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Wendy Parker (Durham): “Scientific Modelling and Limits to the Value-Free Ideal” (BSPS Lecture)
According to the value-free ideal, the internal workings of science, including the evaluation of evidence, should be kept free from the influence of non-epistemic values as much as possible. We identify an underappreciated limit on the extent to which the value-free ideal can be achieved in practice.
Find out more »Reason and Rhetoric: The Ethics of Public Discussion (the Forum)
Even in so-called "mature" democracies, political discussion often turns ugly. Recently we have seen accusations of deception and name-calling in the EU referendum debate, of negative campaigning in the London mayoral election, and of unrestrained personal attacks in the US election. Does such behaviour fall short of an ethical standard for public discussion, or is it an essential feature of political life?
Find out more »Bernhard Salow (Cambridge): “Avoiding Risk and Avoiding Evidence” (with Catrin Campbell-Moore)
Lara Buchak defends a decision theory designed to allow for rational risk avoidance, and shows that it entails that rational agents can be instrumentally required to avoid evidence. We argue that, if Buchak's theory is correct, then rational agents can also be epistemically required to avoid evidence. We also argue that both of these consequences rely only on very weak assumptions about how rational agents respond to evidence.
Find out more »Elay Shech (Auburn University): “Idealizations, Essential Self-Adjointness, and Minimal Model Explanation in the Aharonov-Bohm Effect”
Two approaches to understanding the idealizations that arise in the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect are presented. It is argued that the standard topological approach, which takes the non-simply connected electron configuration space to be an essential element in the explanation and understanding of the effect, is flawed.
Find out more »Hive Minds: Collective Intelligence in Humans and Other Animals (the Forum)
Swarms of bees make decisions as a "democratic" collective, voting on various possible nest sites through waggle dances. Does this phenomenon amount to a form of "collective intelligence"? Do we also find collective intelligence in humans? And what might humans be able to learn from bees about the best ways to act together and to make collective decisions?
Find out more »Can We Learn from Suffering? (the Forum)
The "most depressing lesson" of suffering, Slavoj Žižek writes, is that "there is nothing to be learned from it". Is Žižek’s bleak view convincing, or is there evidence to suggest that suffering can educate or even improve us? If so, do some types of physical or mental suffering have more value than others? What is it that we learn? Does suggesting that suffering has meaning or value validate or demean the experience of suffering?
Find out more »Miklós Rédei (LSE): “Properties of Bayesian learning based on conditional expectation as a conditioning device”
This talk investigates the general properties of general Bayesian learning, where "general Bayesian learning'' means inferring a probability measure from another that is regarded as (uncertain) evidence, and where the inference is conditionalizing the evidence using the conditional expectation determined by a reference probability measure representing the background subjective degrees of belief (prior) of a Bayesian Agent performing the inference.
Find out more »Workshop on Scientific Imagination and Epistemic Representations
Many philosophers of science dismiss imagination as ill-suited for scientific reasoning. The notion of imagination that they assume often coincides with that of irrational or unconstrained thought that enables us to escape reality. This idea disregards the fact that imagination seems also to provide knowledge of reality. For example, imagination seems to play a role in philosophical and scientific thought experiments, scientific modelling, counterfactual reasoning, problem solving, practical deliberations about contingent facts, and more. But how can the same mental ability enable us to escape reality and also learn about it?
Four experts on imagination will address this question from the perspective of philosophy of science, epistemology, cognitive science, and aesthetics.
Find out more »Fiora Salis (LSE): “Models as scientific representations: fiction, reference and make-believe”
In this presentation I develop a novel fictionalist account of how models represent. To this aim I offer a general definition of models as representations, I present a fictionalist account of what models are that draws on Walton’s theory of fiction, I assess current fictionalist accounts of models as representations, and I finally offer an explanation of how models represent in terms of the crucial notions of reference and make-believe. The key idea is that the representation relation between models and the world is a kind of indirect referential relation that is mediated by propositional imagination of the make-believe variety.
Find out more »Future Sex: Technology, Desire, and the New Rules of Engagement (the Forum)
In a year of heated discussions about campus rape culture and street harassment, the merits of sex positivism, and the implications of trans-identity for feminism, we ask what is the future of sex and sexuality? Have the rules of sexual engagement changed in the twenty-first century and has the discipline of philosophy managed to keep up? How do we start to think afresh about desire, after Freud and into the future? And what is the future for sex as our conceptions of the body are reframed by culture, bionics, and even the law?
Find out more »Brain in a Vat and Other Stories: A Celebration of Hilary Putnam (the Forum)
Does perception give me any reason to believe in an external world, or could I be a "brain in a vat" that is fed information by a malicious (or benevolent) scientist? And if I were such a brain, could I ever say or think this? This is just one puzzle raised by the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam, who died last year. Though its origins are in Augustine and Descartes, Putnam revolutionised its implications for our understanding of knowledge, language, and the mind. We bring together a distinguished panel to discuss his life and work.
