This talk has unfortunately been cancelled.   Title: Philosophy of Science comes to California Abstract: The talk describes how 20th Century philosophy of science migrated from Europe to the Los Angeles area during the 1945-1955 decade, and how--and to what extent--it took root there.    This talk will also be available live streamed on YouTube […]

Title: The Model View Meets Quantum Ontology Abstract: What is here called the “model view” of science is a distinct perspective advanced by Ronald Giere and Paul Teller, which places the construction and use of models at the center of scientific theorizing. This paper offers friendly critical discussion--and significant revision--of the Giere-Teller view, emphasizing the […]

Title: How, in a field rife with controversy, some neuroscientific models become generally accepted as good models? Abstract: There is much disagreement in Neuroscience. Many highly regarded and high-impact findings are contested by others as insufficiently supported. Among the many controversies, there are a few specific models that stand out as generally accepted to be […]

Title: Mathematics and Society Reunited: The Social Aspects of Brouwer’s Intuitionism Abstract: Brouwer’s philosophy of mathematics is usually regarded as an intra-subjective, even solipsistic approach, which also underlies his mathematical intuitionism, as he strived to create mathematics that develops out of something inner and a?linguistic. Thus, points of connection between Brouwer’s views and the social […]

Title: Voicing disagreement in science: Missing women Abstract: This paper examines the authorship of post-publication criticisms in the scientific literature, with a focus on gender differences. Bibliometrics from journals in the natural and social sciences show that comments that criticize or correct a published study are 20-40% less likely than regular papers to have a […]

Title: Induction as action: resolving the problem of Whewell’s idealism Abstract: William Whewell is a towering and yet ambiguous figure in Victorian science. Together with Herschel and Mill, he sought to develop a logic of induction that could vindicate the cognitive autonomy of science. Yet his theory of induction was severely criticized by Mill for […]

Title: Coarse-grained Theories of Cooperation and Myxobacteria Abstract: A particular strain of myxobacteria known as Myxococcus xanthus has received attention for its cooperative predation. I examine whether the same explanations proposed to account for cooperation in other areas of the M. xanthus life-cycle – in quorum-sensing, social motility and fruiting body formation – can also account for their […]

Title: From mathematical notations to the applications of mathematics: Studying epistemic accessibility Abstract: This talk is about mathematical notations, and more broadly about mathematical language. My goal is to present, and to argue for the fruitfulness of, a broadly speaking pragmatic approach to this topic—an approach that focuses on how notations shape what is epistemically […]

Title: Transfer of quantum information in teleportation Abstract: The controversial issue of information transfer in quantum teleportation procedure is analyzed in the framework of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In contrast to the claims of Deutsch & Hayden 2000, it is argued that quantum information, considered as a measurable property for an observer in […]

Title: How do Imperatives Motivate? Abstract: (Joint work with Shaun Nichols.) How do we form beliefs on the basis of assertions of declarative sentences? According to the Spinozan theory of belief, belief formation is an automatic and involuntary process (Gilbert 1991, Mandelbaum 2014): the uptake of a declarative utterance is a belief. In this talk […]

Title: Pursuit-Worthy Research in Health: Three Examples and a Proposal Abstract: In the ideal, we might want researchers and institutional reviewers from the populations affected by given research projects. However, that might not always be reasonable—for example, it would be an unreasonable expectation of those with chronic fatigue syndrome to be heavily involved in guiding […]

Title: Some Conceptual Problems in the IPCC Uncertainty Framework and Where to Go from Here Abstract: Studies of climate change are afflicted by deep uncertainty, the communication of which is made more challenging still by the studies’ immediate policy implications. The world of policy-making has its demands: uncertain information should be communicated in a simple, […]

Title: Empirical tests of infectious disease models Abstract: Epidemiologists have been developing mathematical and computational models to predict the course of epidemics since at least the 1920s. In this talk I will consider how these models were tested empirically, especially in the decades leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic. Tests relied either on data from […]

Title: The New Physics Behind the Old Biology and the Old Physics Behind the New Biology: A Tale of Two Revolutions (in Three Acts) Abstract: In this talk I tell the story of the physics-biology dialectic in the twentieth century. It is a tale of two revolutions: one that seemed inevitable but which never came […]

Title: A Critique of the Argument from Inductive Risk Abstract: The argument from inductive risk states that scientists should consider the consequences of their hypotheses and methodological choices in the course of ongoing research. It has played a central role in the widespread retreat from the ideal of value-free science. In this talk I argue […]

