Research

My current research concerns epistemological and ontological issues in the history and philosophy of science and early modern period. Specifically, I compare and analyze questions such as: what methods are used in arriving at scientific knowledge as opposed to mathematical knowledge? When did a probable proposition (e.g, hypothesis) become knowledge or part of a theory? I focus on the answers to these questions that figures like Newton, Du Châtelet, and Leibniz have provided.  

This project is in many ways an expansion of my dissertation Understanding Hypotheses in Newton's Scientific Thought. In it I show that while in the Scholium of Book 3 of the Principia Newton declares to "feign no hypotheses,'' in a later paper Newton admits that hypotheses are allowed if "examinable" by experiments. I make sense of this tension by arguing that Newton's claims in Book 3 are a rejection of Cartesian hypotheses, and that he admits some hypotheses, which are distinguished by their metaphysical and empirical criteria, as well as by their proper usages. After first establishing that Newton was in fact a fallibilist about the certainty he conferred to scientific conclusions, I outline 6 metaphysical and empirical criteria for viable hypotheses. I then outline 2 main usages that viable hypotheses had for Newton: they could be used as a tools to prod science, or as a temporary underlying mechanism for an event.