Organizer: Hasok Chang

It is often said that science is “messy” and, because of this messiness, abstract philosophical thinking is only of limited use in analysing science. But in what ways is science messy, and how and why does this messiness surface? Is it an accidental or an integral feature of scientific practice? In this symposium, we try to understand some of the ways in which science is messy and draw out some of the philosophical consequences of taking seriously the notion that science is messy.

The first presenter discusses what scientists themselves say about messy science, and whether they see its messiness as a problem for its functioning. Examining scientists’ reflections about “messy science” can fulfill two complementary purposes. Such an analysis helps to clarify in what ways science can be considered “messy” and thus improves philosophical understanding of everyday research practice. The analysis also points to specific pragmatic challenges in current research that philosophers of science can help address. 

The second presenter discusses the implications of “messy science” for scientific epistemology, specifically for scientific justification. They show how this messiness plays itself out in a particular episode in nineteenth century medicine: the transition from mid-nineteenth-century miasma views to late nineteenth-century early germ views by examining different senses in which scientific epistemology may be said to be messy and lay out in what ways such messy scenarios differ from the idealized circumstances of traditional accounts of justification. They conclude by discussing some limits that taking these differences into account will impose on developing practice-based views of scientific justification, explaining how it is still possible for such views to retain epistemic normativity.

The third presenter explores how the messiness of eighteenth-century botanical practice, resulting from a constant lack of information, generated a culture of collaborative publishing. Given the amount of information required for an accurate plant description let alone a taxonomic attribution, eighteenth-century botanists and their readers were fully aware of the preliminary nature of their publications. They openly acknowledged the necessity of updating and correcting them, and developed collaborative strategies for doing so efficiently. Authors updated their own writings in cycles of iterative publishing, most famously Carl Linnaeus, but this could also be done by others, such as the consecutive editors of the unpublished manuscripts of the German botanist Paul Hermann (1646-1695), who became his co-authors in the process.

The fourth presenter investigates how biological classification can sometimes rely on messy metaphysics. Focusing on the lichen symbiont, they explore what grounds we might have for relying on overlapping and conflicting ontologies. Lichens have long been studied and defined as two-part systems composed of a fungus (mycobiont) and a photosynthetic partner (photobiont). This bipartite metaphysics underpins classificatory practices and determines the criteria for stability that rely on the fungus to name lichens despite the fact that some lichens are composed of three or more parts. The presenter investigates how reliable taxonomic information can be gleaned from metaphysics that makes it problematic to even count biological individuals or track lineages.

Organizer: Frederick Eberhardt

Over the past few years, the Causal Bayes net framework --- developed by Spirtes et. al. (2000) and Pearl (2000), and given philosophical expression in Woodward (2004) -- has been successfully spun off into the sciences. From medicine to neuro- and climate-science, there is a resurgence of interest in the methods of causal discovery. The framework offers a perspicuous representation of causal relations, and enables development of methods for inferring causal relations from observational data. These methods are reliable so long as one accepts background assumptions about how underlying causal structure is expressed in observational data. The exact nature and justification of these background assumptions has been a matter of debate from the outset. For example, the causal Markov condition is widely seen as more than a convenient assumption, and rather as encapsulating something essential about causation. In contrast, the causal faithfulness assumption is seen as more akin to a simplicity assumption, saying roughly that the causal world is, in a sense, not too complex. There are other assumptions that have been treated as annoying necessities to get methods of causal discovery off the ground, such as the causal sufficiency assumption (which says roughly that every common cause is measured) and the acyclicity (which implies, for example, that there is no case in which X causes Y, Y causes Z, and Z causes X, forming a cycle). Each of these assumptions has been subject to analysis and methods have been developed to enable causal discovery even when these assumptions are not satisfied. But controversies remain, and we are confronted with some long standing questions: What exactly is the nature of each of those assumptions? Can any of those assumptions be justified? If so, which? How do the question of justification and the question of nature relate to each other?

This symposium aims to address those questions. It brings together a group of researchers all trained in the causal Bayes nets framework, but who have each taken different routes to exploring how we can address the connection between the underlying causal system and the observational data that we use as basis to infer something about that system. In particular, we will discuss a variety of different approaches that go beyond the traditional causal Bayes net framework, such as the discovery of dynamical systems, and the connection between causal and constitutive relations. While the approaches are largely driven by methodological considerations, we expect these contributions to have implications for several other philosophical debates in the foundations of epistemology, the metaphysics of causation, and on natural kinds.

