Simon Hayhoe
PhD from the University of Birmingham (2005), MEd from the University of Leicester (1993) and BA from Coventry Art College, Coventry University (1993).
I am a school teacher and practioner researcher in the field of education and disability, with a focus on blindness and visual culture – in the past I have researched the arts education of blind adults and children in schools and museums, the history of the education, study and theorisation of blindness in institutions, and the understanding of accomplished blind artists and computer programmers. I am also an advisor to two international organisations working in the field of education and disability.
Description of the study. During my study at the CPNSS, I aim to research a more objective approach to studying disability through a critique of existing models of disability, using a reworking of Poppers evolutionary approach to objective knowledge, Kuhn's approach to scientific revolutions and Hulme's problem of logical and psychological induction as a foundation. The outcome will be a new book on this topic with the initial working title, The Epistemology of Disability and Ability.
Visiting from Summer 2010 - October 2011
Semra Ucar
It is accepted that universe we live in has three spatial dimensions. These are width, length and depth. But what is "dimension"? How do we design "dimension" in mind? Is it exist in physical world? or is it exist only in our mind? Are "the physical dimension" and "the dimension in mind" same? How do they effect each other? Are there any relation between them? These questions can be answered by physicists or by mathematicians or by ordinary people. A physicist may explain "dimension" by using physics laws, a mathematician may describe "dimension" by using a set of mathematical equations and an ordinary person may not explain "dimension" neither by using physics laws nor mathematical equations. Do we share same "concept of dimension"?
Visiting September 2011
Contact: room LAK G.01, Lakatos building
Jose Martinez-Solano
Hayek and Simon on Complexity and Coordination: Organizations and Markets
Hayek's and Simon's views on complexity —understood in the sense of complex adaptive behaviour— share five elements: bounded rationality, rule-following (i.e. procedural rationality), institutions, cognition and evolution. However, there are differences between them on how to understand these points and solve the problems they raise. Disagreement is deeper when they consider which mechanism is better to cope with complexity in economics and foster coordination among agents. For Hayek, markets are the very best solution for coordination as they are a reliable form of conveying information among agents. In Simon's point of view, organizations are the best way of guaranteeing coordination, so some degree of design (planning) is needed to reach the aim of a working economy. This research would focus on the solutions of both thinkers (markets or organizations) and a comparative assessment of their differences by taking into account the present situation of the economy.
Visiting July & August 2011
Alberto Cordero
A "DOWN-TO-EARTH" SCIENTIFIC REALISM
Visiting July & August 2011
Markus Scholtz
Evolutionary Economics: Explananda, Explanations and the Unit of Evolution
I am broadly interested in evolutionary economics and especially in accounts that are classified as Universal Darwinism / generalized Darwinism. While the respective accounts differ in degree about how far the similarities between biological Darwinism and economical Darwinism go, they share an ambiguity concerning the explananda of their theories and the nature of the unit of evolution.
I will try to explicate the respective explananda of a Universal Darwinism / generalized Darwinism in economics. Moreover, I will expound on the suggested concepts of the unit of evolution (e.g. products, firms, rules, etc.) in order to find out whether or not these units have what it takes to play the respective roles in a generalized evolutionary theory. On a meta-theoretical level, I will evaluate the question of why theories from different scientific domains may explain phenomena in distinctive domains (Why, if at all, does biological theory explain phenomena in the social sciences?)
Visiting July - August 2011
Adriano Pagani
B.A. in Philosophy, University of Rome "La Sapienza", M.A. student in Philosophy of Science at the University of Rome 3
My current project aims to analize the concept of law of nature and to understand what is the difference between laws of nature (i.e. nomic generalizations) and true accidental generalizations. In other words I want to explain why many regularities are true but only some of them correspond to a law. A good example of the difference between a law and a true accidental generalization can be understood comparing the famous Reichenbach's gold sphere's generalization expressing a true regularity with another generalization that intuitively expresses a law : A) all lumps of gold have a volume of less than a cubic mile B) all bits of copper conduct electricity. In order to understand what is peculiar of a law of nature I examine Marc Lange's account of laws and especially the argument from his last book Laws and Lawmakers (2009). Lange take the prime characteristic of a law to be its invariance under a certain range of counterfactuals suppositions. Though accidental generalization may also remain invariant under some range of counterfactuals suppositions laws of nature have a different modal robusteness. Taking this for granted the aim of my project is to further the understanding of the concept of invariance as fundamental to the understanding of the concept of law. Doing this I hope to give a clear definition of the concept of necessity that historically characterised the notion of law of nature.
Visiting Summer Term 2011
Irem Bozbay
PhD student in Quantitative Economics at Maastricht University, The Netherlands
Judgment aggregation theory deals with the problems of aggregating individual judgments into collective judgments. Instead of following the social-choice theoretic approach of aiming to find out how –and whether –group judgments can refl‡ect the individual' judgments in a procedurally fair manner, my project takes the 'epistemic 'approach by aiming to reach true group judgments. This project focuses on judgment aggregation from the truth-tracking and strategic-voting perspective and analyses efficient information aggregation and strategic voting in a Bayesian voting game. By doing so, this work combines two so far disconnected bodies of work, namely the judgment aggregation literature and the binary collective choice literature.
Visiting Summer Term 2011
Marrianne Richter
PhD Student and Research Associate in Philosophy at the University of Stuttgart, Germany (EXC SimTech since 2009). MA from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (2008).
Visual devices are found to play an essential role in the discursive acquisition of knowledge. However, the precise identification of the role of visual devices requires a clarification of the ways in which they are involved in epistemic processes such as inference and reasoning. Starting from a critical discussion of approaches that seek to establish a syntactic view of visual devices, I will argue that the relevant functions of visual devices exceed the narrow scope of linguistic representation. As a syntactic view of visual devices requires the revelation of conditions of unambiguous syntactic and semantic representation under which the representative character is established, the question is whether visual representations truly need to be interpretable in the strict sense of a linguistic representation in order to be part of an operationalizable procedure. I would like to elaborate this argument against the background of examples from simulation-based research.
Visting Summer Term 2011
Ruben Flores
(PhD in Sociology, University of Kent)
Title: Mechanistic Causality and Long-term Historical Transformations.
My project seeks to further our understanding of what is entailed in talking about "causal mechanisms" of long-term historical change. It aims to do so by analysing this notion from two different, yet arguably complementary, perspectives which up until now have remained largely disconnected from one another. The first is the growing philosophical literature on causal mechanisms, which has expanded considerably over the last few years, but which has ignored to a great extent the question at hand. The second is social and historical research.
Visiting Lent & Summer term 2011
Mark Addis
Understanding Expertise
Expertise is broadly conceived as covering various kinds of practical knowledge, attention based knowledge, skills, decision making and action planning and the like. A full understanding of expertise is a complex multi-disciplinary task in which significant disagreements about appropriate methodology often feature. There are different methodologies in different fields, divergent philosophical traditions, and distinct philosophical approaches to expertise are underdetermined by the currently available empirical data. A philosophical task is identifying appropriate methodologies and level of explanation with progress in these areas forming the basis for the development of better theories of expertise along with greater insight into the contextual interdependent nature of consciousness and action.
Visiting from January 2011 - June 2011
Shlomo Cohen
Lecturer in Philosophy, Tel-Aviv University
Project: Recent scientific and medical research, especially with functional brain imaging, demonstrates that in certain cases the final common pathway of action of placebo drugs is indistinguishable from that of the real drugs they are supposed to replace. So, for example, giving placebo for pain might activate the opiate-responsive neural pathways in the brain—a mechanism seemingly identical to what is seen when the patient receives an opiatic drug. Now the ethical problem with placebo treatment is that it is a kind of deception, where supposedly you make the patient believe you give him a drug that actually works on the tissue level but in fact what you give him works just psychologically. The scientific findings, however, bring to a new level the seeming deconstruction of the distinction between "placebo" and "real" drug. It would be reasonable to view instances of placebo treatment that fulfill this criterion as a category unto itself—call it "comparable placebo treatment"—hitherto unrecognized as such. The phenomenon of comparable placebo treatment raises interesting philosophical questions, among which are the following. What sense is left to "deception" when the placebo works precisely (according to objective parameters of the mechanism of action) as the "real" drug? Given that the success of the placebo depends on the patient's belief that he is getting a real drug, and therefore involves a manipulation of sorts, but given also that the placebo nonetheless indeed functions precisely as the patient expects the real drug to function, we need to investigate the conditions under which manipulation amounts to deception. (Only select kinds of human interaction are expected to be entirely devoid of any manipulation.) It is interesting to ask what the implications of all this are with respect to the ethics of placebo treatment and what light it can shed more generally on the ethics of truthfulness.
Visiting Lent Term 2011
Daniele Fanelli
Title: Bias, misconduct and the Hierarchy of the Sciences
Daniele Fanelli is a Leverhulme Early Career fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where he uses advanced quantitative methods to help settle long-standing philosophical and sociological debates on the nature of science. Are all disciplines, fields and researchers equally objective (or non-objective)? Which ones are more likely to yield false results and why? How common are bias and misconduct in science and how can we prevent them?
During his visit at CPNSS, he will review theories and empirical evidence on the Hierarchy of the Sciences hypothesis, according to which disciplines vary systematically in their level of paradigmatic development.
