Annual Lecture Series (in-person)
Lunchtime Talks (in-person)
Conferences (in-person)
Online-Only Events
Ryan Nefdt, University of Cape Town / Center Visiting Fellow Structures and the Special Sciences: The Case of Linguistics This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Please regsier here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_mG3Kp9SKQVmd8RqCsIC4ww ABSTRACT: In many ways the successes of theoretical linguistics in the mid-twentieth century ushered in a cognitive revolution in […]
Riet Van Bork, Center Visiting Post-Doc Fellow A Causal Interpretation of Measurement Models in Psychology This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_zgbFzOAiT1CC89_seYnapg ABSTRACT: Psychometrics -the field that is concerned with measurement in psychology- heavily relies on the use of statistical models to measure psychological attributes […]
Danielle Wenner, Carnegie Mellon University Clinical Research as Basic Structure & the Ethics of Health Research Priority-Setting This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EQ1VBg6oSqq__ooSZd4NNA ABSTRACT: Much work in research ethics treats clinical research as largely comprised of discrete interactions between research sponsors, investigators, and research […]
Christopher Weaver, Center Fellow Hamilton, Hamiltonian Mechanics, and Causation This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_myf5wRdyQvagFkxPfKkSIg ABSTRACT: I show how Hamilton’s philosophical commitments led him to a causal interpretation of classical mechanics. I argue that Hamilton’s metaphysics of causation was injected into his dynamics by way […]
Hannah Rubin, Center Fellow Structural Causes of Citation Gaps This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-eIqsXAFSH-dGiGGk34bbg ABSTRACT: In many fields, members of underrepresented or minority groups are less likely to be cited, leading to citation gaps. Though this phenomenon has been well-studied, one limitation of empirical work […]
Mike Schneider, Center Post-Doc Fellow Empty Space and the (positive) Cosmological Constant This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_D-4dbauiT82yJBqWzPWywA ABSTRACT: I will discuss empty space, as it appears in the physical foundations of relativistic field theories. Of particular interest is the popular idea that there is […]
Kareem Khalifa, Middlebury College Re-tooling the Epistemology of Measurement This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BKMs1HLSRc2gBhxjbXeW8w ABSTRACT: Recent philosophical work on measurement has had a decidedly coherentist orientation. In this paper, we present two foundationalist concepts that also play a role in the epistemology of measurement. […]
The Lost Generation of Philosophers of Science: An Illustration Nicholas Rescher, University of Pittsburgh ABSTRACT: WWII derailed many philosophers of science from their career track. A most interesting example of this is Albert Wohlstetter (1913 - 1997), laureate of the Presidential Medal of Merit. My talk will provide the details. You have the option to […]
Evolutionary Functions of Consciousness W Tecumseh Fitch, Dept of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, Austria ABSTRACT: Recent scientific discussions of consciousness have been dominated by the search for the neural correlates of consciousness and/or philosophical debates concerning the so-called “Hard Problem” – why should conscious cognitive states have a phenomenal, subjective component? Many […]
Can Meaningless Statements be Approximately True? On the Semantic Component of Scientific Realism Darrell Rowbottom, Lingnan University, Center Visiting Fellow ABSTRACT: This paper argues that statements may be approximately true despite being neither true nor false. This has a significant consequence for scientific realism; it makes it possible to relax the semantic component thereof. You […]
Human Achievement and Artificial Intelligence Brett Karlan, University of Pittsburgh, HPS ABSTRACT: Shortly after the deep neural network AlphaGo defeated Go grandmaster Lee Sedol in a series of matches in 2016, Sedol announced his retirement from professional Go. In his retirement announcement, Sedol expressed a sentiment many others have echoed about the encroachment of AI […]
Identifying Future-Proof Science Featured Former Fellow Lunchtime Talk: Peter Vickers, Durham University This will be an online event. Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_HRqsVLWNS-u0Q_2puihG_Q ABSTRACT: My forthcoming book Identifying Future-Proof Science argues that we can confidently identify many scientific claims that are future-proof: they will last forever (so long as science continues). Examples include the evolution of […]
Aydin Mohseni, UC Irvine, Center Post-Doc Fellow HARKing: from Misdiagnosis to Misprescription ABSTRACT: The practice of HARKing---hypothesizing after results are known---is commonly maligned as undermining the reliability of scientific findings. There are several accounts in the literature as to why HARKing undermines the reliability of findings. We argue that none of these is right and […]
Konrad Werner, University of Warsaw, Poland Defining Institutions: A Shared Objective of the Social and Cognitive Sciences ABSTRACT: There is consensus in the field of economics (economic history) and the social sciences more generally that institutions matter significantly when it comes to why certain nations, societies or states prosper while others don’t. However, there is […]
Heather Douglas, Michigan State, Center Senior Fellow Rethinking the Social Contract for Science ABSTRACT: The dominant way of thinking about the relationship between science and society has been a “social contract” that grew out of the debates about science funding in the post-WWII US. This social contract presumed that the most public good would come […]
