UPDATE! Amelia Bonea’s talk on 13 December will now be hybrid, starting at 3.45 — but mince pies and mulled wine will be available in BH1.03 from 3pm! See below for further information.
All seminars are (normally) on Wednesdays, 3.15pm-5pm. Some are in-person — these are all in Botany House room 1.03 unless otherwise stated. (There is a campus map here.) Others are on Zoom; a link will appear next to the seminar listing below at least a day or so in advance. (No hybrid seminars at the moment, sorry. We will revisit this if and when we get better camera/microphone kit!) All welcome!
4 OCTOBER (in person): Jim Secord (History & Philosophy of Science, Cambridge)
NOTE VENUE: BAINES WING 1.16
Also we have had to postpone the launch of Greg Radick’s book, which was supposed to follow the seminar, due to a train strike. We’ll announce it on this site when we’ve rescheduled it.
Against Revolutions. The public image of the history of science remains dominated by dramatic revolutions. Revolutionary narratives also continue to structure–either explicitly or implicitly–much academic teaching and research. This paper examines how the framework of scientific revolutions gained widespread circulation among historians and philosophers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and what functions it has served. The so-called Darwinian Revolution, for example, is a residual inheritance of the otherwise rejected notion of a ‘warfare’ between religion and science. The economic and military implications of geology were for many years displaced by a singular focus on the Plate Tectonics Revolution. Such narratives locate epistemic violence within specialist communities, obscuring the role of the sciences in colonial conquest and in silencing other ways of knowing. Current efforts to reestablish historical studies of science on a new basis need to tackle the problem of displaced epistemic violence more directly. More fundamentally, the emerging focus on global exchange and conflict needs to encompass much earlier periods, countering the tendency to see only recent science as relevant to the present.
18 OCTOBER (Zoom): Kirsten Walsh (Sociology, Philosophy & Anthropology, Exeter)
Join here. Meeting ID: 861 1187 4377 / password Hps2324!
Situated cognition in early modern experimentation: the case of compelled assent. The early moderns surely didn’t have an embodied, extended, embedded or enacted conception of the mind, but I aim to show that this perspective can make sense of some of their practices: in particular, how experimental philosophers approached their experiments. Focusing on Newton’s optical experiments, I’ll argue that some aspects of early modern scientific practice turn crucially on how the experimenter is situated towards gaining particular kinds of know-how. My account provides one answer to a long-standing puzzle regarding Newton’s method: namely, his appeal to ‘compelled assent’ as an epistemic standard.
1 NOVEMBER (in person): Al Wilson (HPS, Leeds)
Four grades of modal naturalism. A-prioristic modal metaphysics aims to identify a space of possibilities that is independent of, and epistemically prior to, the discoveries of natural science. Naturalistic modal metaphysics, by contrast, aims to bring scientific evidence to bear on modal questions directly. The greater the evidential role given to science by an approach to modality, the more naturalistic is that approach. In this talk I distinguish four increasingly naturalistic approaches to objective modality, and discuss how to locate some familiar theoretical discoveries from the history of natural science within the resulting framework.
This will be followed by an informal launch of Greg Radick’s new book, Disputed Inheritance, in the foyer of the Michael Sadler Building (up the stairs inside the main door and turn left), with drinks and nibbles — all welcome!
15 NOVEMBER (Zoom only: CLICK THIS LINK): Emily Collins (Computer Science, Manchester).
Relationships Mediating Trustworthy Human-Robot/AI Interaction: The Impact of Responsibility. Responsible Robotic and AI (RAI) use, should consider, and perhaps even place as central, the humans using these technologies, and what they transparently understand are the consequences of such use in the short/long-term, asking: Who is responsible for the use of these technologies and what does their usage result in?
To understand any of this in the broadest sense, an understanding of the dynamics between the human users is essential. Who are the users? Who are the employers of those users? Who deploys the technology? And what do these mediating relationships, and – crucially – the trust between those branches, have to do with who is ultimately responsible for what happens when we use technology in real-world applied settings?
After a brief discussion of the increasing interest in considering, measuring, and implementing trust in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and relatedly Human-AI Interaction, as it pertains to responsibility, I will propose that the dyadic model of HRI misses a key complexity which lies at the core of both trustworthy RAI systems, and thus how to approach responsible RAI use: A robot’s trustworthiness may be contingent on the user’s relationship with, and opinion of, the individual or organisation deploying the robot.
