tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22641252761612691222024-02-07T00:08:17.600-05:00It's Only A TheoryA Group Blog Devoted to the General Philosophy of ScienceGabriele Contessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.comBlogger312125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-14492808627677410802015-11-23T10:34:00.001-05:002015-11-23T10:34:39.015-05:00CFP: HOPOS 2016 (Minneapolis)<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">June 22-25, 2016, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA</span><br />
<a href="http://hopos2016.umn.edu/" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;" target="_blank">http://hopos2016.umn.edu/</a><br />
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<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Keynote Speakers<br /><br />Karine Chemla, REHSEIS, CNRS, and Université Paris Diderot<br /><br />Thomas Uebel, University of Manchester</b><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">HOPOS: The International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science will hold its eleventh international congress in Minneapolis, on </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">June 22-25, 2016</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">. The Society hereby requests proposals for papers and for symposia to be presented at the meeting. HOPOS is devoted to promoting research on the history of the philosophy of science. We construe this subject broadly, to include topics in the history of related disciplines and in all historical periods, studied through diverse methodologies. In order to encourage scholarly exchange across the temporal reach of HOPOS, the program committee especially encourages submissions that take up philosophical themes that cross time periods. If you have inquiries about the conference or about the submission process, please write to Maarten van Dyck: maarten.vandyck [at] </span><a href="http://ugent.be/" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;" target="_blank">ugent.be</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">.</span><br />
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<b style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">SUBMISSION DEADLINE: January 4, 2016</b><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">To submit a proposal for a paper or symposium, please visit the conference website: </span><a href="http://hopos2016.umn.edu/call-submissions" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;" target="_blank">http://hopos2016.umn.edu/call-<wbr></wbr>submissions</a>Gabriele Contessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-51619294748337027202015-11-19T17:32:00.001-05:002015-11-19T17:33:03.670-05:00Book: Models and Maps: An Essay on Epistemic RepresentationFor those of you who might be interested, a version of my book manuscript <i>Models and Maps: An Essay in Epistemic Representation</i> is now available <a href="http://philpapers.org/rec/CONMAM-9" target="_blank">here</a>. Please feel free to cite and circulate.Gabriele Contessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-73068750519871969442015-08-25T23:45:00.002-04:002015-08-25T23:45:23.198-04:00Postdoc: Intuitions in Science and Philosophy (Aarhus)<div style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 12.6pt; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">The project </span><strong><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">Intuitions in Science and Philosophy</span></strong><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"> </span><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">hires<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">- 2 postdocs and<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">- 1 PhD student.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">Application deadline: 01/11/2015.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">The Sapere Aude project Intuitions in Science and Philosophy, funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research and led by <a href="http://www.samuelschindler.org/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: #003e5c; padding: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">Samuel Schindler</span></a>, will investigate the role and nature of intuitive judgements in science and philosophy. Whereas intuitive judgements in philosophy have been much debated in recent years, little attention has been paid to intuitive judgments in science. This is where the project will step in. In particular, it will investigate intuitive judgements in thought experiments in physics and in the form of acceptability judgements in linguistics. The results of these investigations will be related to debates about the evidential function of intuitive judgements in philosophy.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">The project will cooperate with several renowned scholars in the field and organize two major conferences and a workshop. Each of the project members will be able to visit the project’s cooperation partners abroad. The starting date is negotiable. The project duration is four years. The tasks of the team members will be roughly as follows:<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<strong><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">Postdoc position 1 (2 years): “Justifying intuitive judgments”.</span></strong><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"> </span><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">Together with the PI of the project, the postdoc will, amongst other things, conduct qualitative and quantitative surveys. Knowledge of statistics, experimental design and/or experimental philosophy would be an advantage, but is not required. <u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"><a href="http://www.au.dk/en/about/vacant-positions/scientific-positions/stillinger/Vacancy/show/759456/5283/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: #003e5c; padding: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">To apply for this position click here</span></a>. <u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<strong><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">Postdoc position 2 (2 years): “Histories of thought experiments”.</span></strong><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"> </span><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">In a set of extended historical case studies the postdoc will investigate the role intuitive judgments in thought experiments have played in theory choice. The applicant can be a philosopher, but should have strong interests and competences in the history of science (and ideally, physics). <u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"><a href="http://www.au.dk/en/about/vacant-positions/scientific-positions/stillinger/Vacancy/show/759582/5283/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: #003e5c; padding: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">To apply for this position click here.</span></a> <u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<strong><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">PhD student (3 years): “Justifying intuitive judgements in linguistics”</span></strong><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">. The PhD student will inquire into the justification of the use of acceptability judgements in linguistics. For that purpose, the student (trained in philosophy or linguistics) will, amongst other things, conduct qualitative and quantitative surveys. Knowledge of statistics, experimental design and/or linguistics would be an advantage, but is not required.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;"><a href="http://talent.au.dk/phd/scienceandtechnology/opencalls/calls-on-specific-projects/justifying-intuitive-judgements-in-linguistics/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: #003e5c; padding: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">To apply for this position click here.</span></a> <u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">The project will be located at the <a href="http://css.au.dk/en/?domain=ivs-old.au.dk&%3Bpasskey=H6dhTjf7kkkJsyebnb&cHash=4f4b1bcc2ec367dc30ce133ed9bb49ec" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: #003e5c; padding: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">Centre for Science Studies</span></a> at the <a href="http://www.math.au.dk/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: #003e5c; padding: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">Department of Mathematics</span></a> and associated with the <a href="http://cas.au.dk/en/research/research-programmes/philosophy-and-intellectual-history/research-groups/research-unit-for-epistemology-metaphysics-and-philosophy-of-cognition/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: #003e5c; padding: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">Department of Philosophy</span></a> at Aarhus University. The project members are expected to move to Aarhus. The project language is English. Also teaching in English is possible.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8.5pt;">For further information and questions contact Samuel Schindler (<a href="mailto:sks@css.au.dk" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; color: #003e5c; padding: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">sks@css.au.dk</span></a>) or visit <a href="http://projects.au.dk/intuitions/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://projects.au.dk/<wbr></wbr>intuitions/</a>.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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Gabriele Contessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-39934561335173803132015-08-25T23:43:00.001-04:002015-08-25T23:43:40.051-04:00Job: Associate or Full Professor AOS: Science Studies (Aarhus)<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
Professor/Associate Professor in Science Studies<u></u><u></u></div>
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The Centre for Science Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark invites applications for the position of full professor or associate professor (depending on the qualifications of the successful candidate) in science studies with an expected starting date of February 2016. Deadline for applications is <span class="aBn" data-term="goog_1674291583" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: dashed; border-bottom-width: 1px; position: relative; top: -2px; z-index: 0;" tabindex="0"><span class="aQJ" style="position: relative; top: 2px; z-index: -1;">12/10/2015</span></span>.<u></u><u></u></div>
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We seek applicants with academic expertise in either one or several of the following areas: history of science, technology, or mathematics, philosophy of science, science communication, or related areas.<u></u><u></u></div>
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The Centre seeks to strengthen its research by attracting excellent researchers. The successful candidate is expected to take an active interest in developing the research profile of the Centre in collaboration with the other staff members.<u></u><u></u></div>
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The Centre teaches philosophy of science courses to almost all bachelor students at the Faculty of Science and Technology. The appointee is expected to take responsibility for one or more of these courses.<u></u><u></u></div>
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The Centre also has its own Master’s Programme in science studies. The appointee is expected to teach courses within this programme and engage in the development of new courses.<u></u><u></u></div>
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Moreover, the appointee will be expected to participate in all aspects of the Department’s activities and to be present on a daily basis.<u></u><u></u></div>
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The Centre for Science Studies is placed within the Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science and Technology. The centre ranks as one of the major centres for the history and philosophy of science, technology, and mathematics in Europe. For more information about the Centre, please see:<a href="http://www.css.au.dk/en" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">www.css.au.dk/en</a>.<u></u><u></u></div>
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For further details regarding the application procedure visit:<u></u><u></u></div>
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<a href="http://www.au.dk/en/about/vacant-positions/scientific-positions/stillinger/Vacancy/show/758067/5283/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://www.au.dk/en/about/<wbr></wbr>vacant-positions/scientific-<wbr></wbr>positions/stillinger/Vacancy/<wbr></wbr>show/758067/5283/</a>.<u></u><u></u></div>
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Further information may be obtained from Head of Department Niels O. Nygaard, phone <a href="tel:%2B45%208715%205785" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank" value="+4587155785">+45 8715 5785</a>, email<a href="mailto:niels.nygaard@math.au.dk" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">niels.nygaard@math.au.dk</a></div>
Gabriele Contessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-17121175570463922522015-02-16T12:50:00.001-05:002015-02-16T12:50:56.314-05:00Postdoc position: evaluating evidence in medicine<div style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Open Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.7999992370605px; margin-bottom: 0.825em;">
A new research project <a data-mce-href="http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/jonw/projects/evaluating-evidence-in-medicine/" href="http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/jonw/projects/evaluating-evidence-in-medicine/" style="color: #1b8be0; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.7; text-decoration: none;"><strong style="font-style: inherit; line-height: 1.7;">Evaluating evidence in medicine</strong></a>, has secured funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.</div>
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The project will run for 3 years from 1st June 2015.</div>
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We are advertising for a postdoctoral research associate to work on the project. Find out more by searching for job reference HUM0604 <a data-mce-href="https://jobs.kent.ac.uk/" href="https://jobs.kent.ac.uk/" style="color: #1b8be0; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.7; text-decoration: none;">here</a>.</div>
