Research

At the moment I’m working on a project on group inquiry: the activity of answering a question together. Group inquiry plays a key role in scientific collaboration and democratic deliberation, and I hope to build some of the theoretical framework for understanding what it is, and how it can go well or badly. This project sits somewhere between social epistemology, formal pragmatics, philosophy of science, and political philosophy. I’m also increasingly thinking about how we should think about group inquiry on online platforms, and the kinds of tools we should bring to bear in thinking about the social epistemology of social media.

My PhD thesis was about the nature of knowledge-how, and explored a number of issues about how to best integrate linguistic and philosophical arguments about the nature of knowledge-how. I thought about what the point of having a concept of knowledge-how is, what that might tells us about the normative role of knowledge-how, and I tried to advance a novel account of knowledge-how.

Various chapters of the thesis in published form are available on the papers page, and the thesis as a whole is here.

I have a number of side-projects on the go including work on measuring knowledge, authorship of collaborative work in science, the speech act of advising, and skill.

(The picture at the top is an artist’s imagining of Lewis Fry Richardson’s forecast factory, which was a plan for a steam-punk weather forecasting system, with thousands of people doing manual calculations to forecast the weather in real-time).