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 […]

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: 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 […]

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 […]

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” – […]

Title: People Prefer Moral Discretion to Algorithms: Algorithm Aversion Beyond Intransparency Abstract: We explore aversion to the use of algorithms in moral decision-making. So far, this aversion has been explained mainly by the fear of opaque decisions that are potentially biased. Using incentivized experiments, we study which role the desire for human discretion in moral […]

Title:  Quantum Nanowires: A case study on reproducibility in natural sciences Abstract: Three years ago, I and a friend found major problems in a Nature paper in my field. The paper has since been retracted, along with another Nature paper. Several more are recommended for retraction, are under expressions of concern or pending corrections. I […]

Title:  How much are large language models narrowing the gap to human intelligence?   Abstract:  ChatGPT was released in late October 2022. It is a public interface to GPT-3, an artificial neural network with 175 billion parameters trained on terabytes of text from the internet. It is paradigmatic of the class of Large Language Models (LLMs) […]

Title: "A quantitative field theoretical for spontaneous collapse" Abstract: Any model of spontaneous collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics must involve alterations of the standard Schrödinger equation to allow non-unitary dynamics.  In the past two years I have developed a model for a change to the quantum field theory for fermions to allow […]

Title: From Epistemology to Quantum Mechanics: A Phenomenological Proposal Abstract: Contemporary epistemology is dominated by externalist approaches. In this picture, evidence is not constituted by our experiences but by facts and the epistemic status of our beliefs is not determined by what is internally accessible to us but by external factors such as reliability. This […]

Title: The Sense of Commitment in Joint Action: Towards a Comparative Perspective Abstract: Recent research provides evidence that, in the context of joint action, individuals’ sense of commitment sustains their motivation to persist in performing actions which their joint action partners are expecting and may be relying on them to perform. I will provide an […]

Title: Inductive Risk and Value Freedom, Revisited Abstract: Work on the role of values in science has grown and diversified dramatically in the 21st century. But there is a near-consensus on one basic point, namely the value-ladeness – that is, ladeness with social, moral and political values – of all aspects of the scientific process, […]