Matthew Coates

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Logic and Philosophy of Science at University of California, Irvine.

My research interests are in computational philosophy, particularly in network epistemology, a branch of formal social epistemology that investigates how networks of agents gather and share information. My dissertation uses these tools to study the effects of bad dissent in scientific communities, and possible ways to deal with this bad dissent.

I am also interested in science and policy, the philosophy of biology, and in the history of early analytic philosophy. This latter interest is mostly focused on the work of the economist John Maynard Keynes, including his philosophy of probability and his interactions with philosophers such as Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein.

In my spare time, I enjoy birding and bird photography.