Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
Saint Louis University
3800 Lindell Blvd
St. Louis, MO 63139, USA
(314)977-3151
You can email me at staleykw-at-gmail.com (just replace '-at-' with '@')
Here is my CV.
During the academic year 2008-2009, I will be on leave from teaching duties under a grant from the National Science Foundation in order to pursue research on my project "The Reach of Experiment: Reasoning Securely about Fundamental Physics."
My current interests lie particularly in the investigation of categories used in the epistemic evaluation of scientific and statistical evidence, as manifested in experimental and argumentative practice.
Recently, I co-edited (with Jean Miller and Deborah Mayo) "Error and Methodology in Practice," a special issue of Synthese published in August 2008.
SLAPSA1
The Saint Louis Area Philosophy of Science Association will have its first one-day conference on February 28, 2008. More information will soon be posted on the SLAPSA website.
Nobel News
On October 7, 2008 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, as well as to Yoichiro Nambu. Kobayashi and Maskawa won the prize, according to the announcement "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature"
In 2001 I published a paper on Kobayashi and Maskawa's work that explored its philosophical, theoretical, and experimental background. The paper was published in Physics in Perspective, vol. 3 (2001), pp. 210-229. Here is a draft of that paper that is missing a number of photographs:
Lost Origins of the Third Generation of Quarks: Theory, Philosophy, and Experiment
Most of that paper found its way into the first chapter of my book:The Evidence for the Top Quark: Objectivity and Bias in Collaborative Experimentation (Cambridge UP, 2004).
Recent Papers
These are not final drafts. Please do not quote without permission (or else see the published version, if there is one).
Two Ways to Rule Out Error: Severity and Security
Probability in Fine-tuning Design Arguments
Error-Statistical Elimination of Alternative Hypotheses, Synthese 163 (2008): 397-408.
The CDF Collaboration and Argumentation Theory: The Role of Process in Objective Knowledge (with Bill Rehg), Perspectives on Science 16 (2008): 1-25.
Evidential Collaborations: Epistemic and Pragmatic Considerations in ‘Group Belief ’Social Epistemology, 21
(2007), 321–34.
Agency and Objectivity in the Search for the Top Quark. In Peter Achinstein (ed.), Scientific Evidence: Philo-
sophical Theories and Applications. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, pp. 165–84.
Robust Evidence and Secure Evidence Claims. Philosophy of Science, 71 (2004), 467–88.
What Experiment Did We Just Do? Counterfactual Error Statistics and Uncertainties about the Reference Class.
Philosophy of Science 69 (2002), 279–99.