Visiting until May 2011
Oliver Hallich
Forgiveness as a moral problem
Forgiveness is a core element of social life and of our everyday morality. During my stay at the CPNSS, I intend to investigate the nature and the normative assessment of forgiveness. Starting from an account of forgiveness as a withdrawal of retributive emotions, I analyse the social function of these emotions, stressing that they serve as a means of social regulation and as expressions of self-respect. In the light of this evaluation of retributive emotions, I criticize four arguments in favour of forgiveness. These relate to (i) the social value of forgiveness itself, (ii) the temporal distance between an act of wrongdoing and the present, (iii) repentance on the part of the wrongdoer, (iv) a rupture in the wrongdoer's personal identity. As none of these arguments is persuasive, I propose that instead of asking whether and when forgiveness is justified we ought to try to find out criteria determining the aptness of our retributive emotions. The value of forgiveness turns out to be instrumental: it is a means of restricting the action-guiding force of retributive emotions. By virtue of forgiveness, we can keep these emotions within limits in which they are socially beneficial.
Visiting Michaelmas Term 2010- Summer Term 2011
Deborah Mayo
Deborah Mayo is a professor of philosophy at Virginia Tech and is currently a Visiting Professor at CPNSS. Mayo's work is in the epistemology of science, the philosophy of experiment, and methodological problems of inductive-statistical inference. Her publications include Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge (Lakatos Prize, 1998), and a number of papers directed to solving problems of uncertain evidence and inference as they arise both in philosophy of science and scientific practice. She has an ongoing interest in issues of evidence relevant for regulation and policy (Acceptable Evidence: Science and Values in Risk Management, co-edited with Rachelle Hollander, 1991), and applies her work to current risk assessment controversies (environmental, medical, technological). She has a forthcoming volume, Error and Inference: Recent Exchanges on Experimental Reasoning, Reliability, and the Objectivity and Rationality of Science (ERRORS), co-edited with Aris Spanos (CUP). While visiting the Centre in Autumn 2008 - Autumn 2010, Mayo will lead a Ph.D. Research Seminar (PH500): Topics in the Philosophy and History of Inductive/Statistical Inference and the Foundations of Statistical Science, and she will be working on a related manuscript (Learning From Error).
Wendy Parker
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Ohio University
Title: Models, evidence and climate decision making
I am interested in how we can evaluate the trustworthiness of results obtained from computer simulation models – especially climate models – and when such results can aid in decision making. While at CPNSS, I aim to complete several papers-in-progress on these topics. I also will begin exploring how we might move beyond an unfortunate mismatch between the evidence about future climate change that current science can provide and the kind of information requested by standard decision frameworks (e.g. expected utility approaches).
Visiting Lent Term 2011
Website: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~parkerw/|
Rosa Runhardt
BA in Philosophy, BSc in Mathematics
Rosa Runhardt is a master's student in the History and Philosophy of Science research program at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. This two-year program consists of one year of coursework, followed by one year of research, mirroring the old MPhil structure. After finishing her coursework last summer, Rosa now conducts part of her research at the CPNSS during the Michaelmas and Lent terms. Her interests are general philosophy of science, specifically science and values.
She has a background in physics, mathematics and philosophy. See also http://nl.linkedin.com/in/rosarunhardt|.
Denis Coitinho Silveira
Professor of Philosophy at Federal University of Pelotas – Brazil.
The justification problem in John Rawls's theory of justice as fairness: beyond realism and anti-realism
The current project aims to analyze the moral justification model presented by John Rawls in his theory of justice as fairness. My foremost intent is to investigate the core characteristics of his ethical coherentism model. More specifically, I wish to see how his political constructivism provides an alternative to the problem that realists and anti-realists discuss, i.e., whether moral facts exist regardless of beliefs or there are only subjective moral beliefs, an alternative both for Kant's moral constructivism and for rational intuitionism. I wish to point out how public justification procedures of original position/veil of ignorance, reflective equilibrium, and overlapping consensus with the use of public reason open the way for a cognitivist, non-foundationalist, coherentist, non-descriptivist, internalist-externalist moral model which is consequentialist and makes use of mitigated intuitionism leading to a pragmatic justification model in the public domain.
Joerg Chet Tremmel, PhD, PhD
German citizen. PhD in Philosophy at the University of Düsseldorf (2008). PhD in Political Science at the University of Stuttgart (2005). MA in political sciences from Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-University of Frankfurt (2003). MBA in economics from the European Business School, Oestrich-Winkel (1998).
Kant's well-known question: "What can I know?" refers to all individual scientific disciplines. This question and Popper's three-world model implanted the idea for the following research project in my mind: the development of a model of thought designed to better determine the status of scientific knowledge. I call it the 'five-level model of truth'. Basically, the five-level model of truth distinguishes between an absolute, objective, intersubjective, group, and subjective level of truth. I define the term 'truth' as the answer to the core questions in the various scientific disciplines.
Visiting Michaelmas Term 2010- Summer Term 2011