A Dispositional Account of Aversive Racism

I motivate and articulate a dispositional account of aversive racism. By conceptualizing and measuring attitudes in terms of their full distribution, rather than in terms of their mode or mean preference, my account of dispositional attitudes gives ambivalent attitudes (qua attitude) the ability to predict aggregate behavior. This account can be distinguished from other dispositional accounts of attitude by its ability to characterize ambivalent attitudes such as aversive racism at the attitudinal rather than the sub-attitudinal level and its deeper appreciation of the analogy between traits and attitudes

Collective Implicit Attitudes: A Stakeholder Conception of Implicit Bias

Psychologists and philosophers have not yet resolved what they take implicit attitudes to be; and, some, concerned about limitations in the psychometric evidence, have even challenged the predictive and theoretical value of positing implicit attitudes in explanations for social behavior. In the midst of this debate, prominent stakeholders in science have called for scientific communities to recognize and countenance implicit bias in STEM fields. In this paper, I stake out a stakeholder conception of implicit bias that responds to these challenges in ways that are responsive to the psychometric evidence, while also being resilient to the sorts of disagreements and scientific progress that would not undermine the soundness of this call. Along the way, my account advocates for attributing collective (group-level) implicit attitudes rather than individual-level implicit attitudes. This position raises new puzzles for future research on the relationship (metaphysical, epistemic, and ethical) between collective implicit attitudes and individual-level attitudes

The Reference Class Problem for Credit Valuation in Science

Scholars belong to multiple communities of credit simultaneously. When these communities disagree about how much credit to assign to a scholarly achievement, this raises a puzzle for decision theory models of credit-seeking in science. The reference class problem for credit valuation in science is the problem of determining to which of an agent’s communities – which reference class – credit determinations should be indexed for any given act under any given state of nature. I will identify strategies and desiderata for resolving ambiguity in credit valuation due to this problem and explain how pursuing its solution could, ironically, lead to its dissolution

The Reference Class Problem for Credit Valuation in Science

Scholars belong to multiple communities of credit simultaneously. When these communities disagree about how much credit to assign to a scholarly achievement, this raises a puzzle for decision theory models of credit-seeking in science. The reference class problem for credit valuation in science is the problem of determining to which of an agent’s communities – which reference class – credit determinations should be indexed for any given act under any given state of nature. I will identify strategies and desiderata for resolving ambiguity in credit valuation due to this problem and explain how pursuing its solution could, ironically, lead to its dissolution

The Reference Class Problem for Credit Valuation in Science

Scholars belong to multiple communities of credit simultaneously. When these communities disagree about how much credit to assign to a scholarly achievement, this raises a puzzle for decision theory models of credit-seeking in science. The reference class problem for credit valuation in science is the problem of determining to which of an agent’s communities – which reference class – credit determinations should be indexed for any given act under any given state of nature. I will identify strategies and desiderata for resolving ambiguity in credit valuation due to this problem and explain how pursuing its solution could, ironically, lead to its dissolution

The Reference Class Problem for Credit Valuation in Science

Scholars belong to multiple communities of credit simultaneously. When these communities disagree about how much credit to assign to a scholarly achievement, this raises a puzzle for decision theory models of credit-seeking in science. The reference class problem for credit valuation in science is the problem of determining to which of an agent’s communities – which reference class – credit determinations should be indexed for any given act under any given state of nature. I will identify strategies and desiderata for resolving ambiguity in credit valuation due to this problem and explain how pursuing its solution could, ironically, lead to its dissolution

The Reference Class Problem for Credit Valuation in Science

Scholars belong to multiple communities of credit simultaneously. When these communities disagree about a scholarly achievement’s credit assignment, this raises a puzzle for decision and game theoretic models of credit seeking in science. The reference class problem for credit valuation in science is the problem of determining to which of an agent’s communities — which reference class — credit determinations should be indexed for an act under some state of nature. Solving this problem requires developing rich, mutually informed theories of community and credit that are sensitive to the structure and status systems of complex, heterogeneous scholarly networks

Gender-based homophily in collaborations across a heterogeneous scholarly landscape

Using the corpus of JSTOR articles, we investigate the role of gender in collaboration patterns across the scholarly landscape by analyzing gender-based homophily--the tendency for researchers to co-author with individuals of the same gender. For a nuanced analysis of gender homophily, we develop methodology necessitated by the fact that the data comprises heterogeneous sub-disciplines and that not all authorships are exchangeable. In particular, we distinguish three components of gender homophily in collaborations: a structural component that is due to demographics and non-gendered authorship norms of a scholarly community, a compositional component which is driven by varying gender representation across sub-disciplines, and a behavioral component which we define as the remainder of observed homophily after its structural and compositional components have been taken into account. Using minimal modeling assumptions, we measure and test for behavioral homophily. We find that significant behavioral homophily can be detected across the JSTOR corpus and show that this finding is robust to missing gender indicators in our data. In a secondary analysis, we show that the proportion of female representation in a field is positively associated with significant behavioral homophily

The nature of the silicaphilic fluorescence of PDMPO

PDMPO (2-(4-pyridyl)-5-((4-(2-dimethylaminoethylaminocarbamoyl)methoxy)phenyl)oxazole), has unique silica specific fluorescence and is used in biology to understand biosilicification. This ‘silicaphilic’ fluorescence is not well understood nor is the response to local environmental variables like solvent and pH. We investigated PDMPO in a range of environments: using UV-vis and fluorescence spectroscopy supported by computational data, (SPARC, molecular dynamics simulations, density functional theory calculations), dynamic light scattering and zeta potential measurements to understand the PDMPO–silica interaction. From absorption data, PDMPO exhibited a pKa of 4.20 for PDMPOH22+ to PDMPOH+ . Fluorescence emission measurements revealed large shifts in excited state pKa* values with different behaviour when bound to silica (pKa* of 10.4). PDMPO bound to silica particles is located in the Stern layer with the dye exhibiting pH dependent depolarising motion. In aqueous solution, PDMPO showed strong chromaticity with correlation between the maximum emission wavelength for PDMPOH+* and dielectric constant (4.8–80). Additional chromatic effects were attributed to changes in solvent accessible surface area. Chromatic effects were also observed for silica bound dye which allow its use as a direct probe of bulk pH over a range far in excess of what is possible for the dye alone (3–5.2). The unique combination of chromaticity and excited state dynamics allows PDMPO to monitor pH from 3 to 13 while also reporting on surface environment opening a new frontier in the quantitative understanding of (bio)silicification