Current Research

This is a selection of papers and talks that give a representative view of my work. My ongoing projects focus on Dennettian patterns and pattern identification, explanation especially as related to model use, and on implications of the causal nexus from Salmon for pattern ontologies for phenomena. This is a development and extension of the information theoretic account of causation (see Patterns, Information, and Causation, J Phil). This is a multi-year ongoing project, so do feel free to email and ask about the current works in progress. I am also writing up a series of talks on connected topics, concerning pragmatist explanation and modelling, including how measurement and modality connect. Preprints with abstracts for all publications can be found here.

I will be on research leave in the Fall 2025-Summer 2026 school year.

Selected Papers

(forthcoming) "The Density of Structure", Synthese.
Realist metaphysical views often rely, explicitly or implicitly, on variations of the presupposition that genuine structure is sparse; call this assumption Sparsity. This includes views where there is one uniquely correct way to carve up the world, and also apparently pluralistic views that allow more structure yet still add a limit so there is not 'too' much. This conflates the question of how to characterize what structure is, with two other questions: how much structure there is; and which particular structures there are. I draw on Dennettian patterns, combining deflationary realism with profligacy about real patterns, to demonstrate a pragmatist metaphysical approach to identifying structure without begging the question of how much structure there is. Pragmatist pattern metaphysics allows that the world may be dense in structure, beyond any presupposed particular upper bound from Sparsity. Finding genuine structure may be easy, and most of it reiterative, useless, or uninteresting; the world may be so dense with structure that we could never exhaust it, such that trying to find 'the' correct structure is in principle unachievable. This shifts the substantive task away from the metaphysical question of what structure is, and towards methodological considerations. If there may be more genuine structure than we could ever investigate, our interests as inquirers must play a role in narrowing down which structures we choose to investigate, and which of many closely related structures yields the most systematicity, usefulness, or other epistemic desiderata. This pragmatist approach is minimalist with respect to metaphysical commitment: saying some structure is genuine says very little of substance about it.

(forthcoming) "Identifying Epistemic Injustices to Inform Epistemic Transformative Justice", with Grace Shaw, and Erica Olson, in Ways of World Knowing (OUP), edited by M. Massimi, A. Brown, and M. Jaspars.
In this chapter, we identify four specific subtypes of epistemic injustice that target Indigenous knowledge systems, practices, products, and methods of transmission. These four subtypes of epistemic injustice are: cultural-methodological epistemic injustice, epistemic diminishment, epistemic cultural disruption, and epistemic biophysical disruption. These subtypes identify avenues for the framework of transformative justice targeting these epistemic injustices and their harms. We provide three case studies from the Salish Sea, in British Columbia, Canada, of epistemic transformative justice, described as responses to these subtypes of epistemic injustice. The first involves Indigenous archaeological work on marine resource use over long spans of history. The second involves a Squamish First Nation-led collaborative herring monitoring initiative. The third is about work on revitalizing Straits Salish reef net fishing technology.

