Previous Lunch Forum

2024

CPS Lunch Forum: Francesca Bellazzi

An Exploration of Biochemical Structure

Time and place: Dec. 9, 2024 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652 and Zoom

Chemistry is often referred to as the domain of structure. At least from the 19th century, chemists began to focus their attention on how substances display given spatial relations by connecting the different atoms together, and constraining the spatial relationships between these atoms (Weisberg et al. 2019). Moreover, as analysed by Hendry (2023), chemical structure is crucial in our understanding of chemical classification, nomenclature and it underpins microstructural essentialism in chemistry. But what does it happen when we consider the structure of chemical macromolecules, such as biochemical molecules? As explored by Havstad (2018), the situation gets quite “messy”.

In this talk, I will present the available notions of chemical structure and apply them to biochemical cases with a focus on vitamins and proteins’ structure as the two main case studies. I will start from a pluralistic approach to chemical structure, according to which there are two “main” structures in chemistry: i) structure as chemical bond; ii) structure as geometrical configuration of atoms (Henry 2023). These have also to be conceived as an abstraction, as molecules and elements are intrinsically dynamic. I will then apply these to more complex compounds such as vitamins and proteins. In the case of vitamins, I will argue that we can apply a similar scheme to the one suggested, but we have to consider structure as a geometrical configuration of elements – rather than atoms only. This can be seen as a first case of biochemical structure. In the case of proteins, the situation gets more complex as proteins present a four-level structure. The classical notions of structure apply to primary and secondary structure, but more needs to be said for tertiary and quaternary structure. Specifically, proteins are characterised by a complex structure, which presents two levels of dynamics: they are internally dynamic, and their profile is linked to folding. Accordingly, I will suggest that the case of proteins require a new notion of structure in the philosophy debate, which can be interpreted as “self-assembled” structure. Where the tertiary and the quaternary structure of the proteins are a result of self-assembled processes which deliver a given functional structure configuration. This will be seen as a second sense of biochemical structure.

References

Havstad, Joice. 2018. “Messy Chemical Kinds”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2018 69:3, 719-743

Hendry, Robin 2023. “Structure, essence and existence in chemistry”, Ratio 36, 4

Weisberg, Michael, Paul Needham, and Robin Hendry, (2019). "Philosophy of Chemistry", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/chemistry/>.

Organiser

Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences (CPS)

CPS Lunch Forum: Katharine Browne

What is Collective Attention?

Time and place: Nov. 25, 2024 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652 and Zoom

It is natural to speak of groups or collectives paying attention to certain things, and to make normative judgements about what groups should attend to. We might, for example, say of a hiring committee that they ought to have paid more attention to certain features of a candidate’s qualifications, or to criticize the amount of collective attention paid to celebrity gossip relative to the plight of refugees as unjust.

But what does it mean for a collective to pay attention? There is a well-established literature on collective belief and joint attention, but to date no sustained discussion of the nature and normative significance of collective attention. This paper provides such an account.

I distinguish different types of collective attention corresponding to the attention of non-structured groups (e.g., members of the public).and structured groups (e.g., committees). I focus on the latter and draw on Margaret Gilbert’s work on collective belief to provide a non-summative account to explain the collective attention of structured groups. I end by examining whether this account can be generalized to explain other forms of collective attention, including public attention and joint attention.

Organiser

Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences (CPS)

CPS Lunch Forum: Sebastian Sander Oest

The epistemic role of chemical spontaneity in biology

Time and place: Oct. 28, 2024 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652 and Zoom

Abstract

Chemical spontaneity is a fundamental concept in thermodynamic chemistry, defining the conditions under which a chemical reaction will proceed without the need for external energy input. This principle not only governs the behavior of molecules but also offers a framework for understanding causal processes in other scientific domains. In this paper, I explore how the concept of chemical spontaneity provides a toolkit for causal selection in biological systems. First, chemical spontaneity can be interpreted in interventionist terms, allowing us to understand it as a causal generalization that supports counterfactual reasoning. This reasoning helps predict how chemical reactions would unfold under various circumstances, guiding our understanding of reaction rates, the presence of catalysts, and environmental factors that influence reactions. This establishes robust standards for identifying different types of causal influences within a complex system as stable, proportional, or controlling. Building on this, I then apply these tools to biological contexts, explaining how the principles of chemical spontaneity facilitate causal selection in biological pathways, cascades, and mechanisms.

Organiser

Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences (CPS)

CPS Lunch Forum: Davide Sutto

The Pre-History of the Iterative Conception of Set

Time and place: Oct. 7, 2024 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652 and Zoom

Among the various conceptions of set (Incurvati, 2020) the Iterative Conception

is arguably the most popular and widely studied: sets are built in a sequence of

layers by an iterative process that generates new sets from old ones. Its origins

are usually traced back to Gödel (1947), who describes the universe of sets as

generated by iterated applications of the "set of " operation. In the present paper

I argue for a "pre-history" of the conception (as in Reck and Schiemer, 2020),

tracing the ideas converging into Gödel’s observations and, even later, into the

seminal Boolos (1971), back to the first half of the 20th Century.

The scope of the work is twofold, historical and conceptual. First, I fill some

gaps left open by previous historical accounts such as Ferreirós (2007), whose

remarks on the conception are limited to Cantor and Dedekind. Moreover, an

interesting point assessed by the work is the origin of ordinal numbers: although

evidences show that, before von Neumann, Mirimanoff and Zermelo made crucial

contributions for an account of ordinals as sets, the analyses of Hallett (1984)

and Wang (1974) on the matter are not conclusive. Here I propose a new interpretation

availing myself of recent historical data (Mancosu and Zach, 2023).

Second, I argue for a novel interpretation of the conception as an approach

deeply rooted in the set-theoretical practice, advanced by set-theorists long before

it became a trademark in the philosophy of mathematics. That is, I argue

for a unified and continuous picture of the emergence of the conception, which

contrasts interpretations such as Potter (2004). The pre-history part of this continuum,

more specifically, is divided into two main moments: from the discovery

of the paradoxes up to the formulation of the cumulative hierarchy by Zermelo

(1930) and, from there, up to the aforementioned Gödel (1947).

Organiser

Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences (CPS)

CPS Lunch Forum: Anna Smajdor

Ethics and autonomy in medical AI

Time and place: Sep. 9, 2024 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652 and Zoom

In this paper we compare the capabilities and limitations of AI algorithms and human doctors in the context of treatment recommendations. Ethical concerns have been raised in the literature about transparency, accountability, and interpretability in relation to AI algorithms in the medical context. Patients’ autonomy is not likely to be respected if treatment recommendations are opaque or incomprehensible. Medical AI algorithms are programmed to prioritise predefined goals that may not align with patients' preferences, potentially undermining their autonomy without their awareness. Yet human doctors often face similar challenges, such as reliance on clinical trial data with endpoints that may not be fully understood by patients. Doctors’ options are constrained by external factors, such as quality adjusted life year (QALY) evaluations which are complex, inflexible and often opaque to end users. Moreover, although doctors can provide explanations for their decisions, these do not invariably represent a straightforward account of the processes by which a decision is reached. It may seem unreasonable to expect a higher standard of respect for patient autonomy in the AI context than what we accept in the ordinary clinical setting. Nevertheless, we conclude that there are unique opportunities now to integrate patient autonomy considerations into AI algorithms at the design stage. This includes ensuring that patients’ views are taken into account in the selection of treatment goals, and that these goals and any relevant weightings are made explicit to end users, including both doctors and patients.

Organiser

Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences (CPS)

CPS Lunch Forum: Mikkel Lepperød

Research Scientist Mikkel Lepperød (Simula) will give a talk entitled "Validating models in NeuroAI".

Time and place: May 13, 2024 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

The emerging field of NeuroAI represents a groundbreaking intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, aiming to elevate our understanding of brain function and the algorithms we build inspired by it.

Over the past decades, neuroscience has experienced a technological boom, generating immense datasets that detail the complexities of the brain. Concurrently, the AI revolution has brought forth many neural network models, many believed to mimic aspects of brain function.However, the critical question remains: how can we validate these AI models as accurate representations of neural processes? How would we know that a model is good?

In NeuroAI, validation is challenging because the models typically are not supposed to correspond one-to-one with the brain but rather to carry some of their essence, e.g., similar representations or comparable behavior.This talk addresses this issue, focusing on integrating methods in NeuroAI models with neural data to establish a rigorous, mutual understanding of both artificial and biological neural systems.The goal is to advocate for more focused interdisciplinarity in neuroscience, where model development and experimental research are deeply interconnected, that can enhance both fields.

Organiser

Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences (CPS)

CPS Lunch Forum: Ethan Brauer

Ethan Brauer (IFIKK) will give a talk entitled "Poincare on Intuition and the Applicability of Mathematics".

