Research

Most of my current research is in the philosophy of science (and specifically the philosophy of physics) from a contemporary pragmatist perspective.

My book The Quantum Revolution in Philosophy, a self-contained but opinionated introduction to quantum theory and its significance for philosophy, was published in 2017 (paperback 2019). I wrote this to engage the interest of the educated reader as well as philosophers and scientists beyond specialists in conceptual foundations of physics. It illustrates the philosophical worth of pragmatist ideas by showing how they help us understand perhaps our most successful but most puzzling scientific theory.

Since writing this book I have continued to publish specialist papers in the philosophy of physics, and others exploring the relations between science and metaphysics from a broadly pragmatist perspective. An aim of my earlier research in the philosophy of physics was to shed light on metaphysical topics such as holism, realism and causation. In The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, I developed an approach toward the understanding of quantum theory according to which the theory portrays a nonseparable world, but my view of quantum theory has changed since writing this book. My book, Gauging What’s Real, locates a different kind of nonseparability in contemporary gauge theories.

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