About
I completed my PhD at Ohio State in 2025, after an MA at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and a BA at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
My areas of specialization are philosophy of science, metaphysics, and pragmatism. I have also published or presented in epistemology, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy. Most of my teaching has been in philosophy of science, applied ethics, and logic.
Research
My research develops a framework I call pragmatist realism. The driving question is how a naturalistic metaphysics of science ought to be built, and my answer joins pragmatist methodology to a qualified realism about scientific entities and relations.
This is meant as a third way between two familiar options. Traditional analytic metaphysics often carries excessive epistemological and metaphysical commitments. Neopragmatism, in deflating the representational pretensions of scientific discourse, can also deflate its objective aspirations. Pragmatist realism begins from the human perspective — from what our concepts do for creatures like us — without giving up on the world our sciences are about.
Publications
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Pragmatist Realism about Causation ForthcomingPhilosophy of Science
Perspectivalists hold that what causes are is tied essentially to human agency. I argue that the pragmatist insight behind that view — that our concept of causation is bound up with our lives as deliberating, intervening agents — does not support the perspectivalist conclusion, and I develop an alternative on which causes are identified through human concerns while the causal relation itself stays objective.
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Synthese 199, 4437–4455
Sinan Dogramaci derives a deflationism about rationality from epistemic communism, the view that epistemic terms function to coordinate a community around shared inferential rules. I argue that different sets of rules do not equally support that coordinative function, so deflationism need not be accepted even by the communist.
Reviews
- BJPS Review of Books
Under review
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A Reflexivity Worry for Global Pragmatism
Global pragmatism holds that any discourse can be given a functional-genealogical explanation of its social role. Using the neopragmatists’ own resources, I identify one discourse for which this cannot be done: the explanatory strategy itself, which cannot tell its story without employing the vocabulary it is trying to explain.
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The Grounding Problem for Stance Voluntarism
Stance voluntarism holds that realist and empiricist stances are alike rationally permissible, on the strength of a thin coherence norm. I ask what justifies that norm and from where, and argue that the most viable grounding commits the voluntarist to epistemic instrumentalism — a contested thesis assumed rather than defended.
In progress
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The Zetetic Role of Mathematics in Science
Mathematics contributes to inquiry prior to any explanatory payoff: it can constitute phenomena as objects of inquiry in the first place, individuating observations as instances of known structures and rescuing apparent noise as something worth investigating.
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Local realisms and the historico-pragmatic method
Examining episodes in which theoretical commitment or restraint demonstrably drove scientific progress, and arguing on practical grounds for local realisms and anti-realisms within particular domains.
Teaching
I want students to leave my courses with a sense of philosophy’s importance to their lives. Insofar as philosophy is the critical evaluation of one’s fundamental concepts and values, and since those values inform everything one believes and does, philosophy is a way of becoming more fully oneself.
Two commitments shape how I run a classroom. The first is that philosophy is a conversation, which means small-group discussion, low-stakes entry points, and a room where a question is worth asking regardless of how far afield it seems. The second is that philosophy has been done well by people from every culture and demographic, and my courses are built to reflect that.
Courses taught as instructor of record
- Engineering Ethics for a Just and Diverse WorldAU24 · AU25 · SP26 · AU26
- Engineering EthicsSU22 · SP23 · SU23 · SP26
- Death and the Meaning of LifeAU25
- Contemporary Social and Moral ProblemsSU25
- Introduction to the Philosophy of ScienceSP25
- Introduction to PhilosophyAU22 · SP24
- Introduction to LogicSU24
- Logic and Legal ReasoningAU23
I am also prepared to teach courses in Metaphysics, Symbolic Logic, History of Analytic Philosophy, and Professional Ethics.
Full teaching portfolio — teaching statement, complete course record, quantitative and qualitative feedback, pedagogical training, and sample syllabi.
Documents
Sample syllabi
Contact
230 N. Oval Mall
Columbus, OH 43210