Kareem Khalifa
Middlebury College, USA
Spring Term 2011
Social Construction, Epistemic Value, and Scientific Understanding

2017 Update

I received the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies ($95,000), which I will use to spend a year at Emory University working on a collaborative project, Explanation as Inferential Practice. My book, Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge) should be available in September 2017. The following articles and chapters are forthcoming:

Forthcoming. (with Yannick Doyle, Spencer Egan, and Noah Graham). “Non-factive understanding: a statement and defense.” Journal for General Philosophy of Science.
Forthcoming. (with Jared Millson and Mark Risjord). “Inferentialist expressivism for explanatory vocabulary” in L. Kore?, O. Beran, and V. Kolman (eds.), From Rules to Meanings: New Essays on Inferentialism.
Forthcoming. (with Jared Millson and Mark Risjord). “IBE: Fundamentalism’s failures” in K. McCain and T. Poston (eds.), Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

My presentations for the year include:

(with Jared Millson and Mark Risjord) “Inference, explanation, and the improbable in experimental economics”
     Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable, Vancouver, BC. May 20, 2017.
     European Society for Philosophy of Science, Exeter, UK. September 7, 2017.
(with Jared Millson and Mark Risjord) “Explanation as inference (…to the best explanation?)” Ampliative Reasoning in the Sciences, Ghent, Belgium. May 18, 2017
(with Jared Millson and Mark Risjord) “Inferentialist-expressivism for explanatory vocabulary,” Inferentialism, Bayesianism, and Scientific Explanation, Munich, Germany, January 25-26, 2017.
“Understanding, ability, and scientific knowledge,” American Philosophical Association, March 3, 2017 Kansas City, MO.
(with Yannick Doyle, Spencer Egan, and Noah Graham) “Non-factive understanding: a statement and defense”
     Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice, June 17-19, 2016 Glassboro, NJ (talk cancelled)
     Philosophy of Science Association, scheduled November 5, 2016. Atlanta, GA
(with Jared Millson and Mark Risjord) “Explanatory asymmetry and inferential practice”
University of Pittsburgh Center of Philosophy of Science. Pittsburgh, PA. October 25, 2016.
     Why Rules Matter: Workshop on J. Peregrin, Prague, Czech Republic. November 4, 2016.

2014 Update

Promoted from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor at Middlebury College.

Articles:

2013c. Understanding, grasping, and luck<http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/epi.2013.6>. Episteme 10 (1): 1-17.

2013b. Is understanding explanatory or objectual?<http://www.springerlink.com/content/7381x852lkwv0877/> Synthese. 190 (6): 1153-1171

(with Jose Diez and Bert Leuridan). 2013. General theories of explanation: buyer beware.<http://www.springerlink.com/content/4250073u24u68514/> Synthese. 190 (3): 379-396

2013a. The role of explanation in understanding<http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/05/13/bjps.axr057>. British Journal for Philosophy of Science 64 (1): 161-187.

2012. Inaugurating understanding or repackaging explanation?<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/663235> Philosophy of Science 79 (1): 15-37.

2013 Update

2013c. Understanding, grasping, and luck<http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/epi.2013.6>. Episteme 10 (1): 1-17.

2013b. Is understanding explanatory or objectual?<http://www.springerlink.com/content/7381x852lkwv0877/> Synthese. 190 (6): 1153-1171

(with Jose Diez and Bert Leuridan). 2013. General theories of explanation: buyer beware.<http://www.springerlink.com/content/4250073u24u68514/> Synthese. 190 (3): 379-396

2013a. The role of explanation in understanding http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/05/13/bjps.axr057. British Journal for Philosophy of Science 64 (1): 161-187.

2012. Inaugurating understanding or repackaging explanation?<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/663235> Philosophy of Science 79 (1): 15-37.

Kareem Khalifa (Ph.D. Emory University) is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Middlebury College. His research applies recent developments in epistemology—particularly social epistemology and discussions of epistemic value—to discussions about explanation and scientific realism in the philosophy of science.

At the Center, Kareem hopes to engage scholars in the social studies of science, epistemology, and philosophy of science by developing and defending a new variant of social constructivism. His view differs from previous positions flying under the banner of social constructivism in privileging the social dependence of epistemic value over the social relativity of metaphysical concepts or standards of rationality. Standing at the core of his position is a new model of explanation that places social relations ahead of logical or causal ones, and that serves as the proper aim of science. As a result, Khalifa’s position challenges realism and earlier brands of antirealism, for it claims that science aims for explanatory understanding, even if this involves forfeiting truth or antirealist desiderata such as empirical success.
When not defending unpopular philosophical views, Kareem spends a good deal of time composing and performing avant-garde music that is perhaps even more unpopular. His compositions for dance have been performed from Austria to the Dominican Republic, and he regularly plays bass, guitar, electronic devices, and the oud (a Middle Eastern lute), largely in freely improvised settings. Other interests include cooking, watching movies, and following his favorite sports teams, including the New York Yankees, the New York Giants, and the New York Knicks.