TJ Perkins
My research investigates how science develops at the intersection of methodological practice and cultural context through the analysis of detailed case studies. Too often, popular and even academic accounts of scientific development privilege epistemic features while sidelining important contingencies at work in the development of scientific episodes. This is not a harmless simplification. It results in a distorted picture of science, one that projects mistaken assumptions into past practice and often obscures relevant idiosyncrasies present in scientific development and knowledge production. A focus on these contingencies corrects these misrepresentations but also provides a richer and more accountable view of scientific practice.
My dissertation, “Cultural Readiness and Theory Uptake in the Historical Sciences” shines a spotlight on several historic blunders that science has committed, recharacterizing the face-saving narratives about science that obscure unflattering features of its past and introducing a novel mechanism to account for one way that science can be infiltrated and co-opted by political and cultural aims.
Publications
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
with Carlos Santana (University of Pennsylvania) and Kathryn Petrozzo (Illinois Institute of Technology)
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
​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
with Rose Trappes (University of Bergen), Daniel Cohnitz (Utrecht University), Viorel Pâslaru (University of Dayton), and Ali Teymoori (Helmut Schmidt University)
European Journal of Analytic Philosophy
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.