[PhilPhys] The Center for Philosophy of Science's End of the Semester Talks

[Center for Phil Sci]

The Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh
invites you to join us for the last presentations of the semester. All of
the lectures (except the Watch Party) will be live streamed on YouTube at
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.


*Lunch Time Talk - Ken Aizawa* -

*Canceled - Tuesday, March 31st @ Noon*


*Featured Former Fellow – Sherrilyn Roush *-
https://www.centerphilsci.pitt.edu/fellows/roush-sherrilyn/

Friday, April 3rd @ 12:00pm EST

*Online Only  - https://pitt.zoom.us/j/94358264552
<https://pitt.zoom.us/j/94358264552>*

*Title: Should Newton’s Principia be retracted? “Good Science” and the
Epistemology of Retraction*

Abstract:
There is an epidemic of retractions of scientific journal articles; often,
though not always, it is for fraud or misconduct. This obviously erodes
public trust in our institutions of knowledge production. Inductive
reasoning is non-monotonic, and, accordingly, good science is often
legitimately overturned. These phenomena have a similar feel, so sharpening
the distinction between them is imperative for the survival of trust in
science. We can start with the observations that good science isn’t
retracted, even when its conclusions are overturned – e.g., Newton’s
Principia – and that falsehood of conclusions is neither necessary nor
sufficient to justify retraction of a publication. I sketch an epistemic
distinction between “good science” that is overturned and publications that
should be retracted. Secondly, I provide some guidelines about when
counting retractions in the track records of authors, reviewers, journals,
publishers, and universities gives us evidence about how much to trust
those vehicles in their future publications.

*This talk will be available online through  Zoom:
https://pitt.zoom.us/j/94358264552 <https://pitt.zoom.us/j/94358264552>*



*Lunch Time Talk -  Sven Neth *-
https://www.philosophy.pitt.edu/people/ant-74

*Tuesday, April 7th @ Noon*
Join us in person in room 1117 on the 11th floor of the Cathedral of
Learning.

*Title:   Induction and Indifference*

 Abstract:
The principle of indifference says that if you don’t know which possibility
obtains, you should assign equal credences to all possibilities. There are
different ways to make this precise, but even sophisticated versions of the
principle of indifference fail to vindicate inductive reasoning. I
illustrate this point by discussing Carnap’s work on the foundations of
inductive logic and the No Free Lunch theorem from machine learning and
draw some philosophical lessons.

*This talk will be available online:  Zoom:
https://pitt.zoom.us/j/92589572462 <https://pitt.zoom.us/j/92589572462>*




*Watch Party* -  *Edouard Machery *
https://www.hps.pitt.edu/people/edouard-machery and *John Doris *
https://philosophy.cornell.edu/john-m-doris

*Thursday, April 9 @1:00pm EST*
Watch Party in The Center, room 1117 on the 11th floor of the Cathedral of
Learning

*Symposium on Edouard Machery and John Doris’s book manuscript, Reasonable
Doubt: Should We Trust Science? *

The Center for Philosophy of Science will be hosting a watch party on
Thursday April 9 at 1:00pm to attend the online symposium at the Pacific
Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, held online (
https://www.apaonline.org/mpage/2026pacific). All are welcome to attend the
event and take part to the Q&A at the end of the online symposium. The
event will be streamed at the Center for Philosophy of Science. Cookies and
coffee will be provided.

Chair: Felipe Romero
Commentators: Cailin O’Connor (Irvine), Naomi Oreskes (Harvard), and
Michael Strevens (NYU)
Authors: Edouard Machery and John Doris

*In Reasonable Doubt: Should We Trust Science?*, Machery and Doris
challenge the common and plausible idea that science ought to be trusted.
Reviewing the large metascientific literature, they argue that to a
surprising degree scientific literatures at the frontier of science and, to
some extent, textbook science aren’t trustworthy, and they examine the
causes of this untrustworthiness. Often, science turns out to be an
unreliable process that typically fails because of human epistemic
limitations and the messiness of the world, but sometimes stumble, luckily,
onto true and explanatory theories. But if science cannot be trusted, it
cannot be ignored either, and Machery and Doris’s discussion leads us to
reinvent our epistemic relation to a process as messy and as human as
science.


*Lunch Time Talk -  Simon DeDeo - *
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/people/faculty/simon-dedeo.html

Friday April 10th @ Noon
Join us in person in room 1117 on the 11th floor of the Cathedral of
Learning.

Title:   TBA

 Abstract:
TBA
*This talk will be available online:  Zoom:
 https://pitt.zoom.us/j/97095624890 <https://pitt.zoom.us/j/97095624890>*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listbox.elte.hu/pipermail/philphys/attachments/20260327/88038e90/attachment-0001.html>