Organizer: Sandra Mitchell

Adolf Grünbaum, former president of DLMPST and IUHPS, had an extraordinary impact on philosophy of science in the 20th century. He died November, 15, 2018 at the age of 95. This symposium honors Grünbaum by considering ideas he addressed in his work, spanning philosophy of physics, logic of scientific reasoning, Freud and psychiatry’s status as a science and religion. 

Organizers: Benedikt Loewe and Helena Mihaljevic

A Symposium at CLMPST XVI coordinated by DLMPST/IUHPST and the Gender Gap Project

The project "A Global Approach to the Gender Gap in Mathematical, Computing, and Natural Sciences: How to Measure It, How to Reduce It?" is an international and interdisciplinary effort to better understand the manifestation of the Gender Gap in the named scientific fields, and to help overcome barriers for women in their education and career. The collaboration between eleven partners including various scientific unions allows for a comprehensive consideration of gender-related effects in these fields, yielding the opportunity to elaborate common grounds as well as discipline-specific differences.

Currently, existing data on participation of women in the mathematical and natural sciences is scattered, outdated, and inconsistent across regions and research fields. The project approaches this issue mainly from two different perspectives. Through a survey, scientists and mathematicians worldwide have the opportunity to confidentially share information about their own experiences and views on various aspects of education and work in their disciplines and countries. At the same time, we statistically analyze large data collections on scientific publications in order to understand effects of gender and geographical region on publication and collaboration practices. Moreover, the project aims to provide easy access to materials proven to be useful in encouraging girls and young women to study and pursue education in mathematics and natural sciences.

In this symposium, methods and findings of the Gender Gap project will be presented by Helena Mihaljevic, connected to and contrasted with similar issues in philosophy of science. After three presentations, there will be a panel discussion.

Organizer: Hasok Chang

In this proposed symposium we make a historical–philosophical examination of chemical ontology. Philosophers thinking about the metaphysics of science would do well to scrutinize the history of the concepts involved carefully. The idea of “cutting nature at its joints” does not offer much practical help to the scientists, who have to seek and craft the taxonomic and ontological notions according to the usual messy procedures of scientific investigation. And we philosophers of science need to understand the nature of such procedures. In this session we showcase various attempts to do such historical–philosophical work, with a focus on chemistry.

Robin Hendry will provide a general framing of the issue. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has developed different systems of nomenclature for inorganic and organic substances. These systems reflect both chemistry's historical development and particular metaphysical views about the reality of chemical substances. Looking back into the history, we recognize the contingent decisions taken by past chemists that led to our present conceptions, and the possible paths-not-taken that might have led to different ontological conceptions. Such decisions were, and will continue to be, influenced by various types of forces that shape science. If the history of chemistry is a garden of forking paths, then so is the metaphysics of chemistry.

This presentation will be followed by three concrete studies. Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino will discuss the shift from vitalism to mechanicism that took place in early modern investigations of matter. This was a gradual and complex process, with corpuscularianism as an important commonality shared by the competing perspectives. She argues that aspects of vitalism and mechanicism co-existed in interesting ways in the chemical ontology of the early modern period, and that the gradual demise of vitalism resulted not from reductionism but from a physicalistic and naturalistic rationalization of chemical qualities.

Sarah Hijmans will address the history of the concept of chemical element. She starts by noting that there are two IUPAC definitions that loosely correspond to Lavoisier’s operational concept and Mendedeev’s more metaphysical concept. Little has been said about the evolution of the concept of element between the times of these two great chemists. She argues that the change in the conception of the element was part of a broader evolution of chemical practice. A view very similar to Mendeleev’s was already present in early 19th-century chemical atomism, and developed in a rather continuous way through the century.

Karoliina Pulkkinen will examine the history of the late 19th-century attempts to find periodic regularities among the chemical elements. While Meyer saw it likely that all elements were comprised of the same primordial matter, Mendeleev saw each element as a distinct, individual, autonomous entity and refrained from making representations of periodicity that suggested otherwise. Following Andrea Woody’s discussion of the law of periodicity as a theoretical practice, this paper explores how Meyer’s and Mendeleev’s ontological views on primordial matter shaped their ideas on how to represent periodicity.

Organizers: Benedikt Loewe and Daya Reddy

For scientists and rational thinkers, the increasing acceptance of positions that constitute outright denial of established scientific consensus is disconcerting. In recent years, science denial movements have become more vocal and widespread, from climate change deniers via vaccination opponents to politicians whose statements are directly and openly in contradiction with established facts. The phenomenon of denial of (scientific) facts used to be confined to the fringes of our societies, but now transformed to have relevant policy effects with long-term consequences for all people and the entire globe. Both logic and philosophy of science can contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon and possibly show paths to react to it and
deal with it.

In this symposium, representatives of the International Science Council, the global umbrella organisation for all of the natural and social sciences, will engage with logicians and philosophers of science and discuss both the philosophical theories underlying the phenomenon of denial of facts and their potential consequences for science policy makers and other stakeholders.

Organizers: Silvia De Toffoli and Andrew Arana

This Symposium is invited by PC

The philosophy of mathematics has experienced a very significant resurgence of activity during the last 20 years, much of it falling under the widely used label “philosophy of mathematical practice.” This is a general term for a gamut of approaches which can also include interdisciplinary work. APMP members promote a broad, outward‐looking approach to the philosophy of mathematics, which engages with mathematics in practice, including issues in history of mathematics, the applications of mathematics, and cognitive science. In 2009 the Association for the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice (APMP) was founded — for more information, see: http://philmathpractice.org/. 

In this symposium, we aim at grouping twelve submission falling under the scope of APMP. The different contributions will put into focus different aspects of the philosophy of mathematical practice––both in term of topics and of methods––and with grouping them together we aim at promoting dialogue between them. We include studies of a wide variety of issues concerned with the way mathematics is done, evaluated, and applied, and in connection therewith, with historical episodes or traditions, applications, educational problems, cognitive questions, etc.

APMP aims to become a common forum that will stimulate research in philosophy of mathematics related to mathematical activity, past and present. It also aims to reach out to the wider community of philosophers of science and stimulate renewed attention to the very significant, and philosophically challenging, interactions between mathematics and science. Therefore, it is just natural that a symposium is being submitted to this Congress on behalf of APMP. We asked the members of APMP to submit a proposal for taking part in this meeting and we made an appropriate selection of submission so as to shape a one-day program. The aim of the meeting is to manifest the presence and activity of APMP within the larger community of philosophers of science and logicians. In order to reach this aim we have opted for the format of twelve presentations that showcase the diversity of philosophical work done under the umbrella of APMP.

Organizers: Theo Kuipers and Ilkka Niiniluoto

It is a widespread view among more-or-less realist philosophers of science that scientific progress consists in approach towards truth or increasing verisimilitude. This position has been elaborated within the fallibilist program of Karl Popper, who emphasized that scientific theories are always conjectural and corrigible, but still later theories may be “closer to the truth” than earlier ones. After the debunking of Popper’s own definition of truthlikeness by David Miller and Pavel Tichý, a number of approaches have been developed in order to solve or to circumvent this problem (an early overview is found in Kuipers 1987). The logical problem of verisimilitude consists in finding an optimal definition of closer to the truth or the distance to the truth. The epistemic problem of verisimilitude consists in evaluating claims of truth approximation in the light of empirical evidence and non-empirical characteristics. 

So far, post-Popperian theories of truth approximation have usually assumed, like Popper’s own failing attempt, some kind of deterministic truth to be approached. This target could be descriptive or factual truth about some domain of reality, as expressed by universal laws, or the nomic truth about what is physically or biologically possible. These approaches, including most of the recent ones, are in agreement about the assumption that ‘the truth’ concerns a deterministic truth. However, they are deviating from each other in some other essential respects, especially concerning questions of logical reconstruction (qualitative vs. quantitative, syntactic vs. semantic, disjunction- vs. conjunction-based, content- vs. likeness-based) or concerning adequacy conditions for verisimilitude. Some useful overviews have been published about the state of the art (cf. Niiniluoto 1998, Oddie 2014).

In the symposium, adherents of such theories will now direct their attention to designing extensions to approaching probabilistic truths. Here the truth concerns a collection of statistical facts or the objective probabilities of some process, or probabilistic laws. Again the task is to find appropriate measures for the distance to such probabilistic truths and to evaluate claims about such distances on the basis of empirical evidence. Moreover, various well-known probabilistic enterprises can be (re-)construed as also dealing with truth approximation, if applied in such probabilistic contexts. For example, Carnapian inductive logic can be seen in this light (Festa, 1993). Similarly for straightforward Bayesian approaches, if applied in such contexts. Such reconstructions will also be addressed, including the interesting question whether these reconstructions can be seen as concretizations of deterministic truth approximation. In other words, one may ask whether deterministic measures of truthlikeness are special or limiting cases of probabilistic ones. 

The main aim of this symposium is to bring together the search for such extensions and reconstructions. The significance is of course that the unified perspective on deterministic and probabilistic truth approximation will be illuminating and will stimulate further separate and comparative research. The probabilistic approaches that will be presented at the symposium are listed below (full abstracts are separately submitted, with the acronym APT).

Organizer: Wilfrid Hodges

The symposium will consist of two talks that provide introductions to two areas of logic where medieval Arabic-speaking logicians made advances.  One of these, presented by Wilfrid Hodges, is the use of diagrams for solving logical problems; it was only recently realised that this was achieved both accurately and insightfully in twelfth-century Baghdad.  The other, presented by Saloua Chatti, is hypothetical logic, a distinctive branch of formal logic of great interest to several leading Arabic logicians, with some features of propositional logic and some of temporal logic. 

Organizer: Hasok Chang

This symposium examines the evidential relations between history and philosophy from various angles. Can the history of science show evidential support and falsifications for the philosophical theories about science? Or is it always a case of stalemate in which each reconstruction of history is only one possible reconstruction amongst several others? One suggestion has naturally been that the whole approach aimed at testing and comparing alternative philosophical models by recourse to historical data is misguided at worst, or in need of serious reformulation at best.

The tradition that looms large over this discussion is the attempt to turn philosophy of science into an empirically testable discipline. History and philosophy of science is then understood as a science of science in a close analogy to the natural sciences. One view is that philosophers provide theories to test and historians produce data by which these theories are tested. The most vocal and well-known representative of this approach is the VPI (Virginia Polytechnic Institute) project. The two most notable publications of this endeavour are “Scientific Change: Philosophical Models and Historical Research” and Scrutinizing Science: Empirical Studies of Scientific Change. A conference organised in 1986 preceded the latter publication. The key idea is testability; that historical case studies perform the role of empirical validation or falsification of the philosophical models of science. In this way, case studies were meant to provide ‘a reality check for philosophy of science.’ 

It is the role and status of case studies, and the rationale using case studies, that is brought back to the table and in the locus of this symposium. More generally, the authors are probing the appropriate evidential relationship between history and philosophy. The symposium makes evident a new sticking point in the debate regarding the empirical accountability of philosophical theories: Should very recent science rather than the history of science function as a source of empirical information? Or should we rather focus on finding more sophisticated evidential modes for the history of science? 

Organizer: Paulo Maurício

The study of Climate Change as a philosophic subject was until recent times at very early stages (Winsberg 2018). The first entry related to ‘Climate Science’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy appear as late as 2018 (Parker, 2018). This is more awkward if we recall several of the main issues related to Climate Change and the scientific practice associated: epistemic trust, models, risk, uncertainty, probability, values, data, instruments, and complexity among many others. 
Also, the bridge between research on Climate Change and policy and social spheres create problems that are not settled such as the epistemic trust or, in some other communities the relation between science and non-science. 
At the same time, the development of the philosophical study of Climate Change can convey new educational insights to teach a diversity of philosophical topics. This is particularly relevant to the philosopher of science engaged in ‘social relevant philosophy’ but also to all the other philosophers of science. 
This Symposium aims to bring together philosophers of science prone to shed light upon the above issues and correlated ones. 

References: 
Winsberg, Eric (2018) Philosophy and Climate Change. Cambridge, MA; Cambridge University Press
Katzav, Joel & Parker, Wendy S. (2018). Issues in the Theoretical Foundations of Climate Science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 63: 141-149.
Parker, Wendy, "Climate Science", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/climate-science/>.

Organizer: Sjoerd Zwart

The difference between Theoretical and Practical reason has a long history in philosophy. Modern discussions concentrate on the relation between know-how and knowing-that, and ask whether one of two reduces to the other, or, if not, what the nature is of know-how. During the last decades, practical scientists in the information and social sciences (management, psychology, and law) have recognized the need to discern ‘procedural or action means-end knowledge,’ which may often be paraphrased as follows: ‘if one wants to achieve goal G in (technical, medical, etc.) context C, perform action A.’ This type of explicit (intersubjective—not tacit), or normative action knowledge seems hardly to be directly deducible from declarative scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, it prominently precipitates in countless patents and valuable academic research projects aiming at means-end or intervention knowledge. Despite its fundamental importance it has escaped the attention of most epistemologists. The purpose of this Symposium is to draw attention to, discuss and foster further interest in the production and results of academic (explicit, action) means-end knowledge in engineering, medicine, management or any other branch of practical science.

Organizer: Michael Matthews

As Mario Bunge celebrates his 100th birthday, this symposium will appraise four different aspects of his life-long contribution to philosophy. The five individual presentations are: Mario Bunge: A Pioneer of the New Philosophy of Science; Mario Bunge’s Scientific Approach to Realism; Is Simplicity a Myth? Mach and Bunge on the Principle of Parsimony; Quantifiers and Conceptual Existence; Bunge and the Enlightenment Tradition in Education.
Bunge was born in Argentina on 21st September 1919. He has held chairs in physics and in philosophy at universities in Argentina, the USA, and since 1966 a philosophy chair at McGill University. He has published 70 books (many with revised editions) and 540 articles; with many translated into one or other of twelve languages. 

Bunge has made substantial research contributions to an unequalled range of fields: physics, philosophy of physics, metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, logic, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, management theory, medical philosophy, linguistics, criminology, legal philosophy, and education.
Bunge’s remarkable corpus of scientific and philosophical writing is not inert; it has had significant disciplinary, cultural and social impact. In 1989 the American Journal of Physics asked its readers to vote for their favourite papers from the journal in the sixty years since its founding in 1933. Bunge's 1956 ‘Survey of the Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics’ was among the 20 top voted papers. In 1993, the journal repeated the exercise this time Bunge’s 1966 paper ‘Mach's Critique of Newtonian Mechanics’ – joined his first paper in the top 20.

Beyond breadth, Bunge’s work is noteworthy for its coherence and systemicity. Through to the mid twentieth-century most significant Western philosophers were systematic philosophers. But in the past half-century and more, the pursuit of systemic philosophy, ‘big pictures’, ‘grand narratives’ or even cross-disciplinary understanding has considerably waned. Bunge has defied this trend. His philosophical system was laid out in detail in his monumental eight-volume Treatise on Basic Philosophy (1974-1989). Individual volumes were devoted to Semantics, Ontology, Epistemology, Systemism, Philosophy of Science, and Ethics. His Political Philosophy: Fact, Fiction and Vision (2009) was originally planned as its ninth volume. 

Bunge has applied his systems approach to issues in logic, mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, social science, technology, medicine, legal studies, economics, and science policy. 

Bunge’s life-long commitment to Enlightenment-informed, socially-engaged, systemic philosophy is manifest in his being asked by the Academia Argentina de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales to draft its response to the contemporary crisis of anthropogenic global warming. Bunge authored the Manifesto which was signed by numerous international associations. Guided by his own systematism he wrote: since climate is not regional but global, all the measures envisaged to control it should be systemic rather than sectoral, and they should alter the causes at play – mechanisms and inputs – rather than their effects. …

Clearly Bunge is one of the most accomplished, informed, wide-ranging philosophers of the modern age. This symposium, held in the year that he, hopefully, celebrates his 100th birthday, is an opportunity for the international philosophical community to appraise his contribution to the discipline.

Organizer: Hasok Chang

This special session is devoted to the presentation of the 2019 IUHPST Essay Prize in History and Philosophy of Science. The prize question for this round of competition was: "What is the value of history of science for philosophy of science?" This question was intended as a counterpart to the question for the inaugural run of the prize in 2017, which asked about the value of philosophy of science for history of science. The session will include the presentation of the prize, a lecture by the prize-winner (60 minutes), and a period of discussion with members of the audience. 

This session is offered as part of the set of symposia organized by the Joint Commission, which serves as a link between the historical and the philosophical Divisions of the IUHPST.

Organizer: Aviezer Tucker

Philosophers have attempted to distinguish the Historical Sciences at least since the Neo-Kantians. The Historical Sciences attempt to infer rigorously descriptions of past events, processes, and their relations from their information preserving effects. Historical sciences infer token common causes or origins: phylogeny and evolutionary biology infer the origins of species from information preserving similarities between species, DNAs and fossils; comparative historical linguistics infers the origins of languages from information preserving aspects of exiting languages and theories about the mutation and preservation of languages in time; archaeology infers the common causes of present material remains; Critical Historiography infers the human past from testimonies from the past and materials remains, and Cosmology infers the origins of the universe. By contrast, the Theoretical Sciences are not interested in any particular token event, but in types of events: Physics is interested in the atom, not in this or that atom at a particular space and time; Biology is interested in the cell, or in types of cells, not in this or that token cell; Economics is interested in modeling recessions, not in this recession; and Generative Linguistics studies “Language” not any particular language that existed in a particular time and was spoken by a particular group of people. The distinctions between realms of nature and academic disciplines may be epistemically and methodologically arbitrary. If from an epistemic and methodological perspectives, historiography, the study of the human past, has more in common with Geology than with the Social Sciences that have more in common with Agronomy than with historiography, we need to redraw the boundaries of philosophies of the special disciplines. This is of course highly controversial and runs counter to attempts to distinguish the historical sciences by the use of narrative explanations, reenactment or emphatic understanding.

The Historical Sciences may be distinguished from the Theoretical Sciences according to their objects of study, tokens vs. types; from Experimental Sciences according to their methodologies, inference from evidence vs. experimenting with it; and from natural sciences according to the realm of nature they occupy. The criteria philosophers proposed for these distinctions were related to larger issues in epistemology: Do the Historical Sciences and offer different kinds of knowledge? Do the Historical and Theoretical sciences support each other’s claims for knowledge, and if so, how?; metaphysics and ontology: Do the types of objects the Historical and Theoretical Sciences attempt to study, represent, describe, or explain differ, and if so, how does it affect their methodologies?; and the philosophy of science: What is science and how do the Historical and Theoretical Sciences relate to this ideal? 

Organizers: Valentin Goranko and Frederik Van De Putte

The concept of rational agency is broadly interdisciplinary, bringing together philosophy, social psychology, sociology, decision and game theory. The scope and impact of the area of rational agency has been steadily expanding in the past decades, also involving technical disciplines such as computer science and AI, where multi-agent systems of different kinds (e.g. robotic teams, computer and social networks, institutions, etc.) have become a focal point for modelling and analysis. 

Rational agency relates to a range of key concepts: knowledge, beliefs, knowledge and communication, norms, action and interaction, strategic ability, cooperation and competition, social choice etc. The use of formal models and logic-based methods for analysing these and other aspects of rational agency has become an increasingly popular and successful approach to dealing with their complex diversity and interaction. 

This symposium will bring together different perspectives and approaches to the study of rational agency and rational interaction in the context of philosophical logic. 

The symposium talks are divided into three thematic clusters, each representing a session and consisting of 4-5 presentations, as follows. 

I. Logic, Rationality, and Game-theoretic Semantics. Applying logic-based methods and formal logical systems to reasoning in decision and game theory is a major and increasingly popular approach to agency and rationality. Formal logical languages allow us to specify principles of strategic behaviour and interaction between agents, and essential game-theoretic notions, including solution concepts and rationality principles. Formal logical systems provide precise and unambiguous semantics and enable correct and reliable reasoning about these, while involving the concepts of knowledge, beliefs, intentions, ability, etc. 

II. Deontic Logic, Agency, and Action. Logics of agency and interaction such as STIT and deontic logics have been very influential and generally appreciated approaches to normative reasoning and theory of actions. Active directions of research in this area include the normative status of actions vs. propositions, causality and responsibility, collective and group oughts and permissions, and further refinements of the STIT framework stemming from the works of Belnap, Horty and others. 

III. Logic, Social Epistemology, and Collective Decision-making. Rational agency and interaction also presuppose an epistemological dimension, while intentional group agency is inextricably linked to social choice theory. In this thematic cluster, various logical and formal models are discussed that allow shedding light on these factors and processes. 

Organizer: Zuzana Parusniková

Of all philosophers of the 20th century, few built more bridges between academic disciplines than did Karl Popper. For most of his life, Karl Popper made contributions to a wide variety of fields in addition to the epistemology and the theory of scientific method for which he is best known. Problems in quantum mechanics, and in the theory of probability, dominate the second half of Popper's Logik der Forschung (1934), and several of the earliest items recorded in §2 ('Speeches and Articles') of Volume 1 of The Writings of Karl Popper, such as item 2-5 on the quantum-mechanical uncertainty relations, item 2-14 on nebular red-shifts, and item 2-43 (and other articles) on the arrow of time, show his enthusiasm for substantive problems in modern physics and cosmology. Interspersed with these were a number of articles in the 1940s on mathematical logic, and in the 1950s on the axiomatization of the theory of probability (and on other technical problems in this area). Later he made significant contributions to discussions in evolutionary biology and on the problem of consciousness. All these interests (except perhaps his interest in formal logic) continued unabated throughout his life. 

The aim of this symposium is to illustrate, and to evaluate, some of the interventions, both substantive and methodological, that Karl Popper made in the natural and mathematical sciences. An attempt will be made to pinpoint the connections between these contributions and his more centrally philosophical concerns, especially his scepticism, his realism, his opposition to subjectivism, and his indeterminism.

The fields that have been chosen for the symposium are quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology, cosmology, mathematical logic, statistics, and the brain-mind liaison.

Organizer: Lilia Gurova

There are several camps in the recent debates on the nature of scientific understanding. There are factivists and quasi-factivists who argue that scientific representations provide understanding insofar as they capture some important aspects of the objects they represent. Representations, the (quasi-)factivists say, yield understanding only if they are at least partially or approximately true. The factivist position has been opposed by the non-factivists who insist that greatly inaccurate representations can provide understanding given that these representations are effective or exemplify the features of interest. Both camps face some serious challenges. The factivists need to say more about how exactly partially or approximately true representations, as well as nonpropositional representations, provide understanding. The non-factivists are expected to put more effort into the demonstration of the alleged independence of effectiveness and exemplification from the factivity condition. The aim of the proposed symposium is to discuss in detail some of these challenges and to ultimately defend the factivist camp.

One of the biggest challenges to factivisim, the existence of non-explanatory representations which do not possess propositional content but nevertheless provide understanding, is addressed in ‘Considering the Factivity of Non-explanatory Understanding’. This paper argues against the opposition between effectiveness and veridicality. Building on some cases of non-explanatory understanding, the author shows that effectiveness and veridicality are compatible and that we need both.

A different argument for the factivity of scientific understanding provided by models containing idealizations is presented in ‘Understanding Metabolic Regulation: A Case for the Factivists’. The central claim of this paper is that such models bring understanding if they capture correctly the causal relationships between the entities, which these models represent.

‘Effectiveness, Exemplification, and Factivity’ further explores the relation between the factivity condition and its suggested alternatives – effectiveness and exemplification. The author’s main claim is that the latter are not alternatives to factivity, strictly speaking, insofar as they could not be construed without any reference to truth conditions.

‘Scientific Explanation and Partial Understanding’ focuses on cases where the explanations consist of propositions, which are only partially true (in the sense of da Costa’s notion of partial truth). The author argues that such explanations bring partial understanding insofar as they allow for an inferential transfer of information from the explanans to the explanandum.

What happens, however, when understanding is provided by explanations which do not refer to any causal facts? This question is addressed in ‘Factivity of Understanding in Non-causal Explanations’. The author argues that the factivity of understanding could be analyzed and evaluated by using some modal concepts that capture “vertical” and “horizontal” counterfactual dependency relations which the explanation describes.

Organizers: Carolin Antos, Deborah Kant and Deniz Sarikaya

Text is a crucial medium to transfer mathematical ideas, agendas and results among the scientific community and in educational context. This makes the focus on mathematical texts 
a natural and important part of the philosophical study of mathematics. Moreover, it opens up the possibility to apply a huge corpus of knowledge available from the study of texts in other disciplines to problems in the philosophy of mathematics.

This symposium aims to bring together and build bridges between researchers from different methodological backgrounds to tackle questions concerning the philosophy of mathematics. This includes approaches from philosophical analysis, linguistics (e.g., corpus studies) and literature studies, but also methods from computer science (e.g., big data approaches and natural language processing), artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences and mathematics education. (cf. Fisseni et al. to appear; Giaquinto 2007; Mancosu et al. 2005; Schlimm 2008; Pease et al. 2013). 

The right understanding of mathematical texts might also become crucial due to the fast successes in natural language processing on one side and automated theorem proving on the other side. Mathematics as a technical jargon or as natural language, which quite reach structure, and semantic labeling (via LaTeX) is from the other perspective an important test-case for practical and theoretical study of language. 

Hereby we understand text in a broad sense, including informal communication, textbooks and research articles. 

Organizer: Cristina Corredor

The Spanish Society of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (SLMFCE in its Spanish acronym) is a scientific association formed by specialists working in these and other closely related fields. Its aims and scope cover also those of analytic philosophy in a broad sense and of argumentation theory. It is worth mentioning that among its priorities is the support and promotion of young researchers. To this aim, the Society has developed a policy of grants and awards for its younger members.