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If you know of any strong prospective postdocs, please let them know about this opportunity!</div>
Jon Williamsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05497890510605271093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-52067087474488065592014-12-09T15:20:00.000-05:002014-12-09T15:21:18.884-05:00CFP: Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology 2015<div style="text-align: center;">
Announcing the 5th Annual</div>
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<a href="http://www.utdallas.edu/c4v/2015-conference-values-medicine-science-technology/">Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology Conference</a></h3>
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At the <a href="http://values.utdallas.edu/">Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology</a><br />
The University of Texas at Dallas<br />
May 19-22, 2015</div>
Keynote Speaker:<br />
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<li style="margin: 0;"><a href="http://people.oregonstate.edu/~cloughs/">Sharyn Clough</a> (Oregon State)
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<li style="margin: 0;">Author of <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/074251465X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=074251465X&linkCode=as2&tag=thehangemanat-20&linkId=4U6NXK4QHAG4Z6QN">Beyond Epistemology: A Pragmatist Approach to Feminist Science Studies</a></em></li>
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Science, technology, and medicine have a major impact on our lives. We live with constant technological innovation and scientific discovery, and this changes the conditions that we live in, as well as the way we understand ourselves and the world around us. Science, technology, and medicine are thus entangled with our values, our culture, and our politics, and they have an important impact on policymaking and action. Making value judgments is important to the way that we fund, conduct, evaluate, and apply scientific research.<br />
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We invite proposals for papers that engage with these issues from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical approaches, including philosophy of science, technology, & medicine, epistemology, ethics and political philosophy, history, science and technology studies, policy studies, and natural and social sciences.<br />
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This year's conference will have three target themes:<br />
<ol>
<li><strong>Gender, sex, and sexuality in science, technology, and medicine</strong></li>
<li><strong>Science and values in the work of Paul K. Feyerabend, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of <em>Against Method</em></strong></li>
<li><strong>Distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate roles for values in science</strong></li>
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We welcome any paper and panel proposals in the broad area of values in medicine, science, and technology, but we will give priority to proposals on these target themes.<br />
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Suggested topics for papers and panels include:<br />
<ul>
<li>The value of diversity in epistemic communities</li>
<li>Sexism, heterosexism, or transphobia in technology culture</li>
<li>Sex and gender in medical research or practice</li>
<li>Feminist critique of gender differences research</li>
<li>Feyerbend's relationship to feminist philosophy of science</li>
<li>Feyerabend on science, values, and democracy</li>
<li>The indirect/direct role distinction</li>
<li>The ideal of well-ordered science</li>
<li>The cognitive status of values and value judgments</li>
</ul>
We will consider proposals for individual papers, but also thematic panel sessions and more informal formats. Please feel free to contact us early to discuss potential panel formats at <a href="mailto:values@utdallas.edu">values@utdallas.edu</a><br />
<br />
For contributed papers, please submit a 250-500 word abstract. For symposia and other multi-participant panels, submit an abstract up to 250 words describing the topic of the panel and descriptions of up to 100 words describing each participant's contribution.<br />
<br />
<h3>
<a href="http://tinyurl.com/ScienceValues2015">Submit your proposals here.</a></h3>
<br />
Please do not submit more than once for each presentation format (so you can submit as part of a group symposium as well as an individual paper, but not two papers). Participants will generally only be able to appear on the program once in any capacity. Papers that are not accepted for presentation will be automatically considered in our open roundtables session.<br />
<br />
<strong>Deadline is 1st of February 2015.</strong><br />
<br />
The Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology works to foster diversity and inclusiveness in our programming, events, and outreach efforts. Proposal authors and panel organizers will be asked to submit an optional 50-100 word diversity statement to explain their commitment and contributions to diversity in their proposal and in general. Conference proposals will be reviewed for quality, but final programming decisions will be made with diversity and inclusiveness in mind. Contributed paper proposals will be anonymously reviewed at all stages, whereas final decisions on organized panel proposals may consider identity of the panelists.<br />
<br />
Conference facilities will be wheelchair accessible, and interpreters for the deaf and hard of hearing can be provided upon request. For any questions about the conference, please contact <a href="mailto:values@utdallas.edu">values@utdallas.edu</a><br />
<a href="mailto:values@utdallas.edu"><br /></a>
The Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology is an institutional member of the <a href="http://srpoise.org/">Consortium for Socially Relevant Philosophy of/in Science and/or Engineering (SRPoiSE)</a>.Matthew J. Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00730262274655726070noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-76349770143861823592014-10-18T22:33:00.001-04:002014-10-20T09:37:39.030-04:00PhilPapers Editorship VacanciesI have decided to step down from my roles as Area Editor for General Philosophy of Science and as Editor for Scientific Realism at PhilPapers. Due to personal reasons, I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to dedicate to this wonderful project and I have decided it would be wiser for me to focus my efforts on the two categories of which I will retain Editorship (i.e. Properties, and Dispositions and Powers) instead. This means that the above-mentioned editorships are now vacant. Qualified applicants are encouraged to apply through the PhilPapers application system. PhilPapers is one of the most useful and powerful professional tools we have and it relies on Editors to function at its best, so I hope many of you will consider applying!<br />
<br />
(UPDATE: David Chalmers informs me that, in the process of removing my name from those editorships, all the editorships in the general philosophy of science area have been removed as well. This )Gabriele Contessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-50248383172563299062014-09-25T05:24:00.001-04:002014-09-25T05:24:42.354-04:00EBM+ blog<div class="MsoPlainText">
Readers of this blog may be interested in the blog
of the EBM+ consortium, accessible at <a href="http://www.ebmplus.org/">www.ebmplus.org</a>
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EBM+ is a consortium whose members are keen to develop
the methods of evidence-based medicine to better handle evidence of mechanisms.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Jon Williamsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05497890510605271093noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-71873745036104896812014-05-27T15:00:00.000-04:002014-05-27T15:00:00.661-04:00New Journal: Ergo<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">The first issue of Ergo is out and can be accessed here: </span><a href="http://www.ergophiljournal.org/" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://www.ergophiljournal.<u></u>org<wbr></wbr>/</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The following are four blog posts discussing each of the papers appearing in the first issue:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br style="background-color: white;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Julia Jorati (OSU) on a paper in early modern by Paul Lodge (Oxford):</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><a href="http://philosophymodsquad.wordpress.com/" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://philosophymodsquad.<u></u>word<wbr></wbr>press.com/</a><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Anna Mahtani (LSE) on a paper by Michael Caie (Pittsburgh):</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><a href="http://choiceandinference.com/" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://choiceandinference.com/</a><u style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"></u><wbr style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"></wbr><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">, </span><a href="http://m-phi.blogspot.ca/" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://m-phi.blogspot.ca/</a><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Ellen Clark (Oxford) on a paper in philosophy of biology by</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Christopher Hitchcock (Caltech) and Joel Velasco (Texas Tech):</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><a href="http://philosomama.blogspot.co.uk/" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://philosomama.blogspot.<u></u>co<wbr></wbr>.uk/</a><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Thomas Nadelhoffer (Charleston) on a paper in experimental philosophy</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">by John Turri (Waterloo):</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><a href="http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/xphi/" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://philosophycommons.<u></u>typep<wbr></wbr>ad.com/xphi/</a></span>Gabriele Contessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-8295572943514888972014-04-02T16:51:00.003-04:002014-04-02T16:51:37.096-04:00CFP: Inductive Logic and Confirmation in Science II<div style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">
<i>(24-25 October 2014</i>; <i>Department of Philosophy, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA)</i></div>
<ul style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">
<li><strong>Submission deadline:</strong> *** Friday, May 30, 2014 ***</li>
<li><strong>Notification by:</strong> June 30, 2014</li>
<li><strong>Submission requirement:</strong> Extended abstract (1,000 words or less)</li>
<li><strong>Submit</strong> extended abstracts via email to <a data-mce-href="mailto:jonah.n.schupbach@utah.edu" href="mailto:jonah.n.schupbach@utah.edu" target="_blank">jonah.n.schupbach@utah.edu</a>.</li>
<li><strong>Accommodations:</strong> Expenses for travel, hotel, and meals will be covered in full for any graduate students presenting at the conference. Hotel and meals will be provided for all other presenters.</li>
<li><strong>Publication:</strong> Selected papers from <a data-mce-href="http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/jw/2013/ilacis/" href="http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/jw/2013/ilacis/" target="_blank"><i>ILCS1</i></a> and this workshop may be published in an edited volume or journal special issue. When submitting, please note whether you would like your paper to be considered for inclusion in a proceedings volume.</li>
<li><strong>Website:</strong> <a data-mce-href="http://jonahschupbach.com/ILCS/" href="http://jonahschupbach.com/ILCS/" target="_blank">http://jonahschupbach.com/ILCS/</a></li>
</ul>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">
<b>Keynote Speakers:</b></div>
<ul style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">
<li>Tania Lombrozo (University of California, Berkeley)</li>
<li>Elliott Sober (University of Wisconsin, Madison)</li>
<li>Katie Steele (London School of Economics)</li>
</ul>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">
<b>Conference Organizers:</b></div>
<ul style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">
<li>Jacob Stegenga (University of Utah; <a data-mce-href="mailto:jacob.stegenga@utah.edu" data-mce-style="font-style: normal;" href="mailto:jacob.stegenga@utah.edu" target="_blank">jacob.stegenga@utah.edu</a>)</li>
<li>Jonah Schupbach (University of Utah; <a data-mce-href="mailto:jonah.n.schupbach@utah.edu" href="mailto:jonah.n.schupbach@utah.edu" target="_blank">jonah.n.schupbach@utah.edu</a>)</li>
</ul>
<div style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">
This is the 2<sup>nd</sup> workshop on <i>Inductive Logic and Confirmation in Science. </i> <a data-mce-href="http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/jw/2013/ilacis/" href="http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/jw/2013/ilacis/" target="_blank"><i>ILCS1</i></a>, organized by Juergen Landes and Jon Williamson, was held in Paris in October 2013. This series of workshops is addressed to all researchers (early and not so early career) in all disciplines who have an interest in inductive logic and confirmation theory as they relate to science and the philosophy of science. PhD students are particularly encouraged to participate. The workshop is free and open to anyone. If you plan to attend (and are not on the list of presenters), please register by simply dropping an email to the organizers with your name and affiliation.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10570917524518309635noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-82673302022948054112014-02-25T00:02:00.002-05:002014-02-25T00:03:20.127-05:00Post Doc: Notre Dame<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
<blockquote>
