Overview

My research addresses the transformative power of technology and expert authority across public, private, and professional life.  While this program draws from the Western philosophical tradition, its orientation is interdisciplinary, empirical, practical, and policy-minded.  Such focus is conducive to advancing explanatory and evaluative scholarship compatible with sponsored research, public outreach, and pedagogical development.

My work has been published in quality journals (e.g., Synthese, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Metaphilosophy, Public Affairs Quarterly, Critical Review, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and Science Translational Medicine) and presses (e.g., Columbia University Press, Palgrave McMillan, SUNY Press, Indiana University Press, and Automatic/VIP Press).  It has been re-printed in dominant anthologies (e.g., Readings in the Philosophy of Technology), included in leading reference guides (e.g., Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Technology, Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics, and Oxford Bibliographies Online), commented on in print by renowned scholars (e.g., Harry Collins, Andy Clark, Trevor Pinch, Luc Bovens, and Eric Dietrich), and funded by highly competitive agencies (e.g., National Science Foundation and Mellon Foundation).  I also regularly serve as reviewer for a variety of journals, presses, and funding agencies.

After spending five years as the Book Review Editor of Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences and guest editing special issues of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences and Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, I am now Editor of a book series, “Philosophy of Engineering and Technology,” and journal, Philosophy and Technology, both published by Springer.

I find that studying inherently complex and interdisciplinary topics requires commitment to collaborative inquiry, an approach more common to science and engineering than the humanities.  Cooperating with philosophers who specialize in diverse methods of analysis, professors from other fields (e.g., science and technology studies, engineering, psychology, gaming, law, and business), and administrators (e.g., a Director of Sponsored Research and National Science Foundation Program Officer) facilitates creative exchanges of ideas that enhance scholarship qualitatively and quantitatively.  My collaborative ventures have resulted in the formation of strong international networks, especially in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Wales.  These partnerships manifest in different ways, including frequent visits overseas, visiting professorships, and, at present, a Research Associate position at the Center for Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Science (University of Twente, Netherlands).

While my curriculum vitae contains the most accurate overview of my research, an adequate summary can be given by characterizing the following topics as ones that have received substantive treatment.

• tacit knowledge
• expert authority
• embodied cognition
• behavior-modifying technology
• phenomenological criticism of artificial intelligence
• the logic of technological criticism
• technology transfer
• computer simulations of social behavior
• the ethics of real and virtual global travel
• sustainability ethics
• cognition enhancement
• genetically modified food
• medical imaging technology

Presently, I am prioritizing four projects.

1. An Experiential Pedagogy for Sustainability Ethics

Inspired by Hubert Dreyfus’s conception of engaged and committed learning through active problem-solving and John Dewey’s advocacy of “productive inquiry,” this project aims to create a new approach to teaching sustainability ethics.  Along with Braden Allenby (Lincoln Professor Of Engineering and Ethics at Arizona State University), and Tom Seager (Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University), I am developing a set of innovative pedagogical recommendations and simulations that introduce students to moral dilemmas in sustainability that are engendered by game-theoretic conflicts. By placing students in emotionally resonant and cognitively taxing games that center on problems related to environmental externalities, environmental scarcity, competing generational priorities, and tensions between investment and consumption, we are setting up a unique ethics laboratory. It teaches science and engineering students how to develop collaborative and deliberative skills, while inspiring them to generate and defend moral hypotheses.

The National Science Foundation has provided $399, 926 for this initiative. In order for our games to be played on a global scale, we are collaborating with David Schwartz (Assistant Professor in RIT’s Interactive Games and Media Department), using resources provided by an Overhead Funding for University Growth award ($22,000). The NSF grant supports doctoral student Susan Spierre.  Seager and I are mentoring Spierre’s development as she works on a thesis that identifies a new solution to the problem of how to morally allocate CO2 emissions at a global scale.

This project has resulted in three peer-reviewed conference publications and a number of domestic and international presentations.  Seager and I are currently writing a paper on sustainability education that will be submitted to Ethics, Policy, and Environment, while Spierre, Seager, and I are finishing a paper on the ethics of CO2 emissions that will be submitted to The Monist.