Time and place: Apr. 29, 2024 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

Poincare is well known for arguing against logicism that mathematical induction is known by intuition and that attempts to reduce it to pure logic were viciously circular. Much less attention has been given to another of his objections to logicism, namely that intuition is required for the application of arithmetic.

In this talk, I examine what Poincare says on this subject. I will discuss what light it might shed on his notion of intuition and how it relates to his view that applications of geometry are based on convention rather than intuition.

Organiser

Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences (CPS)

CPS Lunch Forum: Ole Boye

Ole Boye (Department of Public and International Law) will give a talk entitled "Human gene editing – the prohibitions against germ line editing and human enhancement".

Time and place: Apr. 15, 2024 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

In the field of human gene editing, there are currently two main prohibitions: against heritable genome editing (germ line editing) and against non-therapeutic gene editing (human enhancement).

In this CPS lunch talk, PhD candidate Ole Boye will present the regulatory framework containing these prohibitions in Norway, Europe and internationally, as well as some ethical principles underlying these prohibitions.

Boye will also discuss technological developments in the field of gene editing (CRISPR), and whether these scientific advances challenge the existing prohibitions.

Organiser

Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences (CPS)

CPS Lunch Forum: Christian Airikka

Christian Airikka (IFIKK) will give a talk entitled "On Role Spacetime Functionalism".

Time and place: Apr. 8, 2024 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

I discuss Spacetime Functionalism (SF) in the context of interpretations of Quantum Gravity (QG). According to proponents of SF, there exists a metaphysical gap between fundamental theories that lack spatiotemporal properties, such as theories of QG, and spacetime as it appears in the General Theory of Relativity. This gap is supposedly bridged by a functionalist account, wherein one interprets theories of QG by a two-step approach: first, the relevant properties of spacetime are functionalised, i.e., they are given new definitions in terms of their functional roles; then, it is demonstrated how lower-level structures can play these roles.

I start by discussing recent arguments against SF and show how they fail. I admit that realizer spacetime functionalism seems to be self-undermining and claim that if one is to be a functionalist about spacetime, one ought to be a role functionalist about spacetime. I then sketch out what such a position might entail.

CPS Lunch Forum: Jørn Kløvfjell Mjelva

Jørn Kløvfjell Mjelva (IFIKK) will give a talk entitled "States and properties in a relativistic quantum theory".

Time and place: Mar. 11, 2024 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

In textbook treatments of quantum mechanics, the physical state of a quantum system is assumed to be represented by the state vector |Ψ⟩. Furthermore, properties are attributet to the system through the eigenstate-eigenvalue link: a system has the property “A=a” of some observable A if the state vector |Ψ⟩ is an eigenstate of A with the eigenvalue a. However, it can easily be demonstrated that the standard account encounters difficulties when combined with relativistic considerations.

In this talk, I will discuss the issues that arise from applying the standard account to entangled quantum systems in a relativistic context. In particular, I will consider the case of spacelike entanglement swapping, which I take to pose the most serious problem for the standard account. I will then discuss some proposals as to how these issues might be resolved. I suggest that relativistic considerations might require us to adopt an altogether different account of quantum states and properties than the standard account.

CPS Lunch Forum: Sara Pernille Jensen

Sara Pernille Jensen (IFIKK) will give a talk entitled "Understanding machine learning models - traditional problems call for traditional solutions".

Time and place: Mar. 4, 2024 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

Machine learning is becoming an increasingly popular method in science, as it commonly outperforms traditional methods for pattern recognition and prediction of new data. At the same time, such methods are commonly criticised for hindering understanding of the phenomena, such that all we are left with are predictions without explanations. In this talk, I challenge the notion that ML itself is the sole cause of these issues, arguing that the root of the problem is often the datasets used, rather than the analysis method per se.

I will look at some concrete objections to ML methods regarding the reliability and interpretability of the models produced, and respond to these by suggesting some solutions based on more traditional approaches and assumptions in science. Specifically, I argue that data-driven ML models are comparable with phenomenological models, but that controlling and intervening on the input variables is needed to learn a causal model of the system, as has always been the case. I will also present some suggested methods for testing this in practice. Overall, regardless of its novelty in some respects, I argue that machine learning is in many ways continuous with traditional methods in science, and that its problems are to a large extent solvable using established methods.

CPS Lunch Forum: Gard Paulsen

Gard Paulsen (IFIKK) will give a talk entitled "New use for old weather: Histories of collective empiricism and the maritime modernities".

Time and place: Feb. 12, 2024 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

At sea, new use for old weather is now, well, old news. For decades, columns upon columns and pages upon pages of metrological observations, originally kept in nautical logbooks and journals, have been digitalised with increased technological sophistication and scores of transcribers. Today, artificial intelligence is trained to decipher centuries of recorded observations. Both the climate sciences and oceanography have readily utilised this retrieved data to do reanalysis and to model dynamic phenomena. Such digitalisation projects have revived historical studies of the practices in which the observations were first conceived, revealing century-long histories of large-scale “collective empiricism” of, and at, the sea. This has, in turn, challenged the received view of the history of oceanography as something primarily of the 20th century. In this presentation, I will engage with both instances of the use for old weather, the contemporary scientific and the contextually historical, and discuss how the long history of large-scale, distributed and retrieved observational maritime programs and projects challenge notions of data and models.

Organiser

Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences (CPS)

2023

CPS Lunch Forum: Neil Barton

Neil Barton (IFIKK) will give a talk entitled "Multiverses and Fine-Tuning". 

Time and place: Dec. 11, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

A recent position in the foundations of mathematics borrows its terminology from physics, namely the Multiverse View. This position states that there is not one universe containing all the sets, but rather many. At first glance, it looks like this view doesn't share so much with the view in physics beyond somehow involving talk of multiple universes. For a start, the set-theoretic multiverse (realistically understood) is composed of mathematical abstracta, whereas the physical multiverse contains many concreta.

In this talk, I want to explore the extent to which this idea is more than a mere similarity of catchy terminology. In particular, I'll suggest that an important motivation of each is fine-tuning; the idea that if there was just one universe, then it would be (seemingly without good grounds!) set up with very precise anthropocentric constraints. I'll use these observations to explore what each view can learn from the other and whether there are common pitfalls to be mindful of.

CPS Lunch Forum: Bendik Hellem Aaby

Senior lecturer Bendik Hellem Aaby (IFIKK) will give a talk entitled "Conceptual Issues Surrounding Plant Behavior".

Time and place: Nov. 20, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

The concept of behavior is used in a variety of sense both in ordinary language and the behavioral sciences. In its broadest sense, it just refers to what something does. In this sense, a lot of things are capable of behaving; chemicals react, your computer may start behaving strangely after you visited a website with lots of pop-up ads. For behavioral biologists, the concept of behavior is used in a significantly narrower sense. Usually, it refers to an ephemeral and reversible self-caused movement, attributable to the organism acting as a whole (in order to exclude physiological and developmental processes). However, an unequivocal definition of behavior is not established, and many biologists disagree on what it takes for something to be called behavior (Levitis et al. 2009).

The debate around the definition of behavior in biology has, however, been centered the activities of animals. Other organisms, such as plants, fungi, and bacteria are generally left out of the discussion. Are such organisms unable to behave? If so, is there any hope of reaching a definition of behavior which includes all these different kinds of organisms, yet differentiates them from other things, such as car, computers or chemicals? There is also the question of what is at stake. Why do we want to attribute behavioral capacities to plants, fungi or bacteria? In this talk I will address the conceptual difficulties with providing a general definition of behavior in biology which works for both animals and plants. Further, I will argue that in order to take seriously any claims of agency, cognition, or mind in plants, we first need to have established a concept of behavior in which their activities can be properly analyzed.

CPS Lunch Forum: Svend Davanger

Professor Svend Davanger (IMB) will give a talk entitled "Aristotle on memory, time, and the brain".

Time and place: Nov. 6, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

Memory, and the perception of time, are intricately linked. A scifi author, Ray Cummings, once wrote that “Time is what prevents everything from happening at once”. Long before that, Aristotle wrote: “All memory happens with time. Thus, only animals that sense time can remember, …and they do their remembering using the same organ with which they cognize time.” Aristotle was wrong in claiming that this organ was the heart. He did, however, show great insights in analyzing the links between memory and time perception. We will discuss some of his thoughts in light of what modern neuroscience has taught us about how memory and time are processed in the brain.

CPS Lunch Forum: Timothy Williamson

Timothy Williamson (Wykeham Professor of Logic, University of Oxford) will give a talk entitled "Heuristics in Philosophy".

Time and place: Oct. 23, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

Heuristics are “cheap and dirty” or “fast and frugal” ways of answering questions, reliable enough to be useful but not perfectly reliable. They are recognized as playing a major role in human cognition. I will discuss some general heuristics on which we unconsciously rely in philosophy, which may be responsible for philosophical paradoxes and errors in something like the way that heuristics built into our visual systems are responsible for visual illusions.

