Dr. Samuel C. Fletcher

Since Fall of 2015 I've been an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, but I've also been at the MCMP as a Marie Curie Fellow for three different periods: from June, 2017 through mid-December, 2017, from mid-May, 2016 through August, 2016, and from June, 2014 through August, 2015. Before coming to Munich, I completed a PhD in philosophy in 2014 at the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Irvine, where I held a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (from 2010-2014). While at Irvine, I also received my MS in Statistics (2012) and MA in Philosophy (2012). Prior to graduate school, I received my AB in physics from Princeton University.

Research Interests

Much of my work so far has concerned the foundations of physics and of statistics, and how problems in these fields inform and are informed by broader issues in the philosophy of science. In particular, I have worked on the notions of intertheoretic reduction and physicality in classical mechanics and in general relativity, as well as on the interpretation of the likelihood principle in statistical inference. I also have interests in the conceptual and physical basis of computation, the philosophy of applied mathematics, and the history of physics and philosophy of science.