TILPS

This research seminar is a forum for all members of TiLPS with research interests in epistemology or philosophy of science to present and discuss their work. Sometimes we also have a guest speaker or discuss a recently published article. Master students and Research Master students may take this research seminar for credit. Please contact Stephan Hartmann for more information. The seminar meets Thursdays from 16.30 to 18.00. Papers for discussion and some background reading will be available from this website at least one week in advance.

9 February: Room DZ10
Measurement and Robustness
Eran Tal, TiLPS

This paper advances the thesis that a certain kind of robustness is constitutive of physical measurement. I argue that a procedure is adequate for measuring a physical quantity if and only if the outcomes of that procedure converge to those of other, sufficiently diverse procedures when these procedures are appropriately described in terms of that quantity. This kind of robustness, i.e. convergence under description, accounts for the methods actually used to standardize measurement procedures. I illustrate this with a case study of the standardization of time conducted at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The implications of the current thesis for the epistemology of measurement are discussed, with particular attention to problems of coordination as posed by Poincaré and Reichenbach.

9 March: Room DZ8
On the Purely Instrumental Value of True Belief
Torsten Wilholt, Bielefeld

Epistemologists widely hold that true belief must have some value, as truth is the goal of inquiry. My aim in this talk is twofold: First, to give an analysis of the value of true belief in so far as it is implied by the idea that inquiry is directed to the truth. What kinds of valuations and which valuations exactly are implicit in this idea? In a second step, I will then argue that these valuations are purely instrumental in character. In order to support this claim, I will show that although the value of true belief is inherent in inquiry (in a sense that can be made precise by means of the analysis given in the first step), it is consistent with this that the valuations and preferences involved are all held for purely instrumental reasons. I will also argue that the most common motivation for postulating an intrinsic value of true belief rests on a mistake. Intrinsic value is most commonly introduced in order to account for a whole range of human cognitive activities that (apparently) defy considerations of utility. Rather than trying to set out how these activities can be explained and justified through the instrumental value of the truths they pursue, I will argue that they can not satisfactorily be explained or justified on the basis of an alleged intrinsic value of true belief.

16 March: Room DZ8
What Is Scientific Philosophy?
Stephan Hartmann and Jan Sprenger, TiLPS

This programmatic talk tries to answer the question what Scientific Philosophy is (or could be). We will stress the role of idealized models and numerical methods as a tool for the philosopher and explore what this practice means for our understanding of the goals of philosophy. We will also discuss how Scientific Philosophy differs from other philosophical approaches. Finally, we will illustrate our claims by one example - Naturalized Bayesianism.

6 April: Room DZ5
Investigating Human Inference in a Probability Logic Framework
Niki Pfeifer, Salzburg

Probabilistic models have become popular in the psychology of reasoning in recent years. In my talk, I will present a probability logical framework for investigating human reasoning. Coherence in the sense of De Finetti is used as the basic interpretation of probability. I will show how psychological predictions can be derived within this framework. A series of empirical studies of probabilistic versions of well-known argument forms, like modus ponens, will illustrate the psychological reality of the proposed approach. The focus will be on how people interpret and draw inferences about argument forms dealing with conditionals. One key result is that most people seem to interpret uncertain indicative conditionals as conditional probabilities. Finally, I will discuss how the theoretical considerations and the empirical results contribute to construct a new psychological theory of uncertain reasoning.

27 April: Room WZ103 D147
A Puzzle about Belief Updating
Carlo Martini, TiLPS

Recent epistemological literature has been concerned with the problem of disagreement and it counterpart, consensus. According to most of that literature disagreement constitutes evidence, on the basis of which one should change her beliefs accordingly. There has been little analysis, however, about the meaning of consensus, whether consensus is possible at all from an externalist or an internalist point of view, and about the difference between consensus and compromise. In this paper I attempt an analysis of the core issues concerning disagreement and its counterpart, consensus, from the point of view belief updating. I show that, under very reasonable requirements for belief updating (Dietrich and List, forthcoming), disagreement turns out to be an impossible outcome, at least from an internalist perspective. The only viable externalist route, however, cannot truly be called a consensus, but rather a compromise. In other words, what Lehrer (1976) calls rational consensus turns out to be an impossible outcome. Moreover, the analysis and results from the argument raise a puzzle about belief updating, namely, the fact that we cannot update our belief on the basis of an external source of evidence such as disagreement. This latter result is in contrast with a certain version of epistemic voluntarism (see van Fraassen 1984).

11 May: Room DZ5

Part one:

Moral Conformity
Chiara Lisciandra, TiLPS

A remarkable tradition in social psychology has highlighted the effects of conformity in a variety of aspects of people's behaviour (Asch 1951, Milgram 1963). In a well-known experiment, the psychologist Solomon Asch showed that individuals tend to conform even to patently wrong judgements about visual tasks within a group of people expressing the same (wrong) opinion. Considering that visual tasks may be deeply influenced by external factors, in this paper we replicate Asch's experiment in the moral domain. Moral intuitions tend to be particularly entrenched in individuals, and are often considered unconditional and stable over contexts. The hypothesis we aim to test is if -regardless of their content- judgements about moral norms, social norms, and distaste stand the test of social conditioning.

Part two:

Particularistic Culture and Corruption: A Theoretical and Experimental Approach
Ting Jiang, Tilburg

In short, I study the impact of culture on corruption. I first classify cultures as universalistic, open particularistic and closed particularistic (or quasi-universalistic). I then argue that although particularism is the core or even the cause of corruption, the open particularistic culture is the one in which corruption spreads the most. My classification of different cultures is based on three elements: preferences, dynamics of preferences and behavior, which will be modeled as well as empirically examined in the lab. The distinction between universalistic and particularistic cultures is based on the degree of differential other-regarding preference towards ingroup members' payoffs vs. outgroup members' payoffs. The difference in dynamics of ingroup composition and ingroup size separates open from closed particularistic culture. Behavioral and evolutionary game theoretic models will be used to predict the corruption levels in different cultures that I specify. The theoretical results will be tested using economic laboratory experiments.