CPS Lunch Forum: Cathrine Holst

Professor Cathrine Holst (IFIKK) will give a talk entitled "Democratization of expertise?".

Time and place: Oct. 16, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

Well-functioning democracies depend largely on expert knowledge: It is hard to make just and effective policies to reduce carbon emissions, tame the corona virus, or reform pension and tax schemes, without input from expert communities. At the same time, democracies’ expertise dependence may create deep and genuine problems for their legitimacy. A proposed solution to such problems is to “democratize expertise”. The presentation takes up some interpretations, promises and shortcomings of this idea.

CPS Lunch Forum: Naïd Mubalegh

Mubalegh will give a talk entitled "Some epistemological and ontological questions arising with the meeting of economics and evolutionary biology: the case study of the marsh warbler Acrocephalus palustris and its song".

Time and place: Oct. 9, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

Links between (human) economics and evolutionary biology are old. A seminal meeting between the disciplines is of course Charles Darwin's reading of Thomas Malthus (1838), but dialogue has been ongoing throughout the 20th century and until today. Yet, economics is far from being a unified field, as illustrated by the contemporary divide between orthodox and heterodox economics. Taking this into account opens for a new perspective on the questions of how strong the unifying potential of economic thinking is for evolutionary biology, and of how desirable unification is for the discipline. Using the example of the singing behaviour of the marsh warbler (Acrocephalus palustris), I will show how different theories about an "economy of nature" (focusing on the economics of song) can be found in the scientific literature, and I will account for relations between them (complementarity, incompatibility, etc.). On the basis of a historical, conceptual and empirical approach, I will then sketch some ways to further deal with the question of theory choice, in a case where several options are conceivable a priori. 

CPS Lunch Forum: A Constructional Theory of Sets, Parts, and Relations (Salvatore Florio)

The first CPS Lunch Forum of the semester will feature Associate Professor Salvatore Florio (IFIKK, UiO).

Time and place: Sep. 18, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

We develop a constructional approach to ontology, focusing on sets, parts, and relations. On this conception of ontology, one starts with some constructors and an initial collection of objects. Then new objects emerge by construction, that is, from the application of constructors to objects. This approach, which is inspired by work of Kit Fine, provides a unified formalization of core components of prominent formal ontologies. Our project is also shaped by its intended application: the resulting theory is to serve as a top-level ontology for the Information Management Framework of the UK's National Digital Twin.  

CPS Lunch Forum: Keith Wilson

Keith Wilson, (IFIKK, UiO), will give a talk entitled "A Minimally Unified View of Hallucination" (joint work with Roberta Locatelli, University of Tübingen).

Time and place: June 19, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 152

Abstract

The argument from hallucination is often considered to be the most serious objection to a relational or ‘Naïve Realist’ view of perception. The orthodox relationalist response holds that the phenomenal character of hallucinations, i.e. what they are subjectively like, consists solely in their indiscriminability from veridical perception. This response, however, is unsatisfactory in that it (a) explains the phenomenal character of hallucination in purely epistemic terms, and (b) fails to explain why hallucinations are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptions, or indeed whether they have genuine phenomenal character at all. In this paper we offer a novel account of hallucinatory experience that avoids both of these difficulties.

CPS Lunch Forum: Kian Salimkhani and Niels Linnemann

Kian Salimkhani and Niels Linnemann are both guest researchers at CPS and work with philosophy of physics, on which they will present for the Lunch Forum.

Time and place: June 12, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 152

Abstract

The problem of pregeometry and selective realism

Within the philosophy of spacetime, the ontological status of the manifold (as it occurs in classical spacetime theories) has been a controversial issue for decades. We suggest that the debate is vexed by problematic literalist and holist realist background assumptions which we try to overcome with our very own selective realist take on the matter. While the talk focuses on an issue from philosophy of spacetime, it should be of interest to anyone concerned with scientific realism. 

CPS Lunch Forum: Luca Zanetti

Luca Zanetti, guest researcher at CPS, will give a talk entitled "Models and Values".

Time and place: June 5, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 152

Abstract

In this talk, I compare normative uncertainty in normative ethics with model risks in science. Model risks and normative uncertainty are often treated differently in decision theory. I claim that the rational responses to empirical and moral uncertainty can differ. I also claim that the rational response to normative uncertainty and to model risks should be the same. Finally, I show how it can help us make some progress on the problem of inter-theoretical comparisons among values.

CPS Lunch Forum/GOODATTENTION talk: Adriana Alcaraz Sanchez

Adriana Alcaraz Sanchez (University of Glasgow) is a visiting researcher at CPS and will present on her work for this combined talk both for the GOODATTENTION project and the CPS Lunch Forum. The Forum therefore takes place at a different time for this talk.

Time and place: May 19, 2023 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM, GMH 652

Abstract

Unusual Spontaneous Experiences: Their Phenomenology and a Multi-Dimensional Framework of Spontaneous States

In this presentation, I set the groundwork for a phenomenological multidimensional framework of spontaneous experiences aiming at situating spontaneous phenomena across the sleep-wake cycle that have received less attention in the current literature, such as out-of-body experiences, sleep paralysis, void dreams and experiences, states of sensory deprivation, meditative states, mystical states, and hypnosis. The goal of this framework is to show how such forms of experiences can be linked to other more typical forms of spontaneous states like mind wandering and dreaming across five phenomenological dimensions: Self-revelation, Sense of Embodiment, Temporal Extension, Inner Attention, and Complexity of the Content. Moreover, I examine how such a framework can be applied to a live debate on the nature of a particular sort of spontaneous experience, the clear light sleep. This experience, largely described in contemplative traditions like Tibetan Buddhism, has been recently targeted as a potential instance of the minimal phenomenal experience, the simplest form of conscious experience. As such, this sort of spontaneous experience has the potential to shed light on the nature of the mind and the study of consciousness. However, while the state of the clear light sleep has been widely described in contemplative traditions, there is still an important lack of research and consensus about how we should understand such an experience. Here, I take the state of the clear light sleep to show the explanatory value of the multidimensional framework I put forward. I will show how this framework can provide a more accurate description of a phenomenon that has not been captured otherwise in the literature.

CPS Lunch Forum: Teresa Baron

Teresa Baron will present "Why-UD? Assessing the requirement to trial an intrauterine device before elective sterilisation is approved in female patients". Teresa is a guest researcher at CPS and a Nottingham Research Fellow working on reproductive ethics and philosophy of parenthood.

Time and place: May 15, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH Seminarrom 152

Abstract

Some healthcare boards in the UK will approve a request for female sterilisation only if the patient first agrees to undergo a trial period of one year with an intrauterine device (IUD), a form of long-acting reversible contraception. In this article, I argue that this requirement is not justified by appeal to any of the following possible reasons: promotion of informed consent, paternalistic concerns regarding patient regret in later life, and efficiency-savings considerations. I conclude that the IUD requirement (whether based on any or all of these possible reasons) is pointless at best, and punitive at worst. As long as elective vasectomy is offered by the healthcare system, elective female sterilisation should be accessible under similar conditions, without additional barriers to care.

CPS Lunch Forum/Practical Philosophy Seminar: Suki Finn

Suki Finn is guest researcher at CPS and will give the talk "On the reality of gender" for both the Practical Philosophy Group and The CPS Lunch Forum. The Forum therefore takes place outside its normal time slot for this talk.

Time and place: May 4, 2023 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 452

Abstract

In this talk I will describe and defend a metaphysically realist position of gender that takes gender to be real. I will argue for this as a result of applying a (W.V.O.) Quinean indispensability argument as such: for as long as there is gender-based oppression such as misogyny or transphobia then we have an indispensable need for gender-based concepts such as woman and man in order to understand and eliminate such oppression, and therefore if gender is indispensable, albeit contingently, then we should take gender to be real. I argue that debates about what gender is are partially about what the world is like, given that reality includes social reality, where gendered experiences are an irreducible aspect of that social reality. In the spirit of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's strategic essentialism applied at the meta-level, gender is essential for strategic political purposes, even if genders are not essentially defined. I call this position (2nd order) gender essentialism without (1st order) gender essencealism.    

CPS Lunch Forum: Claire Prendergast

Claire Prendergast, postdoc at IFIKK (DEVCOM) presents "Preliminary Empirical Data from a Sequential Study on Young Children’s Pragmatic Development"

Time and place: Mar. 27, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH Seminar room 152

In this talk, I will present some empirical data from year one of a sequential study with 3- and 5-year-old Norwegian-speaking children which aims, at large, to track their individual pragmatic development with respect to non-literal language processing. The preliminary data from year one come from two experiments in which we used visual world paradigms with eye-tracking and picture selection tasks to uncover important contextual and social effects on how children process noun-noun compounds and idiomatic expressions, and a third experiment in which we solicited lexical productions for novel items. Confirmatory analyses of the data provided further evidence for a distinct stage in pragmatic development that may be underpinned by broader social development. Exploratory analyses across the three data sets from year one generated some novel hypotheses that we are testing now for year two of the study which I will also present briefly.

