Conference Schedule
10AM Teddy Seidenfeld – Conditional Probability, Conditionalization, and Total Evidence
11AM Eleonora Cresto – Beyond Indeterminate Utilities. The Case of Neurotic Cake-Cutting
11:20AM Ignacio Ojea Quintana – Unawareness and Levi’s Consensus as Common Ground
11:40AM Rush Stewart – Uncertainty, Equality, Fraternity
1PM Nils-Eric Sahlin – Levi’s Decision Theory: Lessons Learned
1:45PM Wilfried Sieg – Scientific Theories as Set-Theoretic Predicates?
2:45PM Panel Discussion – Learning from Levi
Abstracts available in attached documents under “Supporting material.”
Memorial
A memorial service will be held at 5PM at St. Paul’s Chapel on the Columbia campus. Reception to follow on the 7th floor of Philosophy Hall.
David Albert’s work has been of seminal importance to the foundations of physics, exerting central influence on the direction the field and laying foundations for much of its ongoing development. In celebration of David’s many past and continuing contributions, we will be hosting a conference at Columbia University on the foundations of physics. We expect talks on a range of topics, including the foundations of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, the possible emergence of space and time, the metaphysics of science, and the nature of agency.
Confirmed Speakers
Jeff Barrett (UC Irvine)
Gordon Belot (Michigan)
Craig Callender (UC San Diego)
Sean Carroll (Caltech)
Eddy Chen (UC San Diego)
Sidney Felder (Rutgers)
Alison Fernandes (Dublin)
Shelly Goldstein (Rutgers)
Ned Hall (Harvard)
Barry Loewer (Rutgers)
Tim Maudlin (NYU)
Michael Miller (Toronto)
Alyssa Ney (UC Davis)
Lev Vaidman (Tel Aviv)
David Wallace (Pittsburgh)
Nino Zanghi (Genoa)
Organizing Committee
Alison Fernandes (alison.fernandes@tcd.ie)
Michael Miller (mike.miller@utoronto.ca)
Porter Williams (porterwi@usc.edu)
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The conference is open to the public. Please direct any questions to Porter Williams (porterwi@usc.edu).
Friday, November 15
8:45 am: Breakfast
9:30 am: Jeff Barrett (UC Irvine): Quantum Randomness and Empirical Underdetermination
10:15 am: Shelly Goldstein (Rutgers): Typicality, Humean Probability, and the Mentaculus
11:00: Coffee Break
11:20 am: Craig Callender (UC San Diego): No Time for Time from No-Time
12:05 pm: Alyssa Ney (UC Davis): WFR or QFT?
12:50: Lunch
2:20 pm: Gordon Belot (Michigan): The Mach-Einstein Principle of 1917-1918
3:05 pm: Sean Carroll (Caltech): The Mentaculus as a Causal Network
3:50: Coffee Break
4:10 pm: David Wallace (Pittsburgh): TBA
4:55 pm: Ned Hall (Harvard): Respectful Deflationism
5:45 pm: Adjourn
Saturday, November 16
8:45 am: Breakfast
9:30 am: Lev Vaidman (Tel Aviv): The many-worlds interpretation and the Born rule
10:15 am: Eddy Chen (UC San Diego): Nomic Vagueness
11:00: Coffee Break
11:20 am: Michael Miller (Toronto): Infrared Cancellation and Measurement
12:05 pm: Alison Fernandes (Trinity College Dublin): The Direction of Records
12:50: Lunch
2:20 pm: Sidney Felder (Rutgers): Gödel’s Rotating Solutions, Bilking, and Natural Laws
3:05 pm: Nino Zanghi (INFN Genova): TBA
3:50: Coffee Break
4:10 pm: Tim Maudlin (NYU): S = k ln(B(W)): Boltzmann entropy, the Second Law, and the Architecture of Hell
4:55 pm: Barry Loewer (Rutgers): The Consequence Argument Meets the Mentaculus
5:45 pm: Adjourn
The rich philosophical and mathematical disputes that took place between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz at the start of the eighteenth century have received more historical attention than any other exchange in the history of philosophy. Nevertheless, in this talk, Robert Iliffe discusses a prominent but neglected aspect of their disagreement, namely the mutual claim that their opponents’ conceptual foundations were fictional, and were the product both of diseased thinking and of illegitimately organized intellectual structures. Newton assailed Leibniz’s allegedly debased metaphysics in various prominent places, and mobilized allies such as Roger Cotes and John Keill to do the same. Nevertheless, by far the most sophisticated critique of illicit philosophical assumptions was launched against Newton by Leibniz in his correspondence with Samuel Clarke. In the Fifth letter to Clarke, Leibniz identified core Newtonian positions as infantile, vulgar, and profoundly irreligious, asserting that they were dangerous fictions that were less plausible and much less edifying than the rational romances of writers in the previous century. Although Leibniz saved his most potent intellectual weapons for his final letter to Clarke, Robert Iliffe suggests that his attack on the fictional status of Newton’s work was no mere codicil to his general critique of Newton’s philosophy, but instead lay at the heart of it. This famous debate, while of course somewhat sui generis, is indicative of more general and dynamic features of intellectual debate.
Event Speaker
Robert Iliffe, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oxford
Event Information
This event is free and open to the public; Registration required. Please contact scienceandsociety@columbia.edu with any questions.
This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.
What can science teach us about how we perceive and understand art? How can art help us understand ourselves and each other? In this event, the Zuckerman Institute explores the interactions between our brains and the artistic world, finding connections and parallels between art and science.
Event Speakers
Please visit the event webpage to view the speaker list.
