About

Professor David Baker is associated with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is involved with the Digital Literacy and Communications Lab (DLC lab). The lab serves as a hub for innovation in the humanities, focusing on digital humanities, critical games studies, digital literacy, and communications. It is housed within the English and Comparative Literature Department and is located in Greenlaw 321. The lab's activities include projects and events related to digital humanities and critical game studies, emphasizing the integration of digital media and humanities scholarship.

Research topics

• Theoretical physics
• Physics
• Epistemology
• Quantum mechanics
• Philosophy
• Mathematics
• Classical mechanics
• Mathematical physics

Selected publications

• Correction to: Knox’s inertial spacetime functionalism (and a better alternative)

  Synthese · 2025-12-19

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• Free will in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics

  Philosophical Studies · 2025-04-01

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  Abstract David Wallace has argued that there is no special problem for free will in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, beyond the well-known problem of reconciling free will with physical determinism. I argue to the contrary that, on the plausible and popular “deep self” approach to compatibilism, the many-worlds interpretation does face a special problem. It is not clear on the many-worlds picture how our actions can issue from our most central character traits, given that copies of us in other branches are certain to act differently than we do.

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• What Are Symmetries?

  Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy · 2023-07-17

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  I advance a stipulational account of symmetry-to-reality inference, according to which symmetries are part of the content of theories. For a theory to have a certain symmetry is for the theory to stipulate that models related by the symmetry represent the same possibility. I show that the stipulational account compares positively with alternatives, including Dasgupta’s epistemic account of symmetry, Møller-Nielsen’s motivational account, and so-called formal and ontic accounts. In particular, the stipulational account avoids the problems Belot and Dasgupta have raised against formal and ontic accounts of symmetry while retaining many of the advantages of these otherwise-attractive frameworks.

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• Story Notes for The Intended

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2021-01-01

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• <i>Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance</i>. Katarzyna Lecky. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. vi+277.

  Modern Philology · 2020-08-25

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  Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewPocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance. Katarzyna Lecky. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. vi+277.David J. BakerDavid J. BakerUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis is an impressive book. Katarzyna Lecky has identified a familiar publishing genre—chapbooks: small, cheap, and easy to read—and ably shows that these works had more cultural, economic, and even political significance in early modern Britain than we may have thought. Scale was key. The market for cheap print extended to verse, ballads, and, especially important for Lecky’s claims, “small-format cartography” (13), or pocket maps. All of these were eminently portable, and Lecky makes the case that, taken together, these promoted “praxis-based modes of expertise” that “ordinary practitioners” could use to “build real cultural authority” (3).Just who these “ordinary practitioners” were is a question that requires some finesse from Lecky. She is clear that notions of “class” and “class consciousness” will not work all that well in the early modern period, and sometimes she adopts the more apposite lexicon of “sorts.” But, ultimately, as she says, she is concerned with a “demographic” that is “linked only by its consumption of these publications” (11), a marketing cohort, or what Michael Warner calls a “public.” In this cohort, she argues, members may well have had affinities in common: literacy, geographic mobility, a commitment to markets, and an inclination toward “ideals of representative government” (6). Their reading habits may suggest a taste for variety, for the small scale, and for texts that left themselves open to interpretation. But, other than a shared devotion to cheap print, they had no one distinguishing characteristic. This modal category—a cohort of early modern readers, joined by its buying choices and a mutual sensibility, but not reducible to any one group—is perhaps Lecky’s most subtle and useful contribution overall.Lecky has insightful things to say about the literary authors she treats: Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, William Davenant, and John Milton, each of whom gets a chapter. These authors, like their readers, are joined by their participation in the market for cheap print, but since they participate for “myriad reasons and in myriad ways” (11), she does not try to enlist them all under a single banner. She is adept at bringing out the affiliations between poetry (and poets) and maps (and mapmakers), and between poetry and other disciplines. She is more interested in showing affinity than influence, and does this mostly by juxtaposition. Davenant’s predilection for poetical “numbers,” for instance, is revealed to be of a kind with work on mathematics by Thomas Blundeville, bookkeeping by Richard Dafforne, numerology by William Ingpen, geography by William Pemble and Nathanael Carpenter, and cartography by John Norden, whose pocket maps serve as examples throughout the book. From this nexus of interembedded discourses, each poet emerges distinctly, and each is defined, usually, along two axes: by his relation to the market-sphere of cheap print and by his relation to the royal government. Spenser, for example, is a disgruntled servant of Elizabeth I whose early fervor has dissipated after years of hard service in Ireland. In The Faerie Queene, Amoret, his “pocket-sized heroine,” her tiny heart in hand, emblematizes the “romance of the miniscule triumph[ing] over the majesty of empire” (62). Daniel is a poet of a different type: he adheres closely to the ambitions of James I, to his absolutism and his territorial imperatives, and thus to his plans for a unified Britain. It follows, then, that Daniel will be suspicious of the “multiple truths of the cheap print industry” (90); he denounces its confusions and uncertainties. Jonson’s engagement with royal authority is more nuanced. He was beholden to the cheap-print market. In fact, Lecky reminds us, most of his works “fall into the category” (111). Consequently, he tries to “balance” royal interests with an emergent civic and popular consciousness (114). Similarly, Davenant’s poems “resonate with prosaic economic concerns” (175), although, in the end, he upholds his own version of royal prerogative. And Milton, an “avid collector of atlases” (196), champions an authority grounded in custom and commonwealth, and antithetical to the “Crown’s conception” (208).This book’s strength is also its weakness. Having delineated a category of authors who are associated (although variously) with the ethos and marketing of pocket-sized print, Lecky must then show how this association tells us something important about who the author was, his “identity,” to use an anachronism. Some of these demonstrations are more convincing than others. Predictably, Milton, with his antiroyalist views, fits easily within this category. Lecky’s treatment of Comus, which, set in Wales, intimates the “distance between the Crown and its territories” (220), is compelling. Daniel and Davenant, both royalists who distrust the political implications of small books and small maps, make sense as reactionaries who strive to “challenge” (89) or “dismantle” (153) the genre.Lecky’s attempt to portray Spenser and Jonson as proponents of a cheap-print mentality, however, seems strained. In both instances, the authors have a critical reputation for elitism that Lecky means to counter. But Jonson, albeit the son of a bricklayer, was probably not in his works trying to redirect attention away from the monarchs he served (especially James I), or urging readers to “adopt a more common perspective” (142). This author often actively denigrates or condescends to nonelite people, and sometimes in the same works that Lecky quotes, for instance, in his “Entertainment at Althorpe.” Admittedly, these are questions of emphasis. The case of Spenser is more problematic. Lecky, intriguingly pairing Spenser’s texts with a deck of playing cards featuring maps, highlights his “aesthetic use of miniaturization to combat empire” (69) and explores, with some delicacy, his ambivalent belonging in Ireland, even at one point assigning him an “‘Irish identity’” (71). But, Amoret’s diminutive stature aside, Spenser was a vigorous exponent of English dominion in Ireland in both theory (the View of the Present State of Ireland) and practice (under Lord Deputy Arthur Grey, among others). His felt distance from the court of Elizabeth I did not reconcile him to the Gaels among whom he lived, who probably did not think of him as Irish.Some of these problems are housed in the terms “Britain” and “British,” which Lecky uses throughout the book (though it’s the “English” Renaissance in her title). These terms allow her to bring, for example, Wales and Ireland within the ambit of her argument, but they also elide, as with Spenser, some of the intractable tensions within “Britishness.” Perhaps this arises from a tendency to show “class consciousness” the door, and then smuggle it in through the window. As Lecky points out, writers who served the cheap-print market were a diverse “sort,” and there’s no particular reason why Jonson and Spenser, though both commoners, should have felt akin to “wider publics” (9). At the very least, their affiliations were more complicated than that. After Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance, though, it would be pointless to think through such questions without taking into account the “demographic” that small-size print both catered to and helped to bring into being. This cogent and original book makes a signal contribution to our understanding of early modern print markets and publics. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 2November 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711122 Views: 205 HistoryPublished online August 25, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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• <scp>Samuel Fallon</scp>. <i>Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England</i>