Title: Where counting counts: Supporting a particle interpretation of particle physics Abstract: There is a general consensus among philosophers of physics that quantum field theory (QFT) does not admit of a particle interpretation, and that, therefore, the actual phenomena in the world studied by particle physics does not include any particles--at least, not fundamentally.  This […]

Title:  Delusions as Cognitive-Affective Complexes Abstract: Delusions are defined in the DSM-5 as “beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence” (American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th edition). In this talk, I offer two criticisms of this definition: 1) the concept is too broad in that everyday forms of […]

Title: How to build a mind without working memory: a computational approach to cognitive architecture Abstract: I want to argue that there’s something deeply wrong with the dominant thread running through models of the mind and its constituent parts and functions, from Aristotle’s emphasis on sensation and the faculty of phantasia, through Ibn Sina’s anatomically […]

Title: The Pragmatism of C.S. Peirce and R.B. Brandom as a Frame for Modeling Entrepreneurship Abstract: The science of entrepreneurship has a surprisingly long history, dating from Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la nature du commerce en général (c. 1730). However, the vast majority of the published theoretical work treats entrepreneurship as the explanans for economic […]

Title: Perception and Preference in Poetry: Biases Toward AI-Generated Poems Abstract: AI-generated art and text have become increasingly common, and increasingly sophisticated. This talk presents findings showing that AI-generated poems have become indistinguishable from the poetry of human poets. In fact, we find that participants are more likely to believe that AI-generated poems are human-authored when actually […]

Title:  Hodgkin and Huxley’s Use of Singular Compositional Abduction Abstract: One of the most significant achievements of Twentieth-Century physiology was Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley’s development of theory of the action potential. Despite the scientific prominence of this theory and the amount of philosophical attention that has been devoted to the Hodgkin-Huxley model, there has […]

Title: An Understanding-First view of Explanation Abstract: Jaegwon Kim wrote once that “the idea of explaining something is inseparable from the idea of making it intelligible; to seek an explanation of something is to seek to understand it, to render it intelligible. These are simple conceptual points, and I take them to be untendentious and […]

Title: True Believers: The Incredulity Hypothesis and the Enduring Legacy of the Obedience Experiments Abstract: Stanley Milgram’s “obedience experiments” are among the most famous studies in social psychology, and perhaps, in all the human sciences. While the experiments have always been controversial, lately, more than 60 years after they were conducted, their place in the […]

Title: What Does Quantum Mechanics Tell Us about Reality? Abstract: Quantum mechanics is admittedly the most difficult subject to understand. Physicists and philosophers, let alone students and laymen, are still puzzled by it today. As Richard Feynman once famously claimed, nobody understood quantum mechanics. The crux of the matter lies in the meaning of the […]

Title: On Causal Locality in a Deflationary Account of Quantum Theory Abstract: Quantum theory can be reformulated in terms of old-fashioned configuration spaces and ‘indivisible’ stochastic laws, without a fundamental role for Hilbert spaces, wave functions, density matrices, or even the complex numbers. After reviewing this axiomatically simpler and more transparent formulation, I will argue […]

Title: The Physics of Memory Abstract: Much of the mystery of time arises from the asymmetry of past versus future: not only asymmetries themselves, such as the apparent ‘openness’ of the future and ‘settledness’ of the past, but the ‘passage’ of time – ‘turning’ open future into settled past. In turn, much of the difference […]

Title:  A Historical Case Study in Philosophical Conversation: J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964) & Julian Huxley’s (1887-1975) Social Values in a Scientific Worldview Abstract: Rhetoric about the meaning of empirical work in the Evolutionary Synthesis (c. 1930s-1950s) became part of the established worldview of that era bringing scientific thought to bear on policy issues concerning the management […]

Title: Probabilism Under Scrutiny: Grappling with the Weight of Evidence Abstract: Probabilism, the philosophical view that the role of probability is to capture degrees of belief, support, confirmation, or plausibility about hypotheses, has been gaining increasing traction across a diverse array of disciplines: epistemology, risk assessment, decision theory, ethics, psychology, data science, evidence law, and […]

Title: Peirce Disappears: C.S. Peirce and Early Logical Empiricism Abstract: Scholars of the history of philosophy of science read and hear a lot about Duhem, Mach, Poincaré, and the members of the Vienna Circle. C.S. Peirce, however, is not generally considered a canonical figure in the history of philosophy of science. But in the early […]

Title: A Commitment Account of Norm Externalisation Abstract: It has been argued that moral norms fundamentally differ in character from conventional norms. One of the distinctive features of moral norms is thought to be their externalised character. To say that a norm is externalised is to say that it is experienced as imposed on us […]