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Areas of Strength

HPS at Pitt has multiple areas of strength. We see these areas as cross-cutting and mutually reinforcing. Together they represent one of the most important ways we see ourselves integrating history and philosophy of science. We are committed as a Department to continuing to lead in and develop these areas.

History and Philosophy of Biology and Medicine

HPS faculty are experts and innovators in a wide range of topics in the history and philosophy of the life sciences, including issues in the biology of behavior, evolutionary biology, genetics, developmental biology, epidemiology, and the health sciences.

Faculty and Representative Publications

Michael Dietrich

  • Michael R. Dietrich, Nathan Crowe, and Rachel Ankeny, “Why Study Sex by the Sea?: Marine Organisms and the Problem of Fertilization and Cell Cleavage,” in Why Study Biology by the Sea?, Jane Maienschein, Karl Matlin, and Rachel Ankeny, Eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 271-296.
  • The Handbook of the Historiography of Biology, Michael R. Dietrich, Mark E. Borrello, and Oren Harman, Eds. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2021).
  • Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences. Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich, Editors. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
  • Michael R. Dietrich, Oren Harman, and Ehud Lamm, “Richard Lewontin and the Complications of Linkage,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 88 (2021), 237-244.
  • Michael R. Dietrich, Rachel Ankeny, Nathan Crowe, Sara Green, and Sabina Leonelli, “How to Choose Your Research Organism,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 80 (2020): 101227. 
  • Michael R. Dietrich, Roberta Millstein, and Robert A. Skipper, Jr., Survival of the Luckiest: Perspectives on Random Drift in Evolutionary Biology (Forthcoming).

Paolo Palmieri

  • (2018) A Translation of Luigi Paolucci's On Birdsong Phenomenology, Animal Psychology and Biology. Peter Lang. LINK

Jon Fuller

  • Fuller, J. The New Modern Medicine: Disease Evidence and Epidemiological Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press (2025).
  • Fuller, J. Demarcating scientific medicine. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 2024;106: 177-185.
  • Epidemics from the population perspective. Philosophy of Science 2022;89: 232-251
  • Fuller, J. Universal etiology, multifactorial diseases, and the constitutive model of disease classification. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 2018;67: 8-15.
  • Fuller, J. What are chronic diseases? Synthese 2018;195: 3197–3220.

Edouard Machery

  • Machery, E. 2007. Massive modularity and brain evolution. Philosophy of Science, 74, 825-838.
  • Machery, E. 2008. A plea for human nature. Philosophical Psychology, 21, 321-330.
  • Machery, E. 2012. Why I stopped worrying about the definition of life… And why you should as well. Synthese, 185, 145-164.
  • Machery, E. 2017. Kinds or tails. In J. Poland and S. Tekin (Eds.), Extraordinary Science and Psychiatry (pp. 15-36). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sandra Mitchell

  • “Multilevel Research Strategies and Biological Systems”, with Maureen A. O’Malley, Ingo Brigandt, Alan C. Love, John W. Crawford, Jack A. Gilbert, Rob Knight, and Forest Rohwer, Philosophy of Science, pp. 811-828, 2014
  • “Exporting Causal Knowledge in Evolutionary and Developmental Biology” Philosophy of Science, pp. 697–706, 2008

History and Philosophy of Neural, Behavioral, and Cognitive Sciences

Faculty expertise spans the full range of conceptual, methodological, and historical issues raised by the multidisciplinary attempts to understand the nature, evolution, and development of complex adaptive control systems in humans and other animals, as well as attempts to replicate or model such systems computationally or by other means.

Faculty and Representative Publications

Edouard Machery

  • Machery, E. 2009. Doing without Concepts. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Machery, E. 2016. The amodal brain and the offloading hypothesis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23, 1090-1095.
  • Machery, E. 2016. De-Freuding implicit attitudes. In M. Browstein and J. Saul (Eds.). Implicit Bias and Philosophy: Metaphysics and Epistemology (pp. 104-129). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sandra Mitchell

  • Self-organization and the evolution of division of labor, co-authored with Robert E. Page, Jr., Apidologie, pp. 101-120, 1998
  • Explaining Complex Behavior, in K. Kendler and J. Parnas (eds), Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry: Explanation, Phenomenology and Nosology, Johns Hopkins Press, pp. 19-38, 2008
  • Anthropomorphism: Cross-species modeling, in R. Daston and G. Mitman (eds.) Thinking with Animals, Columbia University Press, 2005b

History and Philosophy of Physics

HPS faculty have expertise across the full range of topics in history and philosophy of physics, from key areas in the history of physics (e.g Galileo, Newton, Einstein, the history of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics), through the central topics that have defined philosophy of physics (symmetry and spacetime, the quantum measurement problem, the foundations of statistical mechanics), to areas that engage with cutting-edge physics (gauge theory, quantum field theory, cosmology, quantum gravity).

Faculty and Representative Publications

Marian Gilton

  • (2016) Whence the Eigenstate-Eigenvalue Link? Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 55, pp. 92-100.

