Daniel C. Burnston

This project began as an NSF funded project with my cooleagues in the WORking Group on Diagrams in Science (WORGODS), as an analysis of the use of diagrams in the biological sciences. During this project, as I looked closely at the construction and employment of scientific representations in practice, I decided that the inferentialist account of scientific representation is obviously the right view. Mark Povich and I am currently developing a variety of inferentialism which we call "Gricean inferentialism." In my own projects in this area, I am employing this perspective as part of a number of case studies addressing (i) the relationship between representation and explanation, and (ii) integrative pluralism. I hope to generalize these projects to a broad account of model-based understanding in science.

• Burnston, D. C. (2017). Real Patterns in Biological Explanation. Philosophy of Science, 84(5), 879-891
• Burnston, D. C. (2016). Data Graphs and Mechanistic Explanation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part C: Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 57, 1-12
• Burnston, D. C., Sheredos, B., Abrahamsen, A., & Bechtel, W. (2014). Scientists' Use of Diagrams in Developing Mechanistic Explanations: A Case Study from Chronobiology. Pragmatics and Cognition, 22(4), 224-243.
• Bechtel, W., Sheredos, B., Burnston, D., and Abrahamsen, A. (2014). Representing time in scientific diagrams. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
• Burnston, D. C. (2013). Mechanistic diagrams as search organizers. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: The Cognitive Science Society, pp. 1952-1957.
• Sheredos, B., Burnston, D. C., Abrahamsen, A., and Bechtel, W. (2013). Why do biologists use so many diagrams? Philosophy of Science, 80, 5, 931-944.