I work in the Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Biology, and Feminist Philosophy of Science. I also draw from Philosophy of Language, Cognitive Science, and metaphilosophy. My primary area of research is on pluralistic and contextualist approaches to concepts utilized in science.
Dissertation description
Broadly, pluralistic approaches have gained prominence in the literature. In my dissertation, I will be considering John Dupré’s promiscuous realist pluralism, Marc Ereshefsky’s eliminative pluralism, and Sarah Richardson’s contextualism. I aim to motivate the following claims: the notions of pluralism – in particular what grounds legitimacy on these various accounts – are relevantly different from one another. What grounds Dupré and what grounds Ereshefsky will be different in so far as their functional role and the outcomes are distinct. Secondly, Richardson’s conceptualization of contextualism that is used within the literature have seemingly similar dialectical points of tension as pluralist positions that I am considering, and may prima facia be used interchangeably with pluralism, but I think this is a mistake. Even with the broadest characterization of pluralism, I argue that you should not use pluralism and contextualism interchangeably because of the role and outcomes of the account.
Understanding Biological Sex Pluralistically
(Draft available upon request)
In this paper, I explore Sarah Richardson’s (2010) analysis and critique of “male” and “female” that uses human genome research to make the case that men and women are as different to each other as separate species. I explore her own proposal, that biological sex is best understood as dyadic kinds.
The negative portion of my paper argues that though her account is intuitive, some of her critiques fall short and her own proposal doesn’t fare well in specific contexts.
In the positive, I argue for a pluralist realist approach to understanding biological sex. I contextualize Richardson’s account as being best understood as a mechanism towards the phenomenon of human reproduction, using Glennan (2017)’s account. When trying to describe other phenomena we may need a different explanation.
Creative Failures
(Draft available upon request)
In this paper, I argue that failure has epistemic value. I explore two notions of epistemic progress, one being linear and the other dynamic. On the dynamic model, there is quality that failure has that allows for progress to be made. As such, I introduce creative failure, and argue that this as an epistemically valuable tool and goal.
Natasha Maria Haddal 