Alfonso Caramazza: Levels of Representation in the Mind/Brain: What Good Are Sensory-Motor Representations?
ABSTRACT In this talk, Dr. Caramazza examines the long debated relationship between the sensorimotor systems and thought. There is a major divide between scientists who reduce sensorimotor representations, and those who consider concepts as too abstract or symbolic for simple reduction to sensorimotor patterns. He will discuss these views through the analysis of various phenomena [...]
William Bechtel: Investigating Neural Representations: The Tale of Place Cells
ABSTRACT While neuroscientists often characterize brain activity as representational, many philosophers have construed this as just a theorist’s gloss on the mechanism. Moreover, philosophical discussions commonly treat neuroscience accounts as finished accounts, not as works in progress. I adopt a different perspective, considering how characterizations of neural activity as representational contributes to the development of [...]
Naomi Oreskes: Merchants of Doubt: Using History and Philosophy of Science to Understand the Climate Change Debate
Great Hall - Somerville House Somerville House, Western University, London, Ontario, CanadaABSTRACT On vital issues such as genetically-modified foods and climate change, having correct scientific knowledge is vital for making good public policy. How does philosophy help us understand science? How strong is the scientific consensus about climate change, and the effects our species has on it? Naomi Oreskes, co-author of the award-winning book Merchants of [...]
Rotman 2013 Annual Conference: Science and Reality
CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION Science has changed the ways we think of, and act on, the world. But do we really understand the relation between scientific theories and the world? Are there different perspectives on the world? How can it be that science, a characteristically human and social endeavour, yields successful predictions and fruitful explanations? What is [...]
Michaela Massimi: Perspectival Realism
ABSTRACT In her talk, Massimi will review the problems and prospects of scientific perspectivism. Scientific perspectivism has been advocated as a philosophical view that can account for the use of incompatible models in science, and as a middle ground between scientific realism and relativism. SPEAKER PROFILE Michela Massimi is a senior lecturer in Philosophy of [...]
Stathis Psillos: Revisiting the ‘Bankruptcy of Science’ Debate
ABSTRACT The ‘bankruptcy of science’ controversy took place in France towards the end of the nineteenth century. It was a heated debate among scientists, philosophers, literary critics, novelists and various public figures that was widely advertised in the press and caught the attention of the wider public on both sides of the Atlantic. It initially [...]
Douglas Kutach: Empirical Fundamentalism
Room 1145 - Stevenson Hall Stevenson Hall, Room 1145, London, Ontario, CanadaABSTRACT The program is built on two main ideas. First, metaphysics should be understood primarily in term of a certain concept of fundamental reality. The fundamental/derivative distinction is meant to replace a variety of competitors such as the reality/appearance distinction, the objective/subjective distinction, the scientific and manifest image, the realism/anti-realism distinction, and the distinction between [...]
Howard Eichenbaum: The Hippocampus in Space and Time
ABSTRACT In humans, hippocampal function is generally recognized as supporting episodic memory, which is characterized by the organization of experience over time, whereas in rats, many believe that the hippocampus creates maps of the environment and supports spatial navigation. How do we reconcile the episodic memory and spatial mapping views of hippocampal function? Here I [...]
Jonathan Kimmelman: Anatomy of Clinical Translation: Ethics, Epistemology, and Policy
ABSTRACT The clinical translation process is widely viewed as plagued by inefficiency, error, and delay. However, such views- and the research reforms aimed at correcting these deficiencies- draw on a problematic understanding of the nature of clinical translation (the “pipeline model”). In what follows, I use the recently translated cancer drug sunitinib to illustrate an [...]
Bas van Fraassen: The Self, From a Logical Point of View
Great Hall - Somerville House Somerville House, Western University, London, Ontario, CanadaABSTRACT Our sense of self is readily extrapolated to engender paradoxes, but that sense is not easily dismissed even when the logical aporiai are exposed. What Kant called the illusions of reason beckon here, but their false promises may be shown up if we subject the possibility of ‘objective’ scientific accounts of ourselves to a [...]
