Indigenous Bioethics

Whether it’s genetic data from Indigenous populations with historically low admixture, wild type plant specimens found only on Indigenous lands, or traditional Indigenous medicinal knowledge, Indigenous data has become extraordinarily valuable to the Western scientific-industrial complex in the 21st century. Indigenous data sovereignty provides a framework for managing Indigenous data in ways that benefit Indigenous people. However, the philosophical, legal, and technological foundations of indigenous data sovereignty have yet to be worked out. I clarify the pragmatics of indigenous data sovereignty by using the acts of policy design, policy execution, and policy evaluation to explicate the practical meanings of policy-guiding concepts . I also examine the history of Western scientific norms surrounding data use in the life sciences.

Philosophy of Science

My philosophical research has focused on scientific concepts like information, representational content, and cognition.

I investigate those concepts by asking questions like, “How do behavioral scientists identify novel instances of these concepts? What actions and habits of reasoning do scientists perform when they want to determine whether the concept is properly applied to a given situation? To what end(s) do scientists employ these concepts, and if the concepts help scientists achieve goals that they value, then how exactly do the concepts facilitate the achievement of those goals?”

As you may have guessed from the above questions, I think pragmatism is a powerful method for clarifying the meaning of abstract scientific concepts. By “pragmatism”, I mean the American philosophical tradition first promoted by Charles Sanders Peirce.

History of Science

A pragmatic perspective has led me to pay special attention to the experimental practices of behavioral scientists. But the buck does not stop at scientific practice because scientific practices do not come from nowhere. They are developed and propagated by people, and their character is contingent on a vast array of historical circumstances. To gain a deeper understanding of scientific concepts, I examine the history of the research communities that use those concepts.