2. Acquiring and Using Interactional Expertise

As defined in the scholarly literature, “contributory experts” are the class of professionals designated by the typical use of the word “expert,” e.g., physicists, chemists, materials scientists, engineers, economists, etc. They develop specialist knowledge and skill through formal education and, in many cases, hands on, experiential training. By contrast, “interactional experts” are not primary practitioners. They learn about a field-including its tacit knowledge-primarily by talking with the people who have acquired contributory expertise. Such deep immersion in the specialist discourse enables them to obtain considerable discursive expertise in specialized domains, even though they lack the practical skills required to make the standard contributions that directly advance the requisite professions

My initial scholarship on interactional expertise had an explanatory focus. By using phenomenological and cognitive science resources, I clarified central experiential conditions required for interactional experts to develop tacit knowledge. My current work focuses on two related questions: How is interactional expertise acquired, and how can interactional expertise be used to add value to interdisciplinary education? Through an Interdisciplinary Healthcare Management grant ($30,000), I provided Northern Illinois University with a curriculum, training manual, and short and long term assessment strategies related to interactional expertise. These tools should provide the foundation for their Interdisciplinary Health Care Management, Effectiveness and Policy graduate certificate. Further progress on the developmental and applied questions is occurring this summer. In August, I will co-direct a National Science Foundation sponsored ($30,000) workshop, “Acquiring and Using Interactional Expertise: Psychological, Sociological, and Philosophical Perspectives,” with Gregory Feist (Associate Professor of Psychology at San Jose State University) and David Stone (Director of Sponsored Research at NIU).  Revised versions of white papers and related material will be compiled for a special issue of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences that I will be co-editing with Stone and Feist on “Tacit Knowledge: New Theories and Practices.”

Interface Ethics

This collaborative venture with Kyle Powys Whyte (Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University) is my newest project.

“Interface ethics” is a term we have invented to address fundamental ethical issues related to the behavior-modifying power of interfaces.  For our purposes, interfaces are understood in broad terms, as visual displays that present users with options for interacting with technologies and technological systems.  According to studies from psychology, cognitive science, and behavioral economics, a range of features exist which incline users to behave in distinctive ways once they are embedded in interfaces.  Because such behavioral modification occurs at an unconscious level, users often fail to notice how their perceptual and cognitive systems are affected.  Moreover, since key studies on behavioral modification are relatively new, and since the autonomy of the subject has long been emphasized in the history of moral philosophy and religion, most people are not educated to be aware of the power that interfaces can have.  As great progress continues to be made on developing  ”natural user interfaces” that are designed to respond seamlessly to users’ bodily movement and adapt to users’ patterned responses, it becomes easier for people to maintain the erroneous belief that they control their devices, without their devices, in turn, also controlling them.

Interface ethics thus addresses the question of what interface designers need to know in order to construct interfaces that: 1) cannot reasonably be expected to cause their users undue harm, and 2) can reasonably be expected to help users achieve ends that they personally identify as valuable.  In so doing, it identifies the conditions under which designers deserve blame for creating “unjust interfaces”-interfaces that cause significant harm, which could have been easily avoided-and deserve praise for creating “benevolent interfaces” that enhance skill and work with cognitive bias.

Our first essay on interface ethics, “Competence and Trust in Choice Architecture,” has recently been accepted for publication in a special issue of Knowledge, Technology, and Policy devoted to the theme of “technology and trust”. Trevor Pinch, professor of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell, and Luc Bovens, professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics, both wrote replies to our piece; they will be included in the same issue.

Presently, Whyte and I are putting the finishing touches on a follow-up essay, tentatively titled, “Trust and Instant Expertise.”  We just submitted “The Right Nudge for Increasing the Supply of Organs,” co-authored with Arthur Caplan, to The American Journal of Bioethics.

4. Ethical Tourism in Real and Virtual Environments

I am collaborating on this project with Kyle Powys Whyte and Kevin Outterson (Associate Professor of Law and co-Director of the Health Law Program at Boston University School of Law). We are focusing on controversies surrounding poverty tourism. This concentration allows us to discuss general issues of ethical travel and globalization, while keeping our inquiry within delimited and thereby manageable parameters.

Poverty tours are tours of impoverished areas-sometimes in developing countries, but also within the developed world-taken by predominantly middle and upper class people. Articles in The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and other popular media characterize these as trips as morally controversial. Critics attack not just actual visits, but also virtual poverty tourism through film, literature, video games, and Internet websites. Using concepts related to voyeurism, informed consent, and justice (compensation justice, participative justice, and recognition justice), we are clarifying the moral obligations that should guide tourists and administrators. Our publications have appeared in or will appear in: Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly, Culture and Civilization vol.2, Environmental Philosophy, and Public Integrity. Our long-term book project is tentatively titled, The Ugly Tourist: Why Some Are Straying Far from Home to Experience Misfortune.