Ontology and Methodology (Virginia Tech)

FIRST CALL FOR CONTRIBUTED PAPERS FOR CONFERENCE:

Ontology and Methodology

http://www.ratiocination.org/OM2013/

Dates: May 4-5, 2013

Special invited speakers:

David Danks (CMU), Peter Godfrey-Smith (CUNY), Kevin Hoover (Duke),

Laura Ruetsche (U. Mich.), James Woodward (Pitt)

Virginia Tech speakers:

Benjamin Jantzen, Deborah Mayo, Lydia Patton, Aris Spanos

o   How do scientists’ initial conjectures about the entities and processes under their scrutiny influence the choice of variables, the structure of mature scientific theories, and methods of interpretation of those theories? 

o   How do methods of data generation, statistical modeling, and analysis influence the construction and appraisal of theories at multiple levels?

o   How does historical analysis of the development of scientific theories illuminate the interplay between scientific methodology, theory building, and the interpretation of scientific theories?

This conference brings together prominent philosophers of biology, computational cognitive science, causation, economics, and physics engaged in research into these interconnected methodological and ontological questions.

We invite contributed papers that illuminate these issues as they arise in general philosophy of science, in causal explanation and modeling, in the philosophy of experiment and statistics, and in the history and philosophy of science. We anticipate covering accommodation costs for accepted contributed papers.

Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2013

For further information on submitting a paper or extended abstract, please visit the conference website: http://www.ratiocination.org/OM2013/.

Organizers:    Benjamin Jantzen, Deborah Mayo, Lydia Patton

Sponsors:       The Virginia Tech Department of Philosophy and the Fund for Experimental Reasoning, Reliability, and the Objectivity and Rationality of Science (E.R.R.O.R.)

EVIDENCE AND CAUSALITY IN THE SCIENCE
ECitS 2012
Centre for Reasoning, University of Kent, 5-7 September 2012
Organisers: Phyllis Illari and Federica Russo
http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/jw/2012/ecits/

Causality is a vibrant and thriving topic in philosophy of science. It is closely related to many other challenging scientific concepts, such as probability and mechanisms, which arise in many different scientific contexts, in different fields.  For example, they are relevant to both causal inference (finding out what causes what) and causal explanation (explaining how a cause produces its effect).  They are also of interest to fields as diverse as astrophysics, biochemistry, biomedical and social sciences. There has also been an explosion of interest in evidence, most obviously in biomedical contexts with the rise of ‘evidence-based medicine’, but also elsewhere, such as in social science.  What is evidence?  How do we decide what our best sources of evidence are?

This conference will examine the relation between causality and evidence. This involves questions about the foundations of the sciences, e.g. what is evidence and how does it contribute to causal knowledge?  But it also involves questions about specific applications, e.g. how should we best deal with the many problems of evidence given by expert witnesses in court; and questions about policy-making, e.g. what constitutes evidence of causation that is relevant to the design of socio-economic and public health policies?

These questions are all of immense current concern.  Pressure on health systems from ageing populations, the obesity epidemic, coupled with severe financial constraints on public policy, means governments are demanding answers with increasing urgency.

**Confirmed Speakers**
Iain Chalmers
Mathias Frisch
Sandra Mitchell
David Lagnado

**Timetable**
• **EXTENDED DEADLINE** 26 MAY 2012: deadline for submission of titles and abstracts of papers for presentation at the conference
◦ Please submit only once: EITHER a long abstract (1000 words max) for presentation, OR a short abstract (300 words max) for a poster presentation.
◦ Send your abstract in doc, dock, txt, rft or pdf format.
◦ To be emailed to Phyllis Illari (phyllisillari@hotmail.co.uk) or Federica Russo (f.russo@kent.ac.uk)

-- 
Dr Federica Russo
Center Leo Apostel, VUB (BE) &
Centre for Reasoning, Kent (UK)
email: f.russo@kent.ac.uk or russo_fede@yahoo.it
https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/federica

Workshop: Objects, Kinds and Mechanisms in Biology (Leeds, April 2012)

Objects, Kinds and Mechanisms in Biology: A One Day Workshop

Philosophy
School of Humanities
University of Leeds,
Leeds UK

Friday April 13th 2012

Aims
The purpose of the workshop is to encourage discussion of the natures and roles of objects, structure and mechanisms in biology with a view to achieving clarity on a number of issues, including:

How can the heterogeneity of biological objects be appropriately accommodated?

Is a metaphysics of mechanisms as entities and activities sustainable in biology?

