RUTGERS UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS AND BIOSTATISTICS www.stat.rutgers.edu
Seminar θSpeaker: Professor Deborah Mayo, Virginia Tech
Title: Probing with Severity: Beyond Bayesian Probabilism and Frequentist Performance
Time: 3:20 – 4:20pm, Wednesday, December 3, 2014 Place: 552 Hill Center
ABSTRACT
Probing with Severity: Beyond Bayesian Probabilism and Frequentist Performance Getting beyond today’s most pressing controversies revolving around statistical methods, I argue, requires scrutinizing their underlying statistical philosophies.Two main philosophies about the roles of probability in statistical inference are probabilism and performance (in the long-run). The first assumes that we need a method of assigning probabilities to hypotheses; the second assumes that the main function of statistical method is to control long-run performance. I offer a third goal: controlling and evaluating the probativeness of methods. An inductive inference, in this conception, takes the form of inferring hypotheses to the extent that they have been well or severely tested. A report of poorly tested claims must also be part of an adequate inference. I develop a statistical philosophy in which error probabilities of methods may be used to evaluate and control the stringency or severity of tests. I then show how the “severe testing” philosophy clarifies and avoids familiar criticisms and abuses of significance tests and cognate methods (e.g., confidence intervals). Severity may be threatened in three main ways: fallacies of statistical tests, unwarranted links between statistical and substantive claims, and violations of model assumptions.
Please join us in conversation with Philip Kitcher as we discuss themes from his new book, Life after Faith. While atheist writers gleefully cataloguing religion’s intellectual and moral vices have been numerous of late, too few have treated their target with the respect it deserves for successfully providing emotional comfort and social cohesion. Kitcher changes that, acknowledging religion’s virtues even as he constructs a secular humanist alternative to replace it.
Talk with him about this on Monday, February 23, 2015 at 7:00pm at Book Culture, 536 West 112th St., NY, NY (212) 865-1588
Body and Mind
Fordham University Philosophy Department Graduate Conference
April 24th and 25th, 2015
Fordham University, Rose Hill Campus
Keynote Speaker: Howard Robinson
University Professor in Philosophy, Central European University
Call for Papers:
The number of studies in the cognitive sciences that reveal the profound degree to which the body influences the mind has continued to grow. However, the grip of Cartesian dualism on philosophy has been slow to loosen. While very few philosophers retain a theory of separate substances of mind and body, the popular computational and connectionist theories of mind of the last few decades continued to leave the body out of the picture.
Recently, a number of so-called “embodied” and “enactive” approaches to cognition have sought to reorient the field. Sometimes, these have been advanced as radical programs that seek to completely overthrow orthodoxy in philosophy of mind. These debates seem to be only increasing in pace. This year’s Fordham University Graduate Philosophy Conference seeks to investigate the impact of the body on the mind through a variety of approaches.
-Early embodied approaches drew inspiration from and explored the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre and others in the phenomenological tradition. We welcome papers that explore this historical connection as well as those that consider the continuing importance of phenomenology to analyzing consciousness.
-We welcome papers that address competing accounts of the emotions, the nature of concepts, how memory works, the modularity of the mind, mental representation and other traditional problems in cognitive science from classical or standard and embodied perspectives.
-We welcome papers that explore embodied and classical accounts of the problem of other minds and issues of intersubjectivity.
-Ultimately, we welcome any paper that seeks to elucidate the important ways the mind is affected by the body while also welcoming papers reflectively critical of these new approaches.
We invite the submission of papers no longer than 3,000 words prepared for a 20-25 minute presentation. Papers should be submitted as .pdf or .doc files and formatted for blind review. Please include as a separate document a cover letter including your name, paper title, institution and contact information.
Submissions should be sent to fordhambodymindconf@gmail.com by Friday, March 6th, 2015.
The Philosophy of Statistics: Bayesianism, Frequentism and the Nature of Inference,
2015 APS Annual Convention
Saturday, May 23 2:00 PM- 3:50 PM in Wilder
(Marriott Marquis 1535 B’way)
Presenters:
Andrew Gelman, Professor of Statistics & Political Science, Columbia University
Stephen Senn, Head of Competence Center for Methodology and Statistics (CCMS) Luxembourg Institute of Health
D.G. Mayo, Professor of Philosophy, Virginia Tech
Richard Morey, Session Chair & Discussant, Senior Lecturer School of Psychology, Cardiff University
Metro Area Philosophy of Science Presents:
Elizabeth Miller (Yale),
Title: TBA.
Jonathan Bain (NYU)
What Explains the Spin-Statistics Connection?
The spin-statistics connection plays an essential role in explanations of non-relativistic phenomena associated with both field-theoretic and non-field-theoretic systems (for instance, it explains the electronic structure of solids and the behavior of Einstein-Bose condensates and superconductors). However, it is only derivable within the context of relativistic quantum field theory (RQFT) in the form of the Spin-Statistics Theorem; and moreover, there are multiple, mutually incompatible ways of deriving it. This essay attempts to determine the sense in which the spin-statistics connection can be said to be an essential property in RQFT, and how it is that an essential property of one type of theory can figure into fundamental explanations offered by other, inherently distinct theories.