John D. Norton

  • (2020) "Einstein’s Conflicting Heuristics: The Discovery of General Relativity," pp. 17-48 in Thinking about Space and Time: 100 Years of Applying and Interpreting General Relativity. Einstein Studies, Volume 15. C. Beisbart, T. Sauer, C. Wüthrich (eds). Cham, Switzerland: Birhäuser/Springer Nature, 2020.
  • (2024) "Einstein against Singularities: Analysis versus Geometry," Philosophy of Physics 2(1): 13, 1–73.
  • (2025) "The Simply Uninformed Thermodynamics of Erasure," Philosophy of Physics, 3(1): 3, 1–21. 
     

Paolo Palmieri

  • (2011) A History of Galileo′s Inclined Plane Experiment and Its Philosophical Implications. Foreword by David Wootton. The Edwin Mellen Press. LINK

David Wallace

  • (2012) The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory According to the Everett Interpretation. Oxford University Press.
  • (2021) Philosophy of Physics: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
  • (2023) The Sky is Blue, and Other Reasons Quantum Mechanics is Not Underdetermined by Evidence, European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13, 54.
  • (2022) Quantum Gravity at Low Energies, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 94, 31-46.
  • (2022) Isolated Systems and their Symmetries, Part I: General Framework and Particle-Mechanics Examples, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 92, 239-248.
  • (2022) Observability, redundancy and modality for dynamical symmetry transformations, in James Read, Bryan Roberts and Nic Teh (eds.), The Philosophy and Physics of Noether's Theorems: A Centenary Volume (CUP,), 322-353.
  • (2024) Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Physics.

Evidence, Inference, and Explanation

Science is distinctive in that its mature claims are well supported by evidence. HPS faculty investigate the nature of the relationship between science and the evidence that supports it and the problems that this relationship faces.

Faculty and Representative Publications

Michael Dietrich

  • Michael R. Dietrich and Phillip Honenberger, “Duhem’s Problem Revisited: Logical Versus Epistemic Formulations and Solutions,” Synthese 197 (2020): 337-354.

Jon Fuller

  • Fuller, J. Epidemiologic evidence: use at your ‘own risk’? Philosophy of Science 2020;87: 1119–1129.
  • Fuller, J. The myth and fallacy of simple extrapolation in medicine. Synthese. Online First 2019; https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02255-0.
  • Fuller, J. Meta-research evidence for evaluating therapies. Philosophy of Science 2018;85: 767-780.

Edouard Machery

  • Machery, E. 2014. Significance testing in neuroimagery. In J. Kallestrup and M. Sprevak (Eds.), New Waves in the Philosophy of Mind (pp. 262-277). Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Machery, E. 2014. In defense of reverse inference. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 65, 251-267.

John D. Norton

  • (2021) The Material Theory of Induction. BSPSOpen/University of Calgary Press, 2021.
  • (2022) "How to Make Possibility Safe for Empiricists." pp. 129-159 in Rethinking the Concept of Laws of Nature: Natural order in the Light of Contemporary Science. ed. Yemima Ben-Menahem. Springer, 2022.
  • (2024) The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference. BSPSOpen/University of Calgary Press. Published August 15, 2024.

Metaphysics, Theories, and Ontologies

HPS faculty are experts and innovators in the areas of philosophical assessments and interpretations of scientific theories, developing accounts of scientific explanation and laws of nature, causation, emergence and complex systems, inter-theoretic relations, as well as the ontological commitments of scientific theories.

Faculty and Representative Publications

Marian Gilton

  • (2020) “Could Charge and Mass be Universals? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research pp. 1-21.

Sandra Mitchell

  • “Emergence: Logical, Functional and Dynamical Accounts” Synthese, pp. 171-186, 2012
  • “Dimensions of Scientific Law" Philosophy of Science, pp. 242-265, 2000

John D. Norton

  • "Causation as Folk Science," Philosophers' Imprint Vol. 3, No. 4. Reprinted in pp. 11-44, H. Price and R. Corry, Causation, Physics and the Constitution of Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

David Wallace

  • (2020) “On the Plurality of Quantum Theories: Quantum Theory as a Framework, and its Implications for the Quantum Measurement Problem”, in S. French and J.Saatsi (eds.), Scientific Realism and the Quantum (OUP).
  • (2020) Lessons from Realistic Physics for the Metaphysics of Quantum Theory, Synthese 197, 4303-4818.
  • (2022) Stating Structural Realism: mathematics-first approaches to physics and metaphysics, in J. Hawthorne (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives volume 36: Metaphysics (Wiley-Blackwell), 345-37.

Methodology, Models, and Experiments

HPS faculty have made groundbreaking contributions to the understanding of the methods used in science from experimentation to data analysis to modeling to the tools used to develop theories (e.g., thought experiments). Some of these contributions are influential in the sciences themselves.

Faculty and Representative Publications

Michael Dietrich

  • Michael R. Dietrich and Nedah N. Nemati, “Model Organisms,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2026 Edition, Forthcoming).
  • Michael R. Dietrich, Rachel Ankeny, Nathan Crowe, Sara Green, and Sabina Leonelli, “How to Choose Your Research Organism,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 80 (2020): 101227.
  • Michael R. Dietrich, “Experimenting with Sex:  Four Approaches to the Genetics of Sex Reversal before 1950,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 38 (2016), 23-41.