<b>Postdoctoral Fellowship in History and Philosophy of Science</b><br />The History and Philosophy of Science Graduate Program at the University of Notre Dame seeks to appoint a Postdoctoral Fellow beginning August 2014 for one year, renewable for a second year. Applicants must have completed all requirements for the doctoral degree by <span class="aBn" data-term="goog_1080513544" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: dashed; border-bottom-width: 1px; position: relative; top: -2px; z-index: 0;" tabindex="0"><span class="aQJ" style="position: relative; top: 2px; z-index: -1;">June 30, 2014</span></span>.<br /><br />Applications are welcome from scholars in any area of history and philosophy of science. In addition to pursuing his or her research and participating actively in the intellectual life of the program, the HPS Postdoctoral Fellow will teach two graduate courses per year, one of which may be in the candidate’s area of specialization. We are especially, but not exclusively, interested in candidates able to teach our graduate philosophy of science survey course (interest in teaching one of our graduate history of science survey courses may also be an asset), and encourage you to explain how your research and teaching experience is well suited to our interdisciplinary program.<br /><br />The annual stipend is $48,000. The fellowship package also includes health insurance and $3000 per year towards research expenses and conference travel. A summary of benefits can be found at: <a href="http://hr.nd.edu/assets/121245/p1_benefit_summary_2014.pdf" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://hr.nd.edu/assets/<wbr></wbr>121245/p1_benefit_summary_<wbr></wbr>2014.pdf</a>.<br /><br />Applicants should send the following materials in electronic form only, in PDF format by email attachment, to <a href="mailto:reilly@nd.edu" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">reilly@nd.edu</a>, including “HPS post-doc” and your last name in the subject line. <b>The deadline for receipt of application materials is March 30<sup>th</sup>.</b><br />1. Cover letter giving a brief summary of your primary field of expertise and qualifications for the fellowship.<br />2. Summary of your dissertation (two page maximum).<br />3. Plan of research to be undertaken during a two-year fellowship period (two page maximum).<br />4. Writing sample (30 page maximum).<br />5. Where applicable, a proposal for a graduate philosophy of science survey course, bearing in mind that our courses are taken by history-, philosophy-, and theology and science-track students (one page maximum).<br />6. Proposal for a graduate seminar in your area of specialization (one page maximum).<br />7. Full curriculum vitae.<br />8. Names and affiliations of three referees whom you have asked to write to us directly.<br /><i>Please note: applications that are printed and received via mail or courier <u>will not</u> be accepted and processed.</i> <br />The three letters of reference should be sent separately, either electronically (<a href="mailto:reilly@nd.edu" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">reilly@nd.edu</a>) or by mail (Reilly Center, 453 Geddes Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556), to arrive by the application deadline. Candidates are responsible for ensuring that their letters of reference arrive by the deadline.<br /><br />The HPS graduate program is housed in the Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values, and draws faculty from a variety of departments including History, Philosophy, the Program of Liberal Studies, Theology, and English. For further information about the Reilly Center and the HPS program, please visit <a href="http://reilly.nd.edu/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://reilly.nd.edu/</a>. The HPS Postdoctoral Fellowship is funded by the College of Arts and Letters.<br /><br />Inquiries may be directed to Anjan Chakravartty (Director, History and Philosophy of Science Graduate Program): <a href="mailto:chakravartty.1@nd.edu" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">chakravartty.1@nd.<wbr></wbr>edu</a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="14464ba40e6cd13f_x__GoBack"></a>.<br /><br />The University of Notre Dame is an equal opportunity, affirmative action educator and employer with strong institutional and academic commitments to racial, cultural, and gender diversity. Women, minorities, and those attracted to a university with a Catholic identity are encouraged to apply. Information about Notre Dame, including our mission statement, is available at<a href="http://www.nd.edu/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://www.nd.edu</a>.</blockquote>
</div>
Gabriele Contessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-87333302688892842182014-02-14T11:47:00.003-05:002014-02-14T11:47:41.681-05:00Lakatos Award 2013<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />Condratulations to <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Laura Ruetsche and </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">David Wallace. Very well-deserved!</span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">The London School of Economics and Political Science announces that the Lakatos Award for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, has been won jointly by Laura Ruetsche of the University of Michigan for her book Interpreting Quantum Theories (Oxford University Press, 2011) and by David Wallace of Oxford University for his book The Emergent Multiverse (Oxford University Press, 2012). Each will win a prize of £7500.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">The Lakatos Award is given for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, widely interpreted, in the form of a book published in English during the previous five years. It was made possible by a generous endowment from the Latsis Foundation. The Award is in memory of the former LSE professor, Imre Lakatos, and is administered by an international Management Committee organised from the LSE, but entirely independent of LSE’s Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">The Committee, chaired by John Worrall, decides the outcome of the Award competition on the advice of an international, independent and anonymous panel of Selectors who produce detailed reports on the nominated books. ______________________________</span><u style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></u><wbr style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></wbr><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">______________________________</span><u style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></u><wbr style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></wbr><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">____________</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Nominations can now be made for the 2014 Lakatos Award, and must be received by </span><span class="aBn" data-term="goog_736984959" style="background-color: white; border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: dashed; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; position: relative; top: -2px; z-index: 0;" tabindex="0"><span class="aQJ" style="position: relative; top: 2px; z-index: -1;">Monday 21st April 2014</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">. The 2014 Award will be for a book published in English with an imprint from 2009-2014 inclusive. A book may, with the permission of its author/s, be nominated by any person of recognised standing within philosophy of science or an allied profession. (The Management Committee is not empowered to nominate books itself but only to respond to outside nominations.)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Please address any nominations, or any requests for further information about the 2014 Award to the Award Administrator, Tom Hinrichsen, </span><a href="mailto:att.a.hinrichsen@lse.ac.uk" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" target="_blank">att.a.hinrichsen@lse.ac.uk</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">______________________________</span><u style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></u><wbr style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></wbr><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">______________________________</span><u style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></u><wbr style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></wbr><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">____________</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Imre Lakatos, who died in 1974 aged 51, had been Professor of Logic with special reference to the Philosophy of Mathematics at LSE since 1969. He joined the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method in 1960. Born in Hungary in 1922, he graduated (in Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy) from Debrecen University in 1944. He then joined the underground resistance. (His mother and grandmother perished in Auschwitz.) After the War, he was active in the Communist Party and had an influential position in the Ministry of Education. In 1950 he was arrested and spent the next three years as a political prisoner. After his release, he was given refuge in the Hungarian Academy of Science where he translated western works in science and mathematics into Hungarian. After the suppression of the Hungarian uprising he escaped to Vienna and from there, with the aid of a Rockefeller fellowship, on to Cambridge, England. He there wrote his (second) doctoral thesis out of which grew !</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">his famous Proofs and Refutations (CUP, 1976, edited by John Worrall and Elie Zahar). Two volumes of Philosophical Papers, edited by John Worrall and Gregory Currie, appeared in 1978, also from CUP.</span><a href="http://www2.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/lakatos/Home.aspx" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" target="_blank">www2.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/<u></u>laka<wbr></wbr>tos/Home.aspx</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">______________________________</span><u style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></u><wbr style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></wbr><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">__________</span></blockquote>
Gabriele Contessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-9450593592544136492014-01-13T13:55:00.001-05:002014-01-13T13:55:24.457-05:00Society For Exact Philosophy, 42nd Annual Meeting
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">SEP 2014<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">42nd annual
meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">June 22-24,
2014<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">California
Institute of Technology<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Pasadena, CA<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #343434; mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The <a href="http://www.phil.ufl.edu/SEP/meeting/2014">2014 meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy</a>
will be held 22-24 June 2014 at the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, CA.This year's meeting is being held in conjunction with the <a href="http://www.kennyeaswaran.org/few">Formal Epistemology Workshop</a> (FEW) which runs June 20-22nd at the University of Southern California. June 22nd
will be a special day devoted to joint activities in Pasadena. It is hoped that
interested participants will take advantage of the spatiotemporal proximity of
these sister events.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-bidi-font-size: 16.0pt;">Keynote Speakers<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">Susan Haack,
University of Miami<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">Scott Soames,
University of Southern California<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana;">Bas van
Fraassen, San Francisco State University<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Trebuchet MS"; mso-bidi-font-size: 20.0pt;">Call for Papers and Abstracts<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">"The SEP
is dedicated to providing sustained discussion among researchers who believe
that rigorous methods have a place in philosophical investigations."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">SEP 2014
invites submissions of papers and abstracts in all areas of analytic
philosophy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">For more
information, including instructions for submissions, visit the conference web
site at: <a href="http://www.phil.ufl.edu/SEP/meeting/2014">http://www.phil.ufl.edu/SEP/meeting/2014</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Information
on the Society and its previous meetings is on the web at <a href="http://www.phil.ufl.edu/SEP">http://www.phil.ufl.edu/SEP</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="" name="_GoBack"></a>Join us in Pasadena!</div>
<!--EndFragment-->Christopher Hitchcockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10232394766065633104noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-7253462765408510432013-10-22T10:25:00.001-04:002013-10-23T02:53:33.298-04:00SILFS 2014 – Triennial International Conference of the Italian Society for Logic and Philosophy of Sciences<br />
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Webpage: http://www.silfs.net/#442-2<br />
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On June 18-20 2014 SILFS, the Italian Society of Logic and Philosophy of Science (www.silfs.net) will hold its triennial conference at the University of Rome “Roma TRE”.<br />
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Invited speakers<br />
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Tarja Knuuttila (University of Helsinki)<br />
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Hannes Leitgeb (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)<br />
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John Norton (University of Pittsburgh) <br />
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Submissions<br />
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We invite submissions in all areas of logic and philosophy of science, with special attention to inter-disciplinary approaches to logical and epistemological issues and topics in the foundations of special sciences (both natural, social and human).<br />
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Every contributed speaker will have 30 minutes, including discussion. The official language of the conference is English.<br />
