Computational Social Philosophy Seminars (CSPS) is a regular international online seminar series, focusing on research that uses or engages with the use of computational tools to address questions in social philosophy.
All seminars are on Mondays at 8 am PT / 11 am ET / 4 pm London / 5 pm Berlin.
Date: April 7, 2025
Speaker: Marina Dubova
Title: Computational investigation of experimentation strategies in science
Abstract: Scientists must choose which among many experiments to perform. To investigate the effectiveness of experimental strategies proposed by philosophers of science and executed by scientists themselves, we developed a multi-agent model of the scientific process that includes active experimentation, theorizing, and social learning. Our findings suggest that randomly choosing new experiments leads the agents to develop the most accurate theories of their simulated environments. In contrast, agents aiming to confirm theories, falsify theories, or resolve theoretical disagreements by their experiments may develop promising accounts for the data they collected, but ultimately misrepresent the ground truth they intended to learn about.
For a complete list of past and upcoming seminar presentations see the Talks page.
The seminars are held on Zoom and last 60 minutes. Our seminars will typically have one of the following formats
Format 1: 30 min presentation + 30 min discussion
Format 2: two flash talks, 15 min presentation + 15 min discussion each
Sina Fazelpour (Northeastern), Sahar Heydari Fard (Ohio State University), Hannah Rubin (University of Missouri), Dunja Šešelja (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Rory Smead (Northeastern), Jingyi Wu (London School of Economics)
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