CPS Lunch Forum: Renata Arruda

Renata Arruda, guest researcher at CPS, presents "Knowing, doing, and the hypothetical reasoning on the problem of overdiagnosis"

Time and place: Mar. 13, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM

The practices of medicine pose some important challenges to philosophy. Overdiagnosis, broadly understood as the excessive use of tests, has been subject to a recent philosophical investigation. A central problem concerns the main characterization of overdiagnosis as based on a counterfactual reasoning, which, due to its own nature, it is open to criticisms about how to make it more meaningful from a factual perspective. On the other hand, knowledge, as the subject matter of philosophy and whose search is its main aim, is downplayed in the particular domain of medicine, when we are able to understand that knowing is undesirable in some circumstances. That seems quite incompatible also concerning the aims of science. How could we reconcile the scientific and epistemological purposes of medicine with the human dimension of avoiding doing harm in the search for knowledge? In this talk, I will present a general perspective on the topic and I will explore some contributions to the current debate, especially from an epistemological perspective.

Renata Arruda is a permanent lecturer at the Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil. She has been teaching general philosophy of science and introductory logic for several years, and has been leading an international research group on her area of expertise as well as being a collaborator in other research groups based in Chile, Spain, and Norway. She is best known for her work in philosophy of medicine and of epidemiology, and during her stay at the CPS, her research will focus on the ontology and epistemology of health and disease processes in medicine and epidemiology, especially the interplay between population data and the individual patient in the problem of overdiagnosis.

CPS Lunch Forum: Simon Okholm

Simon Okholm, guest researcher at CPS, will present "In-between disease theory and normative appeals: Is aging treatable?"

Time and place: Feb. 13, 2023 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH 652

In philosophy of medicine, interest in aging or senescence has mostly been framed in one of two ways: The theoretical question, raising whether or not aging is a disease, and the normative question on whether we should find a treatment for aging. In this presentation, I will explore a related issue that precedes and could inform both debates, namely whether aging is treatable.

By focusing a case study of the murine literature on a drug called rapamycin, I discuss various criteria used for detecting ‘geroprotection’ in biogerontology: Lifespan extension, disease prevention, healthspan promotion, genericity of the effect and action on plausible mechanisms of aging.

I argue that targeting a plausible mechanism of aging would provide definitional criteria for treating aging, whereas that the remaining criteria at best can be considered detection criteria, indicating that that geroprotective effects are likely, but not conclusive. 

2022

CPS Lunch Forum: Sofie Lekve

Sofie Lekve (IFIKK, UiO) presents "Who is IVF for?"

Time and place: Nov. 28, 2022 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH Seminarrom 219

Everyone is welcome! This is an "in-person-seminar", but it will be possible to participate via zoom. 

Abstract: 

In Vitro Fertilization is a medical procedure in which an egg is fertilized outside the womb. As with any clinical treatment, IVF requires a cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA). A CEA is an evaluation that is concerned with determining the efficiency of any particular treatment, the aim being to ensure that our limited resources can provide the most amount of benefits. However, when it comes to conducting a CEA of IVF, we are faced with metaphysical questions that do not arise in most other medical procedures. In this presentation I will address two of these questions. Firstly, what is the desired outcome of IVF? We may intuitively understand that our goal is to create a healthy child. This could mean that the goal is to either cure biological infertility or cure unwanted childlessness. For the prospective parent this distinction is perhaps not of significance, but these different goals would lead to vastly different outcomes in a CEA. 

Secondly, we must determine who IVF is for - who is the benefactor of an IVF procedure? I will outline four different potential benefactors here, demonstrating the vast different outcomes this would result in when conducting a CEA. Lastly, I will evaluate whether these problems are solely due to IVF being a fertility treatment aimed at creating new lives, or if these issues outlined above indicate larger problems with CEAs in general.

CPS Lunch Forum: Matias Slavov (Tampere University)

Matias Slavov (Tampere University, guest researcher at CPS) presents "The one-directionality of time does not entail a unique direction of time"

Time and place: Nov. 7, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH Seminarrom 152

This paper considers two seemingly incompatible theses: there are many directions of time, but they are all one-directional. It is argued that the direction of time is based on causation. The sequential theory of causation is defended against the simultaneous theory. There is a partial overlap of cause and effect, but the cause begins before its effect. It is argued that conservation laws do not exemplify causation. Although it might be that a fundamental physical description of the world lacks causation, paradigmatic instances of causation are temporally directed. It is pointed out that in many cases the distinction between physics and metaphysics is muddy. This weakens the anti-causal philosophy of physics stance. The paper ends by considering a reductio argument: If causation and time in perception are not unidirectional, we are left with absurdities. Eventually, it is explained how the one-directionality of time does not entail a unique direction of time.

CPS Lunch Forum: Karen Crowther

Karen Crowther (CPS/IFIKK) will present "Consistency as a guide in scientific theory-development"

Time and place: Oct. 31, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH Seminarrom 152

Everyone is welcome! This is an "in-person-seminar", but it will be possible to participate via zoom. 

Abstract: I discuss the various heuristic and confirmatory roles of consistency in the development of scientific theories, with particular focus on the search for quantum gravity, a new fundamental theory of physics.

CPS Lunch Forum: Cathrine Holst

Cathrine Holst (ISS/CPS) presents "Worries about philosopher experts".

Time and place: Oct. 10, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, zoom

Well-functioning modern democracies depend largely on expert knowledge and expert arrangements, but this expertise reliance also causes severe problems for their legitimacy. Surprisingly, moral and political philosophers have come to play an increasing role as experts in present-day policy-making, and this paper elaborates on and assesses the force of the epistemic and democratic worries raised by the presence of philosopher experts in contemporary governance, and suggest measures to alleviate them. It is argued that philosophers are likely to have some distinctive biases that may reduce the quality of their advice, and the characteristics of their expertise, and controversies around what their competences amount to, make it hard to distinguish proper from less proper philosopher experts. Reliance on philosopher experts may also intensify democratic worries not least due to the depoliticization pressures that the introduction of ethics expertise tends to give rise to. Still, philosophers have competences and orientations that policy discussions and democratic deliberations are likely to profit from. Worries about philosopher experts may moreover be mitigated by means of a proper design of expert arrangements. Still, confronted with the genuine epistemic risks and democratic challenges of contemporary governance any quick fix is obviously unavailable.

CPS Lunch Forum: Neil Barton

Neil Barton (IFIKK, UiO) presents "Fusing foundations: How similar are foundational debates in mathematics and science?"

Time and place: Sep. 12, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, GMH Seminarrom 152

Although this is now mainly an "in person"- seminar, it will also be possible to join via zoom (contact us to receive a zoom-link).

In this talk, I want to introduce two themes from my research in the foundations of mathematics, and discuss with the group relationships with the philosophy of science more broadly. My focus will be on generating discussion rather than presenting an argument per se.

The first theme is the idea that there are kinds of inference similar to those found in the philosophy of science at play in the justifications of axioms. In this regard we'll discuss the idea that there is something like prediction and confirmation involved in certain justifications. I'll ask what the data might be here, and how mathematical `data' might be similar to or different from our normal scientific data. We'll also discuss the idea that when working with mathematics we often `infer to the best conception'. I'll raise some questions for the group regarding pluralism and open texture in this context.

The second theme is that we often use extensions of a given universe of discourse in set-theoretic mathematics. This has implications for debates on absolute generality---if we can always transcend a given universe of discourse then absolute generality fails. The interesting fact in the context of set theory is that often we use an `external' perspective in order to prove facts about the universe. This raises interesting questions about how seriously we should take the use of these resources. I'll ask the group whether there are analogous methodologies and debates in the philosophy of science more widely (for example regarding multiverse theory and quantum mechanics).

CPS Lunch Forum: Alejandra Mancilla

Alejandra Mancilla, Professor in Philosophy at IFIKK, will present ´Colonialism in and through Antarctica´.

Time and place: May 9, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes Hus, room 452

This article is an introduction to an edited book on "Antarctica and colonialism". Ultimately, the aim is to argue that it makes sense to connect Antarctica with colonialism because doing so illuminates our understanding of both. Colonialism pushes us to ask questions not only about the practices of humans in Antarctica and the power relations established between them, but also about the overarching mindsets that have governed both specific human activities in Antarctica and larger human schemes to govern Antarctica. At the same time, Antarctica pushes us to ask where the limits of colonialism as an analytic category might lie, and how far the concept’s utility extends for providing insight not available through other tools.
The chapter notes that, while imperialism has been an uncontroversial label to describe Antarctica’s history and politics, it is much more contentious whether colonialism took place in Antarctica and, if it did, in what form. We examine different definitions of colonialism and different accounts of the specific moral wrong embedded in it and note that a common feature in the definitions is the domination of one group of people by another. We then discuss what analytic use the term could then have in Antarctica, where there were no people to subjugate. Our suggestion is that, despite of this, a certain colonial logic and attitude were as present as elsewhere. We suggest, moreover, that what happened and happens in Antarctica might entrench colonial structures still present at the international level. The chapter then considers decolonization as a concept and how it may expand the scope of the analysis in Antarctica, particularly in considering the structural legacies of colonialism worldwide.

