Bert Baumgaertner
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Chair of Politics and Philosophy
322A Administration Building
208-885-5997
Department of Politics and Philosophy
University of Idaho
875 Perimeter Drive, MS 3165
Moscow, Idaho 83844-3165
Bert Baumgaertner's research lies at the intersection of philosophy and the cognitive and social sciences. Baumgaertner is also working on the philosophical foundations of agent-based models and is using them to address issues in social epistemology. Baumgaertner is interested in a wide range of areas in both the humanities and the sciences, especially when they come in contact with computation and evolution.
- Ph.D., Philosophy, University of California, Davis, 2013
- B.A., Philosophy, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2007
Office Hours
- Fall: Mon, Wed, Fri. 2-3 p.m. or by appointment.
- Spring: Wed, Thurs, Fri. 11:30-12:30 p.m. or by appointment.
- Computational Philosophy
- Epistemology
- Mind and Language
- Philosophy of Science
Bert Baumgaertner is an associate professor at University of Idaho. His research lies at the intersection of philosophy and the cognitive and social sciences. His approach to issues in these areas is informed by a computational perspective. The theory of computation continues to inform our understanding of the nature of knowledge, language and the mind, which have been Baumgaertner's primary areas of interest (you might call this, roughly, philosophy of artificial intelligence). His most recent work extends a computational methodology to include issues in social epistemology. Baumgaertner is also interested in a wide range of areas in both the humanities and the sciences, especially when they come in contact with computation and evolution.
This is a partial list of Professor Baumgaertner's publications.
- Baumgaertner, B., Benjamin J. Ridenhour, Florian Justwan, Juliet E. Carlisle, Craig R. Miller (2020) “Risk of disease and willingness to vaccinate in the United States: a population-based survey” PLOS Medicine, 17(10): e1003354
- Baumgaertner, B., Fetros, P., Tyson, R., Krone, S. (2018) “Spatial Opinion Dynamics and the Effects of Two Types of Mixing'' Physical Review E, Vol. 98, No. 2, 022310-23, (Online August 13, 2018) DOI 10.1103/PhysRevE.98.022310.
- Baumgaertner, B. (2018) “Models of Opinion Dynamics and Mill-style Arguments for Opinion Diversity” Historical Social Research (Special Issue: Agent-Based Modeling in Social Science, History, and Philosophy) Vol. 43, No. 1, 210-33.
This is a partial list of Professor Baumgaertner’s projects.
- Agent-based modeling of complex interactions
- Evolution of complex signals
- Opinion dynamics modeling
- NSF BEACON Science and Technology Center on “Evolution in Action”. Project title: “Simulating Signals and Security”. The project is to evolve signaling systems in silico in order to understand the conditions under which compositional signals can arise.
- National Institute of Health P20 GM104420-01A1. Project title: “Agent-based models of viral co-infection”. One of three projects in the new Center for Modeling Complex Interactions ($10.6 M).
- Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award Graduate studies award for excellence in teaching at UC Davis ($250), 2013 2 of 7
- The Michael V. Wedin Teaching Award Teaching award for excellence in graduate student teaching at UC Davis, 2012
- Social Sciences Dean's Doctoral Fellowship for Excellence Research award for doctoral students at University of California, Davis, whose record of achievement demonstrates exceptional promise in research and scholarship ($1,000), 2012