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The Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh presents, The Sixty-Fourth Annual Lecture Series. This is the Center’s oldest program, it was established in 1960, the year when Adolf Grünbaum founded the Center. Each year the series consists of six lectures, about three quarters of which are given by philosophers, historians, and scientists from other universities. Over the years most of the leading philosophers of science have spoken in this series.
The Center for Philosophy of Science invites you to join us for our Annual Lecture Series. Attend in person, Room 1008 on the 10th floor of the Cathedral of Learning or visit our live stream on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.
All ALS presentations are on Friday afternoons at 3:30 EST.
For more information and topics as we receive them, please visit our website: https://www.centerphilsci.pitt.edu/events-and-more/annual-lecture-series/
Carnegie Mellon University
September 29th
Title: Epistemic Diversity, Ethics, and the Optimal Timing of Clinical Trials
Abstract:
Ethically acceptable research with human participants should satisfy at least two ethical criteria: it should produce sufficient social value to justify its conduct and it should respect the basic rights and interests of study participants. The concept of clinical equipoise has risen to prominence because it purports to reconcile these objectives by connecting the conditions for initiating and terminating a trial to a state of uncertainty within the relevant community of experts. In this talk I present a method for representing the epistemic state of a community of experts and I show that distributions of expert assessment that are likely to be regarded as canonical examples of equipoise (especially states that reflect some notion of “equal” distribution) fail to satisfy one or more of the above ethical criteria. I consider distributions of expert assessment that reflect healthy vs unhealthy epistemic diversity and draw some general conclusions about the optimal timing of clinical trials. Time permitting, I will show how these results provide further support for conceptualizing trials that use response adaptative randomization as modeling the dynamical change in the distribution of assessments among different experts in a community rather than as the dynamics of belief change of some group agent or meta-expert.
University of California, Irvine
October 13th
Title: Why Natural Social Contracts are Not Fair
Abstract:
Many theorists have employed game theory to model the emergence of stable social norms, or natural “social contracts”. One branch of this literature uses bargaining games to show why many societies have norms and rules for fairness. In cultural evolutionary models, fair bargaining emerges endogenously because it is an efficient way to divide resources. But these models miss an important element of real human societies – divisions into groups or social categories. Once such groups are added to cultural evolutionary models, fairness is no longer the expected outcome. Instead “discriminatory norms” often emerge where one group systematically gets more when dividing resources. I show why the addition of categories to bargaining models leads to unfairness, and discuss the role of power and minority status in this process. I also address how categories might emerge to support inequity, and the possibility of modeling social change. Altogether this work emphasizes that if one wishes to understand the naturalistic emergence of social contracts, one must account for the presence of categorical divisions, and unfairness, as well as for norms of fairness.
University of Minnesota
November 17th
University of Guelph
February 23rd
University of Maryland
March 22nd
Stanford University
April 19th
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