You can see my CV here.

And you can contact me at rosss23@mcmaster.ca

Doctoral Candidate

I am a doctoral candidate in philosophy at McMaster University under the supervision of Dr. Alex Klein.

Dissertation Research: How far can we tolerate or encourage differences between scientific representations? When do differences become conflicts which researchers need to resolve? Some scientific pluralists walk a tightrope, trying to allow as many differences to coexist as possible without tarnishing science’s objectivity. But these goals work at crosspurposes; allowing differences to coexist undermines the friction between alternatives in scientific debate, while objecivity requires such friction to support research standards. The evolutionary synthesis (c. 1920-1950) illustrates this well: heated debate between genetics and evolutionary science led both to a new consensus and to many new avenues of debate. Because of this inescapable tension, there is a tendency for pluralists to be relativists.

Approach to Philosophy

Philosophical questions can be inscrutable, like a sheer, smooth cliff face. I like to have a practical or empirical handhold, some body of concrete knowledge to get me started. Often this means history or the sciences. This rules out reasoning from first principles; any general principles we get will come late.

This is in keeping with philosophical pragmatism, and I owe a lot to one of them in particular, C. S. Peirce. He once wrote:

Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as … to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.1

Approach to Teaching

Philosophy is about quiet reflection, which is necessarily leisurely, but every philosophical question has a practical edge to it somewhere. In daily life, everyone gets asked why they believe or like something, has to decide what to do and who to trust, or confronts problems they have to think through carefully. I try to structure my lectures, seminars, or tutorials with this in mind. It informs the kinds of questions I ask students and the analysis I offer them.

Most of my instruction time is spent on detailed examples. I model the sort of thinking which I hope the students will learn to do. In a course heavy on readings, I might do close analyses of a smaller section of text rather than broadly summarise the whole. In a course heavy on problem sets (like logic or critical thinking), I might give multiple correct answers to one question, explaining the thinking and process behind each answer and the significance of any differences.

  1. From Some Consequences of Four Incapacities ↩︎