What would be an appropriate metaphysics for biological kinds?

Schedule

10.30-10.55 Coffee
10.55-11.00 Welcome
11.00-12.15 Phyllis Illari (Hertfordshire) The Indispensability of Objects in Biology
12.15-13.30 Ellen Clarke (All Souls) The Organism as a Problem in Biological Ontology

13.30-14.15 Lunch (provided)
14.15-15.30 Marcel Weber (Geneva) Individual, Cell Lineage, and Functional Integration

15.30-15.45 Tea
15.45-17.00 Emma Tobin (UCL) Biomolecular Classification
17.00-18.15 Angelo Cei (Leeds) TBA
18.15-18.30 wrap up

A limited number of student bursaries will be available.

Registration is free but please indicate your interest in attending.

For further details contact:
Steven French s.r.d.french@leeds.ac.uk<

mailto:s.r.d.french@leeds.ac.uk>

Financial support for this workshop has been provided by the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.

CFP: Reality Making: Exploring Fundamentals in Metaphysics

University of Nottingham, 10-12 July 2012

***Conference description***

The conference will focus on recent debates in metaphysics surrounding questions of grounding, fundamentality, essentialism and the monism vs pluralism debate. Confirmed invited speakers: Elizabeth Barnes (Leeds), Terry Horgan (Arizona), Laurie Paul (Chapel Hill), Sònia Roca Royes (Stirling) and Jonathan Schaffer (Rutgers/ANU).

Registration details will follow shortly. Some Analysis grants will be available for graduate student participation. Please contact Mark Jago (mark.jago@nottingham.ac.uk) for more information.

***Call for papers***

We are accepting submissions for contributed papers on the topics listed above and related topics. We are also interested in papers which relate any of these topics to the philosophy of science. Please send an abstract of 1,000 words to mark.jago@nottingham.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is April 1, 2012.

***Call for respondents***

Each of our invited talks will be followed by a short reply, given by an early-career researcher (at PhD, postdoc or equivalent stage). If you are interested in giving one of these replies, and are familiar with some of the topics of the conference (grounding, fundamentality, monism vs pluralism, essential properties) or with the work of one of our keynote speakers (Laurie Paul, Jonathan Schaffer, Elizabeth Barnes, Terry Horgan, or Sònia Roca Royes) on the conference topics, please send (i) a 2-page CV and (ii) a short writing sample to mark.jago@nottingham.ac.uk. Deadline: 1 April 2012.

For more information on the conference, please contact one of the organisers, Mark Jago (mark.jago@nottingham.ac.uk) or Stephen Barker (stephen.barker@nottingham.ac.uk). The conference is generously funded by a Mind Major Conference Grant and an Analysis Grant.

2012 Central APA Sessions: Kinds: Natural and Scientific

Thursday, February 12, 2012
9:00 a.m.-Noon

Topic: Kinds: Natural and Scientific

Chair: Carl Gillett (Northern Illinois University)

Speakers: Anjan Chakravarty (Northern Illinois University)
“Perspectival Frameworks for Scientific Taxonomy”

Matthew H. Slater (Bucknell University)
“Is Our Epistemology Writing Checks That Our Metaphysics Can’t Cash?”

Neil E. Williams (University at Buffalo (SUNY))
“‘Disease’ Is Not a Natural Kind Term: A Tale of Two Diseases”

CFA: Individuals Across Sciences (Paris, May 2012)

Call for abstracts: “Individuals Across Sciences: A Revisionary Metaphysics?”
Paris, Paris-Sorbonne University, May 18-19, 2012

Organized by Alexandre Guay & Thomas Pradeu, with the support of Paris-Sorbonne University, the Institut d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques (IHPST) and the Institut universitaire de France (IUF)

This conference will gather metaphysicians, philosophers of biology and philosophers of physics to offer a reflection on criteria of individuality in different sciences and to try to develop a unified account on the notion of what an individual is.

The conference will welcome nine invited speakers, and a selection of submitted papers.

The language of the conference is English.

Information, submission of abstracts: http://individuals2012.sciencesconf.org/

Deadline for the submission of abstracts: December 15, 2011
Please submit a short (maximum 200 words) and a long (maximum 1000 words) abstract.