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Potential contributors will have to submit a title and an abstract (max 6000 characters) prepared for blind refereeing. The abstract should be submitted electronically using the EasyChair submission page at: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=silfs2014.<br />
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The deadline for submission is December 15, 2013.<br />
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Notification of acceptance: March 2014.<br />
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Scientific Committee<br />
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Roberto Arpaia (University of Bergamo)<br />
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Giovanni Boniolo (University of Milan and IFOM) Chair of the Program Committee<br />
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Giovanna Corsi (University of Bologna) Chair of the Program Committee<br />
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Massimiliano Carrara (University of Padua)<br />
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Mauro Ceruti (University of Bergamo)<br />
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Mauro Dorato (University of Rome 3) – SILFS President<br />
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Vincenzo Fano (University of Urbino)<br />
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Laura Felline (Université Catholique de Louvain)<br />
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Roberto Giuntini (University of Cagliari)<br />
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Federico Laudisa (University of Milan-Bicocca)<br />
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Sabina Leonelli ( University of Exeter)<br />
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Massimo Marraffa (University of Rome 3)<br />
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Pierluigi Minari (University of Florence)<br />
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Matteo Morganti (University of Rome 3)<br />
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Francesco Paoli (University of Cagliari)<br />
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Federica Russo (University of Ferrara)<br />
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For further information, please contact the SILFS secretary, Matteo Morganti: matteo.morganti[at]uniroma3.it.<br />
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Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-77932671540934291462013-10-18T13:33:00.000-04:002013-10-18T14:09:38.587-04:00Revisiting KuhnI am teaching a course on scientific revolutions this term, and so I've been rereading <i>Structure</i>. I've also been blogging a bit about it. I previously wrote about <a href="http://laser.fontmonkey.com/foe/index.php?entry=entry130826-065618">my annoyance that the new edition has different page numbers</a> and <a href="http://laser.fontmonkey.com/foe/index.php?entry=entry131017-131339">some reflections on recent writing about Kuhn</a>. This post is about a thread that runs through Kuhn's discussion which, I think, gets something importantly right.<br />
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[cross-posted at <a href="http://laser.fontmonkey.com/foe/index.php?entry=Kuhn-without-incommensurability">Footnotes on Epicycles</a>]<br />
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On Wednesday, we talked about Kuhn's claim that different paradigms are incommensurable, and today we talked about the considerations which might convince scientists to shift from the old paradigm to a new one. Kuhn characterizes the shift as a <i>conversion experience</i>, but not one that is totally unmotivated by reasons. Kuhn reviews a whole range of possible reasons, including puzzle-solving power, precision, novel prediction, and simplicity.<br />
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He insists that none of these reasons are necessarily decisive, however. He writes that<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
paradigm debates are not really about relative problem-solving ability.... Instead, the issue is which paradigm should in the future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely. A decision between alternate ways of practicing science is called for, and in the circumstances that decision must be based less on past achievement than on future promise. (p. 156)</blockquote>
Because a paradigm serves to guide normal science, accepting a paradigm means committing to do normal science in that way. So the choice is forward-looking, while all of the reasons are backward-looking. So, one might say, the choice of paradigm is <i>strategic</i> rather than simply <i>evidential</i>.<br />
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While discussing this passage, I realized that the conclusion does not rely on incommensurability at all. Rather, it just relies on the problem of induction: Past performance of a paradigm provides no guarantee of future results. So proceeding with one paradigm rather than the other is a kind of gamble. Reasonable people with different hunches or different tolerance for risk might disagree about which way to go.<br />
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This allows for a philosophically conservative reading of Kuhn which accepts that revolution is different than normal science, because different paradigms would guide scientific practice in substantially different ways. The conservative reading also accepts that the choice between paradigms cannot be determined by the relevant reasons, especially during the period of crisis.<br />
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The conservative reading isn't adequate as a reading of Kuhn, because it accepts those things without any appeal to incommensurability. The change between paradigms might be like a conversion experience, as Kuhn would have it, because some strategic choices are; consider choosing a career, choosing to get married, or choosing whether or not to have children. But it might instead be a self-conscious choice, like choosing between mutual funds for your retirement account.<br />
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I think that this recommends the conservative reading as a philosophical position, even if it disqualifies it as a reading of Kuhn. The description of normal science and crisis is the really insightful part of <i>Structure</i>, while the stuff about incommensurability is the most problematic.<br />
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It occurs to me that what I've called here the conservative reading of Kuhn, in which underdetermination comes from the problem of induction rather than incommensurability, looks a lot like Lakatos' Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. We're doing Lakatos next week in class, so I'll see if that idea holds up.P.D. Magnushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07799239684943144310noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-50396491439719574942013-10-03T12:44:00.000-04:002013-10-03T12:44:08.699-04:00Special Issue on Race in Biology and Anthropology<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">A special issue of eight articles from STUDIES IN HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGICAL AND BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES on race in biology and anthropology is now available for free downloading at the journal's website:</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><a href="http://www.journals.elsevier.com/studies-in-history-and-philosophy-of-science-part-c-studies-in-history-and-philosophy-of-biological-and-biomedical-sciences/" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" target="_blank">http://www.journals.elsevier.<wbr></wbr>com/studies-in-history-and-<wbr></wbr>philosophy-of-science-part-c-<wbr></wbr>studies-in-history-and-<wbr></wbr>philosophy-of-biological-and-<wbr></wbr>biomedical-sciences/</a><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">In the main journal, articles from the current (September 2013) issue connected with this theme include:</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">* A four-article special section edited by Quayshawn Spencer on whether there's a "space for race" in evolutionary biology after the mid-twentieth-century modern synthesis, with contributions from Lisa Gannett, Alan Templeton and Massimo Pigliucci</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">* A critical exchange between Adam Hochman and Neven Sesardic on what has and hasn't been established about race and genetics</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">* An essay review by Petter Hellström of a recent book on the use of genomics to reconstruct the history of world Jewry</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">* An essay review by Elise Juzda Smith of recent books on the theories and practices of racial science in the nineteenth century</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Other articles in the issue include:</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">* Elliott Sober on why trait fitness is not a propensity (but fitness variation is)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">* John van Wyhe on why it's OK after all to describe Darwin as the Beagle's naturalist</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">* Marshall Abrams versus Denis Walsh on whether natural selection is or is not a cause in its own right</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">* Lara Huber and Lara Keuck on how animal models in biomedicine work</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">* Essay reviews of recent books on everything from the decline of bloodletting to the ties that bind evolution and rationality</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">* Oren Harman on what to make of the growing presence of neuroscience in criminal court cases</span>Gabriele Contessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-59019156601225324292013-08-17T22:48:00.000-04:002013-08-17T22:48:45.853-04:00PD Magnus has a nice <a href="http://aestheticsforbirds.blogspot.ca/2013/08/how-i-came-to-be-interested-in.html">guest post</a> at Christy Mag Uidhir's new blog<a href="http://aestheticsforbirds.blogspot.ca/"> Aesthetics for Birds</a>.Gabriele Contessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-52192305717196475752013-07-10T00:35:00.002-04:002013-07-10T00:35:42.610-04:00New Open-Access Journal!<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Ergo, An Open Access Journal of Philosophy</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><a href="http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ergo" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" target="_blank">http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/<u></u>er<wbr></wbr>go</a><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Ergo is a general, open access philosophy journal accepting submissions on</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">all philosophical topics and from all philosophical traditions. This</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">includes, among other things: history of philosophy, work in both the</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">analytic and continental traditions, as well as formal and empirically</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">informed philosophy.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Ergo uses a triple-anonymous peer review process and aims to return</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">decisions within two months on average.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Ergo is published by MPublishing at the University of Michigan and</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">sponsord by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Papers are published as they are accepted; there is no regular publication</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">schedule.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">To submit a paper, please register and login to Ergo's editorial</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">management system at:</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><a href="http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ergo/index" style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" target="_blank">http://jps.library.utoronto.<u></u>ca<wbr></wbr>/index.php/ergo/index</a><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Submitted manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous review, containing</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">no identifying information. 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color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Christy Mag Uidhir (University of Houston)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Julia Markovits (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Lionel McPherson (Tufts University)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Jennifer Nagel (University of Toronto)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Jill North (Cornell University)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Brian O'Connor (University College Dublin)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Laurie A. Paul (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Richard Pettigrew (Bristol University)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Martin Pickavé (University of Toronto)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Adam Sennet (University of California at Davis)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Nishi Shah (Amherst College)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Quayshawn Spencer (University of San Francisco)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Ásta Sveinsdóttir (San Francisco State University)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Robbie Williams (University of Leeds)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Wayne Wu (Carnegie Mellon University)</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Jiji Zhang (Lingnan University)</span>Gabriele Contessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13607158011908969169noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-80088467061052451682013-05-05T23:19:00.003-04:002013-05-05T23:19:56.335-04:00Program of Perception and Concepts (Riga, May 16-18) The program of the Conference Perception and Concepts, organized by Jesse Prinz and myself, can be found <a href="http://cognition.lu.lv/symp/9-prog-03-05-2013.pdf">there</a>. This will be a fantastic conference.