Event Information
Free and open to the public, registration is required by January 28, 2022. This event will also be live-streamed. Please email zuckermaninstitute@columbia.edu with any questions.
This talk is part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Brain Insight Lecture series hosted by Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
This talk explores the importance of the medieval period and nineteenth-century medievalism to the invention of modern science by placing the work of thirteenth-century Franciscan, polymath, and scholastic natural philosopher Roger Bacon (ca. 1214-1292) into conversation with later scholars, especially William Whewell (1794-1866). Elly Truitt argues that Bacon’s work and reputation became central to a narrative about the development of science that insisted on Europe as the only possible place of origin. Furthermore, Truitt argues that this narrative was constructed, in part, by ignoring large parts of Bacon’s corpus and erasing his deep engagement with medieval scholars working in the Arabic tradition, and by relying instead on a narrative structure that emerged in the context of late antique and medieval Christianity.
Event Speaker
Elly Truitt, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania
Event Information
This event is free and open to the public; Registration required. Please contact scienceandsociety@columbia.edu with any questions.
This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.
Sponsoring Organizations:
- The University Seminars at Columbia University
- Columbia University in the City of New York
- NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study
- The Graduate Center, City University of New York
- The New York Academy of Medicine
- The New York Academy of Sciences
The Center for Science and Society makes every reasonable effort to accommodate individuals with disabilities. If you require disability accommodations to attend a Center for Science and Society event, please contact us at scienceandsociety@columbia.edu or (212) 853-1612 at least 10 days in advance of the event. For more information, please visit the campus accessibility webpage.
The current pandemic has focused attention on the techniques used by epidemiologists and other non-experimental scientists to infer causal hypotheses from correlational data. I have previously argued* that we need to explain these techniques by reducing causal relationships to dependencies in systems of structural equations with probabilistically independent exogenous variables. In this talk I shall aim to use this account to cast light on (a) single-case counterfactual dependence and actual causation, (b) the content and practical relevance of generic causal claims like “smoking causes cancer”, (c) the temporal asymmetry of causation, and (d) the proper understanding of rational action under risk.
*In particular, I’ve argued this in http://weebly-file/1/8/5/5/18551740/stat_nat_csn_monist.pdf. I will also be giving a talk on it at the CUNY Logic and Metaphysics workshop on Monday 7 March 1615-1815.
The talk will be on Zoom. All are welcome to attend!
The zoom link will be distributed through the MAPS mailing list. If you are not on the MAPS mailing list and would like to receive the Zoom link for the talk, please email nyphilsci@gmail.com.
LTF Event: Olivia Branscum,
“Fairness, Objectivity, and Grading
Multimodal Assessments.”
The representational theory of measurement provides a collection of results that specify the conditions under which an attribute admits of numerical representation. The original architects of the theory interpreted the formalism operationally and explicitly acknowledged that some aspects of their representations are conventional. There have been a number of recent efforts to reinterpret the formalism to arrive at a more metaphysically robust account of physical quantities. In this paper we argue that the conventional elements of the representations afforded by the representational theory of measurement require careful scrutiny as one moves toward such an interpretation. To illustrate why, we show that there is a sense in which the very number system in which one represents a physical quantity such as mass or length is conventional. We argue that this result does not undermine the project of reinterpreting the representational theory of measurement for metaphysical purposes in general, but it does undermine a certain class of inferences about the nature of physical quantities that some have been tempted to draw.
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TALK LINK — Email for the passcode cruzdavis <at> umass.edu or jrc2266 <at> columbia.edu
Individuals support forms of domination with varying levels of understanding that they are doing so. In many cases, those very structures of domination distort our conceptions of them through mechanisms such as motivated reasoning, implicit bias, affected ignorance, false consciousness, and belief polarization. These various epistemic distortions, in turn, cause social conflict, notably by promoting political polarization. Those worried by social conflict have spent a great deal of energy decrying the increasingly polarized contexts in which we live. However, epistemic distortions in our sociopolitical beliefs also misrepresent, maintain systems of domination and prevent human needs from being met.
This workshop aims to go beyond pronouncements such as ‘we are polarized’ or that ‘partisanship is on the rise,’ and begin to think through epistemic distortions at the individual and intersubjective levels, the role of criticism and critique in facilitating belief and social change, and the idea of reconciliation, by asking questions such as:
- In what ways are individual beliefs about domination/social structures epistemically distorted?
- What explains why social beliefs are epistemically distorted?
- What are the normative upshots of epistemic distortion for social relationships like allyship, comradeship, and friendship?
- Ought polarization be remedied? Which epistemic resources and theoretical frameworks avail themselves of emancipatory potential?
Convenors
Ege Yumuşak is a philosopher, specializing in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and social & political philosophy. She received a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 2022. Her research examines political disagreement—its material foundations, psychological and social manifestations, and epistemic properties. She is currently writing a series of articles on the nature and significance of clashes of perspective in social life.
Nicolas Côté is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto. His research is mainly in normative ethics and social choice theory, but they also dabble in applied ethics and issues of practical rationality. Côté’s doctoral dissertation work focuses on the measurement of freedom, especially on axiomatic approaches to the measurement question, and on how deontic concerns for protecting individual rights interact with welfarist concerns for improving the general welfare. Côté’s current research focuses on the ethics of decision-making under radical uncertainty.
Invited speakers:
Sabina Vaccarino Bremner; Daniela Dover; Cain Shelley
Invited commentators
TBA
The 6th ELSI Congress welcomes all with an interest in the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of genetics and genomics. Researchers, scholars, practitioners, trainees, policymakers, journalists, and the general public are invited to share and explore the latest ELSI research at ELSIcon2024.