My work falls into two clusters, each with its own subclusters:

• Doing science – specifically, cognitive science, with an emphasis on the onset and trajectory into adulthood of language and its well-orchestrated interactions with other cognitive capacities.

• Understanding the doing of science – initially exploring how disciplines interact, and more recently helping to construct the new mechanistic philosophy of science. Our group’s version began with (a), advanced to include (b), and is now focused especially on (c):

  (a) basic mechanistic explanations of biological and cognitive phenomena
  (b) dynamic mechanistic explanations, which add attention to the dynamics of basic mechanisms--often via computational modeling
  (c) the role of diagrams in scientists’ development of basic and dynamic mechanistic explanations—including, in addition to mechanism diagrams, the use of graphs to display phenomena and to display what we call explanatory relations

Thumbnail of my trajectory:

I began with cognitive science as a graduate student in the psychology department at UCSD, added typical and atypical developmental perspectives at Rutgers, University of Pennsylvania, and The New School, and added occasional forays into philosophy of science and electronically-enhanced education at GSU and Washington University.

Since returning to UCSD in 2002-3, my primary focus has been collaborative work with William Bechtel building our version of the new mechanistic philosophy of science. To guide the theoretical work, we have closely examined selected cases of the kinds of science undertaken in two of UCSD’s  interdisciplinary research units: the Center for Research in Language and the Center for Circadian Biology.

A little more detail on when and where I did what is here and a lot more detail is in publications by topic and publications by date.