HPS_EST January 2025

hps_est@lists.philo.at

8 participants
13 discussions

Invitation: APSE talk by Laura Caponetto & accompanying reading circle

by Veronika Lassl

Dear all, I warmly invite you to an upcoming APSE event on refusal. It consists of a talk by Laura Caponetto (Milan) entitled "Refusing - and Refusing to Obey" and an accompanying reading circle prior to the talk. Date: Thursday, January 16th Reading Circle: 1pm - 3pm Talk: 3pm - 5 pm Location: room 3A (NIG) After the talk, we will go out for dinner. Please write to veronika.lassl(a)univie.ac.at if you would like to join. Everyone is welcome to attend parts or all of this event! Abstract: We can do several different things with the word ‘No’. We can turn down an offer, decline an invitation, deny permission. We can engage in civil disobedience. In this talk, I aim to map these varieties and unpack the normative profile of refusal. I argue that refusal constitutes an illocutionary family comprising acts which have different felicity conditions but share the definitional normative function of preventing certain obligations from being created or waived. I begin by singling out what I take to be the paradigmatic case of refusal. I then broaden the picture a little, to consider speech acts that share ‘family resemblances’ with this paradigmatic case. And then I broaden it further, to look at speech acts that populate the ‘illocutionary neighborhood’, including ‘refusal to obey’. The talk expands upon my previous work on the topic (Caponetto 2023). While that work was primarily concerned with ‘upstream norms’ for refusing (i.e. the conditions under which refusal succeeds), I here focus on its ‘downstream norms’ – on the changes refusal effects on the normative landscape. Reading Circle: We will discuss Caponetto's 2023 paper "The pragmatic structure of refusal" (attached as a PDF), which is closely related to the topic of the talk. Please feel free to bring your lunch! The reading circle is open to everyone - please send a message to vinzenz.fischer(a)univie.ac.at if you want to attend. As an introduction to the field, we suggest: Green, M. (2020) . Speech acts. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/speech-acts/ For further reading regarding the topic: Caponetto, L. (2017). On silencing, authority, and the act of refusal. Rivista di Estetica, 64, 35–52. Langton, R. (2018b). Blocking as counter-speech. In D. Fogal, D.W. Harris, & M. Moss (Eds.), New work on speech acts (pp. 144–164). Oxford University Press. Sbisà, M. (2019). Assertion among the speech acts. In S. C. Goldberg (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of assertion (pp. 158–178). Oxford University Press. Looking forward to seeing you there, Veronika Lassl

2 months

REMINDER: Call for Applications - Summer School on History and Epistemology of Econometrics - Vienna July 2025

by Zarah Weiss

Summer School Call for Applications (Deadline: February 15, 2025) 23rd univie: summer school Scientific World Conceptions (USS-SWC) The History and Epistemology of Econometrics Vienna, July 7-11, 2025 https://summerschool-ivc.univie.ac.at/ Course Description Models and their econometric estimation play an increasingly important role in modern economic and political life. From macroeconomic policy and financial regulation to public health and climate policy, models contribute to shaping policies. The generation of ever more data is likely to support the proliferation of models and econometrics. Research resources in academia focus on the theoretical foundations of the underlying model and on the statistical methods of econometrics; much less attention is devoted to the epistemological challenges of the underlying concepts, the normative challenges of the everyday work with econometrics, and the application of its results in policy decisions and evaluation. The objective of this program is to increase attention amongst philosophers of science, academic economists, and empirical economists in policy institutions (eg, central banks) to these issues. The course is also structured around a particular point of view namely, that economics is a science of models and that most of the main features of econometrics relate generally to the role of models in science. Topics will be selected reflecting participants interests and may include: * History of econometrics to frame the philosophical issues to be discussed in the course * The Vienna Circle and econometrics * Values and Ethical Pitfalls in econometric research * Key philosophical issues of how models relate to the world and how they relate to each other * Data: observation, classification, and measurement of economic variables from a modeling point of view * Conceptual issues related to modeling randomness * The identification problem: how possibly, if at all possible, to map descriptive relations onto theoretical variables? * Issues related to optional stopping, search methodologies, and the proper interpretation of results obtained through search * Different approaches to the nature of causation and different strategies of causal inference * The conceptual basis of graphical causal modeling and controlled, natural, and field experiments * The conceptual issues surrounding the problem of model uncertainty, as well as some of the strategies economists use to address it Main Lecturers: Kevin D. Hoover (Duke University) Kevin D. Hoover is Professor of Economics and Philosophy and Senior Fellow of the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. He is the editor of the journal History of Political Economy and a past editor of the Journal of Economic Methodology. His current research addresses causality, causal inference in economics, the history of macroeconomics, philosophical issues related to the microfoundations of macroeconomics, and the engagement with economics of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles. S. Peirce. He is the author of The New Classical Macroeconomics, the Methodology of Empirical Macroeconomics, Causality in Macroeconomics, Applied Intermediate Macroeconomics, as well as many articles in monetary and macroeconomics, the history of economics, the philosophy of economics, and applied econometrics. Jennifer Jhun (Duke University) Jennifer Jhun is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Duke University, as well as a Senior Fellow of the Center for the History of Political Economy. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. Her main research interests are in the philosophy of science, especially philosophy of economics, but also in issues in other areas, such as psychology and physics. She is currently engaged on a project that investigates antitrust from a historical and philosophy-of-science perspective: Whats the Point of ceteris Paribus? or, How to Understand Supply and Demand Curves. Philosophy of Science 85, no. 2 (2018): 271-292; Economics, Equilibrium Methods, and Multi-scale Modeling. Erkenntnis 86, no. 2 (2021): 457-472; Multi-Model Reasoning in Economics: The Case of COMPASS. Philosophy of Science 90, no. 4 (2023): 836-854; Implied Market Shares and Antitrust Markets as Fuzzy Sets. Forthcoming at The Antitrust Bulletin. (Joint with Matthew Panhans, Federal Trade Commission) Guest Lecturer: Marcel Boumans (University of Utrecht) Marcel Boumans is historian and philosopher of science at Utrecht University. His main research focus is on understanding empirical research practices in science outside the lab from a philosophy of science-in-practice perspective. He is particularly interested in the practices of measurement and modelling and the role of mathematics in social science. The first step in these practices is to make sense of the available data. Visualisations play an important role in this. His current research project Vision and Visualisation is nearing completion with a book manuscript Shaping the Phenomena. The program is primarily directed at graduate students and junior researchers in philosophy of science and economics as well as empirical economists at policy institutions (eg, central banks) but the organizers also encourage applications from people in all stages of their career and from fields other than economics that apply advanced econometrics. Application form and further information: <https://summerschool-ivc.univie.ac.at/application/> https://summerschool-ivc.univie.ac.at/application/ USS-SWC operates under the academic supervision of an International Program Committee of distinguished philosophers, historians, and scientists. Its members represent the scientific fields in the scope of USS-SWC, make contact to their home universities and will also support acknowledgement of courses taken by the students. The annual summer school is organised by the Institute Vienna Circle of the University of Vienna. <https://wienerkreis.univie.ac.at/> https://wienerkreis.univie.ac.at/ Find information about our exchange programme with Duke University (North Carolina) here: <https://international.univie.ac.at/en/international-cooperation/university- wide-partnership-agreements/north-america/> https://international.univie.ac.at/en/international-cooperation/university-w ide-partnership-agreements/north-america/ Inquiries: Administrator: Zarah Weiss Institute Vienna Circle Alser Straße 23/32 1080 Wien <mailto:summerschool.ivc@univie.ac.at> summerschool.ivc(a)univie.ac.at Scientific director: Georg Schiemer Institute Vienna Circle Alser Straße 23/32 1080 Wien <mailto:georg.schiemer@univie.ac.at> georg.schiemer(a)univie.ac.at