I will discuss examples highlighting the need for trustworthy RAI in a variety of disparate environments. This will demonstrate that there is no one approach to the answer of trustworthy RAI, because a human’s relationship with the person, employer, government, etc., who has given them RAI to work with is not consistent. Consequently, we should ask: Who is responsible when technology fails? The employer? The deployer? The user, instructed to work with the technology by said deployer? And ultimately, how does this affect how we understand who is responsible for the outcomes of Human-Robot/AI use? And what does a lack of answers here mean when it comes to building and deploying trustworthy RAI systems?
29 NOVEMBER (in person): Katie Creel (Philosophy & Computer Science, Northeastern).
Don’t Use Machine Learning To Evaluate Grants (Kathleen Creel & Liam Kofi Bright)
Funding science is a chancy business. Promising projects come to naught; strong results fail to replicate. To reduce the uncertainty of their bets, grant-making agencies are encouraging the development of tools that aim to predict which papers will replicate — and, eventually, it is hoped, which grants to fund. The putative benefits of a tool that could predict the success of funding proposals are clear: time saved, public funds better allocated. And the challenges to constructing such a tool seem equally clear: agreeing on machine-evaluable metrics of success for proposals, predicting future scientific success based on the past successes the future is mean to exceed. The current state of automated prediction reflects these challenges. But whether achievement of this task is likely in the short term — or even possible — is immaterial for our argument, which concerns the impact on the epistemic diversity of scientific communities impacted by the establishment of an automated bottleneck.
In this paper, we first outline the reasons to think machine learning-based predictive instruments are likely to homogenize which science is funded. We then rehearse the arguments for epistemic diversity in science, establishing the stakes. We next generate four possible scenarios for the deployment of algorithmic decision-making tools in grant evaluation by varying the predictive success of the average tool and the degree of correlation between the tools. We show that no matter how predictively successful the tool is, using machine learning to filter grants is likely to reduce the diversity of scientific approaches. We conclude by recommending solutions to grant-making agencies.
13 DECEMBER (hybrid): Amelia Bonea (CHISTM, Manchester). 3.45-5.30pm
Amelia will be presenting on Zoom — note the later start time. You can zoom in yourself, or else be more sociable and come along to BH1.03 to watch with others. Mince pies and mulled wine will be available from 3pm (same venue).
Zoom link / Passcode: x&Vj1@
Blank Pages of Geologic History’: Sciences, Politics and Economies of Deep Time in Twentieth-Century India. Among the many research committees set up in the 1940s by the newly established Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of the Government of India was one whose object of investigation focused on the measurement of geological time. Chaired by geologist D. N. Wadia, well known for his research on the stratigraphy and tectonics of the Himalayas and for acting as a Geological Adviser to the Government of India, the Committee counted among its members other notable scientists such as the chemist J. C. Ghosh, palaeobotanist B. Sahni and astrophysicist M. N. Saha. The immediate objective of the research group appeared to be to promote the radioactive dating of geological rocks in the Indian subcontinent, a method hailed for its potential to supplement earlier techniques that relied on stratigraphic correlation and the examination of microfossils. In this respect, the roots of the initiative were firmly anchored in unanswered questions about the ‘blank geological patches’ of the Indian subcontinent, among them the Pir Panjal Range in Kahsmir, which Wadia had visited in 1924 together with Sahni and G. E. Pilgrim, Superintendent of the Geological Survey of India. But why was the measurement of geological time important at this particular historical juncture in pre-independence India? The paper will use the activity of the Committee and the scientific output of various historical actors connected to it to address this question and discuss the significance of time as a conceptual and methodological device in palaeosciences in twentieth-century India. Focusing on palaeobotany and palaeontology, it will illuminate how palaeoscientists filled time with meaning and sought to establish correlations between geological and historical time scales. Their knowledge making was informed not only by the desire to fill the ‘blank pages of geologic history,’ but also by the strategic need to argue the economic relevance of their discipline to the exploitation of natural resources in the Indian subcontinent or to advance related geopolitical agendas.
HPS Leeds 