CPS Lunch Forum: MA-Scholarship recipients

Karianne Hagen and Ane Maria Døhl (MA-students in philosophy, UiO) will give a talk in CPS Lunch Forum. 

Time and place: May 2, 2022 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes Hus, room 452

Karianne Hagen will present: "Should beauty play a role in theory choice?"

For my master thesis, I write about the relation between beauty and scientific theories. My interest in this topic started with Sabine Hossenfelder's book "Lost in Math: How Beauty leads Physics Astray". According to Hossenfelder, theoretical physics is currently in a state where the empirical testing of theories is becoming increasingly difficult. When choosing what theories to develop further within the community, the question of a theory’s beauty has become more prominent in later years, making it a good topic for debate whether or not this is called for. Hossenfelder describes the current theoretical physics environment as in somewhat of a Kuhnian crisis, and she blames beauty, claiming it has no place in the development of physical theories.

Even though Hossenfelder's outlook is a bit grim, it is nevertheless the case that many physicists argue for the success or pursuitworthiness of certain theories based on the theories' beauty. This relation between beauty and scientific theories is the main focus for my master thesis. I ask what importance we should allow beauty to have in the development of, and choosing between, scientific theories, and if it is possible to view this focus on the beauty of theories as scientifically legitimate. I narrow my focus to be mainly on theory choice, asking what role beauty should play here, using physics as my main example. I try to answer these questions by giving a practical definition of beauty in scientific theories, and propose that if we want beauty to be of importance to science, we should view it as a theoretical virtue on the likes of those described by Thomas Kuhn.

Ane Maria Døhl will present: "Truth in non-classical logic"

My thesis explores the concept of truth in non-classical logic. Truth is a central concept for philosophy and the sciences. However, it is vulnerable to semantic paradoxes such as the Liar paradox, “This sentence is false.” If the sentence is true, then what it states is true, so the sentence is false. But if the sentence is false, it is false that the sentence is false: i.e., the sentence is true. This paradox is seen as a major threat to the welfare of our truth concept.

This talk will present solutions to the liar paradox in many-valued logics, which accept more than the classical truth-values true and false. In particular, it will argue that truth is best understood within First Degree Entailment, a logical system with four truth-values.

CPS Lunch Forum: Mai Ha Vu

Mai Ha Vu (Postdoc ILN, UiO): "ImmunoLingo: Leveraging linguistic insights to answer immunological questions"

Time and place: Mar. 28, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes Hus, seminarroom 113

Welcome to CPS Lunch Forum. It will be a hybrid meeting taking place at Blindern, and it will also be possible to follow the lecture through Zoom. The meeting is open for everyone! 

About

Mai Ha Vu is postdoctoral fellow at ILN, UiO. She is working with the Immunolingo Project, where they try to crack the "grammar" of antigen-antibody binding in an interdisciplinary collaboration between immunology, machine learning, statistics, and linguistics.

Abstract

The idea of using language as a metaphor for biological sequences has a
long history, due to the similar representations of (spoken) natural
language as strings of sounds/letters and biological sequences as
strings of nucleic acids in the case of DNA or a string of amino acids
in the case of proteins. For adaptive immunology, the analogy with
language was most prominently featured in Niels Jerne's 1985 Nobel
lecture.

The adaptive immune system contains billions of highly diverse (~10^14)
and highly specialized adaptive immune receptors that (in a healthy
system) together are capable of recognizing almost any foreign molecule
(antigen) and also do not recognize molecules of the self. There is
then a sense that these adaptive immune receptors are governed by a
'grammar', which determines a given immune receptor's specificity (the
antigens that it can recognize). Similarly, natural language can
generate highly diverse, unbounded number of sentences, governed by a
rules that map between string and meaning. However, the extent to which
the language metaphor can apply to biological sequences and their
usefulness for discovering biological 'grammar' remains an open
question.

Immunolingo is an interdisciplinary project between life sciences,
informatics, statistics and linguistics with the goal of learning these
mapping rules. In this talk, I will talk about the challenges we face
when applying linguistics to biological data and the limits of the
metaphor, and a methodological framework we propose for a more
systematic and hopefully fruitful synthesis of linguistic and machine
learning methods in application to biological data.

CPS Lunch Forum: Gry Oftedal

Gry Oftedal, Senior Lecturer and Head of Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences, will present on "Choosing the best level of explanation".

Time and place: Feb. 14, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes Hus, room 452

Welcome to CPS Lunch Forum. It will be a hybrid meeting taking place at Blindern, and it will also be possible to follow the lecture through Zoom. The meeting is open for everyone! 

When giving a causal scientific explanation, how do we make sure to provide an explanation at the appropriate causal level? In the philosophy of causation, choosing the relevant level of explanation is sometimes suggested to be a matter of proportionality (Yablo 1992; Woodward 2010). A proportional causal explanation is neither too broad nor too narrow, it neither provides irrelevant detail nor excludes significant information. But to what extent does the idea of proportionality help us with level choice? I will show how the idea of proportionality in the literature is applied to several different types of level hierarchies (e.g. levels of abstraction and levels of organisation). I will discuss the significance of the multitude of “level types” in causal explanation and some other complications in choosing level of explanation.

CPS Lunch Forum: Katharine Browne

Katharine Browne (IFIKK/Langara) will present on "Vaccination and the Freedom to Choose" at CPS Lunch Forum. 

Time and place: Feb. 7, 2022 12:15 PM – 1:00 PM, Zoom

Welcome to CPS Lunch Forum. It will be a digital meeting taking place at Zoom. The meeting is open for everyone! 

About

Katharine Browne has recently joined the project «Salient Solutions». She has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at IFIKK from 2012 to 2014.

Abstract

The availability of safe and effective vaccines has brought some hope that we may soon put the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic behind us. But vaccination rates remain lower than desirable and this, combined with the waning immunity of those who are vaccinated and the emergence of a highly infectious new variant, is further extending the pandemic.  

As a result, there is growing momentum in some countries towards mandating vaccination against COVID-19. In this presentation I consider the extent to which mandatory vaccination can be ethically justified. I locate the strongest case against mandatory vaccination in respect for bodily autonomy and the doctrine of informed consent. It is widely accepted in biomedical ethics that decision-capable individual has the right to refuse any medical intervention. This should presumably also apply to vaccination.

Mandatory vaccination programmes explicitly violate the doctrine of informed consent.  This requires justification. Proponents of mandatory vaccination argue that individual liberty can be set aside to protect others from harm, and that remaining unvaccinated poses sufficient harm to others. 

I will outline why the harm-based justification for mandatory vaccination is not as straightforward as it might at first appear. This is because it is difficult to pinpoint a clear and immediate serious harm that any one individual's refusal to become vaccinated poses to others. We are left with what I take to be an irreconcilable tension between individual liberty and the aims of public health, and the hard choice of subordinating one in the service of the other. 

2021

CPS Lunch Forum: Jack Wright

Jack Wright (University of Cambridge, guest researcher at CPS, UiO) will present on "The new demarcation problem".

Time and place: Dec. 6, 2021 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes Hus, rom 452

Welcome to CPS Lunch Forum. It will be a hybrid meeting taking place at Blindern, and it will also be possible to follow the lecture through Zoom. The meeting is open for everyone! 

Jack Wright is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the ERC-funded QUALITY project, at the University of Cambridge. He is also a guest researcher at CPS, UiO. Jack's research focuses on the epistemic and political effects of the social organization of science and on the relationship between scientific knowledge and politics. As part of QUALITY he will explore the differential role different quantitative causal inference techniques play in politics.

"The new demarcation problem"

What is special about science? The demarcation of science from non-science was once central to the philosophy of science. That is no longer the case. Philosophers now typically eschew demarcation in favour of local questions about the justification or ontology of particular aspects of science – the epistemic virtue of minimal models, for example. This has lead to a flourishing of interactions between philosophers and scientists, and many productive developments. I will argue, however, that now is a good time to re-examine the demarcation problem, albeit in a new form. Given increasing questions about the role of scientific knowledge in politics and public life, I will argue that it is worth asking: what general features of science give us good reason to rely on its products? I will also sketch a preliminary answer to this problem, one with the sociology of science, rather than a specific scientific method, at the centre.

CPS Lunch Forum: Nicholas Elwyn Allott (UiO) & Terje Lohndal (NTNU)

Nicholas Allott (IFIKK/ILOS,UiO) and Terje Lohndal (NTNU) will present on "the Pursuit of the Strong Minimalist Thesis". 

