TJ Perkins
My research is motivated by a desire to deepen public understanding of how scientific knowledge develops. To this end, I pursue questions and topics that illuminate the messy boundaries, complexity, and contingency of scientific knowledge production. Accounts of scientific change, both popular and scholarly, often privilege the analysis of narrow sets of epistemic features of inquiry while treating the historical, methodological, and cultural contingencies that shape scientific practice as secondary. Yet these contingencies can profoundly influence what scientists take to be evidence, which methods they regard as legitimate, and which explanations come to command authority. Thus, attending to them can challenge assumptions projected onto past scientific practice and reveal how particular forms of knowledge become possible, persuasive, and authoritative. By reconstructing these dynamics through detailed case studies, my work aims to provide a richer and more historically accountable image of scientific knowledge production.
Publications
Mound builders, mound blunders: mythmaking in nineteenth century American archaeology
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
In this paper, I critically examine and overturn a narrative from the history of American archaeology wherein historians have classified the overthrowing of the Mound Builders mythology in the late 19th century as a triumph for science. Despite there being ample evidence that Indigenous peoples constructed the mound earthworks of the eastern USA, a mythical “lost race” was invented that embodied the colonial aims of the new America. The triumph for science view relies on a naïve demarcation criterion, wherein science is identifiable by its association with the correct hypothesis. I argue that the triumph narrative obscures the historical development of archaeological practice that progressed in steps, offering a view of science that is continuous and cumulative, making it difficult to draw a fine line between science and mythmaking at any point in the 19th century. I call for the reclassification of this episode as a demonstration of the ways that epistemically rigorous methodologies can still contribute to falsehoods in ascience entangled with cultural aims.
Culture's Impact on the Historical Sciences
Journal of the Philosophy of History
In this paper I introduce the thesis of cultural readiness about science found in the historical analysis of the Alvarez impact hypothesis of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Cultural readiness posits that in some scientific domains, there are scientifically apt questions, methodologies or theories that are only developed, considered, and adopted by a scientific community once some combination of empirical and cultural factors obtains within and without that domain. I demonstrate that 21st century philosophy of the historical sciences has been motivated by a commitment to legitimization and has prioritized epistemic ingenuity and has not addressed cultural readiness. I then argue that one vehicle for cultural readiness in the historical sciences is their use of narrative explanatory forms. Narratives offer an arena to blend cultural and empirical phenomena by their characteristic elicitation of familiarity and emotionality.
Whose Anthropocene?: a data-driven look at the prospects for collaboration between natural science, social science, and the humanities
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
with Gray Santana (University of Pennsylvania) and Kathryn Petrozzo (Illinois Institute of Technology)
Although the idea of the Anthropocene originated in the earth sciences, there have been increasing calls for questions about the Anthropocene to be addressed by pan-disciplinary groups of researchers from across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We use data analysis techniques from corpus linguistics to examine academic texts about the Anthropocene from these disciplinary families. We read the data to suggest that barriers to a broadly interdisciplinary study of the Anthropocene are high, but we are also able to identify some areas of common ground that could serve as interdisciplinary bridges.
The Online Alternative: Sustainability, Justice, And Conferencing In Philosophy
European Journal of Analytic Philosophy
with Rose Trappes (University of Bergen), Daniel Cohnitz (Utrecht University), Viorel Pâslaru (University of Dayton), and Ali Teymoori (Helmut Schmidt University)
The recent global pandemic has led to a shift to online conferences in philosophy. In this paper we argue that online conferences, more than a temporary replacement, should be considered a sustainable alternative to in-person conferences well into the future. We present three arguments for more online conferences, including their reduced impact on the environment, their enhanced accessibility for groups that are minorities in philosophy, and their lower financial burdens, especially important given likely future reductions in university budgets. We also present results from two surveys of participants who attended one large and three small online philosophy conferences this year. We show that participants were in general very satisfied with presentations and discussions at the conferences, and that they reported greater accessibility. This indicates that online conferences can serve as a good alternative to in-person conferences. We also find that networking was less satisfactory in online conferences, indicating a point for improvement and further research. In general, we conclude that philosophers should continue to organize online conferences after the pandemic. We also provide some advice for those wishing to organize online conferences.