METHOD, THEORY & REALITY
Upcoming Events (Fall 2024)
(If you are interested in attending any of the following meetings, please email us for the Zoom link!)
Thursday February 13, 4:00 - 6:00 PM (EST)
Firdaus Gupte. (UMass Amherst)
"Non-Universal Laws or Explanation: A Dilemma for the Anti-Humean"
ABSTRACT. The world is strikingly regular. Apples fall, bread nourishes, and electrons repel each other throughout the world. What explains this? A popular view is that we can explain this regularity by accepting anti-Humeanism about laws. In this paper, I put pressure on this view by arguing that, if we accept a plausible claim from philosophy and physics, then the laws cannot explain the regularity of the world. This claim is that non-universal laws, laws that do not hold universally throughout a world, are metaphysically possible. It is also sometimes argued that whether anti-Humean laws explain the regularity of the world depends on the specifics of the anti-Humean view in question. I argue against this in this paper - the dilemma above targets all anti-Humean views equally. Over the course of defending this dilemma, I also respond to a recent paper by Hildebrand and Metcalfe (2021), in which they argue that an intelligent God is the best explanation of the regularity of the world.
Thursday April 3, 3:30 - 5:30 PM (EST)
Aja Watkins. (U. Wisconsin-Madison)
"Trust in the Fallible: Lessons from Uncertainty Management in the Environmental Sciences"
ABSTRACT. COMING SOON!
Thursday April 17, 6:00 - 8:00 PM (EST)
Karen Kovaka. (UCSD)
"What Is Meta-Analysis Good For?"
ABSTRACT. There is an ongoing debate about the quality of the evidence that meta-analysis provides. But both critics and defenders of meta-analysis generally assume that the core purpose and contribution of meta-analysis is to tell us what the evidence really says about the existence and magnitude of causal relationships, to extract conclusions that agree from datasets that do not. I argue that while delivering such information about cause-and-effect relationships is the most common use of meta-analysis, this is only an application of the tool, and that its primary epistemic role of meta-analysis is something else entirely: to help us explore and understand variation among populations of studies.