Cailin O'Connor
University of California, Irvine
Fall Term 2015

Cailin is an assistant professor in the department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at UC Irvine. Her research interests include topics in philosophy of biology and the social sciences, philosophy of science, and evolutionary game theory. She completed her dissertation at UC Irvine, titled 'Categories, Generalization, and Vagueness', in 2013. This project applied the same game theoretic model - the sim-max game - to several interrelated problems including the evolution of linguistic vagueness, linguistic ambiguity, perceptual categories, and learning generalization. Her new projects include formal work on the evolution of moral emotions, and work modeling the social dynamics that surround gender and race in epistemic communities and more broadly. Cailin is part of a group at UCI using methods from experimental economics to explore philosophical questions especially related to the origins of meaning. Her Erdos-Bacon number is 8.

2017 Update

In the last year, my paper 'In Epistemic Networks, Is Less Really More?', written with Sarita Rosenstock and Justin Bruner, was accepted and published by Philosophy of Science, and my paper 'Games and Kinds' was accepted by BJPS.  Jim Weatherall and I spent the summer in England, where I was visiting the LSE.  We taught at the MCMP Summer School on Mathematical Philosophy for Female Students.  Besides England and Germany, in the last year I've traveled to Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Spain and, of course various locations in the US to give talks.  My monograph 'Dynamics of Inequity' is under contract at OUP and is now available in draft form.

2016 Update

In the last year, my paper The Evolution of Guilt was accepted for publication at Philosophy of Science, as was a non-technical follow-up Guilt, Games, and Evolution at Emotions Researcher.  My book project, tentatively titled Dynamics of Sex, Gender, and Class is now under contract with Oxford University Press.  I received a three year NSF grant, Social Dynamics and Diversity in Epistemic Communities, to use game theoretic models to explore the dynamics surrounding social categories in academic groups.  I've given 14 talks during this period, and published an essay review Black Holes, Black Scholes, and Prairie Voles with James Weatherall on Michael Weisberg's Simulation and Similarity.  This summer I will be a visiting fellow at the LSE.