Phone: 412-624-5896
Fax: 412-624-6825
Email: pkmach@pitt.edu

Individual Website: http://www.pitt.edu/~hpsdept/fac/facpages/machamer.html

Ph.D., University of Chicago

Research Interests

Though my research spans and incorporates a number of different fields and disciplines, I am fundamentally a philosopher. I do not take this to be a character flaw. I am a philosopher despite, or maybe because of, the fact that I have worked in mathematics, art history and psychology as well as numerous philosophical fields, both contemporary and historical; for example I have done much work on 17th Century science and philosophy, especially on Galileo. My psychology background has been primarily in perception, and has dealt, among other topics, with the perceptual and cognitive aspects of wine tasting.

Among my current projects are a (1) book on Descartes (with my colleague J.E. McGuire), (2) the development of a manuscript that deals with aspects of cognitive and perceptual theory relevant to the activity of interpretation in the arts and humanities and the social and natural sciences (which has served as the basis for courses and for public lectures at Carnegie Science Center and the Mattress Factory), (3) a project involving the nature of values and how they enter into judgments in science, in particular in scientific research, (4) a comparative analysis of the differences in cognitive and neuro-cognitive models of memory and their associated experimental paradigms, (5) the development of a reliabilist epistemological theory that involves knowledge being based in memory systems but the memory structures are judged to be reliable, and so to constitute knowledge, in virtue of activities that causally depend on specific memorial bases. Basically, the idea is that knowledge requires an actions that have associated social criteria that warrant their counting as knoweldge, and (6), most currently, examining the degree to which there is a coherent account of the concept of information, such that it can capture at least major aspects of how that term is used in explaining mechanisms in molecular biology and in neuroscience. I have a number of collaborators in these endeavors, but I actually need to work more closely with some neuroscientists.

Let me elaborate a bit on endeavor (5) which may be of mild interest to those involved in the CNBC. I have been struck for some time that memory models are muddled, inconsistent and mutually unmappable. The terms, e.g. "working memory", "procedural memory", "implicit memory", etc. have been used by many theorists; yet they use them, even the same terms, to describe different cognitive abilities, which are normally only operationally defined by experimental tasks, and different systemic connections. Most often even the localizations are different. The project is to survey some of the major theoretical approaches, isolating similarities and differences among them, and seeing the extent to which one might be able to establish something resembling a coherent model. This is a big task, and one for which I am looking for collaborators. I have been working on this with Lisa Osbeck a psychologist at West Georgia, who was a fellow at Pitt's Center for Philosophy of Science. NSF has turned down versions of this proposal twice, based, perhaps, on the grounds that the proposals were too grand and exploratory and on the fact that I am "under-credentialed" in neuroscience. For this project and it’s relation to my epistemological project (6) about knowledge and its intrinsic relation to activity, I need to gain much more knowledge and am interested in locating compatible colleagues with which to discuss and even apply for grants.

Recent Publications

• Machamer P, Sytsma J:  Neuroscience and theoretical psychology:  What's to worry about?  Theory  Psychology 17(2): 199-216, 2007.

• Machamer P: Philosophy and neuroscience: The problems. In W Gonzalez, J Alcolea (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives in Philosophy and Methodology of Science, A Coruna (Spain), Netbiblo: 183-198, 2006.

• Machamer P, Sytsma J: Neuroscience e natura della filosofia. Iride (in Italian, translated by Alessandro Pagnini) 46: 495-514, 2005.

• Machamer P: Activities and causation: The metaphysics and epistemology of mechanisms. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 187: 27-39, 2004.
• Silberstein M, Machamer P (eds.): Blackwell's Guide to Philosophy of Science.  Basil Blackwell, 2002.
• Machamer P, McLaughlin P, Grush R (eds.): Theory and Methods in the Neurosciences. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.
• Machamer P, Darden L, Craver C: Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy Science 67: 1-25, 2000.