2 months

Vienna STS Talks - STS Talk by Aristotle Tympas

by Katrin Hackl

We are happy to invite you to our 8 talk of the Vienna STS Talk Series in 2024W [cid:image001.jpg@01DB6107.4A0AF8E0] STS Talk by Aristotle Tympas Department of History & Philosophy of Science, National & Kapodistrian University of Athens January 20, 2025 05:00 PM-06:30 PM On starting with 'artificial intelligence' and arriving at 'existential risks', 19th-21st century: From local engine 'explosions' and regional network 'instability' to global environmental 'unsustainability'. Abstract The presentation will seek to contextualize the emergence of the so called 'existential risks' (also called 'existential threats') by offering a long-run history of technology-related risks. As the argument goes, key to this history is, first, the wide-spread phenomenon of steam engine 'explosions' at the start of industrial capitalism (up to the first half of the nineteenth century), and, then, alongside the connection of steam engines to long distance energy transmission lines and networks of lines (throughout the first half of the twentieth century), the emergence of the phenomenon of line/network 'instability'. Biography Aristotle Tympas, a specialist in the study of technology from the humanities and the social sciences, works as professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, School of Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His studies combined engineering (MSc, Aristotelio University, 1989), technology and science policy (MSc, Georgia Tech, 1995) and history-sociology of technology (PhD, Georgia Tech, 2001). Former chair (2017-2019) of the management committee of the 'Tensions of Europe: Research Network on History, Technology and Europe', Tympas currently serves as vice president of the International Master's Programme on Society, Science and Technology (ESST), as director of the Interdepartmental Graduate Program 'Science, Technology, Society-Science and Technology Studies' and as vice-chair of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (he served as department chair from 2020 to 2022). He has been a visiting scholar in the US (MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society), Germany (Viadrina Center B/Orders in Motion) and Sweden (Swedish Institute for Disability Research). He is the author of Calculation and Computation in the Pre-electronic Era (Springer, 2017) and Analog Labor, Digital Capital (Angelus Novus, 2018, In Greek). Organiser Department of Science and Technology Studies Location STS Seminar Room, NIG, St. II. 6th floor, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna & online via zoom<https://univienna.zoom.us/j/63251489007?pwd=FBTgiIoQbHPTvmHhnjFwObba9mAGqZ.6> [cid:image003.png@01DB6108.03B99C10] Best wishes, Katrin Hackl __________ Mag. Katrin Hackl Research Support & Communication Department of Science and Technology Studies University of Vienna Universitätsstraße 7 /II/ 6th floor (NIG) 1010 Vienna / Austria Tel.: 0043-1-4277-496007 [cid:image002.jpg@01DB6107.4A0AF8E0]<https://sts.univie.ac.at/>

2 months

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HPS_EST January 2025