Bas van Fraassen: The Semantic Approach to Science, After 50 Years
Room 1145 - Stevenson Hall Stevenson Hall, Room 1145, London, Ontario, CanadaABSTRACT The 1960s saw many revolutions, worldwide, and some of that epoch’s revolutionary spirit manifested itself in philosophy of science, with strong reactions against the dominant ‘received view’ of Logical Positivism. Scientific realism emerged to dispute ontology, Kuhn single-handedly turned our eyes back to history of science, and the semantic approach replaced the methodological framework [...]
Joel Lexchin: Those Who Have the Gold Make the Evidence: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Clinical Trials
Room 1145 - Stevenson Hall Stevenson Hall, Room 1145, London, Ontario, CanadaABSTRACT Pharmaceutical companies fund the bulk of clinical research and this funding can introduce biases into the research through methods such as influencing the choice of standards of comparison, only publishing positive trials, reinterpreting data submitted to regulatory agencies, ghostwriting, and the use of “seeding” trials. There is no evidence that any of the measures [...]
Charlotte Werndl: Confirmation and Calibration in Climate Science
Room 1145 - Stevenson Hall Stevenson Hall, Room 1145, London, Ontario, CanadaABSTRACT I argue that concerns about double-counting – using the same evidence both to calibrate or tune climate models and also to confirm that the models are adequate – deserve more careful scrutiny in climate modelling circles. It is widely held that double-counting is bad and that separate data must be used for calibration and [...]
2014 PhilMiLCog Graduate Conference
PhilMiLCog is a three-day graduate conference with a broad and interdisciplinary scope. The conference, now in its 12th year, is recognized as one of the top philosophy graduate conferences in North America, synthesizing research from the Philosophy of Mind, Language, and Cognitive science, including psychology, linguistics, evolution, and computer science. PhilMiLCog provides an opportunity for [...]
2014 Philosophy of Logic Math and Physics Graduate Student Conference
Join us for the fourteenth annual Philosophy of Logic, Math and Physics (LMP) graduate student conference in philosophy at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. The LMP Graduate Student Conference will bring together philosophers of logic, mathematics, and physics for two days of presentations and discussions with some of the leaders in these fields. We [...]
Jean Bricmont: A Physicist Looks at Idealism and Relativism
Dr. David S.H. Chu International Student Centre International and Graduate Affairs Building, Western University, London, Ontario, CanadaABSTRACT Jean Bricmont, co-author with Alan Sokal of Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, will share his thoughts on idealism and relativism, from the perspective of a physicist. SPEAKER PROFILE Jean Bricmont is a Belgian theoretical physicist, philosopher of science and a professor at the Université Catholique de Louvain. He works on renormalization group [...]
Metaphysics Within and Without Physics: Annual Philosophy of Physics Conference
Room 1145 - Stevenson Hall Stevenson Hall, Room 1145, London, Ontario, Canada18th ANNUAL PHILOSOPHY OF PHYSICS CONFERENCE The Rotman Institute of Philosophy will devote the 2014 International Conference in the Philosophy of Physics on the relation between science and metaphysics. More specifically, the conference will bring together scientists and philosophers to address an important question about science and its cognitive aspirations: what is the relation between [...]
Causal Powers in Science: Blending Historical and Conceptual Perspectives
Dr. David S.H. Chu International Student Centre International and Graduate Affairs Building, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada2014 ROTMAN SUMMER INSTITUTE The 2014 Institute brings together philosophers of science and metaphysicians with historians of philosophy to discuss conceptual and historical issues concerning the nature and role of causal powers in science and the prospects of the debate between the neo-Aristotelian and neo-Humean approaches to causation and laws of nature. This is a [...]
Peter Godfrey-Smith: Memory as Communication
ABSTRACT Memory can be seen as communication between stages – communication between an earlier and a later self. This idea only becomes more than a loose analogy, though, if there is a theory of communication that can add something substantial to our understanding of memory. I’ll argue that recent models of communication, developed for quite [...]
Roman Frigg: Three-Part Crash Course on the Science of Climate Change
Room 1145 - Stevenson Hall Stevenson Hall, Room 1145, London, Ontario, CanadaABSTRACT This three-part lecture series focuses on the natural science aspects of climate change, as well as the methodological and philosophical questions that arise in connection with them. Everybody wishing to understand the basic physics behind climate change and the use of climate models is welcome to attend; no prior knowledge is presupposed. The first [...]