Join us if you are around!
Edouard MacheryEdouard Macheryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16956463362871981734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-5741414310831702192013-01-03T09:57:00.002-05:002013-01-03T09:57:55.997-05:00Conference "Perception and Concepts" Riga, May 16-18 (CfP deadline: Jan 15)It's not too late to submit a paper for this conference. The deadline is Jan 15. CfP <a href="http://cognition.lu.lv/symp/9-call.html">here</a>.
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Edouard Macheryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16956463362871981734noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-631292185852417312012-12-29T17:42:00.002-05:002012-12-29T17:42:35.612-05:00Science and metaphysics<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Afternoon time at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association. I’m following the session on science and metaphysics, chaired by Shamik Dasgupta (Princeton). The featured speakers are Steven French (Leeds-UK), <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/09/rationally-speaking-podcast-james.html"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">James Ladyman</span></a> (Bristol-UK), and Jonathan Schaffer (Rutgers-New Brunswick). I have developed a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blogging-Path-Self-Knowledge-ebook/dp/B009165CUC/ref=la_B001IU0D3K_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356800013&sr=1-12"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">keen interest in this topic</span></a> of late, though as an observer and commentator, not a direct participant to the discussion. Let’s see what is going to transpire today. A note of warning: what follows isn't for the (metaphysically) faint of heart, and it does require at least some familiarity with fundamental physics.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We started with French on enabling eliminitavism, or what he called taking a Viking approach to metaphysics. (The reference to Vikings is meant to evoke an attitude of plundering what one needs and leave the rest; less violently, this is a view of metaphysics as helping itself to a varied toolbox.) French wishes to reject the claim made by others (for instance, Ladyman) that a prioristic metaphysics should be discontinued. However, he does agree with critics that metaphysics should take science seriously.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The problem French is concerned with, then, is how to relate the scientific to the ontological understanding of the world. Two examples he cited were realism about wave functions and the kind of <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=ontic%20structural%20realism&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDkQFjAA&url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/&ei=7mvfUPKOE4Tg8wSN-YDwAw&usg=AFQjCNEttz3R43qtw5RjN4_LMjKPZPDMkA&sig2=D06lldjhIV7B_aEHJ3afzw&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.eWU"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">ontic structural realism</span></a> favored by Ladyman and his colleague Ross.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ontic structural realism comes in at least two varieties: eliminativist (we should eliminate objects entirely from our metaphysics, particles are actually "nodes" in the structure of the world) and non-eliminativist (which retains a "thin" version of objects, via the relations of the underlying structure).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">French went on to talk about three tools for the metaphysician: dependence, monism, and an account of truth making.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Dependence.</b> The idea is that, for instance, particles are "dependent" for their existence on the underlying structure of the world. A dependent object is one whose features are derivative on something else. In this sense, eliminitavism looks viable: one could in principle "eliminate" (ontologically) elementary particles by cashing out their features in terms of the features of the underlying structure, effectively doing away with the objects themselves.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The basic idea, to put it as French did, is that "if it is of the essence, or nature or constitution of X that it exists only if Y exists, so that X is dependent on Y in the right sort of way, then X can be eliminated in favor of Y + structure."</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As French acknowledged, however (though he didn't seem sufficiently worried about it, in my opinion), the eliminativist still needs to provide an account of how we recover the observable properties of objects above the level of fundamental structure.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Monism.</b> This is the (old) idea that the world is made of one kind of fundamental stuff, a view recently termed "blobjectivism" (everything reduces to a fundamental blob). As French put it, this is saying that yes, electrons, for instance, have charges, but there really are no electrons, there is just the blob (that is, the structure).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A number of concerns have been raised against monism, and French commented on a few. For instance, monism can't capture permutations in state space. To which the monist responds that monistic structure includes permutation invariance. This, however, strikes me as borderline begging the question, since the monist can always use a catch all "it's already in the structure" response to any criticism. But how do we know that the blob really does embody this much explanatory power?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Truthmakers.</b> French endorses something called <a href="http://philpapers.org/rec/CAMFHT"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">Cameronian truthmaker theory</span></a>, according to which < X exists > might be made true by something other than X. Therefore, the explanation goes, < X exists > might be true according to theory T without X being an ontological commitment of T.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps this will be made clearer by looking at one of the objections to this account of truth making: the critic can reasonably ask how is it possible that there appear to be things like tables, chairs, particles, etc. if these things don't actually exist. French's response is that one just needs to piggyback on the relevant physics, though it isn't at all settled that "the relevant physics" actually says that tables, chairs and particles don't exist in the strong eliminativist sense of the term (as opposed to, say, they exist as spatio-temporal patterns of a certain kind, accessible at the relevant level of analysis).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Next we moved to Ladyman, on "between eliminativism and monism: the radical middle ground." He acknowledged that structural realism is accused by some of indulging in mystery mongering, but Ladyman responded (correctly, I think) that it is physics that threw up stuff — like fundamental relations and structure — that doesn't fit with classical metaphysical concepts, and the metaphysician now has to make some sense of the new situation.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ladyman disagrees with French's eliminativism about objects, suggesting that taking structure seriously doesn't require to do away with objects. The idea is that there actually are different versions of structuralism, which depend on how fundamental relations are taken to be. James also disagrees with the following speaker, Schaffer, who is an eliminativist about relations, giving ontological priority to one object and intrinsic properties (monism). Ladyman's (and his colleague Ross') position is summarized as one of being non-eliminativist about metaphysically "thin" individuals, giving ontological priority to relational structures.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One of the crucial questions here is whether there is a fundamental level to reality, and whether consequently there is a unidirectional ontological dependence between levels of reality. Ladyman denies a unidirectional dependence. For instance, particles and their state depend on each other (that is, one cannot exist without the other), the interdependence being symmetrical. The same goes for mathematical objects and their relations, for instance the natural numbers and their relations.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As for the existence of a fundamental level, we have an intuition that there must be one, partly because the reductionist program has been successful in science. However, Ladyman thinks that the latest physics has rendered that expectation problematic. Things got more and more messy in fundamental physics of late, not less so. Consequently, for Ladyman the issue of a fundamental level is an open question, which therefore should not been built into one's metaphysical system — at least not until physicists settle the matter.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Are elementary quantum particles individuals? Well, one needs to be clear on what one means by individual, and also on the relation between the concept of individuality and that of object. This is a question that is related to that old chestnut of metaphysics, the principle of identity of indiscernibles (which establishes a difference between individuals — which are not identical, and therefore discernible — and mere objects). However, Ladyman collapses individuals into objects, which is why he is happy to say that — compatibly with quantum mechanics — quantum particles are indeed objects. The idea is that particles are intrinsically indiscernible, but they are (weakly) discernible in virtue of their spatio-temporal locality. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ladyman, incidentally, is aware of course of the <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=non%20locality&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&sqi=2&ved=0CDEQFjAA&url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlocality&ei=UG_fUJOIBoa09QTBjYDAAw&usg=AFQjCNF9NtuTVAfAJQW2YtC55Gew5Flouw&sig2=sbklWuD8OcZ1Wh8ucmHr8Q&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.eWU"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">quantum principle of non-locality</span></a>, which makes the idea of precisely individuated particles problematic. But he doesn't think that non-locality licenses a generic holism where there is only one big blob in the world, and that individuality can be recovered by thinking in terms of a locally confined holism. Again, that strikes me as sensible in terms of the physics (as I understand it), and it helps recovering a (thin, as he puts it) sense in which there are objects in the world.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Finally, we got to Schaffer, who argued against ontic structural realism of the type proposed by either French or Ladyman. He wants to defend the more classical view of <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=monism&source=web&cd=9&cad=rja&ved=0CF8QFjAI&url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monism/&ei=jm_fUKbfOIqA9gS9_YDgCA&usg=AFQjCNHP_MSMyVrlLnulmGgz6P9Jz_kV5w&sig2=hDcCS8JB8CR_rxbFUNXw8Q&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.eWU"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">monism</span></a> instead. He claimed that that is the actual metaphysical picture that emerges from current interpretations of quantum mechanics and general relativity.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">His view is that different mathematical models — both in q.m. and in g.r. — are best thought of as just being different notations related by permutations, corresponding to a metaphysical unity. In a sense, these different mathematical notations "collapse" into a unified picture of the world.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Schaffer's way to cash out his project is by using the (in)famous <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=ramsey%20sentences&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDEQFjAA&url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey_sentences&ei=_W_fUKXjNYOs9ATw44GgBw&usg=AFQjCNGODfcUgljVPiriIDKWT5Ld3VPJOQ&sig2=RVURclG8EyPMC4yPAgEARg&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.eWU"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">Ramsey sentences</span></a>, which are sentences that do away with labels, not being concerned with specific individuals. Now, one can write the Ramsey sentences corresponding to the equations of general relativity, which according to the author yields a picture of the type that has been thought of since at least Aristotle: things come first, relations are derivative (i.e., one cannot have structures or relations without things that are structured or related). If this is right, of course, the ideas that there are only structures (eliminitavism a la French) or that structures are ontologically prior to objects (Ladyman) are incorrect.