Kate Vredenburgh

I’m a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard University.  I work mainly in the philosophy of (social) science, on topics that intersect with ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysics. The overarching motivation guiding my research is to understand how background epistemic, practical, and ethical commitments influence modeling choices, to think hard about how they should, and to build fairer models.

My dissertation is concerned with the explanatory role of preferences — both descriptive and normative — in the social sciences. On the descriptive side, I argue that revealed preferences do sometimes explain agents’ choices, on either a unificationist or an interventionist account of explanation. On the normative side, I argue that welfare economists draw on normative considerations other than preferences to explain why a procedure or distribution is fair, are right to do so, and should do so more systematically. I also have a project on transparency and the right to explanation.

My research and teaching is increasingly interdisciplinary, at the intersection of philosophy, economics, and computer science. If you have work or syllabi on related topics, or are interested in collaborating, please contact me!