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LTT: Christian Feldbacher-Escamilla
January 17, 2020 @ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm EST
Abductive Epistemic Engineering
Christian Feldbacher-Escamilla, Center Visiting Fellow
U. Duesseldorf Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (DCLPS)
Abstract: We investigate virtues of creative abductive concept formation (cf. Schurz 2008) and their application in epistemic engineering (cf. Brun 2017, Cappelen 2018). It will be shown that abductive virtues allow for an explication of traditional conditions put forward in epistemic engineering. Such traditional conditions are, e.g., the similarity, exactness, fruitfulness, and simplicity requirement. According to these requirements, the notion which is explicated needs to be similar to the notion resulting from an explication, the latter needs to be more exact than the former, it needs to allow for interesting generalisations, and, if possible, it should be elegantly embedded into an established theoretical framework (cf. Carnap 1950/1962, par.2f). As we will argue, the relation between creative common cause abduction and exactness as well as simplicity of explications is quite clear: Common cause abductions can be characterised in detail in the very general framework of Bayesian networks (cf. Feldbacher-Escamilla and Gebharter 2018). Fruitfulness can be explicated in terms of unificatory power. The most challenging problem to be tackled in the talk will be that of relating creative common cause abductions to the similarity requirement for explications.
Details
- Date:
- January 17, 2020
- Time:
-
11:00 am - 12:30 pm EST
- Event Category:
- Lunchtime Talks
Venue
- 1117 Cathedral of Learning
-
4200 Fifth Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 United States