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So, Schaffer thinks of Ramsey sentences as describing structural properties, which he takes to be the first step toward monism. Second, says Schaffer, what distinguishes abstract structures from the one describing the universe is that something bears those structures. That something is suggested to be the largest thing we can think fits the job, that is the universe as a whole. He calls this picture monistic structural realism: there is a cosmos (the whole), characterized by parts that bear out the structures qualitatively described by the Ramsey translation of standard physical theories like relativity and quantum mechanics. Note that this is monism because — thanks to the Ramsey translation — the parts are interchangeable, related by the mathematical permutations mentioned above.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Okay, does your head spin by now? This is admittedly complicated stuff, which is why I added explanatory links to a number of the concepts deployed by the three speakers. I found the session fascinating as it gave me a feeling for the current status of discussions in metaphysics, particularly of course as far as it concerns the increasingly dominant idea of structural realism, in its various flavors. Notice too that none of the participants engaged in what Ladyman and Ross (in their Every Thing Must Go, about which <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/08/surprise-naturalistic-metaphysics_20.html"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">I have already commented</span></a>) somewhat derisively labeled "neo-Scholasticism," that is the entire discussion took seriously what comes out of physics, all participants conceptualizing metaphysics as the task of making sense of the broad picture of the world that science keeps uncovering. That seems to me to be the right way of doing metaphysics, and one that may (indeed should!) appeal even to scientists.</span></span><br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-48513742220361711832012-12-29T11:47:00.001-05:002012-12-29T11:47:34.310-05:00The philosophy of genetic drift<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This morning I am following a session on genetic drift at the American Philosophical Association meetings in Atlanta. It is chaired by Tyler Curtain (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), the speaker is Charles Pence (Notre Dame), and the commenters are Lindley Darden (Maryland-College Park) and Lindsay Craig (Idaho). [Note: I’ve written myself about this concept, for instance in chapter 1 of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-Evolution-Foundations-Evolutionary/dp/0226668371/ref=la_B001IU0D3K_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1356787433&sr=1-5"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">Making Sense of Evolution</span></a>. Check also these papers in the journal Philosophy & Theory in Biology: <a href="http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/ptb/6959004.0002.002/--what-is-drift-a-response-to-millstein-skipper-and-dietrich?rgn=main;view=fulltext;q1=drift"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">Matthen</span></a> and <a href="http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/ptb/6959004.0001.002/--mis-interpreting-mathematical-models-drift-as-a-physical?rgn=main;view=fulltext;q1=drift"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">Millstein et al.</span></a>]</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The title of Charles' talk was "It's ok to call genetic drift a force," a position — I should state right at the beginning — with which I actually disagree. Let the fun begin! Drift has always been an interesting and conceptually confusing issue in evolutionary biology, and of course it plays a crucial role in mathematical population genetic theory. <a href="http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/IIIDGeneticdrift.shtml"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">Drift has to do with stochastic events</span></a> in generation-to-generation population sampling of gametes. The strength of drift is inversely proportional to population size, which also means it has an antagonistic effect to natural selection (whose strength is directly proportional to population size).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Charles pointed out that one popular interpretation of drift among philosophers is "whatever causes fail to differentiate based on fitness." The standard example is someone being struck by lightening, the resulting death clearly having nothing to do with that individual's fitness. I'm pretty sure this is not what population geneticists mean by drift. If that were the case, a mass extinction caused by an asteroid (that is, a cause that has nothing to do with individual fitness) would also count as drift. Indeed, discussions of drift — even among biologists — often seem to confuse a number of phenomena that have little to do with each other, other than the very generic property of being "random."</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What about the force interpretation then? This is originally due to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Nature-Selection-Evolutionary-Philosophical/dp/0226767485/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1356798544&sr=8-10&keywords=sober+1984"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">Elliott Sober</span></a> (1984), who developed a conceptual model of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_principle"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium</span></a> in population genetics based on an analogy with Newtonian forces. H-W is a simple equation that describes the genotypic frequencies in a population where no evolutionary processes are at work: no selection, no mutation, no migration, no assortative (i.e., non random) mating, and infinite population size (which implies no drift).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The force interpretation is connected to the (also problematic, see Making Sense of Evolution, chapter 8) concept of <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=adaptive%20landscapes&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDQQFjAA&url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape&ei=BxvfUNaTFYic9gTVuoGIDw&usg=AFQjCNEk2em2M0C4jlSSJw0VBJyfcYCDUA&sig2=0DqyymJFnUGSEcoC0YKmyw&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.eWU"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">adaptive landscape</span></a> in evolutionary theory. This is a way to visualize the relationship between allelic frequencies and selection: the latter will move populations "upwards" (i.e., toward higher fitness) on any slope in the landscape, while drift will tend to shift populations randomly around the landscape.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The controversy about thinking of drift as a force began in 2002 with a paper by Matthen and Ariew, followed by another one by Brandon in 2006. The basic point was that drift inherently does not have a direction, and therefore cannot be analogized to a force in the physical (Newtonian) sense. As a result, the force metaphor fails.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Stephens (2004) claimed that drift does have direction, since it drives populations toward less and less heterozygosity (or more and more homozygosity). Charles didn't buy this, and he is right. Stephens is redefining "direction" for his own purposes, as heterozygosity does not appear on the adaptive landscape, making Stephens' response entirely artificial and not consonant with accepted population genetic theory.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Filler (2009) thinks that drift is a force because it has a mathematically specific magnitude and can unify a wide array of seemingly disparate phenomena. Another bad answer, I think (and, again, Charles also had problems with this). First off, forces don't just have magnitude, they also have direction, which, again, is not the case for drift. Sober was very clear on this, since he wanted to think of evolutionary "forces" as vectors that can be combined or subtracted. Second, it seems that if one follows Filler far too many things will begin to count as "forces" that neither physicists nor biologists would recognize as such.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Charles' idea is to turn to the physicists and see whether there are interesting analogs of drift in the physical world. His chosen example was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">Brownian motion</span></a>, the random movement of small objects like dust particles. Brownian motion is well understood and mathematically rigorously described. Charles claimed that the equation for Brownian motion "looks" like the equation for a stochastic force, which makes it legitimate to translate the approach to drift.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But I'm pretty sure that physicists themselves don't think of Brownian motion as a force. Having a mathematical description of stochastic effects (which we do have, both for Brownian motion and for drift — and by the way, the two look very different!) is not the same as having established that the thing one is modeling is a force. Indeed, Charles granted that one could push back on his suggestion, and reject that either drift or Brownian motion are forces. I'm inclined to take that route.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A second set of objections to the idea of drift as a force (other than it doesn't have direction) is concerned with the use of null models, or inertial states, in scientific theorizing. H-W is supposed to describe what happens when nothing happens, so to speak, in populations of organisms. According to Brandon, however, drift is inherent in biological populations, so that drift is the inertial state itself, not one of the "forces" that move populations away from such state.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Charles countered that for a Newtonian system gravity also could be considered "constitutive," the way Brandon thinks of drift, but that would be weird. Charles also object that it is no good to argue that one could consider Newtonian bodies in isolation from the rest of the universe, because similar idealizations can be invoked for drift, most famously the above mentioned assumption of infinite population size. This is an interesting point, but I think the broader issue here is the very usefulness of null models in science in general, and in biology in particular (I am skeptical of their use, at least as far as inherently statistical problems of the kind dealt with by organismal biology are concerned, see chapter 10 of Making Sense).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Broadly speaking, one of the commentators (Darden) questioned the very benefit of treating drift as a force, considering that obviously biologists have been able to model drift using rigorous mathematical models that simply do not require a force interpretation. Indeed, not even selection can always be modeled as a vector with intensity and direction: neither the case of stabilizing selection nor that of disruptive selection fit easily in that mold, because in both instances selection acts to (respectively) decrease or increase a trait's variance, not its mean. Moreover, as I pointed out in the discussion, assortative mating is also very difficult to conceptualize as a vector with directionality, which makes the whole attempt at thinking of evolutionary "forces" ever more muddled and not particularly useful. Darren's more specific point was that while it is easy to think of natural selection as a mechanism, it is hard to think of drift as a mechanism (indeed, she outright denied that it is one), which again casts doubt on what there is to gain from thinking of drift as a force. The second commentator (Craig) also questioned the usefulness of the force metaphor for drift, even if defensible along the lines outlined by Pence and others.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Even more broadly, haven't physicists themselves moved away from talk of forces? I mean, let's not forget that Newtonian mechanics is only an approximation of relativity theory, and that "forces" in physics are actually interpreted in terms of fields and associated particles (as in the recently much discussed Higgs field and particle). Are we going to reinterpret this whole debate in terms of biological fields of some sort? Isn't it time that biologists (and philosophers of biology) let go of their physics envy (or their envy of philosophy of physics)?