Hyundeuk Cheon, Seoul National University, Center Visiting Fellow Explicating the Principle of Explicability ABSTRACT: In this talk, I attempt to explicate the principle of explicability for artificial intelligence (AI). While there is widespread consensus that AI needs to be explicable (expressed by different terms such as explainability, interpretability, transparency, or accountability), there are unresolved issues […]
Featured Former Fellow Lunchtime Talk: Yann Benetreau-Dupin, University of Western Ontario This will be an online event. Is Reading Peer Review a Good Idea? ABSTRACT: After a few years as a full-time staff editor for the large, multidisciplinary, open-access journal PLOS ONE (Public Library of Science), I wonder if leaving academic philosophy to read peer-review […]
Brian McLoone, Higher School Economics, Center Visiting Fellow How Should We Think about Models with Impossible Assumptions? ABSTRACT: This talk will be about complications that emerge when one renders a scientific model with an impossible assumption as a counterfactual. The talk will touch on a variety of topics, such as the nature of (im)possibility, the […]
Somogy Varga, Aarhus University, Center Visiting Scholar The Aim of Medicine ABSTRACT: Recent debates about the scope and societal role of medicine raise fundamental questions about its aim. The main task of the talk is to contribute to clarifying this issue. I start by outlining the idea medicine deploys a particular kind of understanding. Then, […]
Nick Huggett, LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago Quantum Gravity on a Tabletop? ABSTRACT: The characteristic – Planck – energy scale of quantum gravity is utterly beyond current technology, making experimental access to the relevant physics apparently impossible. Nevertheless, low energy experiments linking gravity and the quantum have been undertaken: the […]
Matthew Parker, University of Western Ontario, Center Visiting Fellow What Counts as Evidence in a Vast Universe? ABSTRACT: Ziv has a psychological theory and claims that an experiment has confirmed it. Nick says this is irrelevant; the universe is so big that someone was bound to make the same observation even if the theory is […]
Simon DeDeo, Carnegie Mellon/Santa Fe Institute Consilience and Epistemic Values in the Royal Society ABSTRACT: Consilience, the idea that scientific knowledge should draw together disparate phenomena into common frameworks, is a widely accepted value in contemporary science. Little is known, however, about how and when this value first appeared in practice. Using the full-text archives […]
This talk has been moved to online-only. Anthony Beavers, University of Evansville, Center Visiting Fellow Concerning a Machine Command Theory of Ethics ABSTRACT: In this presentation on meta-ethics, I will consider the possibility of a Machine Command Theory (MCT) of ethics that may allow an artificial intelligence to outperform conventional moral theories in determining and […]
Featured Former Fellow Lunchtime Talk: Erik Curiel, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy This will be an online event. Math Does Not Represent ABSTRACT: On the standard---almost universally (albeit often only implicitly) accepted---picture of the relation of mathematics in a physical theory to the world, mathematical entities represent physical entities, mathematical structures represent physical structures, and […]
Ravit Dotan, University of California Berkeley, Center Postdoc Fellow Participatory AI Ethics Governance ABSTRACT: I am designing a new approach for AI ethics governance, based on meaningful stakeholder participation. Currently, the prominent approach in AI ethics governance focuses on articulating AI ethics principles on topics such as transparency, fairness, and privacy. A minority of organizations […]
Edouard Machery, Distinguished Professor of HPS, University of Pittsburgh Formal Modeling in Philosophy of Science - Let’s be realistic! ABSTRACT: In recent years, formal models have become increasingly important in philosophy of science, particularly among social epistemologists. They have also become an important component of metascience. This talk will argue that formal modelers in philosophy […]
Caspar Jacobs, Dept. of HPS, University of Pittsburgh Are Mass Scalings Symmetries of Newtonian Mechanics? ABSTRACT: There has been some recent debate over whether mass scalings - uniform scalings of all particle masses - are symmetries of Newtonian mechanics. The brief answer is that this depends on whether one also inversely scales G, the gravitational […]
Featured Former Fellow Lunchtime Talk: Naftali Weinberger, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy Signal Manipulation and the Causal Analysis of Racial Discrimination ABSTRACT: Discrimination is, in part, a causal concept. To say that an individual was discriminated against based on race entails that her race made a difference to how she was treated. Yet demographic variables […]
Nicholas Rescher, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh A Fallen Branch from the Tree of Knowledge: The Failure of Futurology. ABSTRACT: The talk will examine the futurology bubble of the 1950-1980 era, and considers the reasons for its rise and demise. Please Note: Non-Pitt individuals who want to attend our in-person talks must […]
Robert Batterman, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh Mesoscale Models and Many-Body Physics ABSTRACT: What is the best way to study the bulk behavior of many-body systems? A natural, common sentiment among philosophers and physicists is to take a foundational perspective. Examine the theory that characterizes the interactions among the components of such many-body systems […]