Time and place: Nov. 29, 2021 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes Hus, rom 452

Welcome to CPS Lunch Forum. It will be a hybrid meeting taking place at Blindern, and it will also be possible to follow the lecture through Zoom. To receive the zoom-link, send an e-mail to ingvihar@uio.no.

Nicholas Allott and Terje Lohndal

Allott is Senior Lecturer at ILOS and Prof II on on the research project Creativity and Convention in Pragmatic Development: Typical and Atypical Perspectives, also at the University of Oslo. Allott is also a member of CPS.

Terje Lohndal is Professor of English linguistics in the Department of Language and Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Since August 2021, he is serving as Vice Dean of Research at the Faculty of Humanities. 

In pursuit of the Strong Minimalist Thesis: The Minimalist Programme in linguistics as a radical scientific research programme

The label ‘Minimalist Program’, coined by Noam Chomsky, refers to the mainstream of work in recent decades (c. 1995–present) within generativist investigation of the syntax of natural languages. In this talk we argue that the most fundamental ingredients of this programme are the assumption that syntax bridges meaning and sound systems and the claim that it optimally relates them (the Strong Minimalist Thesis: SMT). We also argue that the SMT earns its place in the program because of where it may lead, rather than because minimalists are convinced of its truth – thus illustrating a distinction sometimes made in philosophy of science between ‘acceptance’ and ‘pursuit’. We show that the SMT has made Minimalism inherently dynamic, motivating changes to its core and the development of new auxiliary hypotheses, and we suggest that this weighs on one side of an old debate in philosophy of science.

CPS Lunch Forum: Salvatore Florio

Salvatore Florio (Professor II CPS/ IFIKK) will present on "Singularism, Pluralism, and Definitional Equivalence".

Time and place: Oct. 25, 2021 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes Hus, rom 452

This Lunch Forum will be a remote talk. We will meet in GMH, room 452. It is also possible to follow the seminar on Zoom.

Florio is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham and Professor II at CPS. He specializes in philosophy of language, logic, and philosophy of mathematics.  His published work focuses on questions about the nature of logic and the foundations of semantics. He is currently working on foundational issues in knowledge representation and on topics at the intersection of philosophy and computer science.

Singularism, Pluralism, and Definitional Equivalence

Atomistic classical mereology and plural logic provide two alternative frameworks for the analysis of plurals in natural language. It is a matter of dispute which framework is preferable. From the formal point of view, however, there is a strong sense in which the two frameworks are equivalent. So they have the same coverage as each other: there is a range of data about plurals that they both capture correctly. We argue that the tie is broken when we consider a wider range of linguistic phenomena, such as mass nouns and group nouns. Mereology is more flexible than plural logic and is thus more easily adapted to account for these richer fragments of natural language.

CPS Lunch Forum: Anna Smajdor - "What is reproduction?"

It is tempting to think that the answer to the question ‘what is reproduction?’ can be found through studying biology. But is this really the case? And if not, how do we answer such a question, and what are the consequences of choosing one way over another?

Time and place: Sep. 20, 2021 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes hus, Seminarrom 203

Welcome to CPS Lunch Forum. It will be a hybrid meeting taking place at Blindern, and it will also be possible to follow the lecture through Zoom. 

What is reproduction?

Sarah Franklin says, '[…] genealogy and reproduction can be seen as two of the most important, but vague and undertheorized, terms in contemporary critical thought. This is evident among bioethicists, who commonly take genetic transmission to be the essential component of reproduction. But current and future reproductive technologies (IVF, surrogacy, reproductive ooplasmic transfer, artificial gametes, reproductive cloning) undermine the plausibility of a simple biological answer to the question 'what is reproduction'? It is becoming evident that different stakeholders might define reproduction in different ways. The World Health Organisation, for example, describes reproductive cloning as 'the replication of human individuals' and declares it 'contrary to human dignity and integrity'. Yet John Harris argues that reproductive cloning could be regarded as a part of the right to reproduce. With the increasing array of technological possibilities, one person's reproduction is another person's replication. My paper examines the impact of proliferating reproductive techniques on understandings of the role of biology in reproduction. I suggest that the tendency to seek a central biological answer to questions of reproduction is untenable in today’s world of reproductive technology. The ways in which members of the public interact with fertility services reveal a subjectivity and variability that cannot be encompassed in biological explanations. This has serious implications for regulation, legislation and social and ethical understandings of the place of reproductive technology in society. It is already possible with today’s technology to create offspring that could be argued to have seven ‘biological’ parents. I conclude that as technology develops further, the definition, and the ethical and legal status of reproduction, will need to be negotiated, rather than inferred from biological facts.

CPS Lunch Forum: Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos

Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos (IFIKK, UiO) will present on "Processing English imprecise absolute adjectives: role of context and linking hypotheses".

Time and place: Oct. 4, 2021 12:00 PM–1:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes hus, Seminarrom 203

Welcome to CPS Lunch Forum. It will be a hybrid meeting taking place at Blindern, and it will also be possible to follow the lecture through Zoom. To receive the zoom-link, send an e-mail to ingvihar@uio.no.

The meaning of absolute adjectives such as 'full' or 'straight' has been claimed to be based around relating objects to maximal degrees of their described property: A full cup of water is only full if it contains the maximal amount of water in it (see Kennedy, 2007). However, these adjectives are often used imprecisely to mean 'almost full' or 'straight-ish'. What are the repercussions of imprecision for sentence processing?

One straight-forward hypothesis, put forth by Syrett et al. (2010), is that even though imprecise usages might be tolerated, they come at a processing cost relative to precise usages, resulting in longer processing time for understanding imprecise vs. precise usages of absolute adjectives.

An alternative hypothesis, suggested by Aparicio et al. (2016),  is that a precise interpretation of absolute adjectives could be costlier to process than an imprecise interpretation given that, in general, there are more contexts that support an imprecise vs. precise interpretation. According to this view, contextually licensed imprecise interpretations should be generally preferable and less costly than precise ones, a view similarly advocated by Krifka for the interpretation of round numbers (2002).

Finally, a further possibility, argued for by Van der Henst et al. (2002) as well as Gibbs and Bryant (2008) for the production of round numbers, is that processing cost of precision will be mediated by considerations of relevance, as defined by Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 2002).

The current work in progress is an investigation on the processing cost of contextualized imprecise adjectives. I will be presenting preliminary results from 3 pilot studies, showing how comprehension rate and processing cost of imprecise absolute adjectives is mediated by context.

CPS Lunch Forum: Yael Friedman - "The concept of recovery" NB Change of room

Yael Friedman (CPS/IFIKK) presents on the concept of recovery in the philosophy of medicine. 

Time and place: Sep. 13, 2021 12:00 PM–1:00 PM, Georg Morgenstiernes Hus, seminarrom 204

Welcome to our first CPS Lunch Forum this fall. It will be a hybrid meeting taking place in Georg Morgenstiernes hus at Blindern, and it will also be possible to follow the lecture through Zoom. Please let us know if you plan to attend in person as there is a limit to how many people can be in the room. To receive the zoom-link, send an e-mail to ingvihar@uio.no.

On recovery: re-directing the concept by differentiation of its meanings

Recovery is a commonly used concept in both professional and everyday contexts. Yet despite its extensive use, it has not drawn much philosophical attention. In this paper, I question the common understanding of recovery, show how the concept is inadequate, and introduce new and much needed terminology.

I argue that recovery glosses over important distinctions and even misrepresents the process of moving away from malady as "going back" to a former state of health. It does not invite important nuances needed to distinguish between biomedical, phenomenological, and social perspectives. In addition, I claim that there are many conditions where we are making use of the concept of recovery, although the person recovered from the condition in question, has not regained the same degree of soundness. I show how the concept of recovery leads to conceptual discrepancies that can result in worsening patients' conditions.

To gain a fuller understanding, I propose to rethink the direction of the process in question. I define the process of moving away from malady as a move forward towards a new state of soundness. I also suggest three terms, corresponding to different perspectives, to describe this movement forward: 'curing' (biomedical perspective), 'healing' (first-person perspective), and 'habilitating' (social perspective). This new terminology provides a more nuanced understanding of the states of both malady and soundness and an attentiveness as to how they differ and relate.

CPS Lunch Forum: Øystein Linnebo

Øystein Linnebo (IFIKK, UiO) presents "Core Constructional Ontology (CCO): a Constructional Theory of Parts, Sets, and Relations".

Time and place: May 3, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, zoom

To receive the zoom-link, send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)ifikk.uio.no.

Core Constructional Ontology (CCO): a Constructional Theory of 
Parts, Sets, and Relations (joint with Salvatore Florio and Martin Pleitz) 

The UK has initiated a program to build a National Digital Twin, and there is a suggestion that its Foundational Data Model be built on a top-level ontology. This project develops a unified formalization of three core components of this ontology, namely sets, mereological sums, and n-tuples. Our formalization uses a constructional approach inspired by work of Kit Fine. ​

CPS Lunch Forum: Karen Crowther

Karen Crowther (IFIKK, UiO) presents "Fundamentality in Physics".

