Category: Perspectives on Science seminar

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 10.5., Samuli Reijula (University of Helsinki) will give a presentation titled “Social categories in the making – construction or recruitment?”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

Real kinds, both natural and social categories, are characterized by rich inductive potential. They have relatively stable sets of conceptually independent projectable properties. Somewhat surprisingly, even some purely social categories (e.g., ethnicity, gender, political orientation) show such multiple projectability. The article explores the origin of the inductive richness of social categories and concepts. I argue that existing philosophical accounts provide only a partial explanation, and mechanisms of boundary formation and stabilization must be brought into view for a more comprehensive account of inductively rich social categories.

Author bio:

Samuli Reijula is an Academy of Finland research fellow (2020-2025) and a university lecturer in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. More about him at www.samulireijula.net.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 3.5., Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche (University of Cambridge) will give a presentation titled “Economists and Policy Networks”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

The main topic of the presentation is the influence of economists and economics on policy. While both economics and policy are moving targets, it is hoped that systematic empirical studies of failures and successes to influence can provide elements for a history of relevance. I will first provide a brief overview of the literature on economists and policy in relation to the more recent literature on expertise in general. I will then discuss the concept of policy network, contextualise its uses in political sciences since the 1970’s and its usefulness for the study of three particular episodes: 1) the role of British economists in the Royal Commission on Equal Pay in 1944-46; 2) the role of Phyllis Wallace at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1965-68; and 3) the role of economists in the U.S. comparable worth controversy in the 1980’s. The last part of the presentation will be exploratory. Using ongoing research on the rise of agglomeration economics in the UK policy landscape, I want to delineate if, why, and when a conceptual framework can be a useful tool to research, describe and theorise in the history of economics.

Author bio:

​​Cléo Chassonnery-Zaïgouche is a historian of economics, currently a postdoctoral research associate on the project Expertise Under Pressure. She works mainly on work on the history of discrimination and wages, economic expertise and quantification. More about her at https://cleocz.com/.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 26.4., Sacha Altay (École Normale Supérieure in Paris) will give a presentation titled “Understanding the spread of fake news”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

In spite of the attractiveness of fake news stories, most people are reluctant to share them. Why? In four pre-registered experiments we found that sharing fake news hurt one’s reputation in a way that is difficult to fix, even for politically congruent fake news. However, some fake news stories did reach a wide cultural success. Does it mean that people don’t care about accuracy and were fooled? Not necessarily. In another paper we identified a factor that, alongside accuracy, drives the sharing of true and fake news: the ‘interestingness-if-true’ of a piece of news. In three pre-registered experiments (N = 904) participants were presented with a series of true and fake news and asked to rate the accuracy of the news how interesting the news would be if it were true and how likely they would be to share it. Participants were more willing to share news they found more interesting-if-true as well as news they deemed more accurate. In the end we argue that people may not share news of questionable accuracy by mistake but instead because the news has qualities that compensate for its potential inaccuracy such as being interesting-if-true.

Author bio:

Sacha Altay is completing a PhD in experimental psychology at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Fascinated by (apparently) irrational beliefs, he tries to understand why despite people’s cognitive abilities to resist misinformation, some false beliefs are so widespread. During his PhD Sacha also tested novel communication techniques to correct people’s misperceptions and fight misinformation. He will soon start a postdoctoral position on misinformation and (mis)trust at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 19.4., Salla-Maaria Laaksonen (University of Helsinki) will give a presentation titled “Unconventional communicators in the corona crisis”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

This talk introduces an ongoing research project UnCoCo that investigates how information and stories related to Covid-19 pandemic circulate and are framed in networks of alternative communicators. Thus we are not interested in the communication by government or traditional media, but rather examine how communicators such as social media influencers or anonymous users take part in framing the pandemic. We conceptualize their discourse as legitimacy judgements targeted towards the institutions and communication of official actors such as the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL).

This presentation focuses on two groups of alternative communicators: networks of alternative experts that emerged and organized online during spring 2020 and an anonymous group of accounts that perform a parody of THL and its key employees on Twitter using the vernacular modalities of online communication.