(forthcoming) "Pattern Ontologies at Work," in Pragmatism and Philosophy of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Gronda, Janak, and Marchetti, Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Science series.
Patterns and pattern ontologies are a powerful way for pragmatists to address metaphysical issues by rejecting a false dichotomy between pluralism and realism. However, there is a common misconception about patterns that I call the philosophically perverse patterns (PPP) problem. Here, critics of patterns invent perverse examples that meet the metaphysical criteria to count as patterns. I defuse this concern by showing how PPP misunderstands what the pragmatist metaphysics of patterns is supposed to accomplish: the bare definition should not rule out, or in, substantive examples of patterns that instead should involve methodological considerations. I use this response to the PPP problem to show how the metaphysical definition of 'pattern' allows the pragmatist to capture the rich intricacies of ontologies in the sciences and yields two illustrative norms by which methodology can be guided in developing or refining ontologies: cohesion and coherence.
(2023) “Trueing,” in The Pragmatist Challenge, edited by H.K. Andersen and S.D. Mitchell, Oxford University Press.
Even in areas of philosophy of science that don’t involve formal treatments of truth, one’s background view of truth still centrally shapes views on other issues. I offer an informal way to think about truth as trueing, like trueing a bicycle wheel. This holist approach to truth provides a way to discuss knowledge products like models in terms of how well-trued they are to their target. Trueing emphasizes: the process by which models are brought into true; how the idealizations in models are not false but rather like spokes in appropriate tension to achieve a better-trued fit to target; and that this process is not accomplished once and done forever, but instead requires upkeep and ongoing fine-tuning. I conclude by emphasizing the social importance of being a pragmatist about truth in order to accurately answer questions about science such as, “but do we really know that…”
​(2024) "Every View is a View from Somewhere: Pragmatist Laws and Possibility", Theoria.
Humean accounts of laws are often contrasted with governing accounts, and recent developments have added pragmatic versions of Humeanism. This article offers Mitchell’s pragmatist, perspectival account of laws as a third option. The differences between these accounts come down to the role of modality. Mitchell’s bottom-up account allows for subtle gradations of modal content to be conveyed by laws. The perspectival character of laws is not an accident or something to be eventually eliminated – it is part of how this modal content is conveyed. I conclude with a discussion of the metaphysical commitments in Humeanism as requiring a perspectiveless view of the manifold from outside, and how Mitchell’s situated account is better able to account for the substantive notion of possibility involved in scientific laws.
​(2023) "Running Causation Aground," The Monist, 106(3): 255-69. 
The reduction of grounding to causation, or each to a more general relation of which they are species, has sometimes been justified by the impressive inferential capacity of structural equation modelling, causal Bayes nets, and interventionist causal modelling. Many criticisms of this assimilation focus on how causation is inadequate for grounding. Here, I examine the other direction: how treating grounding in the image of causation makes the resulting view worse for causation. The distinctive features of causal modelling that make this connection appealing are distorted beyond use by forcing them to fit onto grounding. The very inferential strength that makes causation attractive is only possible because of a narrow construal of what counts as a causal relation; as soon as that broadens, the inferential capacity markedly diminishes. Making causation suitable for application to grounding spoils what was appealing about causation for this task in the first place. However, grounding need not appeal to causation: causal modelling does not have exclusive claim to structural equation modeling or other formal techniques of modelling structure. I offer a case in favour of a different kind of metaphysical frugality, which tend towards narrow, more restrictive construals of relations like causation or grounding, because then each relation behaves more homogenously. This more homogenous behavior delivers stronger inferential power per relation even though there may be more relations to which one is committed.
​(2022) "Hodgson on the relations between Philosophy, Science, and Time," British Journal for the History of Philosophy. ​
Shadworth Hodgson offers an account of how philosophy relates to science - both physical and psychological - in which three different conceptions of time can be identified. He distinguishes the methods of philosophy, involving analysis of the contents of immediate consciousness, and of science, which presumes the existence of the world of common sense. Hodgson holds that philosophical analysis of immediate consciousness, or the analysis of a present moment in the experience, provides the ultimate justification for knowledge in science. Time as an object of study in science must be distinguished from the temporal structure of immediate consciousness. Time as a target of scientific study is thus differentiable into time in physical science, and time in psychology, where the temporal characteristics of consciousness can be studied, but only from a perspective external to that consciousness. Each of those scientific conceptions of time still presupposes and are evidentially dependent on the analysis of immediate consciousness, itself already temporal. The result is that time as a fundamental unit of experience could not, even in principle, conflict with time as studied in science, because it is presupposed by and the evidential base for claims about time in science.
(2022) “Causal Modeling and the Efficacy of Action,” in Mental Action and the Conscious Mind, edited by M. Brent, and L. Miracchi Titus, Routledge Press.