Time and place: Apr. 26, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, zoom

To receive the zoom-link, send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)ifikk.uio.no.

Fundamentality in physics

I explore some different ideas of relative fundamentality in physics, and how these compare to ideas of relative fundamentality in metaphysics.

CPS Lunch Forum: Olav Gjelsvik

Olav Gjelsvik (IFIKK, UiO) presents "On evolutionary theory, morality, and rationalism"

Time and place: Apr. 19, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, zoom

To receive the zoom-link, send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)ifikk.uio.no

This talk addresses some aspects of the relationship between evolutionary theory and moral (and related) knowledge. 

I shall basically maintain that there is no real opposition between evolutionary theory and moral knowledge, and show that some recent arguments (especially by S. Street) in support of the opposite view are not successful, as they generalize to several unwanted cases. The paper it builds from also has a positive part, and this points to a type of epistemological rationalism regarding abstract truths, an approach that is quite compatible with Darwinism.

CPS Lunch Forum: Keith A. Wilson

Keith A. Wilson (IFIKK, UiO) presents work in progress.

Time and place: Mar. 29, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, zoom

To receive the zoom-link, send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)ifikk.uio.no

Title and abstract TBA.

CPS Lunch Forum: Joanna Pollock

Joanna Pollock (IFIKK, UiO) presents work in progress.

Time and place: Mar. 22, 2021 12:00 PM–1:00 PM, zoom

To receive zoom-link, send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)ifikk.uio.no

Title and abstract to be announced.

CPS Lunch Forum: Francesca Secco

Francesca Secco (IFIKK, UiO) presents work in progress.

Time and place: Mar. 8, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, zoom

To receive the zoom-link, send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)ifikk.uio.no.

Title and abstract TBA.

CPS Lunch Forum: Gry Oftedal

Gry Oftedal (IFIKK, UiO) presents 

Are SNPs causes of happiness? Proportionality of cause and effect in GWAS

Time and place: Mar. 1, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, zoom

Are single nucleotides in the DNA causes of happiness? Of cancer? Of TV-watching-habits? New quantitative genetics methods aim to show that many traits are influenced by variation in single nucleotides (SNPs) in our genetic material, each nucleotide contributing to a very small proportion of the effect. However, for most characteristics investigated, it is difficult to locate stable causal relations, and results typically show a much lower heritability of traits compared to the more traditional twin-studies. How should we understand causality tracked by new quantitative genetics methods? In philosophical debates on causality, ideas of proportionality of cause and effect suggest that causes may be more or less proportional to their effects, and that we should seek to arrive at proportionality of causal relata. I will investigate causal claims in GWAS studies in the framework of the philosophical discussion of proportionality, and then ask more specifically, are single nucleotides in the DNA proportional causes of happiness? Of cancer? Of TV-watching habits?​

CPS Lunch Forum: Sebastian Watzl

Sebastian Watzl (CPS/IFIKK, UiO) presents his new ERC- and NRC-projects: "Good attention: attention norms and their significance”

Time and place: Feb. 15, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Zoom

The seminar is open. To receive the zoom-link, send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)ifikk.uio.no

Abstract

At a time dominated by mass information and social media, questions about what we should attend to are central. Attention framing and misdirection threaten social trust and security, and the complex dynamics of the attention economy are both difficult to understand and ethically challenging. We face challenges about how to organize information and how to decide—individually and collectively—what deserves our attention. The internet troll knows how get your attention and keep it. Spin doctors and the advertisement industry attentionally engineer our environment. In the public sphere, misplaced salience and the wrong distribution of attention can make common engagement and collective action impossible. In this talk I will provide an overview of the projects GOODATTENTION and SALIENT SOLUTIONS. The first will provide a systematic study of attention norms – norms that speak to patterns of good, correct, or rational attention. While entire fields of philosophy investigate the normative assessment of other aspects of the mind, the normative structure of attention remains largely unstudied. This project will change that. We will investigate  the function of attention in our individual cognitive architecture, the function of attention sharing and coordination in social interaction, and the role of attention norms in the theory of rationality, epistemology, ethics and political philosophy. The second project will be more applied. We will look at the role of attention in shaping digital communities, the role of attention and salience for collective action, the ethics of nudging and misdirection, and will consider attention framing from an international policy perspective. The two projects work together to study good attention - in both theory and practice.

CPS Lunch Forum: Vincenzo Politi

Vincenzo Politi (IMB(IFIKK), UiO) presents "The distribution of ethical labor in interdisciplinary groups: a case study from personalised medicine".

Time and place: Feb. 1, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Zoom

The seminar is open. To receive the zoom-link, please send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)ifikk.uio.no.

Abstract 

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is an emerging science policy framework which seeks to engage publics and science & technology stakeholders in a responsible, multi-dimensional dialogue on five RRI ‘keys’ (ethics, science education, open access, gender equality and societal engagement) and through four ‘dimensions’ (reflexivity, anticipation, inclusion, and responsiveness). What is meant by ‘ethics’, in the context of RRI, is neither research ethics nor scientific integrity, but rather a form of ethical reflection about the potential impacts of science & technology on society. The problem is that, ethical reflection being a subjective activity, it is not entirely clear how to implement it at the collective and institutional level. 

After defining RRI, in this talk I will present the hypothesis of the ‘distribution of ethical labor’ (DEL), recently formulated by Politi and Grinbaum (2020). For DEL, like the cognitive labor studied in social epistemology, so the whole ethical labor of a research group is distributed across its different members, who engage in ethical reflection in different ways. In this talk I will also present the preliminary results of the qualitative study of DEL and of the level of individuals’ engagement with ethical reflection within an interdisciplinary research project on innovative precision targeted cancer therapies - PINpOINT at UiO. I will conclude with a brief discussion on the relation between science and ethics.

CPS Lunch Forum: Yael Friedman

Yael Friedman (CPS/IFIKK, UiO) presents "Who is the biological patient? A gradual, dynamic model of organism-environment" at our first CPS Lunch Forum this semester.

Time and place: Jan. 25, 2021 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, zoom

The seminar is open. Send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)ifikk.uio.no to receive the zoom-link.

Abstract

Western physicians traditionally describe the biological aspect of the human being as an individual organism. Simultaneously, in public health, epidemiology, and ecological medicine, one can detect wider scopes of biological patients, as populations and ecosystems. The growing literature on symbionts also contributes to the variety of patient definitions, for example, by seeing human beings as holobionts, together with our microbes. While there is a lively discourse in the life sciences about different forms of (humans and non-humans) living beings concerning various scientific contexts, everything outside of them is often understood simply as 'environment,' a broad concept that has stayed as a relic from the exclusively organism-focused past. On the backdrop of current life sciences discussions, I suggest to rethink the traditional dichotomic model of organism-environment, which was introduced by Herbert Spencer in 1855. The paper presents a new gradual model of the living being and its exterior, i.e., the different ways of ´being outside the organism´ that correspond to various living beings. The model is formed as nested domains that create a spectrum of boundaries between the living being and its exterior, which are part of the same whole. The model allows a dynamic understanding of life in general and a more precise definition of the biological patient depending on the scientific context.

2020

CPS Lunch Forum: Laura Crosilla presents "Infinity - Again!"

Time and place: Nov. 16, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, zoom
The seminar is open. Send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)fikk.uio.no, and receive the zoom-link.

Abstract

Traditionally mathematical approaches to the infinite focused on the notion of potential infinity. A profound shift of perspective came with the deep methodological changes that took place in 19th century mathematics, culminating with Cantor’s set theory. While Cantorian set theory has flourished ever since, its treatment of infinity prompted criticism by some of the most influential mathematicians of the early 20th century, such as Henri Poincaré, L. E. J. Brouwer and Hermann Weyl. This criticism laid the seeds for a radically different form of mathematics, i.e. constructive mathematics, which is growing fast today under the stimulus of computer applications. Arguably, some of these new developments bring forward key aspects of the early 20th century’s criticism of Cantorian infinity. In this talk, I consider in broad terms some of the main steps of these developments and point to some of their implications for today’s philosophy of mathematics.

CPS Lunch Forum: Sebastian Watzl

Sebastian Watzl (CPS/IFIKK, UiO) presents "Salience plays a rational role"

Time and place: Nov. 9, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, zoom

The seminar is open. Send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)fikk.uio.no and receive the zoom-link.

