[PhilPhys] Next Week's Hybrid Talks - Margaret Farrell Oct. 21 and Melinda Fagan Oct. 24

[Center for Phil Sci]

The Center for Philosophy of Science invites you to join us for our
Lunch Time Talks.  Attend in person, Room 1117 on the 11th floor of the
Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh or visit our live
stream on YouTube at *https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg
<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg>*.

*Margaret Farrell*

Tuesday, October 21 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
This talk will be available online:  Zoom:
https://pitt.zoom.us/j/97520433778
Title: What would imaginary ancestors do?
Abstract:
In recent work on human cognitive evolution, several biologists and
philosophers have proposed broad, synthetic hypotheses in which they
attempt to bring together knowledge from a wide range of disciplines into
comprehensive narratives. These hypotheses are historically focused and
phylogenetically constrained, their temporal scope makes them well-suited
to tracing gradual changes in selective pressures over time, and their
sequential causal structure means they need not commit to one sort of cause
over another and so can easily incorporate adaptive hypotheses as well as
environmental events or developmental constraints.
But human evolutionary theorists interested in building broad,
comprehensive histories face a challenge: an explanatory standard of high
causal detail in an area where the ideal sorts of evidence are relatively
scarce. Their first response is to cast their net widely: they generally
use a wide variety of evidential sources. Then, to maximize detail in the
face of limited evidence, theorists employ various epistemic strategies to
make the most of the evidence they have. In this talk, I will describe one
kind of strategy that theorists use and argue that there is a persistent
challenge to making this kind of strategy.
The strategy is connecting, either functionally within the same organisms
or evolutionarily over generations, putative cognitive capacities of
ancestral hominins to other cognitive capacities for which material
evidence is available. Making these connections involves what I call a
*close-enough
judgment*, which, though not formally problematic, constitutes a potential
weak point in the construction of human cognitive evolutionary narratives.
Sometimes, theorists take certain connections among cognitive capacities to
be intuitively plausible – so much so that they accept and include them in
their hypotheses. I argue that when they make these plausibility judgments,
they are actually attempting (explicitly or implicitly) to reason from the
perspective of an ancestral hominin. They reason about whether some
inference would be easy, natural, or obvious for a hominin with only a
hypothesized set of ancestral capacities. When they do this, they invoke
their intuitive sense of ease or obviousness as evidence for the
association among cognitive capacities. But such intuitions are
systematically misleading, because they are influenced by the very
cognitive capacity whose evolution the theorist seeks to explain.

*Melinda Fagan*
Friday, October 24 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
This talk will be available online:  Zoom:
https://pitt.zoom.us/j/92610452383
*Title: *Explanatory particularism in scientific practice
*Abstract: *
I introduce a new approach to studying explanation across the sciences,
which I term “explanatory particularism” (EP). EP differs from other
philosophical accounts of explanation in taking social aspects of science
as primary. Alongside recent defenses of pluralism about explanation, EP
rejects the traditional idea that there is one kind of explanation common
to all sciences (and everyday life). Instead, multiple styles of
explanation flourish in local contexts, intersecting with one another in
diverse ways. More radical than other forms of explanatory pluralism, my
particularist approach directs philosophers’ attention to often overlooked
aspects of scientific practice: interdisciplinary collaboration and
conflict, interlinked aspects of understanding, and a pro-social image of
science as diverse yet unified. After introducing the particularist
approach, I’ll discuss some of its main implications and applications.
This talk will be available online (*it will not be recorded*): Zoom
https://pitt.zoom.us/j/92610452383
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listbox.elte.hu/pipermail/philphys/attachments/20251016/318cbcb9/attachment-0001.html>