<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr"><div><font size="4">The Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh
invites you to join us for our upcoming Lunch Time Talks and our Featured Former Fellows Talk. All lectures will be live streamed on YouTube at <a title="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg" id="m_6073136766091579437gmail-OWAa3f7876c-a0f4-4b6f-efde-62085c7a187c" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg. </a></font></div><br><div style="direction:ltr;line-height:1.8;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:14pt;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div style="direction:ltr;line-height:1.8;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4">LTT – <span style="color:rgb(20,24,39);font-weight:700">David Wallace</span></font></div><div style="font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4">Tuesday, September 9th @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EDT </font></div><div style="direction:ltr;line-height:1.8;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4">Room 1117 on the 11th floor of the Cathedral of Learning</font></div><div style="direction:ltr;line-height:1.8;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4"><span style="font-weight:bolder"><br></span></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;line-height:1.8;margin:0px 0px 0.75em;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4"><span style="font-weight:bolder">Title: </span><span style="font-weight:700">The local quantum vacuum as the Past Hypothesis</span></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;line-height:1.8;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4"><span style="font-weight:bolder">Abstract:</span></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4">The
`Past Hypothesis’, as advocated by David Albert and Barry Loewer, is
the hypothesis that the world came into being in whatever particular
low-entropy highly-condensed big-bang sort of macrocondition it is that
the normal inferential procedures of cosmology will eventually present
to us. I consider some hypotheseses about that that macrocondition is
likely to be given what cosmology has already presented to us, and
explore the consequences of these hypotheses for the broader
(`Mentaculus’) project of grounding physics and the special sciences in
the Past Hypothesis. My main conclusion is that current cosmology
suggests a unique, pure quantum state (the local quantum vacuum, or
`Bunch-Davies vacuum’) for the initial state of the Universe, in which
case statistical-mechanical probabilities emerge from quantum
probabilities without any need for an intervening statistical postulate.</font></div><div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)" aria-hidden="true"><br></div><div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4"><span style="font-weight:bolder">Can’t make it in-person? This talk will be available online through Zoom:</span> <span style="color:rgb(51,74,255)"><a id="m_6073136766091579437gmail-LPlnk975044" title="https://pitt.zoom.us/j/92309860754" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://pitt.zoom.us/j/92309860754" target="_blank">https://pitt.zoom.us/j/92309860754</a></span></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4"><br></font></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;line-height:1.38;margin:0px;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4">LTT– <span style="font-weight:700">Nina</span> <span style="font-weight:700">Atanasova</span></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;line-height:1.8;margin:0px;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4"><br></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;line-height:1.8;margin-left:0px;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4">Friday, September 12th @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EDT </font></div><div style="direction:ltr;line-height:2.4;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4">Room 1117 on the 11th floor of the Cathedral of Learning</font></div><div style="direction:ltr;line-height:2.4;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4"><b>Title: The Surreality of Pain</b></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;line-height:2.4;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4"><span style="font-weight:bolder">Abstract: </span></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4">Throughout
the reductionist debates of the twentieth-century philosophy of mind
and science, non-reductionists often referred to pain as irreducible
mental state par excellence. Notwithstanding, reductionists have
remained unmoved in their conviction that mental states are exhaustively
physical in nature. Pain eliminativism, arguably the most radical form
of reductionism, has recently seen a revival in popularity (Baetu 2020,
Corns 2020, Coninx 2021, Hardcastle 2024, Gligorov 2025). According to
pain eliminativism, the commonsense notion of pain as an irreducible
subjective experience is deeply flawed. Thus, it is to be eliminated
from our vocabulary and replaced with the terms of a mature science of
pain.</font></div><div style="margin-top:1em;margin-bottom:1em;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4">The claim of eliminativism can be interpreted descriptively as a <i>prediction</i> of what happens when the science of pain matures. However, it can also be interpreted normatively as a <i>prescription</i> of
what should happen when the science of pain matures. Considering that
the science of pain has matured significantly since the early days of
pain eliminativism (Dennett 1978), the renewed interest in the topic is
not surprising. However, the verdicts on pain eliminativism delivered by
different philosophers are often contradictory and inconclusive. I
attribute much of the disagreement to the equivocation between
predictive and prescriptive interpretations of eliminativism.</font></div><div style="margin-top:1em;margin-bottom:1em;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4">In this talk, I aim to show that pain eliminativism has been successful <i>predictively</i> in
the case of neuroscience pain education (NPE). NPE is an approach to
chronic pain management that allows patients to reconceptualize pain
from a sign of tissue damage to a functional/dysfunctional state of the
nervous system. I argue that the success of this method suggests that