Abstract

Salience is usually treated as either an irrational or as an a-rational influence. Salience based decision making, thus, is often described as “biased”. In this paper, I argue that it is a mistake to treat salience as either outside the scope of rational evaluation or as a distortion of rationality. I argue that there is an important species of rational warrant, a rational entitlement, that is distinct from possessing reasons. We have such a rational entitlement to rely on our psychological salience system. The relevant rational entitlement forms a basic attention norm, i.e. we have a basic rational entitlement to focus more attention on what is more salient to us in a specific situation. I provide three arguments for this conclusion:  a pragmatic argument, an argument from the phenomenal force of salience, and an argument from the function of the salience system. These arguments are mutually re- enforcing. While there are, indeed, salience biases, an agent is rationally entitled to treat those cases as the exception rather than the rule. Salience biases in this sense are like perceptual illusions. Our rational entitlement to focus attention on what is salient to us is more fundamental than what is going on in cases where salience distorts rational decision making.The upshot of this paper forms part of a more general case for a right to have a basic level of trust in our own situated agency.

CPS Lunch Forum: Karen Crowther

Karen Crowther (CPS/IFIKK, UiO) presents "Interpretations of Infinity in Physics".

Time and place: Nov. 2, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Zoom
The seminar is open. Send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)fikk.uio.no and receive the zoom-link.

Abstract:

I will explore some different possible roles and interpretations of infinitities in physical theories. Can singularities be explanatory? Can they act as predictions? Do they tell us something about unknown physics? How could they be used in developing new theories? Can they be taken seriously as features of the world? Or are they only artefacts of idealisations? I will focus mainly on the divergences in quantum field theory and spacetime singularities in general relativity.

CPS Lunch Forum: Øystein Linnebo

Øystein Linnebo (CPS/IFIKK, UiO) presents at CPS Lunch Forum

Time and place: Oct. 26, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Zoom

The seminar is open. Send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)fikk.uio.no and receive the zoom-link.

Title: What is infinity? 

Abstract: The answer we now give is relatively recent. The dominant view in mathematics and philosophy used to be that infinity can only be understood as potential, not actual. For example, while it is always possible to produce one more object, it is not possible for there to simultaneously exist infinitely many objects. This view was finally eclipsed by Georg Cantor’s discovery of modern set theory in the late 19th century. I describe, in a fairly accessible way, how our conception of infinity has developed. I also show how the pre-Cantorian conception admits of a sharp mathematical analysis, which can inspire mathematics that remains interesting today. 

CPS Lunch Forum: Paula Rubio-Fernández

Paula Rubio-Fernández (IFIKK, UiO) presents at the CPS Lunch Forum.

Time and place: Oct. 19, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Zoom

The seminar is open. Send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)fikk.uio.no and receive the zoom-link.

Paula Rubio-Fernández (IFIKK/CPS, UiO) presents "Perspective taking in newly-sighted children: Do they orient towards an interlocutor’s face?"

The seminar is open. Send us a message, and you will receive the zoom-link.

Abstract 

Both children and adults follow gaze to disambiguate reference. In a study with Prakash children (newly sighted children treated from congenital cataracts), we investigated perspective taking in referential communication, starting with their orientation towards people’s faces after bandages are removed post-surgery (Experiment 1), also during an interactive game with a peer (Experiment 2), and in a standard referential communication task that required following an experimenter’s head/gaze to disambiguate her instructions (Experiment 3). In all three experiments, Prakash children made fewer fixations on their interlocutor’s face than their neurotypical controls. Interestingly, directly asking children to focus on the experimenter’s face improved their gaze following, but this behavior needed to be prompted. The results of our first study on the pragmatic abilities of Prakash children suggest that after years of visual deprivation, orienting towards an interlocutor’s face may not come naturally, contrary to what the infancy and early childhood literatures show. The implications of these findings for pragmatic theories of communication will be discussed, in particular the informational efficiency and perceived relevance of communicative signals.

CPS Lunch Forum: Jack Wright

Jack Wright (Cambridge, guest researcher at CPS, UiO) presents at the CPS Lunch Forum.

Time and place: Oct. 12, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Zoom
Title and abstract coming soon.

CPS Lunch Forum: Dragana Bozin

Dragana Bozin (CPS/IFIKK, UiO) presents "Philosophers and scientists: a collaboration to improve climate science communication"

Time and place: Oct. 5, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Zoom
The seminar is open. Send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)fikk.uio.no and receive the zoom-link. 

Abstract 

Recently philosophy of science in practice, experimental philosophy and socially engaged philosophy of science have been on the rise. We argue that these new developments can be taken a step further through direct collaboration between philosophers and scientists to address a specific challenge for climate science by drawing on recent achievements in philosophy and epistemology of science.  
 
One of the central challenges in the climate change debate is skepticism towards climate science often due to lack of understanding of how science works, implicit biases with regard to how we relate to information going against personal beliefs, or other complex mechanisms of knowledge resistance. This presents a challenge for institutions like the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway) working with climate science communication with a mandate to provide decision makers with information relevant for climate change adaption.
 
Philosophers’ expertise regarding what knowledge is, how we acquire knowledge, how we understand the world, how we form beliefs and assign a level of trust to those beliefs, research in philosophy can contribute to new perspectives to climate science communication. In cooperation with MET Norway, the project will bring together perspectives and expertise of philosophers, climate scientists and communication experts to develop concrete strategies for communication of climate science that would moderate knowledge resistance/skepticism. The new communication strategies will be tested through MET Norway.  

CPS Lunch Forum: Olav Gjelsvik

Olav Gjelsvik (CPS/IFIKK, UiO) presents at the CPS Lunch Forum.

Time and place: Sep. 28, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Zoom

The seminar is open to everyone interested. Send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)fikk.uio.no, and you will receive the zoom link.

Towards a normative account of belief

ABSTRACT:

There has been a debate about normative accounts of belief for more than 15 years. This presentation presents some highlights of a quite long chapter on these issues, and focusses on my own normative approach, possibly with a critical light on Tim Williamson’s which may be the best in print.

I work with a clear difference between the normativity intentional action, including that of action of inquiry, and that of belief formation. I use a Fregean approach to belief content, and show that for a normativist account of belief we need a broader look at what is going on in both genuinely paradoxical beliefs and in the beliefs of Moore-type paradox. Any approach to belief needs to deal with both these cases, and my normative approach is able to do so. If I have time, I will show some of the extent to which Williamson’s approach, in my judgement, fails.

CPS Lunch Forum: Robin Solberg

Robin Solberg (Oxford, guest researcher at IFIKK) presents on: "Research programs in set theory".

Time and place: Sep. 21, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, zoom

Abstract: I wish to discuss the relationship between certain conflicting views in the philosophy of set theory, namely monism vs. pluralism about the set theoretic universe, and current projects in contemporary set theoretic practice. I want to investigate to what extent these philosophical positions are relevant to the mathematical practice. And how this again might be, if at all, relevant to the philosophical debate.  

The meeting is open to everyone interested. Send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)fikk.uio.no to receive the zoom-link for the meeting.

CPS Lunch Forum: Gry Oftedal

Gry Oftedal (Senior Lecturer, CPS and IFIKK, UiO) presents work-in-progress on abstraction in the life sciences.

Time and place: Sep. 14, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Zoom

The seminar is open. If you want to participate, send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(a)fikk.uio.no, and you will receive the zoom-link.

How abstract is “a cell”?

Implications of conflating abstraction with organizational level, idealization, and generalization of results in the life sciences.

Abstraction, idealization, and generalization are important ingredients in the scientific toolbox, also for biologists. Newer systems biology approaches are often seen as delivering science that is more holistic, more general (and at the same time more personalized with regard to medical applications), more abstract, higher-level and also multi-level/multi-scale. I will address the focus on higher levels of abstraction, explanation and organization in biology, contrasting molecular and systems biology, and point to some conflations of different types of level hierarchies and what implications such conflations may have for the science as well as for ideas of reduction and explanation.

CPS Lunch Forum: Ingrid Lossius Falkum

Ingrid Lossius Falkum (Associate Professor, CPS and IFIKK/ILN, UiO) will present her new ERC-project, "The Developing Communicator", at the first CPS Lunch Forum.

Time and place: Sep. 7, 2020 12:15 PM–1:00 PM, Zoom

The seminar is open. If you would like to participate, please send an e-mail to gry.oftedal(at)ifikk.uio.no, and you will receive the relevant zoom-link.

The Developing Communicator (DEVCOM)

Children are born communicators. A growing body of developmental evidence suggests that the cognitive abilities enabling the expression and comprehension of communicative intentions – so-called pragmatic abilities – which underlie language use and understanding, develop early. However, a puzzling feature of pragmatic development is children’s difficulties with non-literal uses of language (e.g., “I love you so much I could eat you up!”). How can children be early experts at a range of pragmatically complex tasks requiring attention to speakers’ intentions, but act like ‘literal listeners’ in other contexts? The ERC-project DEVCOM aims to provide an account of the stages and factors involved in children’s developing competence with non-literal uses of language, focusing, inter alia, on how children’s pragmatic reasoning with non-literal uses is influenced by their acquisition of the conventional meanings of words. The project will use a set of novel methodologies combining explicit and implicit measures, assuming that while children’s performance on explicit measures is liable to be affected by a growing sensitivity to sense conventions, implicit measures may be more revealing of their actual pragmatic abilities.