection. Second: how can the technical, scientific character of policy-making be reconciled with the traditional democratic ideal of citizen consent and oversight? More than ever before, democratic governments deploy specialized knowledge that relatively few citizens are in a position to evaluate with any real competence. One way of accommodating this point within a democratic framework is to consider the citizenry, not as a monolithic “public,” but, rather, as a collection of small groups with diverse epistemic competencies. Third, and finally: given this radically delegated character of political inquiry, what is the right way to think about group knowledge in the political context?

Michael's website may be found at:  http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~mfuerste

Alice Jenkins

During my time at Rutgers I shall be working on part of a much larger project, a study of the cultural history of Euclidean geometry in the nineteenth century. The part I shall be focusing on during my fellowship is a chapter tracing Victorian debates about the role of geometry in the liberal education provided at English universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge.

Strong traditional associations reinforced geometry’s place at the heart of elite masculine education in Britain, and indeed in the United States. The study of Euclid was often seen as an essential element in acquiring the mental rigour and moral uprightness that ought to typify an educated gentleman. But as university curricula became increasingly secular and specialised, and as liberal education became more and more accessible to non-gentlemen, changing its own nature as it did so, these associations came under direct and sustained challenge.

The chapter I will be working on addresses topics related to the formation of the disciplines, particularly the history of the separation of the humanities and sciences, and the development of the structure of the modern university.

Steven Meyer

Robust Empiricisms: Jamesian Modernism between the Disciplines, 1880 to the Present

Robust Empiricisms establishes the significance of Jamesian modernism, a strand of modernist thought rooted in the improbable admixture of rationalist and empiricist speculation first advocated by William James in the shadow of a new century (now passed) and subsequently by his successor at Harvard, the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The distinctive character which Jamesian modernism draws from its native inter- and cross-disciplinarity contributes not just to its extraordinary richness and continuing viability in contrast to other important strands of modernist thought but also to its increasing appeal in our own era of aggressive border-crossing and boundary-transgression.

In the present study scientific and literary cultures are conjoined at several levels and in ways inconceivable within rigid (post-Humean) empiricist frameworks, whether these take the form of the “two cultures” paradigm of C.P. Snow or the ever more specialized modes of knowledge production that have come to dominate research agendas in both intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts. Part I offers detailed accounts of the robust empiricisms of James and Whitehead respectively as well as of surprising modes of “thinking with Whitehead” (and James) developed in recent decades by the Belgian historian and philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers and the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour. Part II, positioned against this scientific and philosophical backdrop, presents literary examples of empiricisms equally robust, of the avant-garde experimentalist Gertrude Stein and the art critic and poet John Ashbery. These are followed in turn by literary critical exemplars (William Empson and Paul de Man). Attention thus shifts in the concluding chapters to a stream, already adumbrated in the discussions of Stein and Ashbery, of innovative literary criticism—at once literary and philosophical in motivation, and in the case of Empson mathematical as well.

Joshua Armstrong (Philosophy)

My research at the CCA lies at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics and psychology. In particular, I will be exploring the thesis that the lexicon for natural languages such as English is dynamic. According to this dynamic approach to the lexicon, discourse participants collaborate together to flesh out—and in some cases, create—the meanings of many words “on the fly” in the course of a conversation. Much of the interest in the dynamic lexicon arises from reflecting on the remarkable ability speakers have to effectively communicate using sentences containing novel words that their hearers have never encountered. However, the thesis of the dynamic lexicon has application to a wide variety of issues across a number of academic fields; for example, debates about the nature of context sensitivity in philosophy, and the use of “micro-languages” or “conceptual packs” in linguistics and psychology.

This project thus seeks to reconcile superficially different styles of explanations—from paradigmatically scientific explanations in the cognitive sciences to paradigmatically humanistic explanations in traditional philosophy—into a coherent and compelling approach to the lexicon.

Joshua Gang (English)

My dissertation argues that behaviorism, which was a set of psychological and philosophical theories that privileged overt behaviors over covert mental states, comprised one of the foundational discourses of transnational literary modernism and modern literary criticism. In contrast to those histories that frame modern literature in terms of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and other aesthetic modernisms, my dissertation explores how modernist literature engaged behaviorism’s scientific and philosophical concerns as well as its methodology. Drawing lines across the New Criticism, modernist fiction, postcolonial theory and the history of cognitive science, what I show is that behaviorism’s methodology and concerns were not merely represented by literature but actually assimilated by the practices and techniques of modernist literature and criticism. Behaviorism’s stimulus-response psychology and rejections of consciousness, introspection, and Cartesian dualism, influenced how literature was imagined, written, and interpreted throughout the twentieth century—with that influence continuing up through the present day.

Devin Griffiths (English)

This year, as part of my work at the CCA, I’ll be wrapping up my dissertation “The Age of Analogy; Scientific and Social History in the Nineteenth Century Novel.” My dissertation examines the nineteenth-century novel’s transformative vision of society from two seemingly disparate angles: scientific analogy and historicism. From the appearance of Waverley, the nineteenth-century novel is dedicated to making analogies between the individual life and the past, in a history writ both large and small. Scott’s reorientation towards history coordinated the antiquarian project of ballad collection and the analogical understanding of natural patterns furnished by contemporary science. The formal incorporation of ballad history into the novel leaned heavily upon radical new scientific theories, theories which overturned the stable present by comparing it to a violent past. This new science of comparison stimulated surprising discoveries in the interlinked fields of comparative anatomy and geology, and offered up a method of historical understanding continuous with the novel’s investigation of social connections through relation to the past. And, in turn, the novelization of comparative history provided a rich formal vocabulary for later scientific studies, particularly, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Most recently, I’ve been exploring the use of digital textual analysis to extend this inquiry further, by analyzing the disposition of analogies within the specific works addressed by my dissertation, and within nineteenth-century fiction and non-fiction works more generally. My hope is to get a broad perspective upon how analogy was used in the period, in order to complement the more fine-grained analysis of my dissertation project.

