Miriam Solomon

Miriam Solomon is Emerita Professor of Philosophy at Temple University, where she was also Affiliated Professor of Women's Studies. Solomon's work focuses on the philosophy of science, social epistemology, medical epistemology, medical ethics, and gender and science. Besides her academic appointments, she has published two books (Social Empiricism and Making Medical Knowledge) and a large number of peer reviewed journal articles, and she has served on the editorial boards of a number of major journals.

She was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University while working towards her doctorate, after which she accepted an Assistant Professorship of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati in 1986 before accepting an Assistant Professorship at Temple University in 1991. She received a cross appointment in the Women's Studies department in 1993, was promoted to Associate Professor of Philosophy in 1994, and full Professor in 2003. Solomon argues that scientific dissent is not a situation in need of resolution to consensus, but the normal state of healthy scientific inquiry. She suggests a normative framework that assesses scientific rationality at the level of the scientific community rather than the individual scientist. In Solomon's view, competing scientific theories can even be inconsistent with one another while each containing some degree of truth. In Solomon's view, even if scientists or scientific communities use poor reasoning and flawed practices in arriving at their conclusions, the only matter of import is whether or not they achieve new empirical successes. is an historical and philosophical inquiry into the methods used to produce medical knowledge. The emphasis is on methods developed since the 1970s, specifically consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine and narrative medicine. The book argues that the familiar dichotomy between the art and the science of medicine is not adequate for understanding this plurality of methods. Solomon proposes a pluralistic account of methods in medicine, and shows how the methods developed, partly in reaction to each other's perceived shortcomings.