Jon Fuller

  • Fuller, J. What are the COVID-19 models modeling (philosophically speaking)? History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 2021;43: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-021-00407-5.
  • Fuller, J. The confounding question of confounding causes in randomized trials. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2019;70: 901–926.

Edouard Machery

  • Benjamin, D. J., et al. 2018. Redefine statistical significance. Nature Human Behavior, 2, 6-10.
  • Machery, E. Forthcoming. The alpha war. Review of Philosophy and Psychology.
  • Machery, E. 2020. What is a replication? Philosophy of Science, 87, 545-567.

Sandra Mitchell

  • “Instrumental Perspectivism: Is AI Machine Learning Technology like NMR Spectroscopy?”, in M. Bertolaso and F. Sterpetti (eds) Will Science Remain Human, Springer 2019
  • Perspectives, Representation and Integration”, in M. Massimi and C.D. McCoy (eds.): Understanding Perspectivism: Scientific Challenges and Methodological Prospects, Taylor & Francis 2020

John D. Norton

  • "Why Thought Experiments Do Not Transcend Empiricism" pp. 44-66 in Christopher Hitchcock (ed.) Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Science. Blackwell, 2004.

Paolo Palmieri

  • (2011) A History of Galileo′s Inclined Plane Experiment and Its Philosophical Implications. Foreword by David Wootton. The Edwin Mellen Press. LINK

Computational and Experimental Methods in HPS

HPS faculty are leading innovators and early adopters of new methods of inquiry including experimental reconstruction, experimental philosophy, topic modeling, and large-scale database-driven research.

Faculty and Representative Publications

Michael Dietrich

  • Michael R. Dietrich, Nathan Crowe, and Rachel Ankeny, “Why Study Sex by the Sea?: Marine Organisms and the Problem of Fertilization and Cell Cleavage,” in Why Study Biology by the Sea?, Jane Maienschein, Karl Matlin, and Rachel Ankeny, Eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 271-296.
  • Nathan Crowe, Michael R. Dietrich, Beverly Alomepe, Amelia Antrim, Bay Lauris ByrneSim, and Yi He, “The Diversification of Developmental Biology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 53 (2015), 1-15.

Edouard Machery

  • Linquist, S., Machery, E., Griffiths, P. E., and Stotz, K. 2011. Exploring the folk biological conception of human nature. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 366, 444-453.
  • Machery, E., and Cohen, K. 2012. An evidence-based study of the evolutionary behavioral sciences. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 63, 177-226.
  • Machery, E. 2017. Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Paolo Palmieri

  • (2009) A phenomenology of Galileo′s experiments with pendulums. The British Journal for the History of Science 42, 479-513. Download here the First View paper with supporting document.

Scientific Collaboration and Social Engagement

Direct interaction with scientists provides access to norms, concepts and methodologies of scientific practice and reasoning not easily extracted from publications alone. HPS faculty and graduate students embed in scientific institutions (labs, museums, field experiments, conferences) and actively collaborate with scientists (joint publications). HPS faculty have been early promotors of increasing social engagement through blogs, public presentations and publications in recognition of the important role of philosophy of science in understanding the impact of science on society and society on science.

Faculty and Representative Publications

Michael Dietrich

  • “What is the nature of scientific controversies in the biological sciences?,” Philosophy of Science for Biologists. Kostas Komparakis and Tobias Uller, Editors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 23
  • Kevin J. Peterson, Michael R. Dietrich, and Mark A. McPeek, “MicroRNAs and Metazoan Macroevolution: Insights into Canalization, Complexity, and the Cambrian Explosion,” Bioessays 31 (2009), 736-747.
  • Michael R. Dietrich, Marina DiMarco, Peter Taylor, and Richard C. Lewontin, “The Genotype/Phenotype Distinction,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2026 Edition, Forthcoming).
  • Ann-Sophie Barwich, Stuart Firestein, Michael R. Dietrich, “Wider than the Sky: An Alternative to “Mapping” the World onto the Brain,” European Journal of Neuroscience 62 (2025): e70224.
  • Kevin J. Peterson, Michael R. Dietrich, and Mark A. McPeek, “MicroRNAs and Metazoan Macroevolution: Insights into Canalization, Complexity, and the Cambrian Explosion,” Bioessays 31 (2009), 736-747.

Jon Fuller

Sandra Mitchell

  • “Through the Fractured Looking Glass”, Philosophy of Science, 2020, 771-792.
  • “Why after 50 Years are Protein X-ray Crystallographers Still in Business?” with Angela M. Gronenborn, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 2017, 703-723. · “Trump’s War on Fact-Finding “, Blog of the American Philosophical Association, April 15, 2019
  • "The Ill-logic of Alternative Facts (sic)" June 7, 2017, blog of the Union of Concerned Scientists

Multiple faculty and graduate students: Instant HPS: short videos