British Society for the Philosophy of Science Lecture

abstract tbc

Abstract: The relationship between kin and group selection is a vexed issue in evolutionary theory, and matters are not helped by a tendency to conflate questions of methodology with questions of causal reality. Drawing inspiration from W. D. Hamilton, I suggest we conceptualise the distinction between kin and group selection in terms of differences of degree in the structural features of…

Abstract: TBA

Abstract: Suppose that you were to discover that there is some piece of evidence E that you don't currently know, and that E is evidence in favour of some proposition P. Should you increase your credence in P in the light of this piece of information? I argue that this suggestion seems compelling, but it cannot always be rational to adjust…

It has been argued that thinking in terms of univalent Homotopy Type Theory (HoTT) blocks the Hole Argument. In this talk I consider how this kind of argument might be made rigorous and whether it works. I argue that HoTT can be used to block the hole argument but that, contrary to what is some have claimed, it does not automatically do so … #BSPSLecture

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.

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.

In this talk, I argue for the importance of non-epistemic values in evaluating claims about nonhuman animal mindreading. I show how taking these values into account reveals that the consequences of false negatives are much worse than traditionally conceived.

Abstract: Classical models of the universe generically feature a big bang singularity. That is, when we consider progressively earlier and earlier times, physical quantities stop behaving in a reasonable way. A particular problem is that physical quantities related to the curvature of spacetime become divergent. A long standing hope is that a theory of quantum gravity would "resolve" the big bang…

Abstract: The view that experience seems to tell us directly that time flows has long been accepted by both A-theorists and B-theorists in the philosophy of time. A-theorists take it as a powerful endorsement of their position, sometimes using it explicitly in an argument for their view, and other times more implicitly, as a kind of non-negotiable, experiential given. B-theorists…

An analysis of arguments for pain eliminativism reveals two significant points of divergence between assumptions underlying scientific research on pain and assumptions typically endorsed by physicalist accounts. The first concerns the status of the term ‘pain’, which is an operationalized description of a phenomenon, rather than an explanatory construct. The second concerns an explicit cause-effect model according to which pain is produced by neural mechanisms and causally determined by a variety of biological, psychological and social factors, as opposed to an identity model according to which pain is a physical structure, process or mechanism. These discrepancies undermine eliminativism, rendering it untenable from the standpoint of contemporary scientific research. More generally, they also hinder attempts to integrate scientific findings under the conceptual frameworks of physicalism.