Posted 26 May 2025

The first project event is now over and I think I can speak for everyone involved in saying that the workshop was very stimulating, productive and, not to forget, enjoyable. Thank you everyone!

The next workshop in Lisbon will take place in 2026, but meanwhile, some project members will meet at the GAP.12 Satellite workshop "New Work in Metaphysical Indeterminacy" this September in Düsseldorf. A preliminary programme is available on the events page, so have a look!

Posted: 19 April 2025

The first two project publications are out! 

Laws of nature as results of a trade-off — Rethinking the Humean trade-off conception by Niels Linnemann & Robert Michels, forthcoming in Philosophical Quarterly. 

The Humean theory of laws of nature relies on a trade-off between theoretical virtues to explain what it takes to be a law of nature, but some philosophers have argued that such trade-offs do not play a role in science. The paper gives an example from science, in which such a trade-off is used in applications of AI to re-discover known physical laws from data, then argues that the conception of a trade-off used by Humeans is overly simplistic, and finally argues that given a better understanding of trade-offs, there are bound to be a number of equally optimal trade-offs, resulting in a situation where it may be indeterminate which laws of nature there are.  

 Humansplaining: is it a thing? Is it bad? by Robert Michels & Sanna Hirvonen in AI & Society.

This short paper discusses "humansplaining", the unjust act of a human explaining something to an AI which knows better. If the vision that there might be independent AI scientists who formulate new scientific theories is ever realized, humansplaining may happen in situations in which it is unclear whether human or AI science gets at the truth. 

Click the titles to head over to philpapers to have a look and read them!