Research
My research addresses a central question in philosophy of science: how is understanding generated through systematic inquiry? I pursue this across four connected domains. In philosophy of science, I develop an operative account of progress that foregrounds engineering, instrumentation, and material practice as epistemic achievements in their own right. In artificial intelligence and cognitive science, I examine the conceptual foundations of artificial systems, particularly the unexamined migration of philosophical vocabulary into computational contexts. In public engagement with science, I investigate how science communication and outreach function as cognitively generative practices that reshape researchers’ own understanding through dialogue with diverse communities. In the history of philosophy of science, I recover underappreciated resources from figures including William Whewell and Rudolf Carnap for contemporary debates about knowledge and conceptual change.
These lines of inquiry converge on a central commitment: that understanding how knowledge is produced—constructed, calibrated, and revised through material engagement—is as important as understanding how it is justified. My background in robotics and intelligent autonomous systems (M.Eng., 2024) provides both methodological grounding and a distinctive vantage point on the epistemic significance of practical and technical work.
Research Areas
Scientific Progress & Engineering Epistemology
My dissertation, Engineering Progress in Science (University of Cincinnati, 2025), develops an operative account of scientific progress. Dominant accounts in the literature privilege theoretical discovery—the accumulation of true beliefs, new laws, or improved explanations. I argue instead that scientific works, including instruments, models, calibration routines, and experimental systems, constitute epistemically significant achievements comparable to theoretical contributions. On this account, scientific progress consists in the systematic expansion of both practical-operative and intellectual capacities.
This framework reconceives engineering not as applied science but as a form of inquiry that generates its own distinctive knowledge. The material construction and calibration of scientific instruments represent cognitive achievements that standard philosophies of progress have systematically overlooked.
Conceptual Foundations of Artificial Intelligence
A second strand of my work examines the migration of philosophical vocabulary into AI research. My paper “AI Attention is Not Higher-Order Thought” (in progress) demonstrates that transformer attention mechanisms differ fundamentally from the philosophical and cognitive-scientific concepts from which they borrow. The term “attention” carries deep commitments within philosophy of mind and consciousness studies, yet the computational mechanism bears only a superficial resemblance to its conceptual source.
This research draws on dual training in philosophy and robotics and intelligent autonomous systems (M.Eng., 2024) to investigate what conceptual engineering can contribute to the foundations of AI, and to delineate what philosophy of mind and cognitive science can and cannot offer to the understanding of artificial systems.
Science Communication as Epistemic Practice
A third line of inquiry investigates the epistemic dimensions of science communication and public engagement. In “Leveraging Participatory Sense-Making and Public Engagement with Science for AI Democratization” (with Tim Elmo Feiten, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2025), I draw on enactive cognitive science to argue that dialogical engagement between researchers and communities is not merely an ethical obligation but a cognitively generative practice. This work motivates the development of “participatory cognitive strategies” for involving diverse stakeholders in the design of large-scale AI systems.
An ongoing collaborative project, A Guide for Academic Researchers Conducting Science Outreach (under contract with Cambridge University Press), extends this work into practical guidance for researchers seeking to integrate public engagement into their scholarly practice.
Whewell, Carnap, and the Architecture of Scientific Concepts
My historical research examines how past philosophers of science conceptualized the relationship between conceptual change and empirical inquiry. I focus in particular on William Whewell’s account of induction and scientific discovery and on Rudolf Carnap’s logical frameworks and their implications for conceptual engineering. This work is not antiquarian; it recovers underappreciated philosophical resources that illuminate contemporary debates in epistemology and philosophy of science.