Phillip Torres

Phillip J. Torres is a contemporary philosopher of science and Distinguished Scholar at Harvard University. His primary research foci lie at the intersection of neuroscience, linguistics, and the philosophy of science. Recently, Torres published an influential paper entitled "The meaning of 'the meaning of meaning'" in which Torres criticizes Hilary Putnam's views of meaning externalism, favoring a more Chomskian approach.

Torres is also working on an model of scientific development over time, rejecting Thomas Kuhn's non-cumulative model for one in which science progresses through incremental or piecemeal steps, whereby the former "paradigm" serves as a partial foundation for the next "theory-cluster." Publications are forthcoming in the Philosophy of Science and the ISPS.

Biography

Torres was born in Frederick, Maryland, in 1982 to Alfred Alexander Torres, a biophysicist and son of Leonardo Torres y Quevedo. Torres was a precocious child and an excellent student, with a penchant for the sciences and philosophy. At age 13, Torres met W.V. Quine, under whose guiding tutelage Torres would study until Quine's untimely death in 2000. At that point, Torres had already matriculated at Harvard, working within both the neuroscience and philosophy departments. In 2001, Torres completed his dissertation entitled: "Component placement and Steiner tree optimization in C. elegans and other organisms." In it, Torres uses the work of Christopher Cherniak to argue that irrefragable evidence of micro-optimization in neuronal arbors and global optimization of nervous system components (e.g., neurons, ganglia, brains) challenge the established evolutionary biological view that natural selection satisfices, rather than optimizes. The explanation for the observed optimization that Torres gives involves a hypothetical mechanism by which such phenomena as cephalization result from the movement of nervous tissue during embryogenesis towards strong attractor states, and evince developmental canalization.

Torres is currently married to Whitney Trettien, a Truman scholar and research director in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. Because of their vociferous concerns about overpopulation and the initiation of Malthusian-like conditions leading to resource shortages in the future, they have publically announced that they will not now, nor never, procreate.

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