  The Review of English Studies · 2020-05-26

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  ‘One of my aims is to write a literary history without authors’, says Samuel Fallon early in Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England, and one measure of the success of this careful, rich, and perceptive study is that he has managed to do so. He accomplishes this not by removing early modern authors from consideration, but by redefining them. They, like the personae who populate his account—Edmund Spenser’s Colin Clout in The Shepheardes Calender or Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Pennilesse in the eponymous pamphlet—are ‘collectively imagined fictions … virtual selves called into being by the publics that receive and reimagine their texts’ (p. 21). In fact, he argues that, historically, these personae came first: they were the ‘other selves’ (p. 165) that early modern readers found in texts, before they discovered, and were encouraged to discover, ‘authors’ in them. This emphasis on the agency of readers, their...

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• Knox’s inertial spacetime functionalism (and a better alternative)

  Synthese · 2020 · 39 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Epistemology
  • Theoretical physics
  • Philosophy
  PublisherDOI

• Interpreting Supersymmetry

  Erkenntnis · 2020 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Theoretical physics
  • Physics
  • Mathematical physics
  PublisherDOI

• Some Consequences of Physics for the Comparative Metaphysics of Quantity

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 18 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Epistemology
  • Theoretical physics
  • Philosophy

  According to comparativist theories of quantities, their intrinsic values are not fundamental. Instead, all the quantity facts are grounded in scale-independent relations like “twice as massive as” or “more massive than.” I show that this sort of scale independence is best understood as a sort of metaphysical symmetry—a principle about which transformations of the non-fundamental ontology leave the fundamental ontology unchanged. Determinism—a core scientific concept easily formulated in absolutist terms—is more difficult for the comparativist to define. After settling on the most plausible comparativist understanding of determinism, I offer some examples of physical systems that the comparativist must count as indeterministic, although the relevant physical theory gives deterministic predictions. Several morals are drawn. In particular: comparativism is metaphysically contingent if true, and it is most natural for a comparativist to accept an at-at theory of motion.

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• Money and its Interpretation

  2019-01-01

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Frequent coauthors

• Hans Halvorson

  5 shared

• Patricia Palmer

  3 shared

• Willy Maley

  University of Glasgow

  3 shared

• Alexandre Farnoux

  2 shared

• Daniel Shanahan

  2 shared

• Gabriele Carcassi

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  1 shared

• S. R. Elkington

  Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

  1 shared

• Michael Blandino

  Louisiana State University

  1 shared