A published paper of the first case is available here, open access:
https://jcom.sissa.it/archive/19/05/JCOM_1905_2020_A10

More details about the project:
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/uncocoproject/

Author bio:

Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, Docent, D.Soc.Sc., is a Postdoctoral Researcher
in the Centre for Consumer Society Research, University of Helsinki. Her research areas are technology, organizations, and new media, including organizational reputation and legitimacy in the hybrid media system, the organization of online social movements, and the use of data and algorithms in organizations. She is also an expert in digital and computational research methods. @jahapaula

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 12.4., Inkeri Koskinen (Tampere University) will give a presentation titled “Participation and Objectivity”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

Many philosophers of science have recently argued that extra-academic participation in scientific knowledge production does not threaten scientific objectivity. Quite the contrary: citizen science, participatory projects, transdisciplinary research, and other similar endeavours can even increase the objectivity of the conducted research. Simultaneously, scientists working in fields where such participation is common, have expressed worries about various ways in which it can result in biases. In this paper I clarify how participation can both increase and threaten the objectivity of the conducted research.

Author bio:

Inkeri Koskinen is a Senior Research Fellow at Tampere University and is affiliated with TINT. Her topics of interest are objectivity, diversity in science, values in science, democratisation of scientific knowledge production, transdisciplinarity and the philosophy of the humanities.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 29.3., Harold Kincaid (University of Cape Town) will give a presentation titled “Making Progress on Causal Inference in Economics”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm, Helsinki time (UTC+3).

Please notice that Finland will switch to summer time. The time zone is different from previous seminars.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

Enormous progress has been made on causal inference and modeling in areas outside of economics. We now have a full semantics for causality in a number of empirically relevant situations. This semantics is provided by causal graphs and allows provable precise formulation of causal relations and testable deductions from them. The semantics also allows provable rules for sufficient and biasing covariate adjustment and algorithms for deducing causal structure from data. I outline these developments, show how they describe three basic kinds of causal inference situations that standard multiple regression practice in econometrics frequently gets wrong, and show how these errors can be remedied. I also show that instrumental variables, despite claims to the contrary, do not solve these potential errors and are subject to the same morals. I argue both from the logic of elemental causal situations and from simulated data with nice statistical properties and known causal models. I apply these general points to a reanalysis of the Sachs and Warner model and data on resource abundance and growth. I finish with open potentially fruitful questions.

Author bio:

Harold Kincaid is Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town. Early books were Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences (Cambridge 1996) and Individualism and the Unity of Science (Rowman and Littlefield 1997). He is the coeditor of many books, including the OUP Handbooks of Philosophy of Economics, of Social Science and of Political Science (forthcoming) and of the forthcoming A Modern Guide to Philosophy of Economics (Elgar). He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters in the philosophy of science and social science. In addition to his philosophy of science work, Kincaid does work in experimental economics focusing primarily on risk and time attitude elicitation, currently in the context of covid.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 22.3., Uskali Mäki (University of Helsinki) will give a presentation titled “Modelling and functions: within and without”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

As a cognitive activity, modelling can serve a variety of external functions, such as explanation, prediction, exploration, education, design, persuasion, and so on; and each of these comes in numerous possible further variants. The components of modelling, including idealizing assumptions, serve numerous functions within the activity, such as isolating causal mechanisms and securing mathematical tractability. The challenge of decomposition and coordination is to identify these functions and align them with one another; meeting this challenge is the burden of model commentary. All this has consequences for issues such as model evaluation and the sensible locus of truth ascription in modelling. The talk will summarize, expand, and refine my own past work, and will respond to some recent contributions by other philosophers of modelling.

For background reading, see Mäki (2020).

Author bio:

Uskali Mäki is professor emeritus at the University of Helsinki, directing TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science; and a visiting professor at Nankai University, China. Between 2006-2017 he was an Academy professor. In 1995-2006 he was professor of theoretical philosophy at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, directing EIPE [Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics]. He is a former editor of the Journal of Economic Methodology (1995-2005). His current research focuses mainly on the philosophy of economics and on models, scientific realism, interdisciplinarity, and social aspects of science.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 15.3., Judith Favereau (Université Lyon 2) will give a presentation titled “Trapped in paternalism: randomized experiments and poverty”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee within the J-PAL, promote the systematic use of randomized field experiments (RFEs) in order to fight poverty. Thus, RFEs tend to shape the policies that can be tested with such an experimental design. These policies are behaviorally oriented, therefore many of them are actually nudging devices. Furthermore, Duflo strengthens the J-PAL’s perspective from libertarian paternalism (e.g. nudges) to what she calls a “democratic paternalism”. My claim in this paper is that J-PAL’s RFEs in failing to access the mechanisms behind the poor behaviors, makes it difficult for J-PAL’s researchers to draw political recommendations, and as such Duflo is smoothly pushed to call for a stronger paternalism. The paper methodologically explains such a shift and highlights potential political and methodological alternatives to randomized field experiments.

