Leah Henderson's Website

Research

The main fields of my research are philosophy of science and epistemology. I also work on some specific topics in philosophy of physics. My goal is to contribute to a deeper understanding of some of the most fundamental features of science, but I also believe that philosophy should be socially engaged. As a result, my research programme has both a theoretical and a more applied dimension.

Philosophy of Climate Change

Climate change raises fundamental questions that require a philosophical approach integrating scientific, technological, moral, political and epistemological considerations. I focus particularly on the following three areas:

  • Mitigation of climate change

How should we conceptualise what is needed to mitigate global warming? Is the ‘energy transition’ simply a relatively shallow matter of finding technological solutions to ‘unplug’ fossil fuels and ‘plug in’ low-carbon alternatives, or is it much deeper, requiring radical changes to all the cultural and economic building blocks of society?

  • Science communication

How is the science of climate mitigation communicated to policy-makers and the public, and can this communication be improved?

  • Climate disinformation

How do we understand and tackle disinformation about the climate? What does climate disinformation tell us about disinformation more generally?

Societal Trust

I occupy an endowed chair from the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen) and the Rudolf Agricola School of the University of Groningen. The aim of the chair is to develop our understanding of societal trust. This includes understanding what is currently undermining societal trust and creating positive visions for how to improve it. The chair is embedded in the Rudolf Agricola school at the University of Groningen, which focuses on the broad problem of how to develop a sustainable society. I lead an interdisciplinary research group on the topic of societal trust within this school. There is synergy with my involvement with the Public Participation Centre in Groningen, the NWO Gravitation projects SCOOP on Sustainable Cooperation and SOCION on Social Cohesion.

Focal points are:

  • The role of trust in disagreement and societal polarisation
  • The effects of misinformation and disinformation on trust
  • Trust in science, especially in relation to the problem of climate change.

Social Epistemology

Urgent environmental challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss require unprecedented levels of cooperation and trust. Yet, in society we see divisions and polarisation which threaten to undermine not only cooperation, but even social cohesion. I am interested in what drives disagreements between people and groups – how do disagreements become deep and intractable? What causes societies to polarise in their beliefs? What should you do when trust in your own judgement is undermined? And how should we overcome deep differences in worldviews?

These interests have developed out of my research project ‘Weighing Evidence Reliably’ (2016-2020), which was funded by a Veni grant from the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO). The project investigated how we should factor considerations about the reliability of our sources of information into our overall procedures for weighing evidence.

Philosophy of Science

Scientific Realism debate

I am interested in the nature of the scientific realism debate, and whether it should be conducted at the local or the global level. In recent work, I am developing an argument for a naturalistic approach to the scientific realism debate.

Book reviews:

The problem of induction

I have written the Stanford Encyclopedia article on the problem of induction, and have engaged with recent work on meta-induction.

Frameworks in science

Scientific theories can be regarded as organised into hierarchies, with higher levels sometimes called ‘paradigms’ or ‘frameworks’, and lower levels encoding more specific or concrete hypotheses. Together with cognitive scientists Josh Tenenbaum and Noah Goodman, and the philosopher of science Jim Woodward, I showed how this hierarchical picture of theories can be integrated with a Bayesian approach to confirmation.

Inference to the Best Explanation and Bayesianism

I have argued for a new way of understanding the relationship between Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) and Bayesianism, which I call ‘emergent compatibilism’. According to this view, it is not necessary to see explanatory considerations as heuristics or extra constraints on priors or likelihoods. Rather they can be shown to be reflected in the Bayesian likelihoods, given constraints on the priors that a Bayesian might independently adopt. This builds on the work on hierarchical Bayesian models above.

Philosophy of physics

Prior to pursuing a career in philosophy, I did a PhD and a post-doc in quantum information theory (see my publications in this area here). Quantum information theory is a new cross-disciplinary field which brings together theoretical and experimental quantum physics with computer science, logic and information theory. I have ongoing research interests in what we can learn from quantum information theory about traditional foundational problems in quantum mechanics. In particular, I have looked at what implications the ongoing efforts to reformulate the foundations of quantum mechanics in terms of information-theoretic principles have for interpretation of the theory (Henderson, submitted). This forms part of a general interest in the conceptual implications of reformulation or reaxiomatisation of existing physical theories (Henderson 2014 discusses the case of thermodynamics).

Quantum Information Theory

In quantum information theory, I worked primarily on entanglement measures and protocols. My papers from that time: