Popper Seminar

The aim of this research is to develop a novel way to use computers to ‘evolve’ scientific theories automatically. By using techniques based on genetic programming and simple building blocks (primitive cognitive mechanisms), theories are automatically built, evolved and tested. I will present a system to represent and discover computational models to capture data in psychology. The system uses a theory representation language to define the space of possible models. This space is then searched using genetic programming, to discover models which best fit the experimental data. Whilst the examples are from psychology, the method could in principle be applied to other sciences where experimental data are available. Implications for philosophy of science will be discussed.

Many philosophers suggest that using statistics to attribute legal liability is deeply problematic. A primary worry is that it would be unfair to hold the defending party responsible on the basis of probability alone. My previous work, focusing on criminal law, suggests that this refusal to use statistics is double-edged. Now, turning to the civil law, I argue that the demands of fairness requires us to rethink our approach in non-criminal contexts too. In particular, I suggest that relying on statistics can be required to deal with epistemic gaps in the law and distribute risk in a fair way among different groups in society.

Abstract: Many claims about intertheoretic reductions lack rigorous proofs (e.g., the claim that thermodynamics is reducible to statistical mechanics or even the widespread view that the Newtonian theory of gravitation is reducible to Einstein's general theory of relativity). Apart from specific problems pertaining to individual theories, we also face the general issue that reducibility claims can only be proved or…

In this talk, we'll look at a case that has been unjustly neglected in recent discussions of the criminal standard of proof. After a brief presentation of the case, we'll look to see if we can find a general normative framework that can vindicate our (hopefully shared) intuitions about what we ought to do, what we ought to believe, and who we ought to blame when it seems that we know perfectly we're wrong about who is guilty. My hope is that this discussion will shed some light on the relationship between reasons, oughts, and rationality.

Life is rife with hard choices. Should you be a musician or a lawyer? Have children or remain child-free? How much money, exactly, should you give to charity? And what about hard choices faced by families, groups, and governments? Should the government enact policies that reduce the standard of living of its citizens now in order to benefit future generations? Much of the popular literature on hard choices is psychological–how we in fact make hard choices and what are the ways in which we can go wrong in thinking about them. But there is a prior question that has gone unanswered. What is a hard choice? Why are some choices hard while others easy? Once we get clear on what makes a choice hard, we are in a better position to understand what we should do in the face of such choices. In this talk, I examine what makes a choice hard and offer a new way to think about hard choices that points to a different way of thinking about our place in the world.

When are political regimes permitted to coercively rule their subjects? And when do subjects have moral obligations to support and obey their regimes? One influential strain of thought – political voluntarism – holds that political legitimacy is grounded in the exercise of self-regarding normative powers (consent and promise) on the part of subjects. Despite its attractive emphasis on individual self-sovereignty, this view is widely held to be hopeless. A popular alternative – political functionalism – grounds political legitimacy on the successful performance of morally valuable tasks. In this talk I outline a hybrid view which aims to combine the attractive features of both voluntarism and functionalism. The view that I propose takes coercive rule and political obligations to be ultimately justified by appeal to the value of a regime’s functioning (its contribution to individual wellbeing in particular), but it understands this value to be sensitive to the exercise of self-regarding normative powers on the part of each subject, thus integrating a concern for individual self-sovereignty.

Many projects in comparative cognitive science (which I mean to include research in both comparative psychology and artificial intelligence) are structured around what I’ll call ‘classificatory questions’ – that is, questions about whether nonhuman cognitive systems have the same cognitive capacities as humans. These projects often generate unproductive, often apparently verbal disputes about how cognitive capacities should be delineated. In part because of this, some researchers have argued that we should stop asking classificatory questions, and instead adopt a ‘bottom-up’ approach focussed on cognitive mechanisms. Against this, I offer a defence of classificatory projects – arguing, first, that bottom-up approaches raise many of the same difficult questions about the delineation of cognitive capacities, and second, that these questions can be addressed once we recognise that researchers’ theoretical interests play a role in delineating the objects of study. On this view of things, apparently verbal disagreements may reflect deeper disagreement about why we are engaged in classificatory projects. So, this defence of classificatory projects in comparative cognitive science comes with a qualification: researchers can’t sensibly pursue classificatory projects for their own sake, but only to satisfy some further theoretical interest.

Views on free will are classically classified along their compatibility with determinism. Accounts that require a power to do otherwise require the existence of alternative future possibilities, which are taken to be incompatible with determinism. I argue that determinism does not automatically imply that the future is not settled, and neither does indeterminism automatically imply an open future, depending on other basic ontological assumptions about the nature of laws and temporal ontology. It is thus not determinism, but the question whether the future is open that should be the crucial issue in the free will debate. Given that one of the results of this discussion is that accounts of freedom that require the power to do otherwise are incompatible with temporal ontologies with a fixed future, I will at the end briefly outline an intermediary position between classical incompatibilist libertarianism and classical compatibilism, which is compatible with a fixed future.

In this paper, I will provide a discussion and solution for a phenomenon that has been left untouched by contemporary philosophical accounts of race: the understanding of groups in history. This paper is centrally concerned with retrospective description: the usage of contemporary racial terms as labels or classifications for historical phenomena. This paper seeks to provide an answer to the following question: under what circumstances is it correct to apply racial classifications to historical phenomena? My argument for the paper will be the following: that for the category race, the only way to have a successful and comprehensible way for correctly applying racial descriptions retrospectively is to take an instrumentalist approach --- an approach that rejects using both biological realist accounts and social constructionist accounts as the bases for ascertaining whether a racial term has been correctly applied to past phenomena.