Author bio:

Judith Favereau is currently an associate professor in philosophy of economics and history of economic thought at the pluridisciplinary laboratory TRIANGLE in the University Lyon 2. She is also affiliated to TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science. Her topics of interest are: development economics, experimental economics, philosophy of economics and evidence-based policy. Her research focuses on how development economics, experimental economics and evidence-based policy interact together in order to fight poverty, which implies studying the methodology of these sub-fields and their disciplinary transfers. More information about her at her website judithfavereau.wordpress.com.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Tuesday 9.3., Jack Vromen (Erasmus University Rotterdam) will give a presentation titled “Just how unobjectionable is the Pareto principle?”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 3 to 5 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

The Pareto principle (roughly, the principle that social state B is to be preferred to A if some are better off in B than in A and no one is worse off in B than in A) seems to be generally and routinely accepted by economists without further justification. Economists grant that the principle is weak, in the sense that it applies to only a small subset of comparisons of social states, but almost never seem to call its acceptability in question. Indeed, some economists even state that they cannot see how anyone could possibly object to the Pareto principle. In the paper I argue that reasonable objections, related for example to distributional concerns, can be made to the principle. I first note that that the principle is treacherously simple: it can (and has actually been) interpreted, used and applied in various ways. I then point out that if we confine our attention to how welfare economists standardly interpret and use the principle, the principle can do justice to distributional concerns. Yet I also argue that there are limits to this. Strictly speaking, the Pareto principle implies that no external (“extra-welfarist”) concern can possibly override social welfare changes (as defined by the principle), no matter how weighty the external concern and how small the welfare changes. In principle, such extreme implications can be avoided by generalizing the Pareto principle. But the price to be paid for such a generalization is that the principle becomes even weaker in the sense that it applies to an even smaller set of comparisons of social states.

Author bio:

Jack Vromen is professor of philosophy at the Erasmus School of Philosophy and Director of the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics (EIPE, both at Erasmus University Rotterdam). He co-edits with N. Emrah Aydinonat the Journal of Economic Methodology. His research is at the intersection of economics and philosophy, with special attention to foundations of evolutionary economics, new institutional economics and neuroeconomics. More recently his research focuses on social preferences, on what they are, how they could have evolved, what might motivate them and whether their satisfaction should be included in welfare evaluations.

At the next Perspectives on Science seminar on Monday 1.3., Kristina Rolin (Tampere University) will give a presentation titled “Trust in Science: The Moral Dimension”. The seminar takes place in Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.

Perspectives on Science is a weekly research seminar which brings together experts from science studies and philosophy of science. It is organized by TINT, the Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. More information about the seminar here.

To receive the Zoom invitation, please sign up here.

Abstract:

Trust in alleged experts is thought to be rational when the experts are trustworthy, and one has good reasons to believe that they are trustworthy, and one trusts the experts because of these reasons. Trustworthiness is thought to have two dimensions: the epistemic and the moral. Whereas the epistemic dimension involves expertise (to a reasonable degree in a relevant domain), the moral dimension involves honesty and good will towards those who are epistemically dependent on the expert. Trustworthiness is rarely transparent to others, and hence, the assessment of trustworthiness is dependent on the social indicators of trustworthiness (e.g., indicators of expertise, honesty, good will, and capability to make sound moral judgments). While there is a fair amount of discussion about the social indicators of expertise (Anderson 2011; Goldman 2006), there is surprisingly little discussion about the social indicators of the moral dimension of trustworthiness. In my presentation, I focus on the moral dimension of trustworthiness and its social indicators. In the first part of my presentation, I explain why Baier’s (1986) moral conception of trust (rather than mere reliance) is appropriate in an analysis of trust in science. In the second part of my presentation, I argue that to understand the social indicators of the moral dimension of trustworthiness, we need to distinguish between two types of cases, the ones in which honesty and good will can be assumed by default and the ones in which they cannot be assumed by default. Finally, I analyze the social indicators of the moral dimension in the latter case.

Author bio:

Kristina Rolin is University Lecturer in Research Ethics at Tampere University. She is the PI of the research project “Social and Cognitive Diversity in Science: An Epistemic Assessment” (2018-2022). Her areas of research are philosophy of science and social science, social epistemology, and feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. She is interested in diversity in science, the role of trust and values in science, collective knowledge, epistemic responsibility, and objectivity.