The Statistics Wars and their Casualties workshop: Sept 22 & 23 (online)

Phil Stats Wars logo

Dear Colleagues,

The Statistics Wars and their Casualties workshop will now be fully online. The first 2 meetings (sessions 1 & 2) will be the scheduled dates, but only in the afternoons from 15-18:00 pm London time on Sept 22 and 23, 2022. There will be two future online meetings (sessions 3 & 4) probably in December with dates and times to be announced. There will be lots of opportunities to engage in discussion with attendees and special panelists.  We very much hope to see you there!

To register/receive notification of updates and schedules for the workshop, please visit this link. We really appreciate the continued interest many of you have shown in this workshop and associated forums over the past 2 years. We will strive to avoid duplicate messages. Write to us if you prefer not to receive any further updates on these events.

We would be grateful if you would forward this e-mail to interested colleagues.

Warmest Wishes,
D. Mayo
R. Frigg
M. Harris


The Statistics Wars and Their Casualties

22-23 September 2022
15:00-18:00 pm London Time*

ONLINE

To register/receive notification of updates for the  workshop, please fill out the registration/notification form here.

*These will be sessions 1 & 2, there will be two more future on-line sessions (3 & 4) to be announced.

Yoav Benjamini 
(Tel Aviv University), Alexander Bird (University of Cambridge), Mark Burgman (Imperial College London),  Daniele Fanelli (London School of Economics and Political Science), Roman Frigg (London School of Economics and Political Science), Stephan Guettinger (London School of Economics and Political Science), David Hand (Imperial College London), Margherita Harris (London School of Economics and Political Science), Christian Hennig (University of Bologna), Daniël Lakens (Eindhoven University of Technology), Deborah Mayo (Virginia Tech), Richard Morey (Cardiff University), Stephen Senn  (Edinburgh, Scotland), Jon Williamson (University of Kent)

While the field of statistics has a long history of passionate foundational controversy the last decade has, in many ways, been the most dramatic. Misuses of statistics, biasing selection effects, and high powered methods of Big-Data analysis, have helped to make it easy to find impressive-looking but spurious, results that fail to replicate. As the crisis of replication has spread beyond psychology and social sciences to biomedicine, genomics and other fields, people are getting serious about reforms.  Many are welcome (preregistration, transparency about data, eschewing mechanical uses of statistics); some are quite radical. The experts do not agree on how to restore scientific integrity, and these disagreements reflect philosophical battles–old and new– about the nature of inductive-statistical inference and the roles of probability in statistical inference and modeling. These philosophical issues simmer below the surface in competing views about the causes of problems and potential remedies. If statistical consumers are unaware of assumptions behind rival evidence-policy reforms, they cannot scrutinize the consequences that affect them (in personalized medicine, psychology, law, and so on). Critically reflecting on proposed reforms and changing standards requires insights from statisticians, philosophers of science, psychologists, journal editors, economists and practitioners from across the natural and social sciences. This workshop will bring together these interdisciplinary insights–from speakers as well as attendees.

Sponsors/Collaborations:
Sponsors: The Foundation for the Study of Experimental Reasoning, Reliability, and the Objectivity and Rationality of Science (E.R.R.O.R.S.); Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS), London School of Economics
OrganizersD. Mayo, R. Frigg and M. Harris
Logistician (chief logistics and contact person): Jean Miller

To register/receive notification of updates for the workshop, please fill out the registration/notification form here.

CFP: Society for the Metaphysics of Science Session at the 2023 APA Eastern

Dear Members of the Society for the Metaphysics of Science,

In addition to its stand-alone annual conference, the Society for the Metaphysics of Science has often hosted group sessions at the American Philosophical Association divisional meetings. While those sessions have primarily been at the Central and Pacific meetings in the past, this year we are adding a session at the Eastern division meeting (Montreal, 4–7 January 2023) with an open call for papers.

Anonymized abstracts of 400-700 words should be submitted through EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=smsapae23 ) by Friday, 10 June. Final presentations will be roughly 30 minutes.

Abstracts are welcome in:

  • The metaphysics of any area of natural or social science
  • The implications of any area of natural or social science for metaphysics

Presenters must be members of the APA at the time of the conference and registered for the 2023 Eastern Division meeting.

For any questions please contact the Society for the Metaphysics of Science's APA Eastern division representative, Ryan Miller (Ryan.Miller@unige.ch).

For more information on the Society for the Metaphysics of Science, please see our website: https://socmetsci.org .

SMS Announcements

Kerry McKenzie’s book Fundamentality and Grounding is open access until 23 February 2022.. The CFP for our 2022 Conference, to be held 7–9 September 2022 at the University of Bristol, is now available.
socmetsci.org

Sincerely,

Tyler Hildebrand, Secretary of the SMS

2022 AusSTS workshop

Decorative abstract image

The Call for Applications for the 2022 AusSTS workshop is now open: https://aussts.wordpress.com/aussts2022/

It will be a multi-sited event, with in-person nodes in Melbourne, Sydney, Darwin and Wellington NZ.

The workshop will take place on the 28th and 29th of July 2022.

Theme: Generation

Plenary: Anne Pollock (King’s College London)

Intergenerational Plenary: Hana Burgess (UoA), Mythily Meher (UoA), Billy van Uitregt (VUW)

Please do spread the word to HDR candidates and ECRs that you think may be interested in applying. Applications close 30 May.

