Rationale:
These seminars are intended as an informal venue for research students to present and discuss interesting aspects of their work. The format consists of a presentation of about thirty minutes, followed by about twenty minutes for discussion.
Abstracts, audio recordings and slides are available for past events.
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Call for Contributions
We have three WIPS presentations during the 2010 spring term. All sessions are held in room G3, 22 Gordon Square (map):Thursday 25 Feb at 1-2pm
Jonathan Everett: Causation and Explanation in Evolution: Lessons from Thermodynamics
There is much debate about whether evolutionary theory should be considered as dynamical or statistical- i.e. whether to treat natural selection and drift as forces driving the process or as statistical properies of an ensemble of events. In the literature on this subject both sides have made appeal to thermodynamics to support their position, yet neither side quite captures either the relationship between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics or the sense in which thermodynmics is explanatory. I aim to develop an account of thermodynamics as a 'weakly statistical' theory and argue that treating evolutionary theory as analogous to thermodynamics on this understanding best captures how evolutionary theory functions.
Thursday 11 Mar at 1-2pm
Christian Solberg: Cities as disaster science laboratories
What of disasters in an STS of the built environment? Imperial Japan (Clancey 2006) and Frontier California (Geschwind 2001) were, and still are, areas faced with potentially catastrophic earthquakes and earthquake-induced fires, landslides and tsunamis. How did actors in these cities reconfigure themselves and their built environments in order to cope with seismic hazards? How did earthquakes reconfigure cities and their inhabitants? The answer set out in this paper is that these seismic cities became disaster science laboratories.
It is through the translation of earthquakes into the human-material world that geophysical and hydrological events come to be catastrophes. These translations occur in partially overlapping epistemic and material domains and are subject to different, though related translation procedures. Physically, earthquakes translate into displacements of soils, bodies of water, the built environments and their inhabitants. Economically, earthquakes translate into shifts in distributions of investment and divestment. Socio-culturally they translate into symbolic and material displacements of aggregate control and identity projects. Psychologically, earthquakes translate into shifts in individual behaviours, motivations, cognitions and emotions.
Modern disaster science laboratories, be they physical, engineering or social scientific, analytically focus on displacement processes and displaced spaces, artefacts, assemblages, resources and organisms. In these laboratories the explicit analytical tasks have become defining, measuring and predicting displacement; devising instruments, algorithms, images and formulas that adequately describe and predict the inertial forces, accelerations and trajectories of such displacements; finally re-translating these experimental lash-ups into both classical scientific laboratories and those distributed and embedded in the nominally non-scientific society.
Tuesday 23 March at 1-2pm
Note change of day for this seminar only
Ian James Kidd (Durham): Pluralism and the ineffability of reality in the later philosophy of Paul Feyerabend
The later Feyerabend defended a thoroughgoing epistemological pluralism. Reality is receptive to many different modes of inquiry and forms of knowledge, including, but certainly not limited to, those of the Western sciences. Feyerabend defended this pluralism in two ways. First, he provided a series of epistemological arguments, focusing on maximising criticism and the diversity of values informing human epistemic activities. I connect this with contemporary debates over scientific pluralism, and values in science. Second, and more intriguingly, Feyerabend argued that the only way to safeguard epistemological pluralism was to assert the 'ineffability' of Reality. This 'doctrine of ineffability' precludes any one 'theory', 'worldview', or, more broadly, one set of epistemic activities, from 'Platonising' themselves, and asserting their 'hard realist' credentials. I then outline this 'doctrine of ineffability' and consider whether it can really safeguard epistemological pluralism in the way that Feyerabend suggests, using the recent work of Hasok Chang along the way.
News:
- March 2009 - Call for contributions for WIPS 2010
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