</span></span><br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-33058949895956729382012-12-28T18:00:00.002-05:002012-12-28T18:00:23.515-05:00From the APA: Metaethical antirealism, evolution and genetic determinism<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Friday afternoon session of the American Philosophical Association meeting from which I am blogging actually had at the least three events of interest to philosophers of science: one on race in population genetics, one on laws in the life sciences, and one on the strange combination of (metaethical) antirealism, evolution and genetic determinism. As it is clear from the title of this post, I opted for the latter... It featured three speakers: Michael Deem (University of Notre Dame), Melinda Hall (Vanderbilt), and Daniel Demetriou (Minnesota-Morris).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Deem went first, on "de-horning the Darwinian dilemma for realist theories of value" (no slides, darn it!). The point of the talk was to challenge two claims put forth by Sharon Street: a) that the normative realist cannot provide a scientifically acceptable account of the relation between evolutionary forces acting on our evaluative judgments and the normative facts realists think exist; b) that the "adaptive link account" provides a better explanation of this relation than any realist tracking account. (Note: much of this text is from the handout distributed by Deem.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The alleged dilemma consists in this: by hypothesis, evolutionary forces have played a significant role in shaping our moral evaluative attitudes. If so, how is the moral realist to make sense of the hypothesis while holding on to moral realism? Taking the first horn, the realist could deny any relation between evolution and evaluative judgments. But this would mean either skepticism about evaluative judgments, or lead to a view that evolved normative judgments coincidentally align with moral facts, neither option being palatable to the moral realist.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The second horn leads the realist to accepting the link with evolution. But this means that the s/he would have to claim that tracking normative truths is somehow biologically adaptive, a position that is hard to defend on scientific grounds.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">According to Street there are two positions available here: the tracking account (TA) says that we grasp normative facts because doing so in the past has augmented our ancestors' fitness. The adaptive link account (ALA) says that we make certain evaluative judgments because these judgments forged adaptive links between the responses of our ancestors and the environments in which they lived. Note that the difference between TA and ALA is that the first talks of <i>normative facts</i>, the latter of <i>evaluative judgments</i>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Street prefers ALA on the grounds that it is more parsimonious and clear, and that it sheds more light on the phenomenon to be explained (i.e., the existence of evaluative judgments). Deem doesn't think this is a good idea, because within the ALA evaluative judgments play a role analogous to hard-wired adaptations in other animals, which seems implausible; and because it is mysterious why selection would favor evaluative judgments.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Deem then went on to propose a modified ALA: humans possess certain evaluative tendencies because these tendencies forged adaptive links between the responses of our ancestors and their environments. Note that the difference between standard ALA and realist ALA is that the first one talks of <i>evaluative judgments</i>, the latter of <i>evaluative tendencies</i>. (This distinction makes perfect sense to me: judgments are the result, at least in part, of reflection; tendencies can be thought of as instinctual reactions or propensities. So, for instance, humans have both, while other primates only — as far as we know — possess propensities, but are incapable of judgments.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To put it in his own words, Deem claims that "the realist can show that his/her position is compatible with evolutionary biology and can provide an account of the relation between the evolutionary forces that shaped human evaluative attitudes and independent normative facts. ... [However] it seems evolutionary theory underdetermines the choice between realism and antirealism in metaethics."</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Okay, I take it that Deem's idea is to reject the suggestion that evolution makes it unnecessary to resort to the realist idea that there are normative facts. Perhaps so, in a way similar to which an evolutionary account of our abilities at mathematical reasoning wouldn't exclude the possibility of mathematical realism ("<a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/09/on-mathematical-platonism.html"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">Platonism</span></a>"). But one needs a positive reason to contemplate an objective ontological status of moral truths, and I think the case for that is far less compelling than the analogous case for mathematical objects (one of the reasons being that while mathematical abstractions truly seem to be universal, moral truths would still apply only to certain kind of social organisms capable of self-reflection).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Melinda Hall talked about "untangling genetic determinism: the case of genetic abortion" (another talk without slides, or even a handout!). She is interested in abortion in cases where medical evidence predicts that the infant will be severely disabled. Given such information, is it moral to terminate the pregnancy ("genetic" abortion, a type of negative genetic selection) or, on the contrary, is it moral to continue it?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The basic idea seems to be that genetic abortion is conceptually linked to genetic determinism, i.e., an overemphasis on the importance of genetic factors in development. In turn, Hall argued, the decision to terminate pregnancies in such cases contributes to stigmatize, as well as reduce social resources for, the disabled community.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Disability has both a social and a biological component, and if a lot of the negative effects of disabilities on life quality are the result of social construction, then the main issue is social and not biological. Disability advocates claim that it is problematic to make a single trait (the disability, whatever it is) become an overriding, criterion on the basis of which to make the decision to abort.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is thus apparently a tension — which Hall sought to diffuse — between the usually pro-choice attitude of disability advocates and the restriction on the mother's reproductive rights if one objects to "genetic abortion."</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A reasonable (I think) worry is that "gene mania," i.e., the quest for purely or largely biological explanations for human behavior, may encourage the search for simplistic solutions to problems that are in reality complex and in good part social-environmental. My own worry about Hall and some of her colleagues' approach, however, is the opposite danger that disability advocates may seriously underestimate the biological basis of disabilities, which may in turn lead to an equally problematic tendency to reject medical preventive solutions. (Indeed, Hall at one point made the parenthetical comment that disabilities may not be a "problem" at all. I think that's willful rejection of the painful reality in which many human beings live.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hall went on to invoke the nightmarish social scenario depicted in the scifi movie <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=movie%20gattaca&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&ved=0CD8QFjAB&url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/&ei=dSDeUI6VGYiy8ATF14DwBw&usg=AFQjCNF20ST3HnZMVB5kMED2ap9GbeocgA&sig2=rWjkML90NnFulr5kH1VyUA&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.eWU"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">Gattaca</span></a>. I don't object to using scifi scenarios as evocative thought experiments, but of course there is a huge disanalogy between the situation in Gattaca and the issue of disabilities. Gattaca's "inferiors" were actually normal human beings, pitted against genetically enhanced ones. Disable people are, in a very important sense, the mirror image of the movie's enhanced humans, since they <i>lack</i> one or another species-normal functionality typical of humans.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Though Hall qualified this, disability advocates apparently worry that "negative genetic selection" may nurture a societal attitude that it may one day be possible to eliminate disability, which somehow could turn into decreased social support for disabled people. Frankly, I think that's an egregious example of non-sequitur, and moreover it flies in the face of the empirical evidence that Western societies at least have significantly increased allocation of resources to the disabled (see, for instance, the Americans with Disabilities Act).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This whole discussion seems to be predicated on an (unstated and, I think, indefensible) equivalency or near-equivalency between the moral status of a fetus who is likely to develop into a disable person and that person him/herself. As the commentator for the paper (Daniel Moseley, UNC-Chapel Hill) pointed out, it is hard to see what is morally wrong in parents' decision to abort a fetus that has a high likelihood — based on the best medical evidence available — to develop a disability that would be hard to live with, regardless of whatever support society will provide (as it ought to) to the disabled person resulting from that pregnancy, should the parents decide not to abort.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Finally, Daniel Demetriou spoke about "fundamental moral disagreement, antirealism, and honor." (Yay! Slides!!) He took on Doris and Plakias' argument that moral realism predicts fundamental moral agreement (analogously, say, to agreement about mathematical or scientific facts). However, empirically there is plenty of evidence for moral disagreements, for instance in the case of the "culture of honor" among whites in the American South. This is turned by Doris and Plakias into an argument against moral realism (i.e., there are fundamental disagreements about moral norms because there is no objective thing of the matter about moral norms).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are indeed interesting data showing that white Southerners respond more violently to insult and aggression. The alleged explanation is that these people inherited (culturally, not genetically) a culture of honor, which comes from their pastoral ancestors. More broadly, an honor culture according to some authors is likely adaptive in pastoralist social environments, where goods are easily stolen and a reputation for prompt and violent reaction may function as an effective deterrent (as opposed to, say, the situation in agricultural societies, where goods like crops are not easily stolen).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Interestingly, African pastoralists, as well as pastoralists in Sardinia and in Crete, consider raiding from other livestock owners a way to prove their honor as young men. The same goes for the Scottish highlands, again highlighting the connection between honor and violence.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Demetriou, however, is not convinced by this account, raising a number of objections, including the fact that pastoralist societies are still concerned with fairness, as in the concept of fair fighting. Fairness in fighting would not be a good deterrence against aggression, contra the above thesis. Moreover, there are several honor cultures that are not in fact violent. Instead, Demetriou put forth a "competition ethic account" of honor, where honor has to do with social reputation.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Metaethically, Demetriou agreed that honor really is different from the liberal ethics of welfare, favoring prestige instead. Similarly, liberalism favors cooperative principles, while honor ethics favors competition. So for Demetriou the honor outlook is much more fundamentally different from the liberal ethos than even the story based on the effectiveness of violence would suggest.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">However, the author concluded, moral realism has no problem with the divergence between liberalism and honor, since it is possible to accommodate the difference invoking pluralism of a realist sort. Well, yes, though it seems to me that this strategy is capable of accommodating pretty much any set of data demonstrating empirical divergence of ethical systems... Moreover, one of Demetriou's comments toward the end was a bit confusing. He wondered why a white Southerner who has grown up in an honor culture couldn't "wake up" to a liberal approach, perhaps (his examples) after watching the right movie or reading the right book. But wait, that seems to imply no pluralism at all, but rather a situation in which the person steeped in the honor culture was simply wrong and realized, under proper conditions, that he was so. That, of course, may be, but it is a very different defense of realism against the empirically driven antirealist argument. Which one is it? Actual pluralism, or the idea that there is one correct moral system and some people are simply in error about it?