I’m an Assistant Professor of philosophy at Indiana University, Bloomington. Before starting at Indiana, I was a Postdoctoral Associate in philosophy at Yale. Prior to that, I completed my PhD in philosophy at the University of Michigan. I was advised by Jim Joyce.
Currently, my research is mostly in decision theory and epistemology, although it connects up to topics in philosophy of language, metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of science, and (more recently) philosophy of AI/machine learning.
My email is: calmcnam [at] iu.edu. Feel free to email me if you’re interested in reading drafts of any of my papers-in-progress. Comments are always welcome!
Papers
Causal Decision Theory, Context, and Determinism, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2024
The Punctuated Equilibrium of Scientific Change: a Bayesian Network Model (with Patrick Grim, Frank Seidl, Isabell N. Astor, and Caroline Diaso), Synthese, 2022
Scientific Theories as Bayesian Nets: Structure and Evidence Sensitivity (with Patrick Grim, Frank Seidl, Isabell N. Astor, Caroline Diaso, and Peter Ryner), Philosophy of Science, 2022
Conference Proceedings
Dutch Books, Indicative Conditionals, and Rational Updating (with Snow Zhang), Proceedings of the 24th Annual Amsterdam Colloquium, 2024
Work in Progress
A paper on the Desire-as-Belief thesis, under view
A paper on decision theory and expert deference, under review
A paper on diachronic Dutch books (with Snow Zhang), under review
A paper on self-recommending decision theories, under review
A paper on updating on conditional information, under review
A paper on accuracy (with Mikayla Kelley, Richard Roth, and Snow Zhang—a.k.a. the Accu-vengers)
A paper on decision theory and utilitarianism
A paper on deference, value, and AI alignment
Upcoming Teaching (Indiana)
Phil 105: Critical Reasoning (syllabus coming soon!)
Phil 350: Logic and Philosophy (syllabus coming soon!)
Current Teaching (Yale)
Phil 210/510: Formal Philosophical Methods (syllabus; hand-outs)
Past Teaching (Yale)
Phil 115: First-order Logic (syllabus)
Past Teaching (Michigan)
Phil 303: Introduction to Symbolic Logic (syllabus)