Argument:
The question of knowing what individuals are and how they can be identified has been recurring throughout the history of philosophy. It was, for example, pointedly studied by Aristotle and Leibniz. Most contemporary philosophers consider the problem from a general, metaphysical, point of view, as is the case for Peter Strawson in his landmark book Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (Strawson 1959). On the other hand, in philosophy of science, the preferred approach aims to define the ontological status of this or that individual, or this or that class of individuals, typically in the fields of physics (French & Krause 2006, Ladyman & Ross 2007, Morganti 2009) and biology (Hull 1978, Hull 1992, Dupré & O'Malley 2009, Godfrey- Smith 2009). Today, many consider that the approach used in philosophy of science has obviously been more precise and globally more fruitful than the purely metaphysical approach, often thought as excessively general (for example, see Ladyman & Ross 2007). The project of this conference stemmed from two observations. First, the recent developments on the notion of individual in physics or in biology are most certainly fascinating, but are still “regional”, by which we mean that practically no transversal reflection, comparing different scientific criteria of individuation and conceptions of individuality, has been done. Thus, we believe that a dialogue between philosophers of physics and philosophers of biology on this question is of crucial importance. Second, since it isolates a relatively small field of study, regionalism undoubtedly has the advantage of precision. However, it too often lacks ambition compared to the metaphysical approach, which tries to find the general conditions to individuate an object.

We are convinced that philosophers of science must interact with metaphysicians, in order to determine in which way the focused ontological questioning of the former can contribute to the latter legitimate project of renewing general metaphysics. In bringing together specialists on metaphysics and on physical and biological ontologies, we hope to further define the difficulties that hold back the construction of a general conception of the individual that would be adequate for both physics and biology, and perhaps even beyond.

Invited speakers:
John Dupré (University of Exeter & Egenis, UK)
Steven French (University of Leeds, UK)
Peter Godfrey-Smith (City University of New York, USA)
Alexandre Guay (University of Burgundy, France, researcher at IHPST in 2011-2012, and associated researcher at the CIRST, Canada)
James Ladyman (Bristol University, UK)
Jonathan E. Lowe (Durham University, UK)
Matteo Morganti (Roma 3 University, Italie)
Thomas Pradeu (Paris-Sorbonne University, IHPST & IUF, France)
Simon Saunders (University of Oxford, UK)

Program committee:
Daniel Andler (Paris-Sorbonne University & IUF, France)
Alexander Bird (Bristol University, UK)
Mauro Dorato (Roma 3 University, Italy)
Jean Gayon (Panthéon-Sorbonne University, France) (head of committee)
Max Kistler (Panthéon-Sorbonne University, France)
Tim Lewens (University of Cambridge, UK)
Jean-Baptiste Rauzy (Paris-Sorbonne University, France)
Claudine Tiercelin (Collège de France, France)
The PC will review the abstracts and select the most promising ones.

Organizing committee:
Alexandra Arapinis (IHPST, France)
Isabelle Drouet (Paris-Sorbonne University, France)
Alexandre Guay (University of Burgundy, France, researcher at IHPST in 2011-2012, and
associated researcher at the CIRST, Canada)
Pascal Ludwig (Paris-Sorbonne University, France)
Thomas Pradeu (Paris-Sorbonne University, IHPST & IUF, France) (head of committee)

Contact: thomas.pradeu@paris-sorbonne.fr ; alexandre.guay@u-bourgogne.fr

Metaphysics of Science at the Pacific APA

Two sessions of the Society of the Metaphysics of Science will be meeting at the Pacific APA this week, on Thursday and Friday evenings. Links to some advance drafts and notes are provided.

Thursday, 8:00-10:00 p.m.

G5E Society for the Metaphysics of Science, Session 1

Topic: Abstraction, Idealization, and Multiple Realization

Chair: Tom Polger (University of Cincinnati)

Speakers:

• Matthew Haug (College of William and Mary) Abstraction and Explanatory Relevance
• Colin Klein (University of Illinois–Chicago) Against Scientific Levels: The Problem of Within-Theory Abstraction
• Angela Potochnik (University of Cincinnati) Idealizing the Realizers

Friday, 7:00-10:00 p.m.

G6M Society for the Metaphysics of Science, Session 2

Topic: How Is the Metaphysics of Science Possible? If It Is Possible?

Speakers:

• Paul Humphreys (University of Virginia) Analytic and Scientific Metaphysics
• Andrew Melnyk (University of Missouri) Can There Be a Naturalistic Metaphysics?
• Anjan Chakravartty (University of Toronto) Ontological Relativity as Indispensible Metaphysics of Science
• Alyssa Ney (University of Rochester) What Should a Scientifically-Informed Metaphysics Be?