</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Overall this felt as a somewhat disjointed session, particularly because the second talk had hardly anything at all to do with antirealism, while neither the first nor especially the last talk had much to do with genetic determinism. But such is the way of many APA sessions, and each of the three talks did raise interesting questions about the relationship between ethics and science. It has been pretty uncontroversial for a while among moral philosophers that their discipline (just like every other branch of philosophy, I would argue) better take seriously the best scientific evidence relevant to whatever philosophical issues are under discussion. The much more interesting and thorny question is that of what exactly the implications of the science are for ethical and even metaethical positions, as well as — conversely — what the implications of our ethical theories are for the way science itself is conducted and scientific advise is implemented in our society.</span></span><br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-33564849065465324432012-12-28T12:06:00.000-05:002012-12-28T12:06:08.218-05:00From the APA: Philosophers and climate change<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Massimo Pigliucci</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It's that time of year: the period between Christmas and New Year's Eve, when for some bizarre reason the American Philosophical Association has its annual meeting. This year it's in Atlanta, and I made it down here to see what may be on offer for a philosopher of science. This first post is about how philosophers see climate change, at least as reflected in an APA session chaired by Eric Winsberg, of the University of South Florida. The two speakers were Elisabeth Lloyd (Indiana) and Wendy Parker (Ohio), with critical commentary by Kevin Elliott (South Carolina).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The first talk was by Lloyd, who began by addressing the claim — by climate scientists — that the robustness of their models is a good reason to be confident in the results of said models. Broadly, however, philosophers of science do not consider robustness <i>per se</i> to be confirmatory. To put it simply, models could be robust and wrong.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Still, Lloyd argued that robustness is an indicator that a model is, in fact, more likely to be true. She began by referring to a point made by some theoretical ecologists: good models will predict the same outcome in spite of being built on different specific assumptions.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Lloyd stressed that there are different concepts of robustness. One is that of measurement robustness, the most famous example of which is the estimation, based on as many as 13 different methods, of Avogado's number. The concept used by Lloyd, however, is one of model robustness, which deals with the causal structure of the various climate models. The focus, then, shifts from the outcome (measurement robustness) to the internal structure of the models themselves.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Climate models are a way of articulating theory, because the equations that describe atmospheric dynamics are not analytically solvable. Lloyd went into some detail concerning how these models are actually built, pointing out how often predictions of crucial variables (like global mean surface temperature) are the result of six to a dozen different models, incorporating a range of parameter values. A set of models, or model "type," is characterized by a common core of causal processes underlying the phenomena to be modeled. An interesting example is that when climate models do not include greenhouse gases (but are limited to, say, solar and volcanic effects), they are indeed robust, as a set, but their output does not match with the available empirical data.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The point is that if a model set includes greenhouse gases as a core causal component, all models in the set produce empirically accurate estimates of the output variables — that is, the set is robust — for a range of parameter values of the other components of the model. Moreover, it is the case that individual parameter values in a given model within the set are themselves supported by empirical evidence. The result is a strong inference to the best explanation supporting particular models within a given causal core set.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">While I find Lloyd's analysis convincing, it seems to me that in a backward sense it does reach the conclusion that it isn't robustness per se that should generate confidence in a model (or set of models), but rather the robustness together with multiple lines of evidence pointing toward the empirical adequacy both of the outcome of the model and of its specific parameter settings.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Wendy Parker gave the second talk, tackling the role of computer simulations as a form of theoretical practice in science. She referred to Fox Keller, according to whom describing simulations as "computer experiments" qualitatively changes the landscape of what counts as theorizing in science. Parker is interested in the sense in which simulation outcomes can be thought of as "observations," and the models themselves as observing instruments.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">She began with a description of numerical weather predictions, which started in the 1950s, before modern digital computers. The data anchoring the analysis of weather models today are produced by satellites and local stations. While the models are set up as regular grids on the territory, the data are of course not comparably evenly spread. Forecasters then use various methods of "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_assimilation"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">data assimilation</span></a>," which take into account not only the available empirical data, but also the previous forecasts for a given area. The goal is to find a better fit than the one characteristic of the previous forecast alone to achieve a best estimate of the state of the system.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The resulting sequence of constantly updated weather snapshots was soon seized upon by climate scientists to help bridge the gap between weather and climate. This process of re-analysis of weather data, integrated by additional empirical data not originally taken into account by the forecasters, is now a common practice of data assimilation in climate science (the example discussed by Parker in detail is that of a procedure known as <a href="http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/events/adjoint_workshop-8/present/Sunday/Kepert1.pdf"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">4DVAR</span></a>).</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The point is that re-analysis data sets are simulation outputs, which however are treated as observational data — though some researchers keep them distinct from actual observational data by referring to them in published papers as "reference data" or some such locution. The problem begins when some climate scientists think of assimilation models themselves as "observing instruments" in the absence of actual measurement instruments on the ground. (Interestingly, there are documented cases of assimilation models "seeing" atmospheric phenomena that were not registered by sparsely functioning ground instruments and that were later confirmed by satellite imagery.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Parker wants to reject the claim that models should be thought of as observing instruments, while she is sympathetic to the conceptualization of simulation outcomes as "observations" of atmospheric processes.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Her objection to thinking of assimilation models as observing instruments is that, although they are informative and, indirectly, empirical (because at some previous iteration empirical data did enter into them), they are not "backward-looking" as true observations themselves are (i.e., you don't "observe" something that hasn't happened yet) are and so are best thought of as predictions.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Parker's argument for nonetheless considering simulation outcomes as observations is that they are empirical (indirectly), backward-looking (partially, because model assimilation also uses observations made at times subsequent to the initial model projections), and informative. That is, they fulfill all three criteria that she laid out for something to count as an observing or measuring procedure. Here Parker is building on van Fraassen's view of measuring as "locating in logical space."</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">While I enjoyed Parker's talk, in the end I was not convinced. To begin with, we are left with the seemingly contradictory conclusion that assimilation models are not observation instruments, and yet produce observations. Second, van Fraassen's idea was meant to apply to measurement, not observation. Parker acknowledged that van Fraassen distinguishes the two, but she treated them as effectively the same. Lastly, it is not clear what hinges on making the distinction that Parker is pushing, and indeed quite a bit of confusion may arise from blurring too much the distinction between actual (that is, empirical) observations and simulation outcomes. Still, the underlying issue of the status of simulations (and their quantitative outputs) as theoretical tools in science remains interesting.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The session was engaging — regardless of one's agreement or not about specific claims made by the participants — because it showcased some of the philosophical dimensions of ongoing and controversial scientific research. It is epistemologically interesting, as Lloyd did, to reflect on the role of different conceptualizations of robustness in modeling; and it is thought provoking, as Parker did, to explore the roles of computer simulations at the interface between theory and observation in science. Who knows, even climate scientists themselves may find something to bring home (both in their practice and in their public advocacy, which was commented upon by Lloyd) from this sort of philosophical analysis!</span></span><br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2264125276161269122.post-28105834802543676832012-12-21T15:43:00.001-05:002012-12-21T15:43:56.209-05:00Lakatos Award for Wolfgang SpohnThe London School of Economics and Political Science announces that the Lakatos Award, of £10,000 for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, has been won by Wolfgang Spohn of the University of Konstanz for his book The Laws of Belief: Ranking Theory and its Philosophical Implications (Oxford University Press, 2012).<br />
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The Lakatos Award is given for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, widely interpreted, in the form of a book published in English during the previous five years. It was made possible by a generous endowment from the Latsis Foundation. The Award is in memory of the former LSE professor, Imre Lakatos, and is administered by an international Management Committee organised from the LSE.<br />
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The Committee, chaired by John Worrall, decides the outcome of the Award competition on the advice of an international, independent and anonymous panel of Selectors who produce detailed reports on the nominated books.<br />
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Nominations can now be made for the 2013 Lakatos Award, and must be received by Friday 19th April 2013. The 2013 Award will be for a book published in English with an imprint from 2008-2013 inclusive. A book may, with the permission of the author, be nominated by any person of recognised standing within the profession. (The Management Committee is not empowered to nominate books itself but only to respond to outside nominations.)<br />
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For further details of the nomination procedure or more information on the Lakatos Award 2013, contact the Administrator, Tom Hinrichsen, at <a href="mailto:t.a.hinrichsen@lse.ac.uk">t.a.hinrichsen@lse.ac.uk</a>Franz Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01427094839294789424noreply@blogger.com0