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Jonathan Birch (LSE) “Kin selection, group selection and cultural change”
LAK 2.06, The Lakatos Building London School of Economics, London, United KingdomAbstract: The relationship between kin and group selection is a vexed issue in evolutionary theory, and matters are not helped by a tendency to conflate questions of methodology with questions of causal reality. Drawing inspiration from W. D. Hamilton, I suggest we conceptualise the distinction between kin and group selection in terms of differences of […]
Eran Tal (Cambridge) “The Shifting Economies of Measurement Uncertainty”
LAK 2.06, The Lakatos Building London School of Economics, London, United KingdomElizabeth Irvine (Cardiff) – CANCELLED
LAK 2.06, The Lakatos Building London School of Economics, London, United KingdomUnfortunately, Liz Irvine's talk has been cancelled.
Anna Mahtani (LSE) “Knowledge and the Sure Thing Principle”
LAK 2.06, The Lakatos Building London School of Economics, London, United KingdomJames Ladyman (Bristol) “The Hole Argument and Homotopy Type Theory”
LAK 2.06, The Lakatos Building London School of Economics, London, United KingdomWendy Parker (Durham), “Scientific Modelling and Limits to the Value-Free Ideal”
LAK 2.06, The Lakatos Building London School of Economics, London, United KingdomAbstract. According to the value-free ideal, the internal workings of science, including the evaluation of evidence, should be kept free from the influence of non-epistemic values as much as possible. We identify an underappreciated limit on the extent to which the value-free ideal can be achieved in practice. Our argument – which differs from inductive risk […]
Luke Fenton-Glynn (UCL), “Probabilistic Actual Causation”
LAK 2.06, The Lakatos Building London School of Economics, London, United KingdomAbstract. Actual (token) causation – the sort of causal relation asserted to hold by claims like the Chicxulub impact caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene exitinction event, Mr. Fairchild’s exposure to asbestos caused him to suffer mesothelioma, and the H7N9 virus outbreak was caused by poultry farmers becoming simultaneously infected by bird and human 'flu strains – is of […]
Marta Halina (Cambridge HPS), “The role of values in animal cognition research”
LAK 2.06, The Lakatos Building London School of Economics, London, United KingdomAbstract: The role of non-epistemic values in accepting and rejecting scientific hypotheses has long been recognized. As Rudner (1953) observes, “how sure we need to be before we accept a hypothesis will depend on how serious a mistake would be”. Non-epistemic values play a role whenever the hypothesis under consideration has practical consequences. Despite this, […]
Karim Thébault (Bristol), “Cosmic Singularity Resolution via Quantum Evolution”
LAK 2.06, The Lakatos Building London School of Economics, London, United KingdomAbstract: Classical models of the universe generically feature a big bang singularity. That is, when we consider progressively earlier and earlier times, physical quantities stop behaving in a reasonable way. A particular problem is that physical quantities related to the curvature of spacetime become divergent. A long standing hope is that a theory of quantum […]