This paper brings together Thompson's naive action explanation with interventionist modeling of causal structure to show how they work together to produce causal models that go beyond current modeling capabilities, when applied to specifically selected systems. By deploying well-justified assumptions about rationalization, we can strengthen existing causal modeling techniques' inferential power in cases where we take ourselves to be modeling causal systems that also involve actions. The internal connection between means and end exhibited in naive action explanation has a modal strength like that of distinctively mathematical explanation, rather than that of causal explanation. Because it is stronger than causation, it can be treated as if it were merely causal in a causal model without thereby overextending the justification it can provide for inferences. This chapter introduces and demonstrate the usage of the Rationalization condition in causal modeling, where it is apt for the system(s) being modeled, and to provide the basics for incorporating R variables into systems of variables and R arrows into DAGs. Use of the Rationalization condition supplements causal analysis with action analysis where it is apt.
​(2018) "A Pragmatist Challenge to Constraint Laws," Metascience, 27(1) 19-25.​
Meta-laws, including conservation laws, are laws about the form of more specific, phenomenological, laws. Lange distinguishes between meta-laws as coincidences, where the meta-law happens to hold because the more specific laws hold, and meta-laws as constraints to which subsumed laws must conform. He defends this distinction as a genuine metaphysical possibility, such that metaphysics alone ought not to rule one way or another, leaving it an open question for physics. Lange’s distinction marks a genuine difference in how a given meta-law can be used in explanations. Yet, I argue, it is not simply an empirical matter as to whether a given conservation law is a constraint or a coincidence. There is no set matter of fact about the world that determines this, and physics alone will not be able to return a determinate verdict on a law-by-law basis, even while there is a genuine difference between any given law as constraint and as coincidence. Rather, the difference marks different ways of treating the same law in a theoretical setting: by shifting the explanatory context, treating the same law as part of a different mathematical structure, it can be a genuine constraint and a genuine coincidence. The difference between constraint and coincidence relates to the way in which we use a law in specific theoretical and explanatory settings. Because the same law can appear in multiple contexts, it can be used in these genuinely different ways, without itself ‘‘really’’ being either one or the other as some atomistic empirical fact. Conservation laws as constraints and conservation laws as coincidences are both genuine theoretical roles that the same law can play. I conclude by considering how this pragmatist construal of constraints versus coincidences reveals how two parts of Lange’s work in this section of the book are unexpectedly independent of one another.
​(2017) "Patterns, Information, and Causation," Journal of Philosophy, 14(11): 592-622. ​
​(2017) "Complements, not competitors: causal and mathematical explanations," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 69(2):485-508. ​
A finer-grained delineation of a given explanandum reveals a nexus of closely related causal and non- causal explanations, complementing one another in ways that yield further explanatory traction on the phenomenon in question. By taking a narrower construal of what counts as a causal explanation, a new class of distinctively mathematical explanations pops into focus; Lange’s characterization of distinctively mathematical explanations can be extended to cover these. This new class of distinctively mathematical explanations is illustrated with the Lotka-Volterra equations. There are at least two distinct ways those equations might hold of a system, one of which yields straightforwardly causal explanations, but the other of which yields explanations that are distinctively mathematical in terms of nomological strength. In the first, one first picks out a system or class of systems, finds that the equations hold in a causal -explanatory way; in the second, one starts with the equations and explanations that must apply to any system of which the equations hold, and only then turns to the world to see of what, if any, systems it does in fact hold. Using this new way in which a model might hold of a system, I highlight four specific avenues by which causal and non- causal explanations can complement one another.
(2013) “The Representation of Time in Agency,” in Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Time, edited by A. Bardon and H. Dyke, Wiley-Blackwell.
People's doings as agents in the world are irreducibly temporally extended, involving both time itself as well as various representations of temporality. There are three distinct elements this chapter disentangles in order to draw out the connections between them: temporal experience, agency, and representation. It outlines some of the key issues that arise when agency and temporality are considered jointly. The chapter traces out some intriguing paths for future work from the tangle of issues involved in the representation of time in agency. The issue of time and agency in psychology and the cognitive sciences are also covered. The chapter explores the implication of the dissociation between agency and the sense of agency. It explores options for developing a parallel project to that of explaining the Edmund Husserl's tripartite structure of time consciousness, a project capable of grounding the intentional content of temporal representations involved in agency in neurophysiological processes.
(2014) "A field guide to mechanisms" Parts I and II Philosophy Compass 9(4): 274-283, and 284-293.
In this field guide, I distinguish five separate senses with which the term ‘mechanism’ is used in contemporary philosophy of science. Many of these senses have overlapping areas of application but involve distinct philosophical claims and characterize the target mechanisms in relevantly different ways. This field guide will clarify the key features of each sense and introduce some main debates, distinguishing those that transpire within a given sense from those that are best understood as concerning distinct senses. The ‘new mechanisms’ sense is at the center of most of these contemporary debates and will be treated at greater length; subsequent senses of mechanism will be primarily distinguished from this one.

