Davis Baird

Contact Information Room 120 A USC Honors College Harper College Columbia, South Carolina 29208 v 803-777-0620 db@sc.edu

Profile Courses				Curriculum Vitae (PDF) Publications

Profile

Davis Baird is Dean of the South Carolina Honors College and a founding member of the nanoScience and Technology Studies Group in the University of South Carolina NanoCenter. He received his PhD (1981) from Stanford University’s Program in Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Language and Logic. In addition, he has an MA (1981) from Stanford and a BA (1976) from Brandeis University.

His research has focused on the history and philosophy of scientific instruments, those developed for analytical chemistry during the 20th century, and more recently the instruments that make nanotechnology possible. Here he pursues a familial interest being the son of Walter Baird, co-founder of one of the early developers of spectrographic instrumentation, Baird Associates.

He is the principle investigator of a funded interdisciplinary research effort focused on the societal and ethical interactions of nanotechnology. This effort involves a team of 20 researchers from 10 departments in 6 colleges at USC, working in cooperation USC’s NanoCenter. The effort has received more than $3 million in funding from the National Science Fundation.

Baird is the author of Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments—winner of the 2006 Paul Bunge Prize (University of California Press, 2004) and Inductive Logic: Inferring the Unknown (Prentice Hall, 1992; Pearson Publishing, 1999). With Alfred Nordmann and Joachim Schummer, he is the co-editor of Discovering the Nanoscale (IOS Press, 2004, also available at http://cms.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/fileadmin/phil/nano/nano.html). He also is co-editor of two collections published in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science series: Heinrich Hertz: Classical Physicist, Modern Philosopher (Kluwer, 1994) and Philosophy of Chemistry: Synthesis of a New Discipline (Springer, 2006).