We wrote most of this book while we were Visiting Fellows at the Research School for Philosophy at Australian National University. We are grateful to the university for its support, to the academic staff at ANU, and especially to Katie Steele and Rachael Brown for helpful conversations related to this material. Part of the book was also drafted while Weatherall was a visitor at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics; he is grateful to the institute for its support, and to Rob Spekkens, in particular, for helpful conversations. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1535139. O’Connor is grateful for NSF’s support and thanks the graduate student collaborators who have contributed to projects associated with her grant: Hannah Rubin, Aydin Mohseni, Sarita Rosenstock, Calvin Cochran, Mike Schneider, and Travis LaCroix. Special thanks to Calvin Cochran for his heroic literature searching for this book.
The work here has benefited from many conversations and helpful correspondence with friends and colleagues. We are particularly grateful to Anna Alexandrova, Jeff Barrett, Agnes Bolinska, Bianca Bosker, Simon Huttegger, David Malament, Aydin Mohseni, Matt Nguyen, Robert Northcott, Sarita Rosenstock, Hannah Rubin, Eric Schliesser, Michael Schneider, Brian Skyrms, Kyle Stanford, and Kevin Zollman. Parts of this material were presented at the Australian National University, UC Merced, UC San Diego, and UC Irvine; we are grateful to the audiences for helpful comments and questions. Vera Weatherall also gave helpful feedback on a presentation related to this material. In general, thanks to our colleagues and students at the Department of Logic and Philosophy Science at UC Irvine for continuing support and inspiration. Special thanks to Nicole Bourbaki for her ongoing support.
There are a number of scholars, academics, and journalists whose work has consistently inspired us and whose ideas we have drawn on regularly. We attempt to acknowledge and cite the specific instances in which we use their ideas and work, but their influence deserves general recognition as well. Thanks to Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway, Kevin Zollman, Bennett Holman, Philip Kitcher, Jeffrey Barrett, Kyle Stanford, and Craig Silverman. Several friends and colleagues were kind enough to read a penultimate draft of the manuscript and offer invaluable comments that substantially improved the final version. We are grateful to Jeff Barrett, Bianca Bosker, Liam K. Bright, Craig Callender, Nic Fillion, Nathan Fulton, Bennett Holman, Matt Nguyen, Tina Rivers, Chris Smeenk, and two anonymous readers for Yale University Press.
Justin Bruner deserves special thanks: in addition to offering many helpful ideas and suggestions as we drafted this manuscript, he was a coauthor on the research paper “How to Beat Science and Influence People,” in which the models concerning propaganda were first introduced and analyzed. His previous work with Bennett Holman was also especially influential in how we thought about industry propagandists.
We thank our agent, Zoë Pagnamenta, for her help with this project, and Allison Lewis for her comments on the original proposal and her assistance throughout the process. Bill Frucht at Yale University Press offered many important insights that helped to shape the manuscript; we are extremely grateful for his contributions and support. We are indebted to Jessie Dolch, who copyedited the manuscript for Yale University Press, for her many corrections and helpful suggestions.
Finally we are grateful to Sylvia and Dennis O’Connor for their support and to James and Maureen Weatherall for countless hours of childcare and for their support; and to Eve and Vera Weatherall for their hugs, kisses, snuggles, and really quite infantile jokes.