Joseph Rouse, Ph.D., studies how scientific understanding is achieved in research practice; how human beings and our capacities are understandable in natural scientific terms; and how scientific understanding is socially, culturally, and politically situated. In other words, his research explores and synthesizes what the sciences mean and how their work matters. His most recently published book is Social Practices as Biological Niche Construction, University of Chicago Press, 2023.

What questions are you trying to answer with your research?

My scholarship is focused on two related issues. 

As a philosopher of science, I situate scientific understanding of the world within the ongoing practice of scientific research rather than as a settled compilation of what scientists think we already know. The sciences offer not a single “image” of the world, but a future-directed field of research opportunities, intelligible disagreements, outstanding problems, and the conceptual and practical capabilities that guide them. Scientific researchers’ work is grounded in prior achievements, but looks beyond current conceptualizations toward their possible transformation in subsequent work. Scientists’ understanding is also partly embedded in their grasp of experimental systems, practical skills, and idealized models open to further refinement and reconstruction, and in the need to build and sustain the institutions, resources, and interested audiences that enable research to continue. 

I then ask how best to understand human beings and human ways of life as scientifically intelligible natural phenomena, when we think about scientific intelligibility as embedded in forward-looking research practices. We humans are animals, who inhabit different practices and cultures, with different self-conceptions, yet also share a world in ways that make us interdependent with one another and with other organisms. How does the best current research in biology, the physical and environmental sciences, and the social and cultural disciplines, reconfigure how we should understand ourselves and approach contemporary issues from climate change to political domination and inequality?  

Why that question? What prompted your interest?

Philosophical reflection on human capacities, concerns, and ways of life has always been closely engaged with how we understand the natural world and our place within it. Early in my graduate work, I recognized that philosophical thinking too often trailed behind the sciences, working from scientific theories and practices that were already being surpassed or transformed in research. I was initially excited by the prospect of engaging instead with scientific understanding at the forefront of research, which looks beyond prior achievements toward possible new research opportunities. I was also struck by the extent to which scientific work is focused on isolated, purified, and idealized circumstances constructed and modeled in laboratories or clinics, or encountered through new instruments and protocols. The sciences create novel circumstances, unprecedented phenomena, and new assays, thereby changing the world to let it be more intelligible. These new phenomena, such as purified or synthesized chemicals, alternating electrical currents, or hybrid and recombinant organisms, are also sometimes then introduced into the world “outside” the laboratory along with their enabling conditions.

What was your first research experience?

In my first-year chemistry laboratory course at Oberlin, some of us were invited to go back to 19th-Century journals and reconstruct original syntheses of some metallic complexes. Learning how to synthesize a complex compound from the sparse indications in a German-language journal, and holding in my test tube this brilliantly luminous lavender material that few if any people had seen for 80-some odd years, gave me a sense of the thrill of setting and solving a hard problem.

Tell us about the research that laid the foundation for your work; whose work are you building upon?

My work is grounded in two major developments. First and foremost was a mid-20th Century transformation in how philosophy was related to the sciences in both the European and Anglo-American traditions. Many earlier philosophers sought to ground the norms of scientific inquiry, conceptual understanding, and ethical action in some form of logical, transcendental, or metaphysical necessity that could be determined philosophically. Diverse figures --- Quine, Heidegger, Sellars, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty and many others--- rejected such “armchair” determinations, and explored instead how to situate our philosophical questioning amid our empirically discernible place in nature and history. 
Second was the specific work in philosophy of science and interdisciplinary science studies that eschewed idealizing images of scientific knowledge in favor of close attention to scientific practice, both historically and in contemporary science. I found myself working in conversation with Tom Kuhn, Nancy Cartwright, Donna Haraway, Ian Hacking, Arthur Fine, Karen Barad and many others to understand scientific practice in its messy, engaged complexity rather than through philosophical idealizations.

What questions will remain for the next generation?

Those questions are still being formulated. The questions that we can pose now will not just be answered; they will be transformed in ways that will outrun and confound our predictions. That’s part of the excitement of doing scholarly work.

What is your favorite library database or book?

There is no simple answer to that question. I have always worked by reading widely and discovering from which authors and which research traditions I have learned the most and found the most insightful transformations of my own thinking. I then go read more by those authors, more work in those traditions, and track the citations that were most influential for them.

How can someone learn more about your work?

My web site (https://jrouse.faculty.wesleyan.edu/) contains links to many of my papers and lists my 6 books, all of which are in the library. They could either pick something that looks especially interesting, or better, come talk to me about their own interests so that I can guide them to which aspects of my work might be of greatest relevance to them and most readily accessible given their background.

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

I have long thought of a tenured appointment in philosophy and science studies as a license to read, learn, and think about whatever intellectual issues and achievements I find most illuminating or promising, and then to talk them through with smart, intellectually curious students. The opportunity to follow these trails wherever they led has been a glorious privilege for which I am deeply grateful.