Colleen Rosenfeld (English)

My dissertation examines the relationship between poetic form and methods of thinking in sixteenth century England. Humanist pedagogy subjected poetic figures to the competing and often contradictory claims of the university arts of rhetoric and dialectic. I explore the ways in which Edmund Spenser seized upon these competing claims to critique pedagogy’s model for how the mind ought to work; his style offers, in the stead of this model, a method that insists upon the inseparability of thinking from the time and labor of poetic production. While recent scholarship has done much to revive form as an object of study, I suggest that early modern pedagogy allows us to read form not as an effect of ideology or of circumstance but as a material cause wielded in the production of a certain kind of knowledge that university disciplines were looking to exclude as improbable and, as indecorous. The systematic exclusion of poetic figures from disciplined theories of knowledge achieved a certain measure of success: it served the interests of both the normative social scheme implicit to conceptions of decorum and the emergent empiricism to which our own historical methods have been so largely indebted.

James Delbourgo (History)

My current research investigates the history and sociology of collecting in the era before the foundation of the modern museum. The project uses manuscript and object collections associated with the career of the naturalist Hans Sloane (1660-1753), one of the greatest collectors of the Enlightenment and founder of the British Museum. With a focus on his Jamaica voyage of 1687-1689, but extending to his collections as a whole, the project examines the relation between place, displacement and the production of knowledge objects in the context of early modern trade, capital, colonialism and slavery. The project proceeds on the premise that the collection of things necessitates both technologies of object arrangement (storing, indexing, imaging, etc.) and the collection, assessment and organization of people. Collecting requires and produces collectivities: of agents and merchants, brokers and informants, curators and publics. Through extensive links to trading companies and itinerant travelers from the East Indies to the Americas, Sloane assembled, purchased and mobilized clients to procure botanical and medical specimens, books and manuscripts, prints and curiosities, which ultimately supported the development of metropolitan institutions including the Royal Society, the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum.

Joanna Kempner (Sociology)

The social organization of knowledge is as much formed by its non-production as its production. Yet we know little about the structures and processes that govern the nonproduction of knowledge. This project examines how scientists and researchers across a wide range of disciplines determine which research questions are better left unasked, which data ought not be collected, and which arguments should not be disseminated. Political controversies, I have argued in previous work, are an important mechanism for making visible the normative boundaries surrounding what ought and what ought not be studied. In this project, I examine both how entrenched interests (of institutions, corporations, and advocacy groups) produce political controversy as a method of obfuscation and suppression in science and the circumstances under which scientists decide not to produce knowledge. In doing so, I ask: How can social scientists better measure absence? And how can we assess the meaning of silences and absences?

Robert Matthews (Philosophy)

Appeal to intuition plays an important role in philosophical theorizing and argument. A number of philosophers have recently challenged reliance on intuition data on two different sorts of grounds. First, it is alleged that the intuitions to which philosophers appeal are unreliable for a number of different reasons, e.g., cultural bias or vulnerability to what psychologists call priming and framing effects. Second, and perhaps more importantly, these philosophers allege that even leaving aside these reliability issues, intuition data is not even of the right sort to support the claimed modal necessity of the conclusions that philosophers draw from theorizing based on such data. Conclusions based on intuition data, they claim, have at best the status of contingent ethno-scientific (folk scientific) truths, inasmuch as these conclusions only regiment and render perspicuous the philosophical views of those from whom the intuition data are elicited.

If these criticisms of intuition-based philosophical theorizing are correct, then why should linguistics be in any better shape? Linguistic theorizing, after all, also relies heavily on intuition data. My CCA research project for the coming year will examine skeptical worries about this heavy reliance on intuition data. I will be especially interested in the question of what the relation of linguistic intuition to the linguistic competence must be like such that linguistic intuition could plausibly be thought to provide reliable empirical data for theorizing about linguistic competence.

Susan Sidlauskas (Art History)

My focus at CCA this year will be a body of late 19th and early 20th century medical photographs in which the image is offered as evidence of the cure. The nature of this cure varies, as does the representation of the ailment, as well as the structure of the presentation. For instance, a pair of 1882 photographs show a female patient before and after her “neurasthenia” was treated with the rest cure. In another instance, pictures pasted into the casebooks of a private sanatorium outside London around 1890 demonstrate the agitation and then the “relief” of the disturbed patient before discharge. Another group of photographs from the 1920’s, with accompanying texts, are displayed on black poster board to teach a plastic surgeon’s students how to restore not only the faces, but the “moral character” of their patients.

Despite the supposed objectivity of these images—often conceived in pairs, and almost always displayed for a professional audience through albums, display boards, or textbooks—these standards of medical evidence were deeply shaped by the conventions of the visual culture in which they were produced. The medical photography of the 19th and early 20th centuries tests the distinction between “making” and “finding” with a vexing unpredictability. The assumptions that shaped the choices these medical practitioners made in structuring the evidence of their respective cures must be teased out from a variety of sources, both visual and textual.