Research

My research broadly aims to understand—and sometimes improve—how scientists and policymakers reason from evidence. I am particularly interested in the role of similarity and analogy in inference and decision-making. 

Peer-Reviewed Publications

(2024). Formal Models and Justifications of Democracy. Synthese.

• I show that Hong and Page’s [2004] computational results are not robust under both minor and more substantial parameter changes. I then examine the consequences this has for the use of the models in political philosophy, especially with respect to Landemore’s [2013] defense of democratic theory.   

(2020). How to Think About Analogical Inference: A Reply to Norton . Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A.

• I note some issues with John Norton’s “material theory” of analogy and propose some ways forward.

Book Reviews

(2024). Book Review: Economizing Our Lives. Philosophy of the Social Sciences. 

• Book review of Erik Angner’s How Economics Can Save the World that cautions against metaphorically framing all aspects of our lives in terms of economics.

Under Review (please email me for drafts)

Inferring Unobservable Relations by Analogy

• I show that there is a particular kind of analogical inference that has not been appreciated by philosophers and cognitive scientists. I argue that this kind of inference plays an important role in scientific — especially economic — practice.

Easy Similarity, Hard Representation

• I distinguish between two kinds of similarity judgments made when reasoning analogically from models: an easy and a hard kind. I then show how some of the most forceful recent objections against the similarity view of model representation are substantially mitigated when this distinction is taken into account.

Designing Institutions with Theoretical Models

• I examine two ways that theoretical models can influence institutional design: as (i) blueprints, where the details of the model are carefully implemented into the world, and as (ii) heuristics that serves as sources of conceptual insight. 

Works in Progress

Rethinking Peformativity

• Models are generally taken to be representative of their targets but some models ‘perform’ the world in that they change the target phenomenon. Drawing from case-studies in economics and epidemiology, I argue for three ways that models can perform the world.

Inductive Logic and Analogies: A History

• I provide a conceptual history of the development of work on analogy in inductive logic, from Hosiasson-Lindenbaum (1941)  and Carnap (1945) to modern commentators.

Emergent Analogical Reasoning

• I build a Lewis-Skyrms signaling games that shows how analogical reasoning can emerge from simple reinforcement learning.