Dr. John Dougherty

Personal information

John Dougherty is an Assistant Professor at the Chair of Philosophy of Science and the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP). He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the MCMP. Before joining the MCMP, he obtained his PhD in Philosophy at the University of California San Diego in 2018. He earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and in the history, philosophy, and social studies of science and medicine from the University of Chicago in 2010.

Research interests

John’s research is concerned with topics in philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics. One of his projects addresses conceptual issues in high-energy particle theory. This project is particularly focused on philosophical questions concerning symmetry and representation, and it argues that understanding these questions requires philosophers to revise their notion of “structure”. More recently, John’s research has addressed issues arising in contemporary versions of empiricism in the philosophy of science, with a focus on how they have been influenced by developments in formal semantics and by the work of Wilfrid Sellars.

Selected publications

1. Williams, P. D., Dougherty, J. & Miller, M. E.: Cluster decomposition and two senses of isolability. Philosophy of Physics (forthcoming).
2. Dougherty, J.: Effective and selective realisms. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (forthcoming).
3. Dougherty, J.: The substantial role of Weyl symmetry in deriving general relativity from string theory. Philosophy of Science 88(5): 1149–1160 (2021).
4. Dougherty, J.: The non-ideal theory of the Aharonov–Bohm effect. Synthese 198(12): 12195–12221 (2021).
5. Dougherty, J.: I ain’t afraid of no ghost. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 88: 70–84 (2021).
6. Dougherty, J.: The hole argument, take n. Foundations of Physics 50(4): 330–347 (2020).
7. Dougherty, J.: Large gauge transformations and the strong CP problem. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 69: 50–66 (2020).
8. Dougherty, J.: What inductive explanations could not be. Synthese, 195(12): 5473–5483 (2018).
9. Dougherty, J.: Sameness and separability in gauge theories. Philosophy of Science 84(5): 1189–1201 (2017).