Choice & Inference

C&I readers should check out this interesting post on Deborah Mayo’s new blog.

Well, I’m sure I’m late to the party with regards to this news, but just in case any of C&I’s readers haven’t heard: Deborah Mayo has a really nice and very active new blog, “Error Statistics Philosophy”! Here is a link to her initial post, where she describes the purpose of her blog. An excerpt from that post:

Now that Bayesians have stepped off their a priori pedestal, it may be hoped that a genuinely deep scrutiny of the frequentist and Bayesian accounts will occur.  In some corners of practice it appears that frequentist error statistical foundations are being discovered anew.  Perhaps frequentist foundations, never made fully explicit, but at most lying deep below the ocean floor, are finally being disinterred.  But let’s learn from some of the mistakes in the earlier attempts to understand it.  With this goal I invite you to join me in some deep water drilling, here as I cast about on my Isle of Elba.

From Branden Fitelson:

Dear Friends of FEW,

The Program for this year’s workshop is now set. See here. As you can see, the program is terrific, and so is the venue! If you’re interested in attending, please contact the local organizers: Ole Hjortland <olethhjortland@gmail.com> and/or Florian Steinberger <Florian.Steinberger@lmu.de>. [Note: because of the swanky venue, there will be a limit on the number of attendees this year.]

We hope to see you in Munich!

Best, Branden

Readers will surely be interested in reading this brand new (as of today!) SEP entry on Dutch Book Arguments, written by Susan Vineberg. It looks great!

From Mark Phelan: The Experiment Month Initiative  is currently recruiting philosophers and other academics to participate in some of their researchers’ studies. (We’re hoping to give our researchers the opportunity to compare how philosophers and non-philosophers respond to these studies.) The project hosts 17 different experimental philosophy studies designed by 29 philosophers, each working on illuminating a different philosophical question. Accordingly, Choice & Inference readers are invited to help these philosophers out, either by stopping by the Experiment Month website (linked above) to fill out a brief questionnaire or by spreading the word about these new studies.

(The experiment month initiative is run by Yale Cognitive Science with a grant from the American Philosophical Association.)

From Hannes Leitgeb:

Four doctoral fellowships are being advertised at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP). The MCMP, which is devoted to applications of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy, has recently been established at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU) based on generous support by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Directed by Professor Hannes Leitgeb, the Center hosts a vibrant research community of university faculty, postdoctoral fellows, doctoral fellows, and visiting fellows. From the beginning of May 2011, the Center will organize its own weekly Colloquium in Mathematical Philosophy seminar series, as well as various other activities such as workshops, conferences, reading groups, internal work-in-progress seminars, and the like. The successful candidate will partake in all of the Center’s academic activities and enjoy its administrative facilities and financial support.

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1st Pittsburgh-Tilburg workshop: Formal Epistemology Meets Experimental Philosophy

(TiLPS; 29-30 September 2011)

Over the years, the methodological toolbox of philosophers of science has widened considerably. Today, formal and experimental methods importantly complement more traditional methods such as conceptual analysis and case studies. So far, however, there has not been much interaction between the corresponding communities. Formal work is all too often conducted in an a priori fashion, drawing on intuitions to substantiate various assumptions and to test their consequences. Experimental work, on the other hand, is often limited to testing various assumptions and intuitions, and often does not identify or create new phenomena that can subsequently be integrated into a formal framework. The working assumption of this workshop is that philosophy of science can gain a lot from combining formal and experimental studies. By doing so, philosophy of science will become increasingly scientific as a crucial aspect of the scientific endeavor lies in the combination of formal theories and experimental insights.

This workshop aims to explore the relation between formal and experimental approaches to the philosophy of science. We invite meta-theoretical papers, but especially papers that fruitfully combine both methods to problems from the philosophy of science. This first Pittsburgh-Tilburg workshop will pay special attention to the philosophy of the social sciences, but a focus on other subfields of philosophy of science is also welcome.

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