In part I, I distinguish two senses of the term ‘mechanism’, both of which are explicitly hierarchical and nested in character, such that any given mechanism is comprised of smaller sub-mechanisms, in turn comprised of yet smaller sub-sub-mechanisms and so on. While both of the senses discussed here are anti-reductive, they differ in their focus on scientific practice versus metaphysics, in the degree of regularity they attribute to mechanisms, and in terms of their relationships to the discussions of mechanisms in the history of philosophy and science.

In part II of this field guide, I consider three further senses of the term that are ontologically ‘flat’ or at least not explicitly hierarchical in character: equations in structural equation models of causation, causal-physical processes, and information-theoretic constraints on states available to systems. After characterizing each sense, I clarify its ontological commitments, its methodological implications, how it figures in explanations, its implications for reduction, and the key manners in which it differs from other senses of mechanism. I conclude that there is no substantive core meaning shared by all senses, and that debates in contemporary philosophy of science can benefit from clarification regarding precisely which sense of mechanism is at stake.
(2013) "When to expect violations of causal faithfulness and why it matters," Philosophy of Science S(5): 672-683.
nnn
(2012) “Mechanisms, Laws, and Regularities,” Philosophy of Science 78(2): 325-331.
Leuridan argued that mechanisms cannot provide a genuine alternative to laws of nature as a model of explanation in the sciences, and he advocates Mitchell's pragmatic account of laws. I first demonstrate that Leuridan gets the order of priority wrong among mechanisms, regularity, and laws, and then make some clarifying remarks about how laws and mechanisms relate to regularities. Mechanisms are not an explanatory alternative to regularities; they are an alternative to laws. The existence of stable regularities in nature is necessary for either model of explanation: regularities are what laws describe and what mechanisms explain.

(2012) "Mechanisms: what are they evidence for in evidence-based medicine," Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 18(5): 992-999.
Even though the evidence‐based medicine movement (EBM) labels mechanisms a low quality form of evidence, consideration of the mechanisms on which medicine relies, and the distinct roles that mechanisms might play in clinical practice, offers a number of insights into EBM itself. In this paper, I examine the connections between EBM and mechanisms from several angles. I diagnose what went wrong in two examples where mechanistic reasoning failed to generate accurate predictions for how a dysfunctional mechanism would respond to intervention. I then use these examples to explain why we should expect this kind of mechanistic reasoning to fail in systematic ways, by situating these failures in terms of evolved complexity of the causal system(s) in question. I argue that there is still a different role in which mechanisms continue to figure as evidence in EBM: namely, in guiding the application of population‐level recommendations to individual patients. Thus, even though the evidence‐based movement rejects one role in which mechanistic reasoning serves as evidence, there are other evidentiary roles for mechanistic reasoning. This renders plausible the claims of some critics of evidencebased medicine who point to the ineliminable role of clinical experience. Clearly specifying the ways in which mechanisms and mechanistic reasoning can be involved in clinical practice frames the discussion about EBM and clinical experience in more fruitful terms.
(2012) "The Case for Regularity in Mechanistic Causal Explanation," Synthese 189(3): 415-432.
How regular do mechanisms need to be, in order to count as mechanisms? This paper addresses two arguments for dropping the requirement of regularity from the definition of a mechanism, one motivated by examples from the sciences and the other motivated by metaphysical considerations regarding causation. I defend a broadened regularity requirement on mechanisms that takes the form of a taxonomy of kinds of regularity that mechanisms may exhibit. This taxonomy allows precise explication of the degree and location of regular operation within a mechanism, and highlights the role that various kinds of regularity play in scientific explanation. I defend this regularity requirement in terms of regularity's role in individuating mechanisms against a background of other causal processes, and by prioritizing mechanisms' ability to serve as a model of scientific explanation, rather than as a metaphysical account of causation. It is because mechanisms are regular, in the expanded sense described here, that they are capable of supporting the kinds of generalizations that figure prominently in scientific explanations.
(2009) with Rick Grush, “A Brief History of Time Consciousness: Historical Precursors to James and Husserl,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47(2): 277-307.
William James’ Principles of Psychology, in which he made famous the ‘specious present’ doctrine of temporal experience, and Edmund Husserl’s Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, were giant strides in the philosophical investigation of the temporality of experience. However, an important set of precursors to these works has not been adequately investigated. In this article, we undertake this investigation. Beginning with Reid’s essay ‘Memory’ in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, we trace out a line of development of ideas about the temporality of experience that runs through Dugald Stewart, Thomas Brown, William Hamilton, and finally the work of Shadworth Hodgson and Robert Kelly, both of whom were immediate influences on James (though James pseudonymously cites the latter as ‘E.R. Clay’). Furthermore, we argue that Hodgson, especially his Metaphysic of Experience (1898), was a significant influence on Husserl.

Selected​ Presentations

(2025) Coffa Lecture, History and Philosophy of Science Dearptment, Indiana University.

(2025) "Pragmatism and Scientific Inquiry," organized by K. Staley, with Res Philosophica, St. Louis University.

(2024) "Pragmatist constraints for causal modeling to guide ecological decision-making," in Philosophy of Science Association Symposium with S.D. Mitchell, C. Kendig, J. Suárez, and Z. Mayne. [refereed]

(2024) "Foundations of Causation" at Philosophy of Science: Past, Present, and Future, celebrating the 75th and 50th anniversaries of the Vienna Circle Institute and Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, organized by A. Love and S. Verhaegh.

