Research

Alisa Bokulich’s research is primarily focused on scientific modeling, data, and explanation in the physical sciences, especially (more recently) the Earth sciences (geosciences). She has published on a wide range of topics, including history of physics (e.g., Bohr’s correspondence principle, Dirac, Maxwell), intertheory relations (especially quantum-classical relation), thought experiments, supertasks, fictions in science, metaphysical indeterminacy, non-causal explanations, data models, and modeling in the geosciences.  She has developed an alternative view of scientific explanation she calls the “eikonic” conception and is developing with Wendy Parker a philosophical account of data they call the ‘pragmatic representational’  (PR) view of data.

Bokulich is  the author of Reexamining the Quantum-Classical Relation: Beyond Reductionism and Pluralism, which came out with Cambridge University Press in 2008, and co-editor of four additional volumes (Philosophy of Quantum Information & Entanglement, Scientific Structuralism, Kuhn’s SSR 50 Years On, Turing 100).

She is currently writing a new monograph on the philosophy of the geosciences, which draws on conceptual and methodological issues in geomorphology, stratigraphy, paleontology, and geochronology, with chapters on issues related to models, data, uncertainty, typification, and the philosophy of geologic time.

Bokulich also runs a research group at BU on the Philosophy of the Geosciences called “Phi-Geo”:  Φ-Geo

Current Book Project

Philosophy of the Geosciences: Data, Models, & Uncertainty

Current Paper Projects & Talk Themes

  • “Are We In a Sixth Mass Extinction?” (with Federica Bocchi, Leticia Castillo Brache, Gloria Grand-Pierre, & Aja Watkins)
  • “The Holocene Temperature Conundrum: Lessons for & from the Philosophy of Data”
  • “Kuhn’s ‘5th Law of Thermodynamics’: Measurement, Uncertainty, & Anomalies” (with Federica Bocchi)
  • “Synchronizing the Molecular and Fossil Clocks: Discordance and Iteration” (with Katherine Valde)
  • “Philosophy of Geologic Time”
  • “Learning to Measure What Isn’t There: The Problem of Missing Time”
  • “Peirce & the Philosophy of Metrology”
  • “Managing Uncertainty in Radiometric Dating”