This talk examines initial conditions dependence and initial conditions uncertainty for climate projections and predictions. First, a clear conceptual characterisation of predictions and projections is given. Concerning initial conditions dependence, projections are often described as experiments that do not depend on initial conditions. Although prominent, this claim has not been scrutinized much and I argue that evidence does not support this claim. Concerning initial conditions uncertainty, several kinds of initial conditions uncertainty are identified (two of them have not been discussed much so far). Overall, the discussion shows that initial conditions dependence and uncertainty in climate science are more complex and important issues than usually acknowledged.

This paper presents a novel argument against the possibility of action at a distance, with realism about space-time topology as its main premise.

Physical and psychological violence, to false beliefs and credibility deficits, have already been identified as potentially harming an individual or group, but facts about salience have not seemed particularly relevant to harm. In this talk, I argue that certain salience structures can indeed be harmful. One can harm an individual or group simply by making salient the wrong feature about them in one’s attention. I motivate this proposal by considering statements from those who have experienced rape. Drawing out a recurring theme from these statements, I suggest that many of these individuals do not want their experience of rape to become the most salient thing about them—the thing that others attend to the most. This can be explained, I argue, by recognising that attending to people in the wrong way can constitute a minimalist way of disrespecting their personhood. After defending the significance of this minimalist form of harm, I sketch some ways in which harmful salience structures might be implicated in a different context: racism. Systematically attending to certain individuals such that their skin colour, for example, is their most salient feature, plausibly constitutes a particularly subtle and insidious form of racism.

Revealed preference approaches to modeling choice in the social sciences face seemingly devastating predictive, explanatory, and normative objections. In this talk, I will focus on predictive and explanatory objections, and offer two defenses. First, I argue that when revealed preferences are multiple realizable, revealed preferences can causally explain behavior well. But, considerations of multiple realizability open the revealed preference theorist to an equally plausible interpretation of these models, that they pick out a coarse grained psychological disposition. Second, I argue that when agential preferences cannot be easily analytically separated from the environment that produces the relevant behavior, revealed preferences also causally explain, if one adopts a counterfactual dependence account of causal explanation. An upshot of these two arguments is an explanatory dilemma for dispositional interpretations of “preference.”

Most philosophers of science are realists. Most philosophers of science are, at least implicitly, empiricists. But, I argue, it is not reasonable to be both an empiricist and a realist, because empiricism is motivated by epistemological internalism and realism requires the rejection of internalism. Nor is instrumentalism a reasonable position. So an empiricist should be an outright sceptic about science. Conversely, someone who wishes to have a positive attitude to at least some parts of science, should not be an empiricist. I conclude by pointing out that scientific practice is at least prima facie inconsistent with empiricism.

In this paper I aim to expand and further develop the idea of ‘limitarianism’, which, in one formulation, is the idea that no-one should be excessively rich (Robeyns 2017). Since introducing that term, several worries and critiques have been voiced, both in (forthcoming) papers as well as through conversations. Do we really need ‘limitarianism’ if we already have the idea of egalitarianism? Is limitarianism not simply a version of sufficientarianism? What, if anything, makes limitarianism distinctive? In this paper I address these critiques by providing a more precise formulation of limitarianism, and hence providing an answer to the question: “Why limitarianism?”

What modes of mentality can be used to grasp the idea of the ‘body politic’? A standard view is that within a polity, it is not possible to perceive the public – instead one has to imagine it. I argue that this view is wrong in letter but may be correct in spirit. Against the letter of the standard view, it is possbile to perceive the public, but as per the spirit of some of its motivations, this appears to be possible only in ways that inhibit democracy.

Dispositionalism is the theory of modality that grounds all modal truths in powers: all metaphysically possible and necessary truths are to be explained by pointing at some actual power, or absence thereof.

One of the most enticing and often cited reasons to endorse dispositionalism is that it promises to deliver an especially desirable epistemology of modality, one that is i) realist, ii) anti-(radically) skeptical, iii) anti-exceptionalist, and iv) able to deliver a good solution to the Integration Challenge. This is the challenge to “reconcile a plausible account of what is involved in the truth of statements of a given kind with a credible account of how we can know those statements, when we do know them”. The crucial idea is that adopting a powers-based theory of modality allows us to perceive at least some modal facts, by making certain affordances genuine features of reality.

Unfortunately, the pairing of a perception-based, empiricist epistemology of modality and Dispositionalism is not as unproblematic and natural an union as it might first appear.

I’ll present a few worries that stem from a conflict between the sketched epistemology of modality and one of the core principle of powers metaphysics — namely that dispositional properties have a relational essence and must be understood in structuralist terms, and draw some consequences for the project of Dispositionalism and powers ontologies more broadly.

Social norms are commonly understood as rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to evolved psychological adaptations. In this paper, we propose a novel methodological and conceptual framework for the cognitive science of social norms that we call normative pluralism. We begin with an analysis of the (sometimes mixed) explanatory aims of the cognitive science of social norms. From this analysis, we derive a recommendation for a reformed conception of its explanandum: a community level behavioral construct that we call “normative regularities”. Our central empirical proposal is that the psychological underpinnings of social norms are most likely realized by a heterogeneous set of cognitive, motivational, and ecological mechanisms that vary between norms and between individuals, rather than by a single type of process or distinctive norm system. This pluralistic approach, we suggest, offers a methodologically sound point of departure for a fruitful and rigorous science of social norms.