Find out more »Eric Olson (Sheffield): “Why definitions of death don’t matter”
Definitions of death are said to be important because they tell us at what point someone dies, which ethicists need to know in order to work out when someone loses the intrinsic moral status of the living. This paper argues we need not know what death is or when it occurs in order to answer these ethical questions. Questions about the significance of death are really questions about the significance of the various specific losses that figure in definitions of death. Which of those losses amounts to death makes no difference.
Find out more »Feraz Azhar (Cambridge): “Three aspects of typicality in multiverse cosmology”
Extracting predictions from cosmological theories that describe a multiverse, for what we are likely to observe in our domain, is crucial to establishing the validity of these theories. One way to extract such predictions is from theory-generated probability distributions that allow for selection effects – generally expressed in terms of assumptions about anthropic conditionalization and how typical we are. In this talk, I urge three lessons about typicality in multiverse settings.
Find out more »Justin Sytsma (Victoria University of Wellington): “Are religious philosophers less analytic?”
Some researchers in philosophy of religion have charged that the sub-discipline exhibits a number of features of poor health, prominently including that "partisanship is so entrenched that most philosophers of religion, instead of being alarmed by it, just take it for granted". But while these studies indicate that there is a correlation between religious belief and judgments about natural theological arguments, they do not establish that causation runs from belief to judgment as has been claimed. In this paper I offer an alternative explanation, suggesting that thinking style is a plausible common cause.
Find out more »Matthieu Gallais (University of Lille): “A Modal Epistemology of Scientific Models: Structures, Make-Believe and Properties”
The modal epistemology I develop aims to describe how scientific models and target systems are related by comparing theoretical properties with world-lines, that is to say to epistemic constructions across possible situations. I suggest that what must be considered as remaining the same from models to real systems is the properties, rather than the structures.
Find out more »Johanna Thoma (LSE): “Temptation and Preference-Based Instrumental Rationality”
In the dynamic choice literature, temptations are usually understood as temporary shifts in an agent’s preferences. What has been puzzling about these cases is that, on the one hand, an agent seems to do better by her own lights if she does not give into the temptation, and does so without engaging in costly commitment strategies. This seems to indicate that it is instrumentally rational for her to resist temptation. On the other hand, resisting temptation also requires her to act contrary to the preferences she has at the time of temptation. But that seems to be instrumentally irrational as well. I here consider the two most prominent types of argument why resisting temptation could nevertheless be instrumentally rational, namely two-tier and intra-personal cooperation arguments.
Find out more »Improv Your Mind: Philosophy, Music, and Making Things Up (the Forum)
From Nietzsche’s dalliances with tragic drama and Adorno’s adoration of Schoenberg to Badiou’s writing on dance, philosophy’s love affair with the performing arts has been long and thoughtful. In this debate, we discuss the ways philosophy thinks about performance.
Find out more »Luke Fenton-Glynn (UCL): “Probabilistic Actual Causation” (BSPS Lecture)
Actual (token) causation – the sort of causal relation asserted to hold by claims like the Chicxulub impact caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene exitinction event, Mr. Fairchild’s exposure to asbestos caused him to suffer mesothelioma, and the H7N9 virus outbreak was caused by poultry farmers becoming simultaneously infected by bird and human ‘flu strains – is of significance to scientists, historians, and tort and criminal lawyers. It also plays a role in theories of various philosophically important concepts, such as action, decision, explanation, knowledge, perception, reference, and moral responsibility. Yet there is little consensus on how actual causation is to be understood, particularly where actual causes work only probabilistically. I use probabilistic causal models to cast some light on the nature of probabilistic actual causation.
Find out more »Does the Universe Have a Purpose? (the Forum)
The traditional answer to this question is that God has a plan for the universe and we are part of it. Almost as traditionally, atheists have countered that the universe has no purpose since a benevolent God does not exist. But what if the purpose of the universe does not involve us – or God – at all?
Find out more »Barbara Osimani (LMU Munich): “Exact replication or varied evidence? Reliability, robustness and the reproducibility problem”
The “Reproducibility Project: Psychology” by the Open Science Collaboration caused some stir among psychologists, methodologists as well as scientists, since less than half of the replicated studies succeeded in reproducing the results of the original ones. The APA has attributed this result to hidden moderators that rendered the replications ineffective. Also publication bias and low power have been identified as possible sources for such mismatch. While some analysts have provided formal confirmation for the plausibility of such explanations (Etz and Vandekerkhove, 2016), others have further insisted on the problem of noisy data and suggested that “to resolve the replication crisis in science we may need to consider each individual study in the context of an implicit meta-analysis” (Andrew Gelman).
I investigate these positions through the lenses of Bayesian epistemology, and in particular of recent results on the Variety of Evidence Thesis.
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