Alison Wylie
Professor of Philosophy
University of British Columbia
February 9, 2024
“How Knowers Know Well: Standpoint Theory and Achievement Thesis”
Alison Wylie is the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of the Social and Historical Sciences. She has a long-standing interest in philosophical questions raised by archaeology, feminist theory, and collaborative research practice. She works with the indigenous/Science research network at UBC and the Center for Braiding indigenous Knowledge and Science.
Dr. Uljana Feest
Professor of Philosophy
Leibniz University of Hanover
January 12, 2024
“Machine Learning and Algorithmic Bias in Personality Research”
Dr. Feest studied psychology, philosophy and history and philosophy of science (HPS) in Frankfurt, Bristol and Pittsburgh. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) and then held a position as assistant professor at the Technische Universität (TU) Berlin.
Dr. Şerife Tekin
Professor at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities
SUNY Upstate Medical University
October 6, 2023
“Virtues of the Multitudinous Self Model in Psychiatry”
Dr. Tekin’s work in philosophy of psychiatry takes place at the cusp of philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and bioethics. She wrote on topics spanning the place of the self in science, the role of patient narratives in psychiatric research and mental healthcare, ethical issues arising in medical applications of artificial intelligence, and the value of medical humanities education for health professionals.
Ahmad El Abbar
Ph.D. Student in Philosophy of science
University of Cambridge
April 28, 2023
“Removing Climate Knowledge: Structural Injustice in Climate Assessment”
Ahmad El Abbar’s research explores the ways in which the distribution of climate knowledge raises concerns of justice. In Spring 2023, he visited the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego as a Fulbright Scholar
Ryan McCoy
Ph.D. Student in Philosophy of Climate Science and Policy
University of Kentucky
April 14, 2023
“The Role of Local Knowledge in Climate Research”
Ryan McCoy research focuses on the use of local knowledge within climate research through transdisciplinary and citizen science initiatives
Dr. Kareem Khalifa
Professor of Philosophy
UCLA (2022–present), Middlebury College in Vermont (2006–2022).
March 31, 2023
“How Value-Landen are Segregation Indices?”
Dr. Khalifa’s research interests include general philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology. In addition to authoring over 30 articles, he authored the book, Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge, 2017) and co-edited Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences (Routledge, 2022). He is currently extending his previous work in these areas to social-scientific conceptions of race and segregation. He is currently a Future of Truth Fellow at the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute. In 2025, he will be the Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science. In 2017, he received the American Council of Learned Societies’ Burkhardt Award, which funded a five-year project, Explanation as Inferential Practice.
Dr. Julia Bursten
Professor of Philosophy and affiliate faculty in Gender and Women’s Studies
University of Kentucky
February 17, 2023
“Epistemology in Agricultural Extension”
Dr. Bursten’s research explores the mechanics of scientific knowledge in oddball and under-explored sciences, like nano science and agricultural science. She writes for both philosophical and scientific audiences, and her work has been published in journals including Nature Nanotechnology, Philosophy of Science, and Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science.
Matthew J. Brown
Professor of Philosophy and History of Ideas
University of Texas at Dallas
February 18, 2022
“Trust, Expertise and Scientific Authority in Democracy”
Matthew J. Brown is Director of the Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology and Program Head of History and Philosophy at the University of Dallas at Texas. He is the author of Science and Moral Imagination: A New Ideal for Values in Science.
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Maya J. Goldenberg
University of Guelph
January 22, 2021
“A War on Science: Rethinking Vaccine Hesitancy and Refusal”
Because vaccine hesitancy has been framed as a problem of public misunderstanding of science, vaccine outreach has focused on educating the misguided publics. Where efforts to change vaccine attitudes have failed, cynicism has bred the harsher view that the publics are anti-science and anti-expertise. Yet research into science and the publics lends strong support to the view that public attitudes regarding scientific claims turn crucially on epistemic trust rather than engagement with science itself. It follows that it is poor trust in the expert sources that engender vaccine hesitancy. This consideration redraws the lines of responsibility, where vaccine hesitancy signals a problem with scientific governance rather than a problem with the wayward publics. In order to improve vaccine communications, we should focus on building that trust rather than educating the misinformed publics or puzzling over the moral and epistemic failings of the publics. Doing this does not discount that public health agencies have the science on their sides. It does mean recognizing that the best science is not enough to ensure public uptake of health recommendations.
Bennett Holman
Underwood International College, Yonsei University
March 17, 2020
“On Bias in Science”
The standard definition of bias holds that it is a systematic deviation from the truth. I will argue that giving up the value-free ideal of science necessitates a move away from this definition. For example, the precautionary principle requires us to keep a potentially unsafe chemical off the market even at the expense of mistakenly restricting access to greater number of chemicals that are safe. Yet numerous philosophers have argued that the inaccuracy induced by the precautionary principle is an appropriate infusion of values into science (e.g., Heather Douglas, Kevin Elliott, Justin Biddle, Daniel Steel, etc.). Moreover, there seem to be cases of epistemically problematic practices that do not result in a systematic deviation from the truth. For example, a pharmaceutical company that compares a standard dosage of their drug to a suboptimal dose of their competitors seems to be a clear case of bias. Yet though the results may be misleading, so long as the dosages are reported, the results are accurate (i.e., “unbiased”). I offer a definition of bias that classifies the use of the precautionary principle as unbiased and the rigged drug trial as biased, and sorts through a number of other similar tricky cases. In so doing, I suggest this conception of bias prepares the ground to differentiate between acceptable and unacceptable roles for values in science, what Torsten Wilholt and I have proposed to call “The New Demarcation Problem”.
Joyce C. Havstad
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Oakland University
February 7, 2020
“The Sensational Science of Human Prehistory: High Inductive Risk and Low Epistemic Standards”
Some scientific notions are sensational. Counted among these are speculations about our own, human origins from within various interacting populations of archaic hominins. When we evolved, where we came from, who we had sex with… these are all topics of enduring, popular interest. Recent scientific study of these matters—especially relating to the Denisova, a purportedly novel population of archaic hominins—is both technically stunning and socially reckless. Here I urge the relevant scientists to consider what responsibilities they incur when erring in their scientific pronouncements about the relative contributions of the Denisovato the genome of apparent sub-populations of current humans. Since there is obvious, demonstrable risk of error in this case, these scientists ought to anticipate their corresponding responsibility, and I offer a proposal for how they might fulfill it.
George Reisch
Managing Editor of The Monist and Series Editor for Popular Culture and Philosophy
September 20, 2019
“The Structure of a Political Disengagement: On Thomas Kuhn, James B. Conant, and the Place of History of Science in Postwar America”
More than any other text in the history and philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions shaped the nature, values, and boundaries of American scholarship about science in the last half of the twentieth century. Questions about whether and how science studies are, or can become, socially engaged can therefore profit by considering the origins and development of Structure prior to its publication in 1962. This talk examines how Kuhn’s early theorizing about science followed Harvard President James B. Conant’s vision of history of science as a core component of American postwar education. In the context of the cold war, however, and in some ways because of that context, I will argue that Kuhn theorized a different vision for understanding science, one that firmly separates scientific values and progress from social values and progress. While Structure became famous for its provocative claim that scientists trained under the competing paradigms live in “different worlds,” it was arguably Kuhn’s view that professional scientists live in worlds different than their fellow citizens that helped to disengage postwar history and philosophy of science from issues concerning economics and social welfare.