Maria Carla Galavotti
Maria Carla Galavotti is Full Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Bologna.
She has been “Visiting fellow” at a number of institutions, including the Department of Philosophy of Princeton University, the Center for the Study of Language and Information of Stanford University, the Centre for Time of the University of Sydney. She spent at the Pittsburgh Center of Philosophy of Science two terms in the academic year 1989-90, and went back for shorter visits many times.
While staying in Pittsburgh she did extensive work at the Archives of Scientific Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, which led to the publication of the collection of Ramsey’s papers Notes on Philosophy, Probability and Mathematics (1990). In the Fall 2005 she worked on the Bruno de Finetti Collection with the end in view of writing an Introduction to the English edition of Bruno de Finetti’s Philosophy of Probability (Springer, Forthcoming). She just organized a conference to celebrate the Centennial of Bruno de Finetti’s birth, called “Bruno de Finetti, Radical Probabilist” (Bologna, October 26-28, 2006).
Her main research topics are the foundations of probability and statistics, scientific explanation, probabilistic causality, the role and structure of models in the natural and social sciences.
She recently published the book Philosophical Introduction to Probability (Stanford: CSLI, 2005), and edited the collection Cambridge and Vienna. Frank P. Ramsey and the Vienna Circle (Dordrecht-Boston: Springer, 2006), which includes a number of papers that were read at a conference held in Vienna in 2003, to celebrate the Centennial of Ramsey’s birth.
She also edited the volumes Observation and Experiment in the Natural and Social Sciences (Dordrecht-Boston: Kluwer, 2003) and, together with P. Suppes and D. Costantini, Stochastic Causality (Stanford: CSLI 2001).
She recently took an interest in epistemological problems related to criminal trial, publishing an article together with Federico Stella (“L’‘oltre il ragionevole dubbio come standard probatorio’. Le infondate divagazioni dell’epistemologo Laudan”, Rivista Italiana di Diritto e Procedura Penale, 2006) which criticizes some recent papers of Larry Laudan. An English version of this paper is forthcoming.
She is presently working on a pluralistic view of causality that regards it as intrinsically context-dependent. She gave papers on this topic at the workshops “Causation, Probability and Decision” (Centre for Time of the University of Sydney on April 21, 2006) and “Pluralism and Causality” (LSE, October 9-10, 2006). Her article “Causal Pluralism and Context” will appear in the volume edited by M.C.Galavotti, P.Suppes and R.Scazzieri, Reasoning, Rationality and Probability (Stanford: CSLI 2007).