pain eliminativism can be justified <i>prescriptively</i> in other contexts beyond the scope of science.</font></div><div style="direction:ltr;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4"><span style="font-weight:700">This talk will be available online through Zoom: </span> <a id="m_6073136766091579437gmail-LPlnkOWAab1875d1-1722-fcee-8e73-7cca1385b6a5" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://pitt.zoom.us/j/91293273230" title="https://pitt.zoom.us/j/91293273230" target="_blank">https://pitt.zoom.us/j/91293273230</a></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;margin:0px;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4"><span style="font-weight:700"><br></span></font></div><div id="m_6073136766091579437gmail-x_x_x_x_Signature"><div style="direction:ltr;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);font-family:Calibri,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(12,100,192)"><font size="4"><br></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);font-family:Calibri,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(12,100,192)"><div><font size="4"><span style="font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Featured Former Fellow<b> – Wayne Myrvold</b></span></font></div><div><font size="4"><br></font></div><div><font size="4"><span style="font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Tuesday, September 16th @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EST</span></font></div><div style="letter-spacing:0.5px"><font size="4"><span style="letter-spacing:0.5px;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><i>ONLINE ONLY:</i> </span><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Zoom: <a href="https://pitt.zoom.us/j/92946226719" target="_blank">https://pitt.zoom.us/j/92946226719</a><br></span></font></div><div style="letter-spacing:0.5px"><font size="4"><br><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></span></font></div><div style="letter-spacing:0.5px"><font size="4"><span style="letter-spacing:0.5px;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><b>Title: </b></span><b><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)">No only to anti-realism”: Some skeptical thoughts on scientific realism</span></b></font></div><div style="letter-spacing:0.5px"><font size="4"><br></font></div><div style="letter-spacing:0.5px"><font size="4"><span style="letter-spacing:0.5px;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><b>Abstract:</b> </span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">Debates about scientific realism and anti-realism have been a prominent
part of the landscape of philosophy of science for the past few decades,
which have seen a proliferation scientific realisms and anti-realisms.
Thirty-five years ago Howard Stein, from whom I borrow my title, added a
skeptical voice to these discussions, arguing that the issue between
scientific realists and its opponents had not been clearly drawn. This
talk takes up that skeptical thread. I will argue, first, for the modest
conclusion that we should believe whatever we have sufficiently good
evidence for. As this includes the existence of some things (including
atoms) that are not directly observable, this modest conclusion involves
rejection of any form of anti-realism that involves a prohibition
against accepting the existence of unobservable entities. A mere absence
of a prohibition, however, hardly deserves to be elevated into a
philosophical position, hence I don’t consider my view to be adding to
the menagerie of versions of “scientific realism.” I doubt that there is
any defensible position worthy of that name.</span></font></div><font size="4"><br></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);font-family:Calibri,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(12,100,192)"><font size="4"><br></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);font-family:Calibri,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(12,100,192)"><div style="direction:ltr;line-height:1.8;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4">LTT – <b>Aydin Mohseni</b></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;line-height:1.8;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4"><b><br></b></font></div><div style="font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4">Friday, September 19th @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EDT </font></div><div style="direction:ltr;line-height:1.8;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4">Room 1117 on the 11th floor of the Cathedral of Learning</font></div><div style="direction:ltr;line-height:1.8;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4"><span style="font-weight:bolder"><br></span></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;line-height:1.8;margin:0px 0px 0.75em;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4"><span style="font-weight:bolder">Title: </span><b><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)">A Bayesian Reduction of Causation in Causal Models</span></b></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;text-align:left;text-indent:0px;line-height:1.8;margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px;font-family:Aptos,Aptos_EmbeddedFont,Aptos_MSFontService,Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="4"><b>Abstract:</b></font></div><font size="4" style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">The ontological status and explanatory role of causation has been a
perennial puzzle. In recent work, Pearl and Mackenzie (2018) advance the
thesis of a causal hierarchy (PCH) and posit the irreducibility of
causal claims to purely probabilistic ones. Bareinboim et al. (2022)
claim to have proven this irreducibility in the context of structural
causal models (SCMs). We challenge this claim and demonstrate a general
reduction of interventional propositions to probabilistic ones within
the same context of SCMs and proffer a de Finetti-style representation
theorem for causal learning and reasoning.</font></div><div style="direction:ltr;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);font-family:Calibri,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(12,100,192)"><font size="4"><span style="font-weight:bolder;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></span></font></div><div style="direction:ltr;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);font-family:Calibri,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(12,100,192)"><font size="4"><span style="font-weight:bolder;color:rgb(0,0,0)">This talk will be available online through Zoom:</span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"> </span><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><a href="https://pitt.zoom.us/j/98127984221" target="_blank">https://pitt.zoom.us/j/98127984221</a></span></font></div></div><br></div>
</div></div>