LTT: Riet van Bork
Title: TBA Abstract: TBA This talk will also be available live streamed on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.
Annual Lecture Series (in-person)
Lunchtime Talks (in-person)
Conferences (in-person)
Online-Only Events
Title: TBA Abstract: TBA This talk will also be available live streamed on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.
This Talk has been postponed, date TBA. Title: "The Concept of Control" Abstract: The talk will argue that control is a complex and inherently unclear inception ill suited to the significant work that philosophers--especially ethicists--have envisioned for it. This talk will also be available live streamed on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.
Pitt Philosophy is hosting a conference in honor of the career of Thomas Ricketts. For more information, please visit: https://www.philosophy.pitt.edu/tom-ricketts
Title: Gender and values at the intersection of molecular biology and psychiatry Abstract: This talk points to socio-political values that call for more integration between molecular and social-environmental approaches to human cognition and neuropsychiatry, such as improving human mental health and reducing societal inequities. My general perspective on the overall landscape of human behavior research […]
Title: “The field framework in physics (and beyond)” Abstract: Over the past century, analogies between particle physics and condensed matter physics have successfully guided theoretical developments in both domains. Prominent examples include the construction of the Higgs model in particle physics and the development of renormalization group methods. Unlike prior historical uses of analogies in […]
Title: Aphantasia, unsymbolized thinking and conscious thoughts Abstract: According to a common view, conscious thoughts necessarily involve mental images. This is alleged to be the case not only when one entertains conscious thoughts about perceptible things like cats or waterfalls, but also when one thinks about more abstract things, like the nature of concepts. In […]
Title: Pattern Finding and Pattern Making Abstract: Human beings are proficient pattern finders (e.g., scientific laws), and pattern makers (e.g., art, architecture, political systems). According to philosophical tradition, going back at least to Aristotle, these different capacities are made possible by fundamentally distinct cognitive competencies: theoretical vs. practical reason. But some of our most effective […]
Title: The Bearable Thinness of Being: A Pragmatist Metaphysics of Affordances Abstract: Taking a pragmatist stance toward the practices and products of science shapes our answers to central philosophical questions. I will explicate how scientists’ conceptual and representational practices work in concert with their observational and experimental ones to stabilize acceptance of claims of scientific […]
Title: A Metaphysical Mapping Problem for Race Theorists and Human Population Geneticists Abstract. In this talk, I identify and clarify a mapping phenomenon that’s almost twenty years old. The phenomenon is that the populations at a fivefold subdivision of humans into biological populations—the so-called human continental populations—correspond one-to-one with the five official races of the […]
Formal and Experimental Philosophy Workshop In recent years there has been an explosion of work in both formal and experimental philosophy, as well as a growing number of researchers who are working at their intersection. This includes a broad tent of topics: the psychology of decision and moral judgment; the rationality of reasoning under uncertainty; the role of […]
Title: Essentially Dynamic Concepts Abstract: Important biological concepts often display unruly behavior: there is consensus that they designate something important, but not how that 'something' should be defined, identified, or theorized—and the set of options changes over time. My talk will present an ongoing effort to make sense of this general phenomenon. First I sketch a […]
GPP Final Conference KNOWLEDGE, WISDOM, AND UNDERSTANDING OCTOBER 13-15, 2022 The Geography of Philosophy Project (GPP) celebrates the conclusion of its investigation into the themes of Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding with a final conference discussing its themes. research, and impact. For the GPP Final Conference, the project PIs Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich, and Clark Barrett […]
Rules Made to be Broken: Calibrating Climate Proxies Abstract: Philosophical analysis of measurement in scientific practice often focuses on the development and use of measurement standards. However, when it comes to proxy measurements in climate science---e.g. indicators such as tree rings that are used to reconstruct past climate variables like temperature---scientists develop measurement standards only […]
Title: Heterodox scientists: A sliver of hope for our increasingly conformist times? Abstract: Nowadays we all face tremendous pressures to conform to domineering narratives. This holds for science as much as for politics. Recent exposés of the silencing of scientific ideas—alternative public health policies during the COVID-19 pandemic and alternatives to the amyloid plaque explanation […]
