Research

Recently my research has been largely in the field of social epistemology, which is the study of how we should go about acquiring true beliefs and knowledge. I also work on a range of general topics in philosophy of science, and 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.

Social Epistemology

At the moment, we are facing urgent environmental challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss, which 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: