Days: Monday, August 5th Tuesday, August 6th Wednesday, August 7th Thursday, August 8th Friday, August 9th Saturday, August 10th Sunday, August 11th
View this program: with abstractssession overviewtalk overview
10:45 | Integrating Perspectives: Learning from Model Divergence (abstract) |
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.
15:15 | Scientists’ reflections on messy science (abstract) |
15:45 | Blur science through blurred images. What the diversity of fuzzy pictures can do for epistemic, methodological and clinical goals (abstract) |
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.
15:15 | Convergence to the Causal Truth and Our Death in the Long Run (abstract) |
15:45 | Causal Minimality in the Boolean Approach to Causal Inference (abstract) |
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.
15:15 | Adolf and natural religion (abstract) |
15:45 | Adolf Grünbaum on "Zeno's Metrical Paradox of Extension" (abstract) |
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.
15:15 | How science loses by failing to address the gender (and other) gaps (abstract) |
15:45 | What can publication records tell about the gender gap in STEM? (abstract) |
15:15 | Beyond Belief: Logic in Multiple Attitudes (joint work with A. Staras and R. Sugden) (abstract) |
15:15 | Grounding Numerals (abstract) |
15:45 | Paths of abstraction: between ontology and epistemology in mathematical practice. The Zilber’s trichotomy through the lens of Lautman and Cavaillès (abstract) |
15:15 | Geometry, psychology, myth as aspects of the astrological paradigm (abstract) |
15:15 | Super-Humeanism: a naturalized metaphysical theory? (abstract) |
15:45 | Transcendental in physical theory (abstract) |
15:15 | Unfalsifiability and Defeasibility (abstract) |
15:45 | Robustness, Invariance, and Multiple Determination (abstract) |
15:15 | Structuralist Abstraction and Group-Theoretic Practice (abstract) |
15:45 | Expressive power and intensional operators (abstract) |
15:15 | Transcriptions of Gottlob Frege’s Logical Formulas into Boole’s algebra and Language of Modern Logic. Similarities and Differences (abstract) |
15:45 | Hilbert and the Quantum Leap from Modern Logic to Mathematical Logic (abstract) |
15:15 | Classifying First-order Mereological Structures (abstract) |
15:45 | A class of languages for Prawitz's epistemic grounding (abstract) |
15:15 | "Thought Experiments" in Mathematics? (abstract) |
16:45 | Messy metaphysics: the individuation of parts in lichenology (abstract) |
17:15 | Tinkering with nomenclature. Textual engineering, co-authorship, and collaborative publishing in eighteenth-century botany (abstract) |
16:45 | Progressive Methods for Causal Discovery (abstract) |
17:15 | Proportional Causes and Specific Effects (abstract) |
17:45 | Finding causation in time: background assumptions for dynamical systems (abstract) |
16:45 | What is a placebo? (abstract) |
17:15 | Adolf Grünbaum on Freud (abstract) |
16:45 | Mathematical Understanding by Thought Experiments (abstract) |
16:45 | Computers and the King’s New Clothes. Remarks on Two Objections against Computer Assisted Proofs in Mathematics (abstract) |
17:15 | Formal Proof-Verification and Mathematical Intuition: the Case of Univalent Foundations (abstract) |
16:45 | Updating scientific adviser models from policy-maker perspectives: a limit of debate of 'science and value' and norms of public policy (abstract) |
17:15 | In defense of a thought-stopper: Relativizing the fact/value dichotomy (abstract) |
17:45 | Values in Science and Value Conflicts (abstract) |
16:45 | Processes and Mechanisms (abstract) |
17:15 | Second pattern existence and truth-making (abstract) |
16:45 | Underdetermination of theories, theories of gravity, and the gravity of underdetermination (abstract) |
17:15 | Some problems in the prediction vs accommodation debate (abstract) |
16:45 | Why do outcomes in a long series of rolling a fair dice approximately follow the uniform distribution? (abstract) |
17:15 | Anomalous averages, Bose-Einstein condensation and spontaneous symmetry breaking of continuous symmetries, revisited (abstract) |
16:45 | Frege and Peano on axiomatisation and formalisation (abstract) |
17:15 | Sources of Peano's Linguistics (abstract) |
17:45 | On Vopěnka's ultrafinitism (abstract) |
16:45 | How science is knowledge (abstract) |
17:15 | CANCELLED: Commutative transformations of theory structures (abstract) |
16:45 | Predication elaboration: Providing further explication of the concept of negation (abstract) |
17:15 | Open-ended Quantification and Categoricity (abstract) |
17:45 | Free Logic and Unique Existence Proofs (abstract) |
Place: Faculty of Civil Engineering, CTU in Prague, Thákurova 2077/7, 166 29 Prague 6
The welcome reception will be held in the building neighbouring the congress venue; all participants as well as accompanying persons are welcome.
View this program: with abstractssession overviewtalk overview
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.
09:00 | The history of science and the metaphysics of chemistry (abstract) |
09:30 | Early Modern Chemical Ontologies and the Shift from Vitalism to Mechanicism (abstract) |
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.
09:00 | Fake news, pseudoscience, and public engagement (abstract) |
09:30 | Unwitting Complicity: When Science Communication Breeds Science Denialism (abstract) |
10:00 | The philosophical roots of science denialism (abstract) |
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.
09:00 | Heterogeneous mathematical practices: complementing or translation? (abstract) |
09:30 | Abstraction by Parametrization and Emdedding. A contribution to concept formation in modern and contemporary mathematics (abstract) |
10:00 | Virtues, arguments, and mathematical practice (abstract) |
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).
09:00 | Approaching Probabilistic Laws (abstract) |
09:30 | Approaching deterministic and probabilistic truth: a unified account (abstract) |
10:00 | Approaching objective probabilities by meta-inductive probability aggregation (abstract) |
09:00 | Smart Systems: The Power of Technology (abstract) |
09:30 | Challenges of New Technologies: The Case of Digital Vigilantism (abstract) |
09:00 | Disputing unconscious phenomenality (abstract) |
09:30 | Neuroscience: science without disguise. A critique of Manzotti's and Moderato's dualistic account of neuroscience (abstract) |
10:00 | Social Sciences and Moral Biases (abstract) |
09:00 | What mature Lakatos learnt from young Lakatos (abstract) |
09:30 | CANCELLED: Don’t be a Demarc-hater: Correcting Popular Misconceptions Surrounding Popper’s Solution to the Demarcation Problem (abstract) |
10:00 | Karl Popper’s Three Interpretations of the Epistemological Peculiarities of the Social Sciences (abstract) |
09:00 | Objectivity of science from the perspective of x-phi (abstract) |
09:30 | Does Analogical reasoning imply Anthropomorphism? (abstract) |
10:00 | Empirical investigation of the Liar Paradox. Human brain perceives the Liar sentence to be false. (abstract) |
09:00 | Truth Lies: Taking Yet Another Look at the Theory-Laden Problem (abstract) |
09:30 | Constraining the Unknown (abstract) |
10:00 | Simulated data (abstract) |
09:00 | The Unity of Science: From Epistemic Inertia to Internal Need (abstract) |
09:30 | Medieval Debates over the Infinite as Motivation for Pluralism (abstract) |
10:00 | Setting Limits to Chang's Pluralism (abstract) |
09:00 | The Universalism of Logic and the Theory of Types (abstract) |
09:30 | Towards a New Philosophical Perspective on Hermann Weyl’s Turn to Intuitionism (abstract) |
10:00 | Tarski’s two notions of consequence (abstract) |
09:00 | Iterated belief revision and DP postulates (abstract) |
09:30 | Critical thinking and doxastic commitments (abstract) |
10:00 | Reasoning about Perspectives. New Advances (abstract) |
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.
09:00 | An introduction to Arabic hypothetical logic (abstract) |
09:30 | Abū al-Barakāt and his 12th century logic diagrams (abstract) |
11:00 | Some Sixty or More Primordial Matters: Chemical Ontology and the Periodicity of the Chemical Elements (abstract) |
11:30 | The building blocks of matter: The chemical element in 18th and 19th -century views of composition (abstract) |
11:00 | Truth and Truthfulness, Part I: What Fake News Is and What It's Not (abstract) |
11:30 | Truth and Truthfulness, Part II: Why They Matter (abstract) |
11:00 | As Thurston Says (abstract) |
11:30 | Complexity of mathematical cognitive tasks (abstract) |
12:00 | Employing Computers in Posing and Attacking Mathematical Problems: Human Mathematical Practice, Experimental Mathematics, and Proof Assistants (abstract) |
11:00 | CANCELLED: Inductively approaching a probabilistic truth and a deterministic truth, the latter in comparison with approaching it in a qualitative sense. (abstract) |
11:30 | Optimizing group learning of probabilistic truths (abstract) |
12:00 | Credal accuracy in an indeterministic universe (abstract) |
11:00 | What is proof complexity? (abstract) |
11:00 | Methodological individualism and holism in the social sciences (abstract) |
11:30 | Can we apply the science/technology distinction to the Social Sciences? A brief analysis of the question (abstract) |
12:00 | CMW-revolution in Social Sciences as a Type of “Scientific Revolution” (abstract) |
11:00 | Feyerabend and the Reception and Development of Logical Empiricism (abstract) |
11:30 | Feyerabend's Well-Ordered Science: How an Anarchist Distributes Funds (abstract) |
11:00 | Are in-depth interviews a must for ethnography of HEP labs? (abstract) |
11:30 | Cognitive and epistemic features: a tool to identify technological knowledge (abstract) |
12:00 | Scientific communication in the problematic field of epistemology: inside and / or outside (in French) (abstract) |
11:00 | Evidential Relations in a Trading Zone (abstract) |
11:30 | Is biased information ever useful (in the philosophy of science)? (abstract) |
11:00 | Pluralism and relativism from the perspective of significance in epistemic practice (abstract) |
11:30 | The pluralist chemistry and the constructionist philosophy of science (abstract) |
11:00 | On Takeuti's view of the concept of set (abstract) |
11:00 | Combining Temporal and Epistemic Logic: A matter of points of view (abstract) |
11:30 | Modeling Belief Base Dynamics Using HYPE Semantics (abstract) |
12:00 | A formalism for resource-sensitive epistemic logic (abstract) |
11:00 | Definite truth (abstract) |
11:30 | A Three-Valued Pluralist Solution to the Sorites Paradox (abstract) |
12:00 | Language games and paradoxes of deontic logic(s) (abstract) |
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?
14:00 | Scenes from a Marriage: On the confrontation model of history and philosophy of science (abstract) |
14:30 | The problem of rule-choice redux (abstract) |
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/>.
14:00 | History and Epistemology of Climate Model Intercomparison Projects (abstract) |
14:30 | Fragmented authoritarian environmentalism, nationalism, ecological civilisation and climate change in China (abstract) |
14:00 | The interaction between diagrams and computers in the first proof of the Four-Color Theorem (abstract) |
14:30 | The Computational Effectiveness of Geometric Diagrams (abstract) |
14:00 | Counterfeit Chance (abstract) |
14:30 | A Defence of Pluralism of Causality (abstract) |
14:00 | Formal and Informal Logic in the Lvov-Warsaw School (abstract) |
14:00 | On the unifying character of dispositional realism (abstract) |
14:30 | Can categorical properties confer dispositions? (abstract) |
14:00 | Values in Science: Ethical vs. Political Approaches (abstract) |
14:30 | The Problem of Scientific-Epistemological Racism and the Contributions of Southern Global Epistemologies in the Construction of Paradigmatic Transformations of the Philosophy of Science (abstract) |
14:00 | The Increasing Power of Chomsky Hierarchy: A Case Study of Formal Language Theory Used in Cognitive Biology (abstract) |
14:30 | How early humans made the sciences possible (abstract) |
14:00 | An Explanatory View of Individuating Natural Kinds (abstract) |
14:30 | Risk factors, explanation and scientific understanding (abstract) |
14:00 | Mysterianism and the Division of Cognitive Labour (abstract) |
14:30 | An empirical challenge for Scientific Pluralism – Alternatives or Integration? (abstract) |
14:00 | Pegging Levels (abstract) |
14:30 | On Social Reality: Taking the Enterprise as an Example (abstract) |
14:00 | Chemical reactivity: Causality or reciprocal action? (abstract) |
14:30 | Realism About Molecular Structures (abstract) |
14:00 | Logical Approaches to Vagueness and Sorites Paradoxes (abstract) |
14:30 | Semantic paradoxes of underdetermination (abstract) |
15:15 | Truth, incoherence and the evolution of science (abstract) |
15:45 | The Science We Never Had (abstract) |
15:15 | Real Climate Possibilities: Proximate vs. Remote (abstract) |
15:45 | Bridging the gap between science and public through engineering environmental concepts (abstract) |
15:15 | On the relations between visual thinking and instrumental practice in mathematics (abstract) |
15:45 | Who discovered imaginaries? On the Historical Nature of Mathematical Discovery (abstract) |
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.
15:15 | Declarative and procedural knowledge: a recent mutation of the theory/practice duality and its significance in the era of computational science (abstract) |
15:45 | Interlocking Models validating Engineering Means-End knowledge (abstract) |
15:15 | Understanding scientific inquiry via agent-based modeling (abstract) |
15:15 | Can neuropsychoanalysis save the life of psychoanalysis? (abstract) |
15:45 | Problematic interdisciplinarity of the Cognitive Science (abstract) |
15:15 | Positivisation of Political Philosophy and Its Impact on The Whole Discipline (abstract) |
15:45 | The Competition of Interests in Public Scientific Knowledge Production------An Analysis of Chinese Case (abstract) |
15:15 | Count-as Conditionals, Background Conditions and Hierarchy of Constitutive Rules (abstract) |
15:15 | Intergenerational Justice Issues in Germline Genome Editing (abstract) |
15:45 | CANCELLED: How Should We Treat Human Enhancement Technology: Acceptance or Rejection? (abstract) |
15:15 | Pluralism About Criteria of Reality (abstract) |
15:45 | Why epistemic pluralism does not entail relativism (abstract) |
15:15 | From Subject natural logic to scientist logic in natural science: an epistemological reflexion (abstract) |
15:15 | A Bridge for Reasoning: logical consequence as normative (abstract) |
15:45 | Attack at Dawn if the Weather is Fine (abstract) |
15:15 | An Attempt to Highlight Ambiguities in Approaches to Resolve Chisholm Paradox (abstract) |
15:45 | Type Theory, Reducibility and Epistemic Paradoxes (abstract) |
16:45 | The philosophy and mathematical practice of Colin Maclaurin (abstract) |
17:15 | On continuity in Bolzano’s 1817 Rein analytischer Beweis (abstract) |
16:45 | Computational reliabilism: building trust in medical simulations (abstract) |
17:15 | Truth-values for technical norms and evaluative judgements: a comparative analysis (abstract) |
16:45 | Kuhn's wide-ranging influence on the social sciences, literary theory, and the politics of interpretation (abstract) |
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.
16:45 | Four Realist Theses of Mario Bunge (abstract) |
17:15 | Mario Bunge: A Pioneer of the New Philosophy of Science (abstract) |
16:45 | Optimal Team Structures in Science (abstract) |
17:15 | Mathematical Proving as Spatio-Temporal Activity of Multi-Agent Systems (abstract) |
16:45 | Sympletic Battlefronts. Phase Space Arguments for (and against) the Physics of Computation (abstract) |
17:15 | Digital determination and the search for common ground (abstract) |
16:45 | A discussion of bi-logic and Freud's representation theory in fromal logic (abstract) |
17:15 | Using Repertoire to Understand Psychotherapy (abstract) |
16:45 | CANCELLED: Metaphysical pluralism: between skepticism and trivialization? (abstract) |
17:15 | Scientific Perspectivism. Metaphysical Aspects (abstract) |
16:45 | Do Heuristics Exhaust the Methods of Discovery? (abstract) |
16:45 | If killing is forbidden, do I have to ensure that no one is killed? (abstract) |
17:15 | Fuzzy logic and quasi-legality (abstract) |
16:45 | Knowledge, Reasoning Time, and Moore’s Paradox (abstract) |
17:15 | Is the Liar Sentence Meaningless? (abstract) |
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.
18:00 | Negotiating History: Contingency, Canonicity, and Case Studies (18:00-19:00) (abstract) |
18:30 | CANCELLED: History and Philosophy of Science After the Practice-Turn: From Inherent Tension to Local Integration (19:00-19:30) (abstract) |
18:00 | Revising Logic: Anti-Exceptionalism and Circularity (abstract) |
18:30 | Independence and Metasemantics (abstract) |
18:00 | Top-down inhibitory experiments: the neglected option (abstract) |
18:30 | Sending Knowns into the Unknown: Towards an Account of Positive Controls in Experimentation (abstract) |
18:00 | Computational abstraction (abstract) |
18:00 | Quantifiers and Conceptual existence (abstract) |
18:30 | Mario Bunge and the Enlightenment Project in Science Education (abstract) |
18:00 | Are transparency and representativeness of values hampering scientific pluralism? (abstract) |
18:30 | Corporate Funding of Public Research: A Feyerabendian Perspective (abstract) |
19:00 | The role of TV series in the democratization of science (abstract) |
18:00 | Rethinking the given. Sellars on the first principles. (abstract) |
18:30 | The Problem of the Variable in Quine's Lingua Franca of the Sciences (abstract) |
18:00 | Natural Deduction Rules as Means of Knowing (abstract) |
18:00 | The Ontology of Mass and Energy in Special Relativistic Particle Dynamics (abstract) |
18:30 | Spacetime: Substantive or relational? (abstract) |
19:00 | Change, temporal anticipation, and relativistic spacetime (abstract) |
18:00 | Scientific ways of worldmaking. Considerations on philosophy of Biology from Goodman’s theory of worlds (abstract) |
18:30 | Objectivity as Mind-Independence – Integrating Scientific and Moral Realism (abstract) |
19:00 | Free Will and the Ability to Change Laws of Nature (abstract) |
18:00 | Justification of Basic Inferences and Normative Freedom (abstract) |
18:30 | Probabilistic Agent-Dependent Oughts (abstract) |
18:00 | Fuzzy Semantics for Graded Adjectives (abstract) |
18:30 | Formalizing the Sorites Paradox in Mathematical Fuzzy Logic (abstract) |
19:00 | Modal Quantifiers, Potential Infinity, and Yablo sequences (abstract) |
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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?
09:00 | On the possibility and meaning of truth in the historical sciences (abstract) |
09:30 | Origins (abstract) |
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.
09:00 | Varieties of permission for complex actions (abstract) |
09:30 | From Oughts to Goals (abstract) |
10:00 | Reciprocal Group Oughts (abstract) |
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.
09:00 | Popper and the Quantum Controversy (abstract) |
09:30 | Comment on “Popper and the Quantum Controversy” (abstract) |
10:00 | Popper on the mind-brain problem (abstract) |
Kateřina Trlifajová (Czech Technical University, Czechia)
09:00 | Defamiliarization in science fiction: new perspectives on scientific concepts (abstract) |
09:30 | Reducing Vagueness in Linguistic Expression (abstract) |
10:00 | The History of Science-related Museums: A Comparative and Cultural Study (abstract) |
09:00 | Robustness in configurational causal modelling (abstract) |
09:30 | Discontinuity and Robustness as Hallmarks of Emergence (abstract) |
10:00 | Levels of Being: An Egalitarian Ontology (abstract) |
09:00 | Machine learning: a new technoscience (abstract) |
09:30 | Can machine learning extend bureaucratic decisions? (abstract) |
10:00 | The Historical Basis for Algorithmic Transparency as Central to AI Ethics (abstract) |
09:00 | Scientific Laws and Closeness to the Truth (abstract) |
09:30 | Laws of Nature and Explanatory Circularity (abstract) |
09:00 | The problem of figurativeness in science: From communication to the articulation of scientific knowledge (abstract) |
09:30 | Media memory as the object of historical epistemology (abstract) |
10:00 | Knowledge production in social networks as the problem of communicative epistemology (abstract) |
09:00 | Measurable Epistemological Computational Distances in Medical Guidelines Peer Disagreement (abstract) |
09:00 | On the Infinite Gods paradox via representation in Classical Mechanics (abstract) |
09:30 | CANCELLED: Anthropocentrism in Science (abstract) |
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.
09:00 | Considering the factivity of non-explanatory understanding (abstract) |
09:30 | Understanding metabolic regulation: A case for the factivists (abstract) |
10:00 | Effectiveness, Exemplification, and Factivity (abstract) |
09:00 | Siebel's argument against Fitelson's measure of coherence reconsidered (abstract) |
09:30 | Frequency interpretation of conditions for the application of probability theory according to Kolmogorov (abstract) |
09:00 | The problem of causal inference in clinical psychoanalysis: a response to the charges of Adolf Grünbaum based on the inductive principles of the historical sciences. (abstract) |
09:30 | Explanation in Humanities (abstract) |
11:00 | Experiments in History and Archaeology: Building a Bridge to the Natural Sciences? (abstract) |
11:30 | Collingwood, the narrative turn, and the cookie cutter conception of historical knowledge (abstract) |
11:00 | Stit heuristics and the construction of justification stit logic (abstract) |
11:30 | CANCELLED: Ability and Knowledge (abstract) |
12:00 | Introducing Causality in Stit Logic (abstract) |
11:00 | Comment on “Popper on the Mind-Brain Problem” (abstract) |
11:30 | The rehabilitation of Karl Popper’s views of evolutionary biology and the agency of organisms (abstract) |
12:00 | Agency in Evolutionary Biology (abstract) |
11:00 | Modal notions and the counterfactual epistemology of modality (abstract) |
11:30 | Epistemology of Modality Without Metaphysics (abstract) |
11:00 | Philosophy in Science Teacher Education (abstract) |
11:00 | Non-Causal Explanations of Natural Phenomena and Naturalism (abstract) |
11:30 | The truth in understanding (abstract) |
11:00 | Idealizations and the decomposability of models in science (abstract) |
11:30 | Who is afraid of Model Pluralism? (abstract) |
11:00 | Duality and interaction: a common dynamics behind logic and natural language (abstract) |
11:30 | The practice of proving a theorem: from conversations to demonstrations (abstract) |
12:00 | An Attempt at Extending the Scope of Meaningfulness in Dummett's Theory of Meaning. (abstract) |
11:00 | Two types of unrealistic models: programatic and prospective (abstract) |
11:30 | A Dynamic Neo-Realism as an Active Epistemology for Science (abstract) |
11:00 | Expected Utility, Inductive Risk, and the Consequences of P-Hacking (abstract) |
11:30 | Multicausality and Manipulation in Medicine (abstract) |
11:00 | Scientific explanations and partial understanding (abstract) |
11:30 | Facticity of understanding in non-causal explanations (abstract) |
11:00 | Schematism of historical reality (abstract) |
11:30 | Philosophy (and methodology) of the Humanities: towards constructing a glossary (abstract) |
11:00 | Theory of Formalization: The Tractarian View (abstract) |
11:30 | The Semantic Foundations of Philosophical Analysis (abstract) |
12:00 | Łukasiewicz’s Concept of Anti-Psychologism (abstract) |
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.
14:00 | Bridging the Gap Between Proof Texts and Formal Proofs Using Frames and PRSs (abstract) |
14:30 | Perspectives on Proofs (abstract) |
14:00 | Constructive deliberation: pooling and stretching modalities (abstract) |
14:30 | Coalitional Logic on Non-interfering Actions (abstract) |
14:00 | Popper and Modern Cosmology: His Views and His Influence (abstract) |
14:30 | Comment on “Popper and Modern Cosmology” (abstract) |
14:00 | CANCELLED: Teaching Conceptual Change: Can Building Models Explain Conceptual Change in Science? (abstract) |
14:00 | Scale Separation, Scale Dependence, and Multiscale Modeling in the Physical Sciences (abstract) |
14:00 | Machine learning, theory choice, and non-epistemic values (abstract) |
14:30 | Taking a machine at its word: Applying epistemology of testimony to the evaluation of claims by artificial speakers (abstract) |
14:00 | Explanatory Conditionals (abstract) |
14:00 | Definition and Faculties of Life in Medieval Islamic Philosophy (abstract) |
14:30 | CANCELLED: Schrödinger's 'What Is Life?' 75 Years On (abstract) |
14:00 | The Topology of Intertheoretic Reduction (abstract) |
14:30 | Empirical Underdermination for Physical Theories in C* Algebraic Setting: Comments to an Arageorgis's Argument (abstract) |
14:00 | Thou Shalt not Nudge: Towards an Anti-Psychological State (abstract) |
14:30 | Utopias in the context of social technological inquiry (abstract) |
14:00 | A Roundabout Ticket to Pluralism (abstract) |
14:30 | A Practice-Oriented Logical Pluralism (abstract) |
14:00 | Reflections on the term “Philosophical logic” (abstract) |
14:30 | Abstract and concrete concepts: an approach to classification (abstract) |
15:15 | A structuralist framework for the automatic analysis of mathematical texts (abstract) |
15:45 | Entering the valley of formalism: Results from a large-scale quantitative investigation of mathematical publications (abstract) |
15:15 | Deliberation, Single-Peakedness and Voting Cycles (abstract) |
15:45 | Learning Probabilities: A Logic of Statistical Learning (abstract) |
15:15 | De Finetti meets Popper or Should Bayesians care about falsificationism? (abstract) |
15:45 | Comment on “De Finetti meets Popper” (abstract) |
15:15 | CANCELLED: Does Scientific Literacy Require a Theory of Truth? (abstract) |
15:45 | Impact of Teaching on Acceptance of Pseudo-Scientific Claims (abstract) |
15:15 | A plurality of methods in the philosophy of science: how is that possible? (abstract) |
15:15 | Liability Without Consciousness? The Case of a Robot (abstract) |
15:45 | Automated Reasoning with Complex Ethical Theories -- A Case Study Towards Responsible AI (abstract) |
15:15 | How virtue signalling makes us better: Moral preference of selection of types of autonomous vehicles. (abstract) |
15:45 | Prospect of NBICS Development and Application (abstract) |
15:15 | Theoretical Virtues in Eighteenth-Century Debates on Animal Cognition (abstract) |
15:45 | Bridging between biology and law: European GMO law as a case for applied philosophy of science (abstract) |
15:15 | Abductive Inference and Selection Principles (abstract) |
15:15 | Three Problems with the Identification of Philosophy with Conceptual Analysis (abstract) |
15:45 | Using norms to justify theories within definitions of scientific concepts (abstract) |
15:15 | A generalized omitting type theorem in mathematical fuzzy logic (abstract) |
15:45 | On ranks for families of theories of abelian groups (abstract) |
15:15 | How Should We Make Intelligible the Coexistence of the Different Logics? -An Attempt Based on a Modal Semantic Point of View (abstract) |
15:45 | On the elucidation of the concept of relative expressive power among logics (abstract) |
15:15 | Even logical truths are falsifiable. (abstract) |
15:45 | The Influence Of The Late School Of Alexandria On The Origin And Development Of Logic In The Muslim World (abstract) |
16:45 | Using linguistic corpora to understand mathematical explanation (abstract) |
17:15 | Studying Actions and Imperatives in Mathematical Texts (abstract) |
16:45 | Dynamic Term-Modal Logic (abstract) |
17:15 | A logical approach to Nash equilibria (abstract) |
16:45 | Karl R. Popper: Logical Writings (abstract) |
17:15 | Comment on "Karl R. Popper: Logical Writings" (abstract) |
16:45 | Science as Critical Discussion and Problem of Immunizations (abstract) |
17:15 | PHILOSOPHICAL AND DEMARCATION ASPECTS OF GLOBAL WARMING THEORY (abstract) |
16:45 | On the definitions of social science and why they matter (abstract) |
16:45 | Numbers as properties; dissolving Benacerraf’s Tension (abstract) |
17:15 | The development of epistemic objects in mathematical practice: Shaping the infinite realm driven by analogies from finite mathematics in the area of Combinatorics. (abstract) |
16:45 | Prerequisite for Employing Intelligent Machines as Human Surrogate (abstract) |
17:15 | Dr. Watson: The Impending Automation of Diagnosis and Treatment (abstract) |
16:45 | Time, causality and the transition from tree to network diagrams in the life sciences (abstract) |
17:15 | Evolving theories and scientific controversies: a carrier-trait approach (abstract) |
16:45 | Frames – A New Model for Analyzing Theories (abstract) |
17:15 | Abstraction in Scientific Modeling (abstract) |
16:45 | Intrinsic, extrinsic, and the constitutive a priori (abstract) |
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.
16:45 | On revision-theoretic semantics for special classes of circular definitions (abstract) |
17:15 | Common solutions to several paradoxes. What are they? When should they be expected? (abstract) |
16:45 | Online misinformation as a problem of embodied cognition (abstract) |
17:15 | The Role of Cognitive and Behavioral Research on Implicit Attitudes in Ethics (abstract) |
18:00 | Semiotic analysis of Dedekind’s arithmetical strategies (abstract) |
18:30 | Text-driven variation as a vehicle for generalisation, abstraction, proofs and refutations: an example about tilings and Escher within mathematical education. (abstract) |
18:00 | Interactive Turing-complete logic via game-theoretic semantics (abstract) |
18:30 | Rationality principles in pure coordination games (abstract) |
18:00 | Empirical Identity as an Indicator of Theory Choice (abstract) |
18:30 | Abandoning Models: When Non-Empirical Theory Assessment Ends (abstract) |
19:00 | Toward a Coevolutionary Model of Scientific Change (abstract) |
18:00 | A Phenomenological Analysis of Technological Innovations (abstract) |
18:30 | On Engineering Design. A Philosophical Inquiry (abstract) |
19:00 | The anthropic technological principle (abstract) |
18:00 | Modeling Biological Possibilities in Multiple Modalities (abstract) |
18:00 | Intuition, Intelligence, Data Compression (abstract) |
18:00 | How Pragmatism Can Prevent From the Abuses of Post-truth Champions (abstract) |
18:30 | Deference as Analytic Technique and Pragmatic Process (abstract) |
18:00 | Karl Popper, prehistoric technology and cognitive evolution (abstract) |
18:30 | CANCELLED: Peirce on the Logic of Science – Induction and Hypothesis (abstract) |
19:00 | What is an hypothesis? (abstract) |
18:00 | Incompleteness-based formal models for the epistemology of complex systems (abstract) |
18:30 | A Meta-Logical Framework for Philosophy of Science (abstract) |
19:00 | A formal axiomatic epistemology theory and the controversy between Otto Neurath and Karl Popper about philosophy of science (abstract) |
18:00 | Natural analogy: A Hessean Approach to Analogical Reasoning in Theorizing (abstract) |
18:00 | Rethinking the transformation of classical science in technoscience: ontological, epistemological and institutional shifts (abstract) |
Ends 19:00.
18:00 | What should a normative theory of argumentation look like? (abstract) |
18:30 | Issues at the intersection between metaphysics and biology (abstract) |
18:00 | How Can We Make Sense of the Relationship between Adaptive Thinking and Heuristic in Evolutionary Psychology? (abstract) |
18:30 | Music cognition and transposition heuristics: a peculiar case of mirror neurons (abstract) |
19:00 | What is constitutive for flavour experiences? (abstract) |
View this program: with abstractssession overviewtalk overview
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.
09:00 | Some recent applications of model theory (abstract) |
09:30 | Feasible syntax, feasible proofs, and feasible interpretations (abstract) |
10:00 | Towards a characterization of pseudo-finiteness (abstract) |
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.
09:00 | Bolzano, Kant and the Evolution of the Concept of Concept (abstract) |
09:30 | Bolzano’s theory of ground and consequence and the traditional theory of concepts (abstract) |
10:00 | Bolzano’s requirement of a correct ordering of concepts and its inheritance in modern axiomatics (abstract) |
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.
09:00 | Broad-Spectrum Conceptual Engineering (abstract) |
09:30 | Conceptual Engineering and Semantic Control (abstract) |
10:00 | On two kinds of conceptual engineering and their methodological counterparts (abstract) |
09:00 | Organizational Etiological Teleology: a Selected-Effect Approach to Biological Self-Regulation (abstract) |
09:30 | Organisms as Situated Models (abstract) |
10:00 | Fitness incommensurability and evolutionary transitions in individuality (abstract) |
09:00 | In Defense of Abstractions: Sofia Yanovskaya between Ideology and Cybernetics (abstract) |
09:30 | Lakatos’ philosophy of mathematics and „political ideologies” (abstract) |
09:00 | Pseudoscience within science? The case of economics (abstract) |
09:30 | External Validity and Field Experiments in Economics (abstract) |
10:00 | Economic sciences and their disciplinary links (abstract) |
09:00 | Scientific Metaphysics and the Manifest Image (abstract) |
09:30 | Underdetermination and Empirical Equivalence: The Standard Interpretation and Bohmian Mechanics (abstract) |
09:00 | Can Conventionalism safe the Identity of Indiscernibles? (abstract) |
09:30 | Spacetime and Fundamental parts (abstract) |
09:00 | Indiscernibility and rigidity in Banach spaces (abstract) |
09:00 | Explicating ‘Explication’ via Conceptual Spaces (abstract) |
09:30 | New versions of the mathematical explanation of the cicada case - ad hoc improvements with uncertain outcomes or the way to a full explanation? (abstract) |
10:00 | Explanation and ontology (abstract) |
09:00 | Deterministic and Indeterministic Situations (abstract) |
09:30 | How are mathematical structures determined (abstract) |
10:00 | Modelling Minimalism and Trivialism in the Philosophy of Mathematics Through a Notion of Conceptual Grounding (abstract) |
09:00 | Poincaré Read as a Pragmatist (abstract) |
09:30 | Three Ways to Understand the Inductive thoughts of Whewell (abstract) |
10:00 | The Nascency of Ludwik Fleck’s Polemics with Tadeusz Bilikiewicz (abstract) |
09:00 | Mutually inverse implication inherits from and improves on material implication (abstract) |
09:30 | Expansions of relevant logics with a dual intuitionistic type negation (abstract) |
10:00 | Basic quasi-Boolean expansions of relevant logics with a negation of intuitionistic kind (abstract) |
11:00 | Towards a model theory of symmetric probabilistic structures (abstract) |
11:30 | Accessible categories and model theory (abstract) |
12:00 | Tameness, compactness, and cocompleteness (abstract) |
11:00 | Did Bolzano Solve the Eighteenth Century Problem of Problematic Mathematical Entities? (abstract) |
11:30 | Bernard Bolzano and the part-whole principle for infinite collections (abstract) |
12:00 | On Bolzano’s early rejection of infinitesimals (abstract) |
11:00 | In Defense of a Contrastivist Approach to Evidence Statements (abstract) |
11:30 | Concepts and Replacement: What should the Carnapian model of conceptual re-engineering be? (abstract) |
12:00 | The Methodological Tradition of Explication (abstract) |
Organizers: Erich Reck and Georg Schiemer
While philosophers of mathematics usually focus on notions such as proof, theorem, concept, definition, calculation, and formalization, historians of mathematics have also used the notion of “style” to characterize the works of various mathematicians (from Euclid and Archimedes through Riemann, Brouwer, Noether, and Bourbaki to Mac Lane and Grothendieck). One question is, then, whether that notion should be seen as having significance from a philosophical point of view, and especially, for epistemological purposes. The notion of “style” is quite ambiguous, however, both in general and as applied to mathematics. In the present context, it is typically used in a sense close to “methodology” or “general approach”, i.e., a characteristic and distinctive way of investigating, organizing, and presenting mathematical ideas (geometric, algebraic, conceptual, computational, axiomatic, intuitive, etc.); but it has also been used in a personal/psychological sense (individual style), a sociological/political sense (e.g., national styles), a literary or more broadly aesthetic sense (writing style, stylish,), and as indicating a brand (an easily recognizable, influential, and visible style).
The seven talks in this session will explore this topic in a broad and multi-faceted way. They will investigate supposed differences in style within ancient and medieval mathematics (not just in ancient Greece but also China), early and late modern mathematics (into the 19th and 20th Centuries, e.g., Boole, Riemann, and Dedekind), and current mathematics (especially category theory, but more computational approaches too). A particular focus in several of the talks will be the “structuralist” style that has dominated much of mathematics since the second half of the 19th century. But “stylistic” issues concerning logic, on the one hand, and more popular presentations of mathematics, on the other, are also considered. In addition, several more general discussions of the notion of style in science, e.g., by Ludwig Fleck, G.-G. Granger, and Ian Hacking, are addressed and related to mathematics, as are questions about the dynamics of styles, i.e., the ways in which they get modified and transformed over time. Overall, it will become evident that the notion of “style” should, indeed, be seen as significant philosophically, but also as being in need of further disambiguation and sharpening.
11:00 | Dedekind, Number Theory, and Methodological Structuralism: A Matter of Style? (abstract) |
11:30 | Structuralism as a mathematical style: Klein, Hilbert, and 19th-Century Geometry (abstract) |
12:00 | Designing the structuralist style: Bourbaki, from Chevalley to Grothendieck (abstract) |
11:00 | The Shifting Semantics of Plant (Data) Science (abstract) |
11:00 | Do abstract economic models explain? (abstract) |
11:30 | Prediction markets and extrapolation (abstract) |
11:00 | The Reach of Socratic Scientific Realism: From axiology of science to axiology of exemplary inquiry (abstract) |
11:30 | An Attempt to Defend Scientific Realism (abstract) |
12:00 | Practical Realism and Metaphysics in Science (abstract) |
11:00 | Metaphysics and Physics of Consciousness as a problem of modern science (abstract) |
11:30 | Doing Without Structural Representations (abstract) |
11:00 | Intimate diary of an AIDS patient. An approximation to the "medical gaze" with Foucault and Guibert (abstract) |
11:30 | Food, identity and end of life (abstract) |
12:00 | Psychology, anthropology and delusions (abstract) |
11:00 | Simplicity in Abductive Inference (abstract) |
11:30 | Mathematical Depth and Explanation (abstract) |
12:00 | Non-causal Explanations in Quantitative Linguistics (abstract) |
11:00 | A Learning Theoretic Argument for Scientific Realsm (abstract) |
11:30 | Mutual Misunderstanding in Signalling Games (abstract) |
12:00 | A Constructivist Application of the Condorcet Jury Theorem (abstract) |
11:00 | Deductive Savages: The Oxford Noetics on Logic and Scientific Method (abstract) |
11:30 | Logical Empiricism in Exile. Hans Reichenbach's Research and Teaching Activities at Istanbul University (1933–1938) (abstract) |
12:00 | V.N. Ivanovsky's Conception of Science (abstract) |
11:00 | Abstract semantic conditions and the incompleteness of intuitionistic propositional logic with respect to proof-theoretic semantics (abstract) |
11:30 | First-degree entailment and structural reasoning (abstract) |
12:00 | The irrelevance of the axiom of Permutation (abstract) |
14:00 | Forking and categoricity in non-elementary model theory (abstract) |
14:00 | Bernard Bolzano’s 1804 Examination: Mathematics and Mathematical Teaching in Early 19th Century Bohemia (abstract) |
14:30 | Looking at Bolzano's mathematical manuscripts (abstract) |
14:00 | Conceptual Engineering in the Philosophy of Information (abstract) |
14:30 | The Common-Sense Notion of Truth as a Challenge for Conceptual Re-Engineering (abstract) |
14:00 | Granger's Philosophy of Style (abstract) |
14:30 | Comparing the geometric style and algebraic style of establishing equations in China, 11th-13th centuries (abstract) |
14:00 | The Inquiry Model of Medicine (abstract) |
Organizers: Giovanni Valente and Roberto Giuntini
SILFS (Società Italiana di Logica e Filosofia della Scienza) is the Italian national organization devoted to fostering research and teaching in the fields of logic, general philosophy of science and philosophy of the special sciences. It comprises a large number of academics working in such areas, who are based in Italy as well as in other countries. This symposium proposes to explore philosophical and methodological issues concerning the foundations of our best scientific theories, with the aim of bridging across the diverse research trends characterizing the Italian community of logicians and philosophers of science. Specifically, the symposium focuses on the formal status of successful theories developed in various fields of science, most notably the life-sciences, the mathematical sciences and the social sciences. For this purpose, it brings together experts on the logic and philosophy of medicine, physics, computation and socio-economics, so as to jointly investigate from different perspectives a host of inter-connected questions that arise when facing the outstanding problem of how to formalize scientific theories.
More to the point, we plan to deal with the following issues: (1) how to provide a formal treatment of empirical evidence in medical research; (2) how to elaborate a computational notion of trust that can be applied to socio-economical contexts; (3) how to construct a rigorous framework for the logic of physical theories, with particular focus on the transition from classical to quantum mechanics; (4) how to develop a mathematical foundation for the concept of reduction between different theoretical systems. By addressing such specific questions with a systematic and inter-disciplinary approach, the symposium wishes to advance our general understanding of the relation between theories and formalization.
14:00 | A game-theoretic approach to evidence standards in Medicine (abstract) |
14:30 | How to Build a Computational Notion of Trust (abstract) |
14:00 | Carnap on the Reality of Atoms (abstract) |
14:30 | Functional Ontologies and Realism: The Case of Nuclear Physics (abstract) |
14:00 | Some philosophical remarks on the concept of structure. Case of Ladyman’s and Heller’s view (abstract) |
14:30 | Regarding minimal structural essentialism in philosophy of spacetime (abstract) |
Organizer: Charles Sebens
One of the primary tasks of philosophers of physics is to determine what our best physical theories tell us about the nature of reality. Our best theories of particle physics are quantum field theories. Are these theories of particles, fields, or both? In this colloquium we will debate this question in the context of quantum field theory and in an earlier and closely related context: classical electromagnetism. We believe that the contemporary debate between particle and field interpretations of quantum field theory should be informed by a close analysis of classical electromagnetism and seek to demonstrate the fruitfulness of such a dialogue in this session.
Our first speaker will start the session by discussing the debate between Einstein and Ritz in the early 20th century over whether classical electromagnetism should be formulated as theory of particles interacting directly with one another or interacting via fields. They will discuss the technical challenges facing each approach as well as the role that philosophical and methodological presuppositions play in deciding which approach is to be preferred.
Our second speaker will defend a dual ontology of particles and fields in classical electromagnetism. They argue that the singularities which arise in the standard Maxwell-Lorentz formulation of electromagnetism are unacceptable. However, the standard equations of electromagnetism can be modified (as is done in the Born-Infeld and Bopp-Podolsky formulations).
Our third speaker will recount the problems of self-interaction that arise for a dual ontology of particles and fields in the context of classical electromagnetism and defend point particle ontology. They will go on to argue that attempts to formulate quantum field theory as a theory of fields have failed. They believe that it too should be interpreted as a theory of particles.
Our final speaker will defend a pure field ontology for quantum field theory. They will argue that quantum theories where the photon is treated as a particle are unacceptable. On the other hand, treating the electron as a field yields significant improvements over the ordinary particle interpretation.
14:00 | Particles, fields, or both? A reevaluation of the Ritz-Einstein debate (abstract) |
14:30 | Good Singularities, Bad Singularities (abstract) |
14:00 | On Explanation and Unification (abstract) |
14:30 | CANCELLED: Equilibrium theory and scientific explanation (abstract) |
14:00 | Some formal and informal misunderstandings of Gödel's incompleteness theorems (abstract) |
14:30 | Constructing illoyal algebra-valued models of set theory (abstract) |
14:00 | Integrating HPS: What’s in it for a Philosopher of Science? (abstract) |
14:00 | A Naturalized Globally Convergent Solution to the Problem of Induction (abstract) |
14:30 | Meta-Inductive Prediction based on Attractivity Weighting: Mathematical and Empirical Performance Evaluation (abstract) |
15:15 | Thin Objects and Dynamic Abstraction versus Possible Structures (abstract) |
15:45 | Extensionalist explanation and solution of Russell’s Paradox (abstract) |
15:15 | Bolzano's real numbers: sets or sums? (abstract) |
15:45 | On the several kinds of number in Bolzano (abstract) |
15:15 | Varieties of conceptual change: the evolution of color concepts (abstract) |
15:45 | The Semantic Account of Slurs, Appropriation, and Metalinguistic Negotiations (abstract) |
15:15 | "Cultured people who have not a technical mathematical training": audience, style, and mathematics in The Monist (1890–1917) (abstract) |
15:45 | On the "mechanical" style in 19th-century logic (abstract) |
15:15 | Decolonising Scientific Knowledge: Morality, Politics and a New Logic (abstract) |
15:15 | Stability of traits as the kind of stability that matters among holobionts (abstract) |
15:45 | "Taxonomic freedom" and referential practice in biological taxonomy (abstract) |
15:15 | Is semantic structuralism necessarily "set-theoretical" structuralism? A case of ontic structural realism. (abstract) |
15:45 | Scientific realism and the reality of properties (abstract) |
15:15 | Structural Modality as the Criterion for Naturalistic Involvement in Scientific Metaphysics (abstract) |
15:45 | Econometric modeling falsifies structural realism (abstract) |
15:15 | Why field theories are not theories of fields (abstract) |
15:45 | The Fundamentality of Fields (abstract) |
15:15 | Realism and Representation in Model-Based Explanation (abstract) |
15:45 | Is the No-miracles argument an Inference to the Best Explanation? (abstract) |
15:15 | Rigidity and Necessity: The Case of Theoretical Identifications (abstract) |
15:45 | The axiomatic approach to genidentity according to Z. Augustynek (abstract) |
15:15 | Integrated HPS? Formal versus Historical Approaches to Philosophy of Science (abstract) |
15:45 | A Philosophy of Historiography of the Earth. Metaphor and analogies of “natural body” (abstract) |
15:15 | Formalisation and Proof-theoretic Reductions (abstract) |
15:45 | The generalized orthomodularity property: configurations, pastings and completions (abstract) |
16:45 | Scientific Freedom and Scientific Responsibility (abstract) |
View this program: with abstractssession overviewtalk overview
09:00 | Can set-theoretic mereology serve as a foundation of mathematics? (abstract) |
Organizer: Hanne Andersen
Previous ERC panel member Atocha Aliseda will present her experiences from serving on the panel and on this basis provide advice to future applicants.
Grant recipients Tarja Knuuttila and Barbara Osimani will participate in the session and will answer questions from the audience on her experiences as applicant and reciptient.
Organizers: Lorenzo Galeotti and Philipp Lücke
The study of sets of real numbers and their structural properties is one of the central topics of contemporary set theory and the focus of the set-theoretic disciplines of descriptive set theory and set theory of the reals. The Baire space consists of all functions from the set of natural numbers to itself. Since this space is Borel-isomorphic to the real line and has a very accessible structure, it is one of the main tools of descriptive set theory. Because a great variety of mathematical objects can be canonically represented as subsets of Baire space, techniques from descriptive set theory and set theory of the reals can be applied throughout mathematics. These applications are limited to the study of objects of cardinality at most the size of the continuum. Therefore, the question whether similar methods can be applied in the analysis of larger objects arose naturally in several areas of mathematics and led to a strongly increasing interest in the study of higher Baire spaces, i.e., higher analogues of Baire space which consist of all functions from a given uncountable cardinal to itself.
In the recent years, an active and steadily growing community of researches has initiated the development of higher analogues of descriptive set theory and set theory of the reals for higher Baire spaces, turning this area of research into one of the hot topics of set theory. Results in this area provide a rich and independent theory that differs significantly from the classical setting and gives new insight into the nature of higher cardinals. The proofs of these results combine concepts and techniques from different areas of set theory: combinatorics, forcing, large cardinals, inner models and classical descriptive set theory. Moreover, they also use methods from other branches of mathematical logic, like model theory and the study of strong logics. In the other direction, these results have been applied to problems in other fields of mathematical logic and pure mathematics, like the classification of non-separable topological spaces, the study of large cardinals and Shelah's classification theory in model theory.
These developments have been strongly supported by regular meetings of the research community. The community met first at the Amsterdam Set Theory Workshop in 2014, then at a satellite workshop to the German mathematics congress in Hamburg in 2015, at a workshop at the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in Bonn in 2016, and at the KNAW Academy Colloquium in Amsterdam in 2018.
The increased significance of the study of higher Baire spaces has been reflected through these meetings by both strongly growing numbers of attendees and a steadily increasing percentage of participants from other fields of set theory. The Symposium on higher Baire spaces will provide the opportunity to reunite this community a year after the last meeting.
11:00 | The Open Dihypergraph Dichotomy for Definable Subsets of Generalized Baire Spaces (abstract) |
11:30 | The indestructibility of the tree property (abstract) |
12:00 | Easton's function and the tree property below $\aleph_\omega$ (abstract) |
Organizers: Sara Negri and Peter Schuster
Glivenko’s theorem from 1929 says that if a propositional formula is provable in classical logic, then its double negation is provable within intutionistic logic. Soon after, Gödel extended this to predicate logic, which requires the double negation shift. As is well-known, with the Gödel-Gentzen negative translation in place of double negation one can even get by with minimal logic. Several related proof translations saw the light of the day, such as Kolmogorov’s and Kuroda’s.
Glivenko’s theorem thus stood right at the beginning of a fundamental change of perspective: that classical logic can be embedded into intuitionistic or minimal logic, rather than the latter being a diluted version of the former. Together with the revision of Hilbert Programme ascribed to Kreisel and Feferman, this has led to the quest for the computational content of classical proofs, today culminating in agile areas such as proof analysis, dynamical algebra, program extraction from proofs and proof mining. The considerable success of these approaches suggests that classical mathematics will eventually prove much more constructive than widely thought still today.
Important threads of current research include the following:
1. Exploring the limits of Barr’s theorem about geometric logic
2. Program extraction in abstract structures characterised by axioms
3. Constructive content of classical proofs with Zorn’s Lemma
4. The algorithmic meaning of programs extracted from proofs
11:00 | On the historical relevance of Glivenko's translation from classical into intuitionistic logic: is it conservative and contextual? (abstract) |
11:30 | A simple proof of Barr’s theorem for infinitary geometric logic (abstract) |
12:00 | Proof theory of infinite geometric theories (abstract) |
Organizers: María Del Rosario Martínez Ordaz and Otávio Bueno
In their day-to-day practice, scientists make constant use of defective (false, imprecise, conflicting, incomplete, inconsistent etc.) information. The philosophical explanations of the toleration of defective information in the sciences are extremely varied, making philosophers struggle at identifying a single correct approach to this phenomenon. Given that, we adopt a pluralist perspective on this issue in order to achieve a broader understanding of the different roles that defective information plays (and could play) in the sciences.
This symposium is devoted to exploring the connections between scientific pluralism and the handling of inconsistent as well as other types of defective information in the sciences. The main objectives of this symposium are (a) to discuss the different ways in which defective information could be tolerated (or handled) in the different sciences (formal, empirical, social, health sciences, etc. ) as well as (b) to analyze the different methodological tools that could be used to explain and handle such type of information.
The symposium is divided into two parts: the first tackles the issue of inconsistency and scientific pluralism. This part includes discussions of the possible connections between the different ways in which scientist tolerate contradictions in the sciences and particular kinds of scientific pluralism. This analysis is extremely interesting in itself as the phenomenon of inconsistency toleration in the science has often been linked to the development of a plurality of formal approaches, but not necessarily to logical or scientific pluralism. In fact, scientific pluralism is independent of inconsistency toleration.
The second part of the symposium is concerned with a pluralistic view on contradictions and other defects. This part is devoted to explore under which circumstances (if any) it is possible to use the same mechanisms for tolerating inconsistencies and for dealing with other types of defective information. This part includes reflections on the scope of different formal methodologies for handling defectiveness in the sciences as well as considerations on scientific communicative practices and their connections with the use of defective information and reflections on the different epistemic commitments that scientists have towards defective information.
11:00 | Inconsistency and belief revision in cases of approximative reduction and idealization (abstract) |
11:30 | Logic-based ontologies in the biomedical domain: From defects to explicit contradictions (abstract) |
12:00 | Lewis, Stalnaker and the Problem of Assertion & Defective Information in the Sciences (abstract) |
Reasoning in social context has many important aspects, one of which is the reasoning about strategic abilities of individuals (agents) and groups (coalitions) of individuals to guarantee the achievement of their desired objectiveswhile acting within the entire society. Various logical systems have been proposed for formalising and capturing such reasoning, starting with Coalition Logic (CL) and some extensions of it, introduced the early 2000s.
Coalition Logic provides a natural, but rather restricted perspective: the agents in the proponent coalition are viewed as acting in full cooperation with each other but in complete opposition to all agents outside of the coalition,which are treated as adversaries.
The strategic interaction in real societies is much more complex, usually involving various patterns combining cooperation and competition. To capture these, more expressive and refined logical frameworks are needed.
In this talk I will first present briefly Coalition Logic and then will introduce and discuss some more expressive and versatile logical systems, including:
i. the Socially Friendly Coalition Logic (SFCL), enabling formal reasoning about strategic abilities of individuals and groups to ensure achievement of their private goals while allowing for cooperation with the entire society;
ii. the complementary, Group Protecting Coalition Logic (GPCL), capturing reasoning about strategic abilities of the entire society to cooperate in order to ensure achievement of the societal goals, while simultaneously protectingthe abilities of individuals and groups within the society to achieve their individual and group goals.
Finally, I will take a more general perspective leading towards a unifying logic-based framework for strategic reasoning in social context, and will associate it with the related concepts of mechanism design (in game theory)and rational synthesis (in computer science).
11:00 | Logic-based strategic reasoning in social context (abstract) |
11:00 | Is There a Hard Problem for the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness? (abstract) |
11:30 | What is "biological" about biologically-inspired computational models in cognitive science? Implications for the multiple realisation debate (abstract) |
12:00 | Turing Redux: An Enculturation Account of Calculation and Computation (abstract) |
11:00 | Inductive Method, or the Experimental Philosophy of the Royal Society (abstract) |
11:30 | Bilancie giuste a posta per chiarire questa verità. The importance of instrument in Guidobaldo dal Monte’s Le mechaniche (abstract) |
11:00 | Laws, Causation and Explanations in Classical Genetics: A Model-theoretic Account (abstract) |
11:30 | Category Theory as a Formal Language of the Mechanistic Philosophy (abstract) |
12:00 | What is the explanatory role of the structure-function relationship in immunology? (abstract) |
11:00 | Dispositions and Causal Bayes Nets (abstract) |
11:30 | Modeling Creative Abduction Bayes Net Style (abstract) |
11:00 | Differences of discourse understanding between human and software agents (abstract) |
11:30 | Logic as metaphilosophy? Remarks on the mutual relations of logic and philosophy (abstract) |
12:00 | Hypercomputing Minds: New Numerical Evidence (abstract) |
11:00 | Mechanistic Explanations and Components of Social Mechanisms (abstract) |
11:30 | Against Reductionism: Naturalistic methods in pragmatic cognitive sociology (abstract) |
11:00 | CANCELLED: Higher-order identity in the necessitism-contingentism debate in higher-order modal logic (abstract) |
11:30 | Model Existence in Modal Logics (abstract) |
11:00 | Frege semantics or why can we talk about deflation of false? (abstract) |
11:30 | Are logical expressions ambiguous and why? (abstract) |
12:00 | New Thoughts on Compositionality. Contrastive Approaches to Meaning: Fine’s Semantic Relationism vs. Tarski-Style Semantics (abstract) |
I use Einstein’s theory of relativity to draw out some lessons about the defining features of an objective description of
reality. I argue, in particular, against the idea that an objective description can be a description from the point of view of no-one in
particular.
14:00 | How to describe reality objectively: lessons from Einstein (abstract) |
14:00 | Definable bistationary sets (abstract) |
14:00 | Ecumenism: a new perspective on the relation between logics (abstract) |
14:30 | Modal Negative Translations as a Case Study in The Big Programme (abstract) |
14:00 | Mutually inconsistent set theoretic-universes: An analysis of universist and multiversist strategies (abstract) |
14:30 | Informal Rigorous Mathematics and its Logic (abstract) |
14:00 | Asymmetries in interdisciplinarity (abstract) |
14:30 | How scientists are brought back into science – The error of empiricism (abstract) |
Organizers: Hitoshi Omori and Heinrich Wansing
Modern connexive logic started in the 1960s with seminal papers by Richard B. Angell and Storrs McCall. Connexive logics are orthogonal to classical logic insofar as they validate certain non-theorems of classical logic, namely
Aristotle's Theses: ~(~A-> A), ~(A-> ~A)
Boethius' Theses: A-> B)-> ~(A-> ~B), (A-> ~B)-> ~(A-> B)
Systems of connexive logic have been motivated by considerations on a content connection between the antecedent and succedent of valid implications and by applications that range from Aristotle's syllogistic to Categorial Grammar and the study of causal implications. Surveys of connexive logic can be found in:
*Storrs McCall, "A History of Connexivity", in D.M. Gabbay et al. (eds.), Handbook of the History of Logic. Volume 11. Logic: A History of its Central Concepts, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2012, pp. 415-449.
*Heinrich Wansing, "Connexive Logic", in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition).
There is also a special issue on connexive logics in the IfCoLog Journal of Logics and their Applications. The entire issue is available at: http://collegepublications.co.uk/ifcolog/?00007
As we are observing some growing interests in topics related to connexive logics, collecting attention from researchers working on different areas within philosophical logic, the symposium aims at discussing directions for future research in connexive logics. More specifically, we will have talks related to modal logic, many-valued logic, probabilistic logic, relevant (or relevance) logic and conditional logic, among others. There will also be some connections to experimental philosophy and philosophy of logic.
14:00 | Are connexive principles coherent? (abstract) |
14:30 | Variable sharing principles in connexive logic (abstract) |
14:00 | Margaret Cavendish on corporeal qualities (abstract) |
14:30 | Theory of Impetus and its Significance to the Development of Late Medieval Notions of Place (abstract) |
14:00 | Rethinking Cybernetics in Philosophy of Biology (abstract) |
14:00 | Bridging Across Philosophy of Science and Scientometrics: Towards an Epistemological Theory of Citations (abstract) |
14:30 | CANCELLED: Why the behavioural turn in policy takes behavioural science wrong and what it means for its policy relevance (abstract) |
14:00 | On how Descartes changed the meaning of the Phytagorean theorem (abstract) |
14:30 | Are Points (Necessarily) Unextended? (abstract) |
14:00 | On Howson’s Bayesian approach to the old evidence problem (abstract) |
14:30 | On a structuralist view of theory change:study of some semantic properties in formal model of belief revision (abstract) |
14:00 | A bimodal logic of change with Leibnizian hypothetical necessity (abstract) |
14:00 | Leśniewski, Lambda, and the Problem of Defining Operators (abstract) |
14:30 | Intensionality, Reference, and Strategic Inference (abstract) |
Organizer: Paula Quinon
The HaPoC symposium "Philosophy of Big Data" is submitted on behalf of the DLMPST, History and Philosophy of Computing division
The symposium devoted to a discussion of philosophical problems related to Big Data, an increasingly important topic within philosophy of computing. Big Data are worth studying from an academic perspective for several reasons. First of all, ontological questions are central: what Big Data are, whether we can speak of them as separate ontological entity, and what their mereological status is. Second, epistemological ones: what kind of knowledge do they induce, and what methods do they require for accessing valuable information.
These general questions have also very specific counterparts raising series of methodological questions. Should data accumulation and analysis follow the same general patterns for all Sciences, or should those be relativized to particular domains? For instance, shall medical doctors and businessmen focus on the same issues related to gathering of information? Is the quality of information similarly important in all the contexts? Can one community be inspired by experience of another? To which extent human factors influence information that we issue from Big Data?
In addition to these theoretical academic issues, Big Data represents also a social phenomenon. “Big Data” is nowadays a fancy business buzzword, which - together with "AI" and "Machine Learning" – shapes business projects and the R&D job market, with data analysts among the most attractive job titles. It is believed that "Big Data" analysis opens up unknown opportunities and generates additional profits. However, it is not clear what counts as Big Data in the industry and critical reflection about it seems necessary.
The proposed symposium gathers philosophers, scientists and experts in commercial Big Data analysis to reflect on these questions. We believe that the possibility to exchange ideas, methodologies and experiences gathered from different perspectives and with divergent objectives, will enrich not only academic philosophical reflection, but will also prove useful for practical - scientific or business - applications.
15:15 | On the epistemology of data science – the rise of a new inductivism (abstract) |
15:45 | Finding a Way Back: Philosophy of Data Science on Its Practice (abstract) |
15:15 | Can we add kappa-dominating reals without adding kappa-Cohen reals? (abstract) |
15:45 | Higher Metrisability in Higher Descriptive Set Theory (abstract) |
15:15 | On the constructive content of proofs in abstract analysis (abstract) |
15:45 | Program Optimisation through Proof Transformation (abstract) |
15:15 | Handling of defectiveness in a content-guided manner (abstract) |
15:45 | CANCELLED: Chunk and Permeate: Reasoning faute de mieux (abstract) |
15:15 | Connexivity and Conditional Logic (abstract) |
15:45 | Towards a bridge over two approaches in connexive logic (abstract) |
Organizers: Gisela Boeck and Benedikt Loewe
The year 2019 is the International Year of the Periodic Table (IYPT), celebrating the 150th anniversary of its year of discovery, and the International Union for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST) is one of the supporting institutions of IYPT.
With this event at CLMPST 2019, we aim to offer all participants of the congress, independent of whether they are working in philosophy of chemistry or not, an insight into the relevance and important of the Periodic Table. The event consists of talks for a general academic audience, with a non-technical historical introduction by Hasok Chang, two personal reflections by current or recent graduate students in philosophy of chemistry, and a local point of view by a expert from Prague. The session will be chaired by Gisela Boeck.
15:15 | Why should philosophers care about the periodic table? (abstract) |
15:45 | Mendeleev’s dedicated supporter and friend. The Czech chemist Bohuslav Brauner and the worldwide reception of the periodic system (abstract) |
15:15 | Does research with deep neural networks provide a new insight to the aim of science debate? (abstract) |
15:45 | Process, not just product: the case of network motifs analysis (abstract) |
15:15 | Multi-modal Mu-calculus with Postfix Modal Operator Abstracting Actions (abstract) |
15:45 | Dialogical justication logic. A basic approach (abstract) |
Organizer: Mateusz Łełyk
The aim of our symposium is twofold. Firstly, we provide a unified approach to a number of contemporary logico-philosophical results and propose to see them as being about the commitments of various prominent foundational theories. Secondly, we give an overview of formal results obtained over the past few years which shed new light on commitments of both arithmetical theories and theories of sets.
The rough intuition is that commitments of a theory are all the restrictions on the ways the world might be, which are imposed on us given that we accept all the basic principles of the theory. For clarification, during the symposium we focus on the following two types of commitments of a given foundational theory Th:
1. Epistemic commitments are all the statements in the language of Th (or possibly, in the language of Th extended with the truth predicate) that we should accept given that we accept Th.
2. Semantic commitments are all the restrictions on the class of possible interpretations of Th generated by the acceptance of a theory of truth over Th.
In the context of epistemic commitments, several authors have claimed that a proper characterisation of a set of commitments of Th should take the form of an appropriate theory of truth built over Th (see, for example, [Feferman 91], [Ketland 2005] and [Nicolai,Piazza 18]). During the symposium we give an overview of the latest results concerning the Tarski Boundary - the line demarcating the truth theories which generate new implicit commitments of Peano Arithmetic (PA) from the ones which do not. Moreover, we investigate the role of a special kind of reducibility, feasible reducibility, in this context and prove some prominent theories of compositional truth to be feasibly reducible to their base theories.
A different approach to characterize the epistemic commitments of a foundational theory Th was given in [Cieśliński 2017]. Its basic philosophical motivation is to determine the scope of implicit commitments via an epistemic notion of believability. One of the symposium talks will be devoted to presenting this framework.
While investigating the epistemic commitments of Th, we look at the consequences of truth theories in the base truth-free language. Within this approach, a truth theory Th_1 is at least as committing as Th_2 if Th_1 proves all the theorems of Th_2 in the base language. In the semantic approach, one tries to understand every possible condition which truth theories impose on the class of models of Th, instead of looking only at the conditions which are expressible in the base language. A theory Th_1 is at least as semantically committing as Th_2 if for every condition which Th_2 can impose on models of PA, the same condition is imposed already by Th_1. During the symposium we present and compare the latest formal results concerning the semantical commitments of various truth theories extending two of the most distinguished foundational theories: PA and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF). During the talks we discuss the philosophical meaning of these developments.
References:
[Cieśliński 2017] The Epistemic Lightness of Truth, Cambridge University Press.
[Feferman 1991] Reflecting on Incompleteness, Journal of Symbolic Logic, 56(1), 1-49.
[Ketland 2005] Deflationism and the Godel Phenomena: reply to Tennant, Mind, 114(453), 75-88.
[Nicolai, Piazza 2018] The Implicit Commitments of Arithmetical Theories and its Semantic Core, Erkenntins.
15:15 | Commitments of foundational theories: Introduction (abstract) |
15:45 | The contour of the Tarski Boundary (abstract) |
15:15 | Tool-driven science (abstract) |
15:45 | Technoscience and Philoscience (abstract) |
15:15 | Generalized Interpretability and Conceptual Reduction of Theories (abstract) |
15:45 | The Tarski equipollence of axiom systems (abstract) |
15:15 | A Notion of Semantic Uniqueness for Logical Constants (abstract) |
15:45 | Clasical Logic and Schizophrenia: for A Neutral Game Semantics (abstract) |
16:45 | Semantic interoperability: The oldest challenge and newest frontier of Big Data (abstract) |
17:15 | Big Data in Life Sciences (abstract) |
17:45 | Philosophizing on Big Data, Data Science, and AI (abstract) |
16:45 | Ideals, idealization, and a hybrid concept of entailment relation (abstract) |
17:15 | The Jacobson Radical and Glivenko's Theorem (abstract) |
16:45 | Disturbing Truth (abstract) |
17:15 | Quasi-truth and defective situations in science (abstract) |
17:45 | Making Sense of Defective Information: Partiality and Big Data in Astrophysics (abstract) |
16:45 | On the Significance of Argumentation in Discovery Proof-Events (abstract) |
17:15 | Problem Reduction as a general epistemic reasoning method (abstract) |
Ends 17:45 now.
16:45 | Tableaux procedures for logics of consequential implication (abstract) |
16:45 | Understanding the chemical element: a reflection on the importance of the periodic table (abstract) |
17:15 | Values in Science and Early Periodic Tables (abstract) |
16:45 | Parity claims in biology and a dilemma for informational parity (abstract) |
16:45 | Feasible reducibility and interpretability of truth theories (abstract) |
17:15 | Models of Truth Theories (abstract) |
17:45 | Some semantic properties of typed axiomatic truth theories built over theory of sets (abstract) |
16:45 | Learning Subjunctive Conditional Information (abstract) |
17:15 | On the complexity of formulas in semantic programming (abstract) |
17:45 | Hyperintensions as abstract procedures (abstract) |
16:45 | A theorem of ordinary mathematics equivalent to $\mathsf{ADS}$ (abstract) |
17:15 | A non-trivial extension for Ms (abstract) |
16:45 | DSTIT modalities through labelled sequent calculus (abstract) |
17:15 | Counterfactuals and Reasoning about Action (abstract) |
17:45 | Logic of Scales (abstract) |
16:45 | What is it Like to Be First Order? Lessons from Compositionality, Teams and Games (abstract) |
17:15 | Analysis of Incorrect Proofs (abstract) |
Place: Plzenska restaurant – Municipal House, náměstí Republiky 5, 110 00 Prague 1
The congress dinner will be served at the Plzenska restaurant located in the basement of the Municipal House in the historical centre of Prague. Art Nouveau Plzenska restaurant is a place which mingles traditional Czech cuisine with an unique interiror from the early twenties (opened in 1912). The interior was decorated by the best Czech painters and artists of the time.
The price includes three courses menu and accompanying wine, beer and soft drinks.
View this program: with abstractssession overviewtalk overview
Organizers: Giuseppe Primiero and Nicola Angius
Defining identity between two objects is a fundamental problem in several philosophical disciplines, from logic to language and formal ontology. Since Frege, identity has been addressed in terms of formal constraints on definitional criteria which vary depending on context, application and aims. This symposium collects and compares current approaches to identity for computational systems in formal and applied contexts. Problems of interest include: definitional identity in arithmetics, intensional identity for proofs, the definition of replicas and the
study of preservation of second-order properties for copied computational artefacts, and the identity over time of formally defined social institutions. All these contexts offer problematic interpretations and interesting questions for the notion of identity.
Arithmetics offers a precise formal interpretation of logical identity, but higher types display a tension between extensionality and equivalent term evaluation of identical functions: if the latter is accepted, then functions are co-definable but irreducible.
In proof-theoretical semantics a sentence is identified by the set of all its proofs with a common inferential structure. Accounting for intensional aspects of these objects means to uphold their identity, while investigating common meta-theoretical properties like harmony and stability.
From formal to implemented objects, the problem of identity resurfaces for computational artefacts. For these objects, by definition subject to replication, the notion of copy has started receiving formal treatment in the literature, while the notion of replica can be further analysed with respect to existing approaches for technical artefacts. Moreover, the problem of preservation of behavioural properties like safety and reliability is crucial.
Finally, these problems extend to applications in social ontology. In particular, identity criteria are at the basis of an ontological analysis of the persistence of organisations through time and changes, a problem which can be formulated both theoretically and formally.
The problem of defining formal identity criteria for natural and technical objects traces back to ancient philosophy and it characterises modern and contemporary analytic ontology from Leibniz to Frege. This symposium collects contemporary analyses of the logical accounts of identity in formal and applied contexts.
This symposium is submitted on behalf of the Commission for the History and Philosophy of Computing, Member of the DLMPST.
09:00 | Definitional identity in arithmetic (abstract) |
09:30 | Harmony, stability, and the intensional account of proof-theoretic semantics (abstract) |
Organizers: Ilya Kasavin, Alexandre Antonovskiy, Liana Tukhvatulina, Anton Dolmatov, Eugenia Samostienko, Svetlana Shibarshina, Elena Chebotareva and Lada Shipovalova
The topic of the special symposium is inspired by Max Weber’s lecture on “Science as a Vocation” [Wissenschaft als Beruf], which will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of its publication in 2019. The ambivalence of the German term Beruf [occupation, job, vocation] plays a crucial role in Weber’s text, making it possible, on the one hand, to view science as a highly specialized activity, and on the other hand, to uncover its openness, its communicative nature, and its ethical dimension. In particular, the essay’s focus on the communicative dimension of science, and its relation to ideas of social progress, brings to light the significance of human meaning and practice in the conduct of science, but also the reliability of scientific knowledge and its perceived status in society. Weber’s lecture clearly remains relevant today, since it interrogates the possibility of history and philosophy of science to be both a specialized and an open project, designed to bridge the disciplinary gaps between various approaches to study science. More broadly, his essay thus presents a timely attempt to address the problem of integrating different academic cultures: philosophy and the sciences; ethics and methodology.
The call for epistemic openness should be complemented by a renewed methodological focus, including an emphasis on detailed historical and sociological research, and the development of educational practices that foster the creation of new “trading zones” (Peter Galison), in which cross-disciplinary discussions of science, technology and human values can take place. With our call, we thus invite scholars to re-engage Weber’s text, from the perspective of 21st century Science and Technology Studies (STS), to help forge new forms of interdisciplinary interaction and expertise.
09:00 | The Scientist’s Dilemma: After Weber (abstract) |
09:30 | Scientists’ social responsibilities in the context of science communication (abstract) |
10:00 | Scientist as an Expert: Breaking the Ivory Tower (abstract) |
Organizer: Mate Szabo
This project investigates the interplay between informal mathematical theories and their formalization, and argues that this dynamism generates three different forms of understanding:
1. Different kinds of formalizations fix the boundaries and conceptual dependences between concepts in different ways, thus contributing to our understanding of the content of an informal mathematical theory. We argue that this form of understanding of an informal theory is achieved by recasting it as a formal theory, i.e. by transforming its expressive means.
2. Once a formal theory is available, it becomes an object of understanding. An essential contribution to this understanding is made by our recognition of the theory in question as a formalization of a particular corpus of informal mathematics. This form of understanding will be clarified by studying both singular intended models, and classes of models that reveal the underlying conceptual commonalities between objects in different areas of mathematics.
3. The third level concerns how the study of different formalizations of the same area of mathematics can lead to a transformation of the content of those areas, and a change in the geography of informal mathematics itself.
In investigating these forms of mathematical understanding, the project will draw on philosophical and logical analyses of case studies from the history of mathematical practice, in order to construct a compelling new picture of the relationship of formalization to informal mathematical practice. One of the main consequences of this investigation will be to show that the process of acquiring mathematical understanding is far more complex than current philosophical views allow us to account for.
While formalization is often thought to be negligible in terms of its impact on mathematical practice, we will defend the view that formalization is an epistemic tool, which not only enforces limits on the problems studied in the practice, but also produces new modes of reasoning that can augment the standard methods of proof in different areas of mathematics.
Reflecting on the interplay between informal mathematical theories and their formalization means reflecting on mathematical practice and on what makes it rigorous, and how this dynamism generates different forms of understanding. We therefore also aim to investigate the connection between the three levels of understanding described above, and the notion of rigor in mathematics. The notion of formal rigor (in the proof theoretic sense) has been extensively investigated in philosophy and logic, though an account of the epistemic role of the process of formalization is currently missing. We argue that formal rigor is best understood as a dynamic abstraction from informally rigorous mathematical arguments. Such informally rigorous arguments will be studied by critically analyzing case studies from different subfields of mathematics, in order to identify patterns of rigorous reasoning.
09:00 | Formalisation and Understanding in Mathematics (abstract) |
09:30 | Mathematical Vs. Empirical Thought Experiments: between Informal Mathematics and Formalization (abstract) |
10:00 | The Independence of Excluded Middle from Double Negation via Topological Duality (abstract) |
Organizers: Dominik Klein, Soroush Rafiee Rad and Ondrej Majer
Epistemic and Doxastic logic, on one hand, and probabilistic logics on the other, are the two main formal apparatus used in the representation of knowledge and (graded) belief. Both are striving fields that have allowed for many fruitful applications in philosophy and AI. In representing knowledge and belief, classic epistemic and deontic logic rely on a number of minimal assumptions. Agents are, for instance, usually taken to be logically omniscient and their informational states are assumed closed under logical equivalence. Within dynamic logic, also informational updates are often assumed to be correct, i.e. truthful. In the same manner in the probabilistic approach the agents beliefs are assumed to satisfy the Kolmogorov axioms for probabilities which in turn impose strong rationality and consistency conditions on these beliefs.
These assumptions are, of course, idealizations. Newly learned information can often be false or misleading and rarely satisfies classic strong consistency criteria. What is more, real agents frequently behave in ways that are incompatible with orthodox assumptions of logical and probability theory. To establish more comprehensive positive or normative theories about agents, there is hence a need for theories that are able to deal with weaker contexts where some standard assumptions are violated.
This workshop brings together a number of approaches for weak, substructural epistemic logic. The approaches discussed apply to the merging of possibly contradictory information, probabilistic assignments based on contradictory or inconclusive information, intensional and hyper-intensional beliefs, i.e. belief states that are not closed under logical equivalence and collective epistemic states such as group knowledge among groups of weaker-than-classic agents.
09:00 | Common belief logics based on information (abstract) |
09:30 | Non-classical probabilities over Dunn Belnap logic (abstract) |
10:00 | Priority Merge and Intersection Modalities (abstract) |
09:00 | Complexity and model theory (abstract) |
Books and journals have a significant role in the scholarly disciplines, as means of disseminating work, as professional forums for debate, and as criteria for advancement in most research fields. Scholarly publishing is undergoing profound changes, which makes it all the more critical that researchers, especially junior researchers, stay abreast of the current state of scholarly publishing.
To this end, the Editors of prominent journals in the history and philosophy of science will convene a panel on issues facing scholarly publishing. The forum will have a strong focus on providing advice and mentorship to junior scholars about selecting journals, placing their work in journals, best practices for navigating the review process, and obtaining a broad and engaged audience for scholarly work. These recommendations will be of interest to more senior researchers as well, including discussion of the role of referees and of the review process, and of recent changes to the landscape of journal publishing.
As part of the panel, some speakers will discuss current developments in, and prospects for, scholarly publishing. These may include the increasing role of open access publishing, including Plan S in Europe, and the changing relationships between book and journal publishing.
The following Editors have agreed to take part:
• Rachel Ankeny, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
• Otávio Bueno, Synthese
• Sabina Leonelli, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
• Thomas Reydon, Journal for General Philosophy of Science
• K. Brad Wray, Metascience
A 90 minute time slot will allow ample time for questions.
09:00 | Modeling in neuroscience: Can complete and accurate understanding of nerve impulse propagation be achieved? (abstract) |
09:30 | Understanding Causal Reasoning in Neurophysiology (abstract) |
09:00 | Similarities and Differences in the Logic of Aristotle and Avicenna (abstract) |
09:30 | Sortal Interpretation of Aristotelian Logic (abstract) |
10:00 | Pythagorean arithmetic as a model for Parmenidean semantics (abstract) |
09:00 | CANCELLED: Theoretical and methodological differences in the evolutionary analysis of human behavior (abstract) |
Organizers: Nina Atanasova, Karine Chemla, Vitaly Pronskikh and Peeter Müürsepp
This symposium is predicated upon the assumption that one can distinguish between different scientific cultures. This is the founding hypothesis of the IASCUD commission. The distinction between these scientific cultures can be made on the basis of the bodies of knowledge actors uphold (which present differences depending on the culture) and the scientific practices they adopt; the distinct kinds of material environment that actors shaped to operate in these contexts and how they operate with them; and also on the basis of epistemological facets. Among the facets that appear to be useful to differentiate cultures, we include: epistemic and epistemological values; types of questions and answers that are expected; types of explanation and understanding that actors hope for. This approach to scientific cultures has the potential of allowing us to understand cultures as temporary formations and not as fixed entities.
The aim of this symposium is to focus on the types of circulation that can be identified between cultures conceived along these lines and also on how these various phenomena of circulation can help us approach the historicity of scientific cultures and of their relationship with one another. The issues we would like to address include the following:
• What can circulate between scientific cultures? We are interested in cases when knowledge and practices migrate from one culture to another. We are also interested in the borrowing of material elements and practices, as well as the adoption of epistemological choices and practices from one context into another. Events of this latter type have perhaps been studied to a lesser extent, but they seem to us to deserve specific attention.
• How does the circulation affect what is circulated? If we all agree that the adoption of an element of knowledge or practice in a different environment transforms this element, we lack a systematic approach to these phenomena of “recycling”.
• How does the circulation affect the adopting culture, and its relationship with the culture of origin? How can it elicit a reconfiguration of the scientific cultures in presence? The study of how actors revise their knowledge in the light of new elements falls for us under this broader category of questions. However, if we consider circulation in the wider perspective that we advocate, the issue of revision presents itself in a new light. In the symposium, we aim at promoting the study of revision more broadly.
09:00 | Notations & translations as catalysts of conceptual change (abstract) |
09:30 | Elements of Continuity in the Circulation of Mathematical Knowledge and Practices in Chapter "Measures in Square" in Mathematical Writings in China (abstract) |
10:00 | Avatars of generality: on the circulation and transformation of list-making practices in the context of enumerative geometry (abstract) |
09:00 | What time symmetry can (and cannot) tell us about time’s structure (abstract) |
09:30 | Metaphysical issues in modern philosophy of time: V. I. Vernadsky’s idea of "cause" of time ("source" of time) (abstract) |
10:00 | The direction of time (abstract) |
09:00 | Situated Counting (abstract) |
09:30 | Numerical cognition in the perspective of the Kantian program in modern neuroscience (abstract) |
09:00 | Combining truth values with provability values: a non-deterministic logic of informal provability (abstract) |
09:30 | Comparative infinite lottery logic (abstract) |
10:00 | On conditions of inference in many-valued logic semantics of CL$_{2}$} (abstract) |
11:00 | Second order properties of copied computational artefacts (abstract) |
11:30 | Organisations and variable embodiments (abstract) |
11:00 | Max Weber’s distinction truth/value and "Old-European" semantics (abstract) |
11:30 | Moral achievement of a scientist (abstract) |
12:00 | M. Weber’s "inconvenient facts" and contemporary studies of science-society communication (abstract) |
11:00 | A formalization of logic and proofs in Euclid’s geometry (abstract) |
11:30 | Gödel's and Post's Proofs of Incompleteness (abstract) |
12:00 | Gödel and Carnap on the impact of incompleteness on formalization and understanding (abstract) |
11:00 | Algebraic Semantics for Inquisitive Logics (abstract) |
11:30 | Substructural propositional dynamic logic (abstract) |
12:00 | Residuals and Conjugates in Positive Substructural Logic (abstract) |
11:00 | Creating Epistemically Successful Interdisciplinary Research Infrastructures: Translational Cognitive Neuroscience as a Case Study (abstract) |
Organizer: Joeri Witteveen
This is a symposium proposal with a PANEL DISCUSSSION format. No individual symposium papers will be submitted.
Prospective participants: Mieke Boon, Hasok Chang, Hans Halvorson, Mikkel Johansen, Alan Love, Roy Wagner
Abstract:
The teaching of history and philosophy of science occupies a somewhat unusual position in many university curricula. It is typically offered to philosophy students as part of their program, but is sometimes also part of the science curriculum. Often philosophy of science courses are electives, but at some (European) universities, history and philosophy of science is a required course for science students and forms part of the core curriculum. The aim of this panel discussion is to reflect on the practice of teaching HPS to science students. This is a particularly fitting topic for discussion at CLMPST 2019 as it takes the conference theme, “Bridging across academic cultures,” beyond research, into teaching.
The symposiasts will share and reflect on their experience with teaching HPS to science students in the formal, physical, life, and engineering sciences. The session format will be open-ended and allow for a broad variety of inputs and contributions. It will provide room for sharing personal experiences, reflect on the institutional and organizational embedding of teaching science students, and allow for the presentation of sample teaching materials. The audience of the session is welcomed to join the discussion, which will touch on the following questions, among others.
(1) What makes teaching science students different from teaching philosophy students and how should we (historians and philosophers) adapt to an audience of practitioners of a field of study that we are reflecting on? The goals of teaching science students will often be somewhat different from teaching philosophy students, which could affect the selection of topics, the teaching format and styles, and the modes of examination.
(2) How can the teaching of philosophy of science to science students benefit from recent developments in integrated HPS, practice-oriented philosophy of science, and socially relevant philosophy of science? The increasing attention to case studies and scientific practice in contemporary HPS research is a rich source of teaching materials. Based on particular examples, panel members will discuss how these can be packaged and processed to make them suitable for teaching.
(3) What kind of teaching materials are useful for teaching HPS to science students? Many history and philosophy of science textbooks are written without an audience of scientists in mind, but some newer textbooks are particularly written for training scientists. If used, what role should a textbook occupy? What is the proper role of other teaching materials (articles, dedicated webpages, podcasts, vlogs) for exploring specific topics and examples? We discuss advantages and disadvantages of working with different kinds of textbooks and with collections of articles.
(4) What is the added value of having someone trained in HPS teach a course history and philosophy of a scientific subject? Does HPS teaching occupy a special niche, which HPS teachers do better than specialists in the field, and if this is claimed, what is the evidence for it? Reflection on these questions will be crucial to explain the importance of educational expertise in HPS to students and program managers.
(5) What are the best practices for co-teaching a philosophy of science course with a scientist? We consider best practices for developing co-taught courses and discuss how different academic backgrounds and teaching styles can be complementary and in conflict.
(6) What, if any, are the essential ingredients for a course in HPS for scientists? Should a brief twentieth-century history of philosophy of science from (say) logical empiricism to Feyerabend be part of any philosophy of science course, or should developments in the particular science under discussion be leading in the selection of topics? And what about teaching students about their own role as scientists: should an HPS course make space for discussion of responsible conduct of research, integrity, and social responsibility?
The outcomes of the panel discussion will be used in a project led by the University of Copenhagen to inventory, organize, and disseminate teaching materials and information about best practices on teaching philosophy of science to science students. To this end, we aim to open a web portal for philosophy of science teachers in the near future.
11:00 | The circulation of epistemic values between mathematical cultures: The epistemic values pursued by J.-L. Lagrange in his teaching of analysis at the Ecole Polytechnique (abstract) |
11:30 | Communication and exchanges among scientific cultures: Sharing, recycling, trading, and other forms of circulation> Characterizing as a cultural system the organization of mathematical knowledge: a case study from the history of mathematics (abstract) |
11:00 | A Scientific-Understanding Approach to Evo-Devo Models (abstract) |
11:30 | How do evolutionary explanations explain? (abstract) |
11:00 | On the forking topology of a reduct of a simple theory (abstract) |
11:30 | Remarks on Abstract Logical Topologies: An Institutional Approach. (abstract) |
11:00 | The Intensional and Conceptual Content of Concepts (abstract) |
11:30 | Reception of Absolute Propositons in the Avicennian Tradition: Ibn Sahlān al-Sāwī on the Discussions of the Contradiction and Conversion of Absolute Propositions (abstract) |
11:00 | Theoretical equivalence and special relativity (abstract) |
11:30 | Dynamics and Chronogeometry in Spacetime Theories (abstract) |
12:00 | Symmetry, General Relativity, and the Laws of Nature (abstract) |
11:00 | Seeing and Doing, or, why we should all be only half-Bayesian (abstract) |
11:30 | Inductive Inference and Structures: How to Learn Equality in the Limit (abstract) |
Organizer: John Baldwin
This book serves both as a contribution to the general philosophy of mathemat-
ical practice and as a specific case study of one area of mathematics: model theory.
It deals with the role of formal methods in mathematics, arguing that introduction
of formal logic around the turn of the last century is important, not merely for the
foundations of mathematics, but for direct impact in such standard areas of tra-
ditional mathematics as number theory, algebraic geometry, and even differential
equations. Finding informative axiomatizations of specific areas of mathematics,
rather than a foundation which is impervious to the needs of particular areas drives
this impact. Some of the many uses of the tools of modern model theory are de-
scribed for non-specialists.
The book outlines the history of 20th century model theory, stressing a
paradigm shift from the study of logic as abstract reasoning to a useful tool for
investigating issues in mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics. The book
supports the following four theses that elaborate on this shift.
Theses
1. Contemporary model theory makes formalization of specific mathematical
areas a powerful tool to investigate both mathematical problems and issues
in the philosophy of mathematics (e.g. methodology, axiomatization, purity,
categoricity and completeness).
2. Contemporary model theory enables systematic comparison of local formal-
izations for distinct mathematical areas in order to organize and do mathe-
matics, and to analyze mathematical practice.
3. The choice of vocabulary and logic appropriate to the particular topic are
central to the success of a formalization. The technical developments of first
order logic have been more important in other areas of modern mathematics
than such developments for other logics.
4. The study of geometry is not only the source of the idea of axiomatization
and many of the fundamental concepts of model theory, but geometry itself
(through the medium of geometric stability theory) plays a fundamental role
in analyzing the models of tame theories and solving problems in other areas
of mathematics.
The book emphasizes the importance in formalization of the choice of both
the basic notions of a topic and the appropriate logic, be it first order, second
order, or infinitary logic. Geometry is studied in two ways: the analysis of the
formalization of geometry from Euclid to Hilbert to Tarski and by describing the
role of combinatorial geometries (matroids) in classifying models. The analysis
of Shelah’s method of dividing lines for classifying first order theories provides a
new look into the methodology of mathematics. A discussion of the connections
between model theory and axiomatic and combinatorial set theory fills out the
historical study.
14:00 | Symposium on John Baldwin’s Model Theory and the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice (abstract) |
14:30 | Symposium on John Baldwin’s Model Theory and the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice (abstract) |
14:00 | An Engineer: Bridging the gap between mechanisms and values (abstract) |
14:30 | Title What’s in a Name? To the History of a ‘scientist’ (abstract) |
14:00 | The Epistemic Basing Relation in Mathematics (abstract) |
14:30 | Epistemic aspects of reverse mathematics (abstract) |
Organizer: David Casacuberta
About 90% of the biomedical data accessible to researchers was created in the last two years. This certainly implies complex technical problems on how to store, analyze and distribute data, but it also brings relevant epistemological issues. In this symposium we will present some of such problems and discuss how epistemic innovation is key in order to tackle such issues.
Databases implied in biomedical research are so huge that they rise relevant questions about how scientific method is applied, such as what counts as evidence of a hypothesis when data can not be directly apprehended by humans, how to distinguish correlation from causation, or in which cases the provider of a database can be considered co-author of a research paper. To analyze such issue current characterizations of hypothesis formation, causal link, or authorship do not hold, and we need some innovation in the methodological and epistemic fields in order to revise these and other relevant concepts.
At the same time, due to the fact that a relevant deal of such biomedical data is linked to individual people, and how some knowledge from biomedical sciences can be used to predict and transform human behavior, there are ethical questions difficult to solve as they imply new challenges. Some of the them are in the awareness field, so patients and citizens understand these new ethical problems that didn’t arise before the development of big data; others relate to the way in which scientists can and can’t store, analyze and distribute information, and some others relate to the limits on which technologies are ethically safe and which bring erosion of basic human rights.
During the symposium we will present a coherent understanding on what is epistemic innovation, some of logical tools necessary for its development, and then we will discuss several cases on how epistemic innovation applies to different aspect of the biomedical sciences, also commenting its relevance when tackling ethical problems that arise in contemporary biomedical sciences.
14:00 | The Incompleteness of Explanatory Models of Abduction in Diagnosis: The Case of Mental Disorders (abstract) |
14:30 | Solidarity and regulatory frameworks in (medical) Big Data (abstract) |
14:00 | Proof systems for various FDE-based modal logics (abstract) |
Organizer: Masahiro Matsuo
In philosophy of science, Bayesianism has long been tied to subjective interpretation of probability, or probability as a degree of belief. Although several attempts have been made to construct an objective kind of Bayesianism, most of the core issues and controversies concerning Bayesianism have been biased to this subjectivity, particularly to the subjective priors. Along this line of argument, philosophers currently seem to implicitly assume that Bayesian statistics, which is increasingly getting popular in many fields of science, can be treated legitimately as a branch of subjective Bayesianism.
Despite this comprehensive view, which could be partly traced back to the interpretation of Savage’s ‘Likelihood Principle’, how subjectivity is involved in Bayesian statistics is not so obvious. On the contrary, scientists who use Bayesian statistics are inclined to think of it rather as based on an objective methodology, or else merely as a mathematical technique, without even knowing much of arguments of philosophical Bayesianism. These suggest that there is a considerable gap between typically discussed Bayesianism in philosophy and Bayesian statistical method used in science. The problem is no longer simply the distinction about subjective or objective but more importantly, the present situation where this linkage is almost neglected by both philosophers and statisticians despite the common use of the term “Bayesian”. Bayesian philosophy without statistics and Bayesian statistics without philosophy are both epistemically unsound, and undoubtedly philosophers of science should have responsibility for the restoration of this linkage.
In this symposium, we present some perspectives which could presumably help this restoration. Although an approach trying to examie the history of Bayesianism minutely is certainly necessary in some part of the analysis to achieve this goal, there must be a risk of losing our way if we focus too much attention on this, because the history of it, particularly of the rise of Bayesian statistics, is tremendously complicated to unravel. In order to grasp appropriately the relation between current Bayesian philosophy and statistics, it seems a more plausible way to start from the current situation we are placed in and to investigate it from multiple philosophical and statistical perspectives available, with some help of historical ones when in need. This is the basic strategy we have in this symposium. Accordingly, our focus is not just upon restoration, but rather on (in a positive sense) reconstruction of the linkage between the two Bayesian camps. The perspectives we present are: a parallelism found between Bayesianism and inductive logic; a complementary relation between Bayesian philosophy and statistics; a solution to the conflict between Bayesian philosophy and frequentism through Bayesian statistics; and a linkage between Bayesian philosophy and statistics through statistical theories based on both Bayesianism and frequentism. In this symposium, we have time to discuss after each speaker’s presentation.
14:00 | TRLBPS: Examination of the linkage between Bayesian philosophy and statistics from a logical point of view (abstract) |
14:30 | TRLBPS: Constructing a complimentary relation between Bayesian philosophy and statistics (abstract) |
14:00 | The alienated/subjective character of scientific communication (abstract) |
14:30 | High-energy physics cultures during the Cold War: between exchanges and translations (abstract) |
14:00 | Towards an Analytic Scientific Metaphysics (abstract) |
14:00 | Mapping vs. representational accounts of models and simulations (abstract) |
14:00 | A logic for an agentive naïve proto-physics (abstract) |
14:30 | Splicing Logics: How to Combine Hybrid and Epistemic Logic to Formalize Human Reasoning (abstract) |
14:00 | About the world described by Quantum Chemistry (abstract) |
14:30 | Does the reality of the wave function follow from the possibility of its manipulation? (abstract) |
14:00 | Eliminating Pain (abstract) |
14:30 | The Privilege Problem for Semantic Dispositionalism (abstract) |
14:00 | A Computational Pragmatics for Weaseling (abstract) |
14:30 | Sensory perception constructed in terms of Carnap's inductive logic: developing philosophy of computational modeling of perception (abstract) |
15:15 | Should a mathematician read this book? (abstract) |
15:45 | Mathematical and Philosophical Problems arising in the context of the book (abstract) |
15:15 | What is the Common Conceptual Basis of Gödel Embedding and Girard Embedding? (abstract) |
15:15 | innovative tools for reaching agreements in ethical and epistemic problems in biosciences (abstract) |
15:45 | Design epistemology as innovation in biomedical research (abstract) |
15:15 | Revisiting the two major statistical problems, stopping-rule and the catch-all hypothesis, from the viewpoint of neo-Bayesian statistics. (abstract) |
15:45 | The linkage between Bayesian and frequentism statistics is easier than between Bayesian statistics and philosophy (abstract) |
15:15 | When Arabic Algebraic Problems met Euclidean Norms in the 13th Century – A Case Study on the Scientific Innovation by the Transformation in Cross-cultural Transmission (abstract) |
15:45 | Experts and Expertise in North-South Circulation in Mid-Twentieth Century Mathematics (abstract) |
15:15 | Applicability Problems Generalized (abstract) |
15:45 | Towards the Reconciliation of Confirmation Assessments (abstract) |
15:15 | The evolutionary epistemology of Rupert Riedl – a consequent realization of the program of naturalizing epistemology? (abstract) |
15:45 | CANCELLED: The Monogenesis Controversy: A Historical and Philosophical Investigation (abstract) |
16:15 | Darwin's causal argument against intelligent design (abstract) |
15:15 | The quantum measurement as a physical interaction (abstract) |
15:45 | In Defence of Branch Counting in Everettian Quantum Mechanics (abstract) |
15:15 | Why cognitive kinds can't be the kind of kinds that are natural kinds? A new hypothesis for natural kinds (abstract) |
15:15 | An algebraic model for Frege's Basic Law V (abstract) |
15:45 | On calculi and ranks for definable families of theories (abstract) |
16:15 | Semilattices of numberings (abstract) |
Place: Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Beer, food, fun.
View this program: with abstractssession overviewtalk overview
Can we still use classical logic and semantics if the interpretation of natural language terms, mathematical terms, and scientific terms is not uniquely determined? This talk will develop a positive answer by applying a method
that goes back to F. P. Ramsey: we only need to “Ramsify” semantics.
NOTE: A light refreshment and welcome drink will be served one hour before the lecture.