Im Rahmen des Forschungsseminars laden wir recht herzlich ein zum Vortrag:

Jonathan Surovell (Texas State University)
"Empirical Significance, Predictive Power, and Explication"

Abstract

Criteria of empirical significance are supposed to state conditions under which (putative) reference to an unobservable object or property is “empirically meaningful”. Up to now, all such criteria have identified empirical significance with predictive power. I will argue that this approach rules out some vocabulary with a legitimate scientific function, viz. reducing the computational burden of extracting predictions from theory. I spell out this objection by specifying a “shortcut term” of this kind that is ruled empirically meaningless by Schurz’s criterion. I then discuss an approach to defining empirical significance that is capable of avoiding my objection and, more ambitiously, that may break the cycle of “punctures and patches” that has plagued the project from the beginning. In a nutshell, the idea is to give various “immanent” definitions of empirical significance instead of a “transcendent” definition.

Speaker

I was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. I completed a BA in philosophy at McGill University in 2005 and a PhD in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in 2013. I now teach philosophy at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. The two philosophical topics that I think about most are empiricism and reproductive ethics. My current projects include, in addition to the empirical significance paper I’ll present, papers on the epistemic rationality of stance empiricism and the Carnap-Quine debate about ontology.

Bibliography

“But for the Grace of God: Abortion, Cognitive Disability, Luck, and Moral Status” (Ethical

Theory and Moral Practice, 2016)

“The Bradleyan Regress, Non-Relational Realism, and the Quinean Semantic Strategy” (Grazer

Philosophische Studien, 2015)

“Embryonic Viability, Parental Care, and the Pro-Life Thesis: A Defense of Bovens” (Journal of

Medical Ethics, 2013)