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
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
Since 1986 Icahn School of Medicine has co-sponsored an annual series of day-long conferences, Issues in Medical Ethics. These conferences attract a broad audience of 150-200 participants including physicians, medical students, nurses and other health care providers, scientists, lawyers, academics, and graduate students. Speakers have come from medicine, philosophy, government, and law.
Each year’s conference focuses on a timely issue. Topics have included medical professionalism, organ transplantation, the Americans with Disabilities Act, money and access to health care. The proceedings of many of these conferences have appeared in special issues of The Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine. In February 2014, the conference topic was “Data Science and Digital Medicine.”
If would like to have your name added to our mailing list, contact Karen Smalls at 212-241-6602, fax 212-241-5028, or e-mail: karen.smalls@mssm.edu.
Co-Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and the Workshop on Precision Medicine: Ethics Politics, and Culture
Maël Lemoine (University of Tours): Medicine without Diseases
5:30 pm on Monday, May 9th, Philosophy Hall 716, Columbia University
Philosophers have discussed the definition of the general concept of disease, but have paid less attention to the general concept of a “disease entity”. Whereas the former aims to distinguish healthy from pathological states, the latter aims at a distinction between pathological states. But what would happen to the concept of disease if the concept of disease entities were abandoned? An intuition may be that the demarcation between “health” and “disease” would go unchanged. Yet this would lead to a conflation of both functions, namely, of the health/disease demarcation and the Disease A/Disease Z demarcation. This result is a potential consequence of so-called “precision medicine,” in particular, of theranostic approaches that aim to match disease signatures with treatment signatures while potentially bypassing the step of categorical diagnosis. In this talk I present what I call the three models of disease – the disease entity, disease mechanisms and disease signatures – and demonstrate how health and disease should be distinguished for a naturalist philosopher of medicine applying a disease signature model instead of a disease entity one.
Sue Weinberg Lecture
Public Health Skepticism and Respect for Women’s Voices
Anne Barnhill (Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, University of Pennsylvania)
Jessica Martucci (Fellow in Advanced Biomedical Ethics, University of Pennsylvania)
OCTOBER 28, 2016, 4:30-6:30pm
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Room TBA
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.