Abstracts

Elena Castellani (Florence)

'Convergence strategies for theory assessment'

This paper addresses the issue of the import of convergence arguments in empirical and non-empirical theory assessment. A first part is devoted to making the point of the different types of strategies based on convergence, providing new distinctions with respect to the existing literature. Then, two distinct, representative cases are examined, where, respectively, the convergence obtains (a)in terms of (theory-mediated) empirical procedures, and (b) in terms of purely theoretical procedures (however physically motivated). These are: (a) Perrin's famous argument on behalf of the atomic hypothesis on the grounds of the convergence of thirteen different procedures to the same result for the Avogadro number; (b) the convergence argument motivating the trust in the viability of the extra-dimension conjecture in the context of early string theory. In both cases, I argue, the evaluation of the assessment strategy significantly depends on how the convergence argument is interpreted.

Vincenzo Crupi (Turin)

'Norms vs. evidence in reasoning research' 

Diagnoses of (ir)rationality often arise in the empirical investigation of human reasoning. How can such diagnoses be disputed and assessed? We will articulate a principled classification of different cases relying on a view of experimental work from a philosophy of science perspective. We will then see that much fruitful research done with classical experimental paradigms was triggered by normative concerns and yet fostered insight in properly psychological terms (some cornerstone examples will be discussed). The analysis provided suggests that normative considerations retain a constructive role for the psychology of reasoning — contrary to recent complaints in the literature — but not the one that “normativist” cognitive scientists have often assumed. In particular, the approach I propose does not blur the is-ought distinction.

Niccoló Rossi (Barcelona)

'Knowledge and grounds: the case of disjunction'

If Andrea knows that Biden won the last presidential election, they also know that either Biden won the last presidential election, or Biden is a reptilian. This is the response that epistemic logics based on standard Kripke relational semantics provide, which is consistent with the fact that minimally rational agents can perform disjunction introduction. This is not the case in topic-sensitive semantics though. Andrea might not grasp the concept of ‘reptilian’, and therefore not be able to know any proposition dealing with reptilians. I argue that this requirement is too strong. I keep the idea that topic-grasping is crucial for knowledge, but I weaken the requirement: only grasping some ‘minimal topics’ of a proposition is needed. I use a theory of logical grounding (Correia, 2014) in order to define which are the minimal grounds of a proposition and define a minimal topic as the topic of a minimal ground. Once this is done, I propose a semantic clause for knowledge that maintains the good features of topic-sensitive semantics while improving its treatment of disjunction. Doing so, I exploit the concept of logical grounding in order to define the minimal parts of a proposition which are relevant truth-wise and topic-wise for the knowledge of such a proposition. 

Moritz Schulz (TU Dresden)

'You should believe! Knowledge, evidence, and inquiry'

There is a recent debate about positive norms for belief. Do we have a positive duty to believe when faced with a certain body of evidence? What is the nature of such duties (is it epistemic, zetetic, practical, or even moral)? What conception of evidence is necessary to formulate such norms? In this talk, I am going to address these questions from a perspective that is friendly to the knowledge-first framework. 

Mattias Skipper (INN University)

'The Bayesian and the Abductivist'

What is the relationship between Bayesian updating and abductive inference? Van Fraassen famously argued that the two are incompatible, concluding that abduction is ultimately irrational. Others have disagreed with van Fraassen, arguing that abduction, properly understood, is in fact compatible with Bayesianism. Our goal here is to present some formal results that allow us to tackle this debate from a new angle. We begin with what we take to be a minimal version of the abductivist's claim that explanatory power has confirmation-theoretic import. We then show that this minimal abductivist principle, when combined with various forms of Bayesian updating, places surprisingly strong and controversial constraints on how we must measure explanatory power. The results won't settle the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists in any straightforward way; but they mark some important choice points for all participants in the debate.

Javier Suárez (Oviedo)

'What is this thing called evidence? The complex process of making evidence in Biology'

It is commonly assumed in philosophy of science that a claim or, generally, a piece of information, counts as evidence for an hypothesis if it makes the hypothesis more likely to be true. But an intriguing question about this relationship concerns how exactly these pieces of information are constructed as evidence in the first place. In this talk, I analyse the complex process that a specific piece of biological information- needs to go through before it is considered 'evidence' for/against a biological hypothesis. In doing so, I reveal why knowing not just the source of the information or the technology used to obtain it, but the history of this very technology, is relevant for the making of evidence. I illustrate how this is relevant to understand what evidence is in cases of technological repurposing, and thus an important condition to avoid scientific failure.

Adán Sus (Valladolid)

'Evidence, physical principles and non-empirical criteria: The case for dark matter'

According to the standard model of cosmology (Λ-CDM), 80% of the matter content of our universe (95% of the total eneregy-momentum burden which also includes dark energy) is dark. Evidence for the existence of non-baryonic dark matter comes from observations at different astronomical and cosmological scales, being the concordance of between these different sources a strong argument in favour of dark matter. Although most physicists favour the dark matter hypothesis, an alternative paradigm to solve the matter discrepancy, consisting of some kind of modification of the gravitational theory, generally referred as MOND, has been explored. This situation provides an excellent case to evaluate some debates in the philosophy of science. In particular, the use of different physical principles, with different degrees of justification, together with some non-empirical criteria, proves to be essential for the identification of evidence as evidence for dark matter rather than for one of the alternative cosmological models. In this talk I will discuss the status of these principles (the Equivalence Principle, in particular) and criteria for the determination of the evidence for the dark matter hypothesis and I will reflect on the import that this has for an interpretative strategy of spacetime theories that gives ideal/schematized observers a prominent place.