Thank you all

Very Best,
Roberta

Roberta Pala, coordinator for AusSTS

Conference 2023

At the 2021 AGM, held as part of the last AAHPSSS conference, the suggestion was made about bringing forward the next conference so that we could have an in-conference person as soon as possible. At the moment, the AAHPSSS committee is considering the following options:
·      12 – 14 April 2023 (mid-semester break)
·      14 – 16 June (start of semester break)
·      19 – 21 July (end of semester break)
·      Usual time, late November (start of semester break)
We will organize a proper poll of member preferences on these options. However, if any of you have strong feelings here, feel free to let me know. We intend to continue to offer online options regardless.

Martin Bush, Secretary

PSA2022: Call for Symposium Proposals

Philosophy of Science Association Logo

Twenty-Eighth Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association

November 10 – November 13, 2022

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Submission opens on January 5, 2022 for proposals for symposia to be presented at the PSA2022 meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 10–13, 2022. The deadline for submitting symposium proposals is 11:59 pm Pacific Standard Time on January 26, 2022. Please note the compressed timeframe between the opening of the submission portal and the deadline. Submission is through the PSA2022 website, https://psa2022.dryfta.com/.

A call for contributed papers and a call for posters for the poster forum will be issued separately. Decisions will be returned on symposia submissions prior to the deadline for contributed papers. The call for session chairs will be sent out in late summer 2022. The conference will begin at 8:30 am on November 10 and last through 3:00 pm on November 13.

A symposium should involve several presenters, typically 4–5, organized around a topic of interest in the philosophy of science (broadly construed). The PSA2022 program committee is committed to assembling a program with high-quality symposia on a variety of topics and diverse presenters that reflect the full range of current work in the philosophy of science. Symposia that make connections with current science, such as by including working scientists, or that make other connections outside philosophy, such as with history, sociology, or public policy, are warmly invited. We will not be considering “Author Meets Critics” sessions, but topical sessions that build upon recently published books are welcome.

At the time of submission, proposers may choose to have their proposals considered for the Women’s Caucus Prize Symposium; for more information please see the Women’s Caucus website.

Members of the PSA2022 Program Committee

Proposals must include sufficient supporting material to enable the program committee to evaluate the quality and interest of the symposium. Proposals for symposia should include:

  1. The title of the proposed symposium
  2. A short descriptive summary of the proposal (100-200 words)
  3. A description of the topic and a justification of its current importance to the discipline (up to 1000 words)
  4. A list of participants with institutional affiliations and e-mail addresses, including any non-presenting co-authors
  5. Titles and abstracts of all papers (up to 500 words for each title and abstract)
  6. Either an abbreviated curriculum vitae or short biographical description for each participant, including any non-presenting co-authors (up to 1 page for each participant)

See the meeting website for more information and to submit a symposium proposal after submissions open on January 5, 2022. Please note the compressed submission window - there are slightly fewer weeks between submissions opening and deadline for symposia proposals than usual, to accommodate the compressed timeline between PSA 2021 and PSA 2022.

The site also has a discussion page, which can be used to help organize and find participants for symposium proposals. To post on the discussion page or submit a proposal, you will need to first create an account, even if you’ve created an account in the past. (Click on “Create Account” on the top menu.) Each author of a symposium paper (whether a presenting author or not) and each symposium commentator will also need to create an account.

The deadline for submitting symposium proposals is 11:59 pm Pacific Standard Time on January 26, 2022. Symposium organizers will be informed of the program committee’s decision prior to the deadline for submitting contributed papers (April 6, 2022). Please see important information below on the PSA policy regarding multiple submissions.

After the conference, symposium presenters may submit their papers for review for publication in a supplementary issue of Philosophy of Science. The submission deadline for symposium papers will be announced at a later date. Papers will be evaluated for publication individually. Authors are welcome to post their symposium papers as PSA2022 Conference Papers at philsci-archive.pitt.edu (a publicly accessible digital archive) prior to the meeting (note that submission to the archive does not count as prior publication for papers submitted to the supplementary issue).

Please note that in accordance with current PSA policy:

  1. No previously published paper may be submitted for presentation at the PSA meeting.
  2. Any individual can be a presenting author in only one symposium proposal. Commentators are considered to be presenting authors. Multiple symposium proposals that include the same person as a presenting author will not be reviewed.
  3. No one is permitted to present more than once at each PSA meeting. Thus, if a symposium proposal in which you are a presenting author is accepted, you cannot submit a contributed paper for which you are the presenting author. Commentators that are part of symposia are considered to be presenting authors. A scholar may appear as co-author on more than one paper or symposium talk but may present at PSA2022 only once. This policy does not apply to the poster forum; a presenting author on a contributed paper or symposium paper may also present a poster in the poster forum.
  4. If an accepted symposium subsequently loses participants, maintaining acceptance will be contingent on the symposium organizer developing satisfactory alternatives to maintain the quality and coherence of the session.

All questions about submissions should be directed to the Chair of the PSA2022 Program Committee, Holly Andersen, at psa2022@philsci.org.

2021 Conference Update

The next AAHPSSS conference will be held 24 – 26 November, 2021. The conference was to be based at the University of Wollongong, but COVID travel restrictions have necessitated moving it completely on-line. Conference registration rates have therefore been substantially reduced. Registration is now open and includes concessional rates for students and the unwaged, and options for single-day registration.

AAHPSSS is committed to interchange between scholars from a wide range of disciplines, with a focus on supporting postgraduate students, early career academics, and those in insecure employment. Please do consider how you might contribute to this conference, and how we all might support emerging scholars in the field.