Sherrilyn Roush is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy in

UCLA Department of Philosophy The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

specializing in the

philosophy of science Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultim ...

and

epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Episte ...

Career

She joined

King's College London King's College London (informally King's or KCL) is a public research university located in London, England. King's was established by royal charter in 1829 under the patronage of King George IV and the Duke of Wellington. In 1836, King's ...

in 2014 after accepting the inaugural Peter Sowerby Chair in Philosophy and Medicine. Previously, Roush was an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy at

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranke ...

(1999–2006). She was then an associate professor and then a full professor of philosophy at

U. C. Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...

. Starting winter quarter 2018, she is professor of philosophy at UCLA.

Philosophy

Her book ''Tracking Truth'' presents a unified treatment of knowledge, evidence, and epistemological realism and anti-realism about science, based on the idea that knowing is responsiveness to the way the world is, and that this is an ability to follow the truth through time and changing circumstances. Responsiveness is defined for empirical knowledge by a reformulation of

Robert Nozick Robert Nozick (; November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University,

’s tracking conditions—for example: if p were false, then S wouldn't believe p—using conditional probability instead of counterfactuals. Roush argues that the new tracking view is superior to other externalist views of knowledge, including process reliabilism. Of particular interest are the new view's fallibilist account of knowledge of

logical truth Logical truth is one of the most fundamental concepts in logic. Broadly speaking, a logical truth is a statement which is true regardless of the truth or falsity of its constituent propositions. In other words, a logical truth is a statement whic ...

, its treatment of reflective knowledge and lottery propositions, its solutions to the value problem and the generality problem, its implications about skepticism, and its explanation of why knowledge is power in the Baconian sense. In the second half of the book it is argued that the tracking theory of evidence is best formulated and defended as a confirmation theory based on the Likelihood Ratio. The tracking theories of knowledge and evidence thereby fit together to provide a deep explanation of why having better evidence makes you more likely to know. Finally, the book argues that confirmation theory is relevant to debates about scientific realism, and defends a position intermediate between realism and anti-realism on the basis of a view about what having evidence requires.

External links

Roush's page at UCLARoush's page at King's College LondonRoush's website at U.C. BerkeleyAn Interview With Sherrilyn Roush

References

Epistemologists Philosophers of science University of California, Berkeley alumni Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century American philosophers American logicians University of California, Berkeley faculty Philosophers of medicine {{US-philosopher-stub