(2024) "Measuring Modality" keynote at Pragmatism in Philosophy of Science conference, organized by C. Smeenk, Western University.

(2023) "Lebesgue Necessity and its connection to measurement" at "Discreteness and Precision in Physics" workshop, Paris IHPST, organized by M. Miller and V. Ardourel.

(2023) "Knowledge Restoration in Átl’ḵa7tsem/Howe Sound" with Erica Olson (Marine Stewardship Initiative), for "Ocean and Us", Royal Society of Edinburgh, organized by M. Massimi, A. Brown, and M. Jaspars.

(2023) Speaker on laws and regularities, one week Summer Seminar, SET Foundations project with Templeton Foundation, organized by M. Page and J. Jhun. Videos available at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNR18r_6hHxRdeZK5EW3Mcg

(2023) "Starting Points in Ohio: a pragmatist account of the asymmetry of explanation," Annual Lecture Series at the Center for the Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh.

(2022) "Mathematizing temporal experience," at "The Character of Temporal Experience" conference, organized by Torrengo, Merlo, Teroni, and Hoerl, University of Geneva [refereed]

(2022) "Patterns and the Density of Causal Structure", Santa Fe Institute Workshop on Patterns, https://www.santafe.edu/events/real-patterns-science-and-cognition.

(2021) "Distinctness and Extensional Independence," Contributed paper, Philosophy of Science Association Biennial Meeting. [refereed]

(2021) “Hodgson on time as an object of scientific investigation,” Workshop on “Invention of Time at the Turn of the 20th Century”, organized by E. Thomas and M. Moravec, Durham.

(2021) “Causation is to Information as Work is to Energy”, Harvard Mini-Workshop on Foundations of Thermodynamics.

(2019) Talk on pragmatist approaches to biological individuality, in “Unculturable Organisms in the Era of Big Data” session with Anders K. Krabberød and Kathleen Creel, International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), Oslo.

(2019) Keynote speaker, Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology Annual Research day, Simon Fraser University.

(2019) "Nonconservation of causation as transfer of conserved quantities," Balter Distinguished Lecture, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.

(2018) “Defining Patterns,” University of Toronto and Leibniz University, Hannover.

(2018) "Who gets to decide what words mean? SFU's Clan: History, Intent, and Meaning in Sports Teams Names." Black History Month Speaker series, Kwantlen Polytechnic.

(2017) University of Pittsburgh History and Philosophy of Science Annual Alumni Lecture, Center for Philosophy of Science.

(2017) “The Agential Present,” Symposium on Ancient and Contemporary Notions of Time, Central APA. With Ned Markosian, Barbara Sattler, and Sarah Brodie.

(2016) “Causation, Information, and Laplace’s Pattern,” Colloquium talk, University of Pennsylvania.

(2016) "Patterns, Information, and Causation," Contributed paper talk, Philosophy of Science Association, Atlanta, Georgia, Nov. 2-4, 2016. [refereed]

(2016) “The Agential Present”, Workshop on temporal awareness in thought and perception, Thought and Sense project, organized by Sebastian Watzl, University of Oslo.

(2016) “A new place for action explanation in scientific causal explanation,” Plenary keynote speaker, Causality in the Sciences conference, University of Aarhus.

(2015) “Managing Mechanisms: Ecosystems, land management, and grafting mechanisms,” International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), Montreal, Canada.

(2015) “Opening the door to the Metaphysics room: a philosophy of science take on Sider’s Writing the Book of the World,” for PragMaPS workshop, University of Oslo, organized by H.K. Andersen and S.D. Mitchell.

(2014) “Causal versus noncausal explanations: competitors or complements?” Symposium on Noncausal Explanation with Alexander Reutlinger, Lawrence Shapiro, and Marc Lange. Philosophy of Science Association biennial meeting, Chicago.

(2014) “Information as a tool to model causal complexity,” Causality and Complexity in the Sciences, University of Koln.

(2014) “Why pragmatism can offer philosophers of science what we wanted from logical empiricism,” Workshop on New Directions in Pragmatic Metaphysics for Philosophy of Science, SFU Harbour Centre, Vancouver.

(2013) “A metaphysics for causation, and why we should be talking about causal metaphysics,” Working group on Causation, organized by Frederick Eberhardt, Carnegie Mellon University.

(2013) “Patterns, Information, Causation,” American Philosophical Association, Pacific division annual meeting, Metaphysics of Science society session organized by Cory Wright, San Francisco.

(2012) “When to expect violations of causal faithfulness and why it matters,” Philosophy of Science Association biennial meeting, San Diego