Event Categories: BSPS Choice Group Conjectures and Refutations Popper Seminar Sigma Club

Events for 24 October 2018
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2:00 pm
Lakatos Award Expert Workshop with Craig Callender
A half-day workshop addressing issues raised by Craig Callender’s Lakatos Award-winning book, What Makes Time Special? Featuring Craig Callender, Carl Hoefer, Huw Price, Heather Dyke and Alastair Wilson. Free and open to all.
Find out more »4:30 pm
Andrew Reisner (Uppsala): “Why and how alethic and pragmatic considerations jointly determine what we ought to believe”
For roughly two decades evidentialism, of some nearby variant thereof, has been the orthodoxy about normative reasons for belief, or as I would prefer to put it, the determinants of what one ought to believe. While some form of evidentialism or alethicism remains the dominate view, a small but growing number of philosophers are defending the view that there are pragmatic reasons for belief. Amongst them the most popular view is strict pragmatism: the view that all reasons for belief are pragmatic reasons for belief. While some authors suggest a pluralist alternative, many seem to imply that evidential/alethic reasons for belief and pragmatic reasons for belief nonetheless cannot be compared. In this talk I offer some considerations about why we should expect to be able to compare alethic and pragmatic reasons for belief and offer a new suggestion about how to do so. Or to put the point in a preferable way, I offer a suggestion about how alethic and pragmatic considerations contribute to determining what we ought to believe.
Find out more »6:30 pm
Imagination in Science (the Forum)
Science is often mistakenly thought to involved nothing but cold reason. In reality, very human acts of creativity appear everywhere. We explore the role of imaginative thinking in science. Are thought experiments sources of knowledge or just hypotheses? Can a story or narrative also be a scientific explanation? And how should a scientist balance creative thinking with respect for the facts?
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