Jonathan Livengood is an Associate Professor of Philosophy, who works primarily in the philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology, and experimental philosophy. Most of his research is motivated in some way by an interest in scientific method—an interest he’s had since he first read C.S. Peirce’s Illustrations of the Logic of Science as an undergraduate.

He is author (with Justin Sytsma) of the book The Theory and Practice of Experimental Philosophy, which discusses some theoretical motivations for doing experimental work in philosophy, as opposed to relying on intuition or armchair speculation, and also explains how to do experimental work that one might use to answer some philosophical questions.

Jonathan works on a cluster of problems that fall under the umbrella of causal reasoning. Some examples include the psychology of causal inference and causal perception, the semantics of causal attributions, normative questions about causal and inductive inferences from data, and the role and legitimacy of causation in the sciences. Recently, he has been working on building a computational model of causal perception (i.e., our ability to perceive relations of cause and effect in some physical systems, such as collisions between billiard balls).

In addition, Jonathan has interests in the aim and structure of science, in the normativity of logic, and in the problem of induction.