David McElhoes

David McElhoes joined the Arizona State University faculty in 2013 as an instructor in the School for Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies. Working primarily in the intersection of metaphysics and the philosophy of science, he investigates the connection between empirical science, mathematics, and logic in an effort to enhance our philosophical understanding of the limits of human inquiry.

At the center of his efforts is an investigation into the nature of hierarchical structures, the results of which came together to form his 2013 dissertation, “The Metaphysics of Multi-level Explanation.” Building on these results, McElhoes argues that the domain of objects studied by ecologists exhibits the same kind of structure as the domain of sets that is studied by mathematicians: a cumulative hierarchy in which each level contains everything found at all lower levels. This similarity, he argues, is more than skin-deep; both hierarchies, quite surprisingly, can be coherently described using the same special language of parts-and-wholes (i.e., the language of hylomorphic mereology), and it can be shown that cumulativeness is a property of any hierarchy so-described. If this is right, it suggests that the metaphysical foundations of empirical science and mathematics are the same, thereby providing a unified metaphysical foundation for two domains that have long been thought to be incommensurable.

In other work, McElhoes investigates the logic of self-referential sentence and the paradoxes that arise from them. Using the distinction between paradoxical and non-paradoxical cases of self-reference, he suggests that there is a class of self-referential sentences straddling the line of paradox, which can be used to probe the limits of human inquiry. They can be used, for example, to demonstrate the logical impossibility of omniscience, as well as challenge the central principles of contemporary modal logic.  

Aside from these specific projects, he is also writing on the topics of fundamentality, metaphysical explanation, the mind-body problem and mental causation, the justification of deduction, and he is planning to develop a logic that models controversy, providing insights into its resolution.

For fun, McElhoes plays terrible disc golf and enjoys painfully spicy food. He has no pets. And he is Canadian.