Title: Discovery in Synthetic Biology: A Call for Doing Philosophy in Science Abstract: The work of synthetic biologists strikes some as strange and foreign (Keller 2009). Synthetic biologists are in the business of exploring a range of biological possibilities rarely sampled by the nature world – or the world outside the lab (Malaterre 2013). In this talk, I’ll argue that a common logical structure characterizes the mode of discovery adopted by many research […]
Title: Stating structural realism: mathematics-first approaches to physics and metaphysics Abstract: I respond to the frequent objection that structural realism fails to sharply state an alternative to the standard predicate-logic, object / property / relation, way of doing metaphysics. The approach I propose is based on what I call a `math-first' approach to physical theories […]
Title: Philosophy of the Cosmological Constant Abstract: The (re)introduction of lambda into cosmology has spurred debates that touch on central questions in philosophy of science, as well as the foundations of general relativity and particle physics. We provide a systematic assessment of the often implicit philosophical assumptions guiding the methodology of precision cosmology in relation […]
The Center for the Philosophy of Science is organizing a workshop to celebrate the distinguished career of Professor James W. Woodward on November 4th and 5th 2022. This is the weekend before PSA2022 being held in Pittsburgh as well. Jim Woodward was Professor at Cal Tech for many years and moved to Pittsburgh in 2010. […]
This event is hosted by the department of HPS. For more information please visit: https://www.hps.pitt.edu/events/wesley-c-salmon-memorial-lecture-peter-godfrey-smith-univ-sydney .
Talk titles and schedule to follow.
Title: Measurement in a network approach to psychopathology Abstract: In psychology, the standard model for measurement is the latent variable model. In a latent variable model of depression, the correlations between depression symptoms are explained through these symptoms all being manifestations of depression. However, it seems implausible that symptoms such as “insomnia” and “concentration problems” […]
Title: Fringe theories and epistemic tolerance Abstract: In this talk, I push the upward bound of our epistemic tolerance in science to its reasonable limit. In particular, I support the unpopular position that we should actively cultivate a receptive attitude towards even the wildest fringe theories. First, I unpack the concepts of ‘fringe’ and ‘mainstream’ […]
Title: Functionalism in physics and inter-theoretic relations Abstract: Philosophers of physics appeal to functionalism in a variety of contexts. This talk will explore what kind of functionalism they should be appealing to and what it might have to do with inter-theoretic relations. This talk will also be available live streamed on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.
Approximating Bayes? On The Role of Approximations in Bayesian Cognitive Science The Bayesian framework is prominent in contemporary cognitive science. Its key tenet is that many aspects of cognition can be modeled as a one form or another of Bayesian inference. Early work within the framework applied this idea in a fairly direct manner. But, […]
Title: A Unified Theory of Probability Abstract: I defend a partial entailment/degree-of-support interpretation of probability as a unified theory of both physical and epistemic probability. On this interpretation, probabilities are necessary and a priori relations between propositions, and measure the degree to which one proposition supports, or “partially entails”, another. I begin by providing a […]
Title: “Control Problems.” Abstract: The concept of control plays a prominent role in pure and applied science. And it features prominently in ethics too. The paper’s issue is how these things fit together. This talk will also be available live streamed on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.
Title: Are the problems of neuroscience just like everyone else's? And what should philosophers do about them? Abstract: Lately, there have been many papers criticizing various methods in neuroscience as failing to yield results that can support the desired conclusions. Specifically, while neuroscientific results identify correlations and causal relations, scientists often aim to draw conclusions […]
Title: Richard Lewontin and the Complications of Linkage Abstract: During the 1960s and 1970s population geneticists pushed beyond models of single genes to grapple with the effect on evolution of multiple genes associated by linkage. The resulting models of multiple interacting loci suggested that blocks of genes, maybe even entire chromosomes or the genome itself, should be […]
An Author Meets Critics Symposium on Bob Batterman's new book, A Middle Way: A Non-Fundamental Approach to Many-Body Physics. "Robert W. Batterman's monograph examines a ubiquitous methodology in physics and the science of materials that has virtually been ignored in the philosophical literature. This method focuses on mesoscale structures as a means for investigating complex […]
Title: Gricean inferentialism about scientific representation: A framework and two applications. Abstract: Traditional views of scientific representation are “referentialist.” They argue that a representation’s meaning is determined by a substantive relation (canonically, similarity or isomorphism) to what it represents. These views face well known problems in accounting for idealization and the “problem of style” – […]