The objectives of the SLMFCE are to encourage, promote and disseminate study and research in the fields above mentioned, as well as to foster contacts and interrelations among specialists and with other similar societies and institutions. The symposium is intended to present the work carried out by prominent researchers and research groups linked to the Society. It will include four contributions in different subfields of specialization, allowing the audience at the CLMPST 2019 to form an idea of the plural research interests and relevant outcomes of our members.

Ends 19:00.

Organizer: John Baldwin

This symposium builds on the proposed Authors and Critics session on Baldwin’s book: Model Theory and the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice: Formalization without Foundationalism. A key thesis of that book asserts: Contemporary model theory enables systematic comparison of local formalizations for distinct mathematical areas in order to organize and do mathematics, and to analyze mathematical practice.

Session I: Appropriate formalization for different areas of mathematics.

Session II: Abstract elementary classes and accessible categories.

Organizer: Steve Russ

The resources for study and scholarship on the thought and writings of Bernard Bolzano (Prague, 1781-1848) have been transformed by the ongoing publication of the Bernard Bolzano-Gesamtausgabe (Frommann-Holzboog, Stuttgart, 1969 - ). This edition is projected to have 132 volumes, of which 99 have already appeared. (See 
https://www.frommann-holzboog.de/editionen/20.) The prodigious scale of the work testifies to the wide spectrum of Bolzano’s interests and insights, ranging from his theology lectures and ‘edifying discourses’, through social, political and aesthetic themes, to his major works on philosophy, logic, mathematics and physics. In his thinking and his life he personified the congress theme of, ‘Bridging across academic cultures’. The availability of so much previously unpublished, and significant, material has contributed to an increasing momentum in recent decades for Bolzano-related research, including: publications, PhD theses, translations, conferences, projects, reviews and grant awards. More than half of the Gesamtausgabe volumes, overall, are devoted to methodological or mathematical subjects. 

The topic, and purpose, of this symposium is the presentation, and representation, of this thriving area of research which encompasses the history and philosophy of science and mathematics. We propose to divide the symposium into two sessions: Session A on the broader theme of methodology, Session B more specifically on mathematics. The two themes are not disjoint. 

Organizer: Manuel Gustavo Isaac

Conceptual engineering is a fast-moving research program in the field of philosophical methodology. Considering concepts as cognitive devices that we use in our cognitive activities, it basically assumes that the quality of our conceptual apparatuses crucially determines the quality of our corresponding cognitive activities. On these grounds, conceptual engineering adopts a normative standpoint that means to prescribe which concepts we should have, instead of describing the concepts we do have as a matter of fact. And its ultimate goal as a research program is thus to develop a method to assess and improve the quality of any of our concepts working as such cognitive devices—that is, for the identification of improvable conceptual features (e.g. conceptual deficiencies) and the elaboration of correlated ameliorative strategies (e.g. for fixing the identified conceptual deficiencies). Given the ubiquity of deficient and improvable concepts, the potential outreach of conceptual engineering is arguably unlimited. But conceptual engineering is still a very young research program and little has been said so far as to how its method should be devised. The purpose of the MET4CE Symposium is to contribute to filling this theoretical gap. Its main aim will then be to propose critical reflections on the very possibility—whether and why (or why not)? how? to what extent?—of developing an adaptable set of step-by-step instructions for the cognitive optimization of our conceptual apparatuses. With this in mind, the common background of the symposium will be made of the Carnapian method of explication rebooted as an ameliorative project for (re-)engineering concepts. Against this background, a first objective of the symposium will be to present ways to procedurally recast Carnapian explication with complementary frameworks (e.g. via reflective equilibrium, metrological naturalism, formalization, or conceptual modeling) for the purposes of conceptual engineering. A second objective will next be to present ways to extend the scope Carnapian explication as a template method with alternative frameworks (e.g. via conceptual history/genealogy, experimental philosophy, or constructionism in philosophy of information), again, for the purposes of conceptual engineering. And finally, a third objective of the symposium will be to evaluate these upgraded methodological frameworks for (re-)engineering concepts by comparison with competing theories of conceptual engineering that reject the very possibility of developing any template procedural methods for (re-)engineering concepts (such as Cappelen’s ‘Austerity framework’). The expected outcome of the MET4CE Symposium is thereby to provide conceptual engineering with proven guidelines for making it an actionable program for the cognitive optimization of our conceptual apparatuses.