Nature/Nurture (Forum for Philosophy)
Scientists agree that nature and nurture are essential ingredients in human development. But if both the blank slate and genetic determinism have been rejected, why do researchers still disagree and what is it that they disagree about? Join us as we’ll explore the issues at stake, taking a wide variety of perspectives, from the […]
Carina Prunkl (Oxford): “How Anthropocentric is Thermodynamics?”
Thermodynamics “smells more of its human origin than other branches of physics”, Bridgman famously wrote in 1941. Taking a closer look at the history of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, we find that this ‘human smell’ enters the subject as early as the writings of Maxwell, who makes use of concepts such […]
Peter Achinstein (Johns Hopkins): “Epistemic Simplicity: The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel”
Both Newton and Einstein claim that nature is simple and that simplicity is a sign of truth. Is there any substance to either claim? The talk will be based on some parts of my recent book “Speculation: Within and About Science”.
Peter Achinstein is Professor […]
2019 Lakatos Award Lecture with Henk W. de Regt
It is widely acknowledged that a central aim of science is to achieve understanding of the world around us, and that possessing such understanding is highly important in our present-day society. But what precisely is scientific understanding, and when is it achieved?
In his Lakatos Award winning book Understanding Scientific Understanding […]
2019 Lakatos Award Expert Workshop with Henk W. de Regt
On 21 November 2019, this half-day workshop addressed issues raised by Henk W. de Regt’s Lakatos Award-winning book, Understanding Scientific Understanding.
This video playlist includes the following talks:
Fernand Gobet (LSE): “Automatic generation of scientific theories using genetic programming”
The aim of this research is to develop a novel way to use computers to ‘evolve’ scientific theories automatically. By using techniques based on genetic programming and simple building blocks (primitive cognitive mechanisms), theories are automatically built, evolved and tested. I will present a system […]
Stephen John (Cambridge HPS): “Epistemic risk paternalism”
A recent wave of work in philosophy of science has identified multiple points in the justificatory process at which scientists must make decisions involving “epistemic risk”. In turn, many have argued that these decisions must or should be decided by appeal to non-epistemic values. However, […]
Deborah Mayo (Virginia Tech): “Severe Testing: A Conjecture Passes a Severe Test Only if a Refutation Would Probably Have Occurred if it’s False”
High-profile failures of replication in the social and biological sciences underwrite a minimal requirement of evidence: If a conjecture is retained when little or nothing has been done that would have refuted it, then […]
Replication Crisis? (Forum for Philosophy)
The hallmark of good science is often supposed to be experiments that produce the same results when repeated. But over the last number of years, scientists have replicated a number of established, high-profile experiments and produced different results. Does it point to serious flaws and biases in the sciences? Or it is evidence of […]
Marius Backmann (Konstanz): “Necessarily the Old Riddle – Necessary Connections, Laws of Nature, and the Problem of Induction”
In my talk, I will criticise recent attempts to solve the problem of induction by invoking a notion of necessary connections, as provided by necessitarian accounts of laws of nature or recent neo-Aristotelian powers accounts.
The basic model of the […]
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