[SydPhil] University of Sydney Philosophy Seminar Series, Cristian Larroulet Philippi, (University of Melbourne)

[Ryan Cox]

 Hi everyone,

This week's speaker in the University of Sydney Philosophy Seminar Series is Cristian Larroulet Philippi, (University of Melbourne)

The title of the talk is "Assessing the Bayesian picture of scientific advice: On the political division of labour. (Joint work with Ahmad Elabbar (HPS, University of Cambridge)) ". Here is an abstract for the talk:

Richard Jeffrey (1956) famously articulated an internal critique to Richard Rudner’s (1953) argument from inductive risk and offered an alternative view of scientific advice, which we call “the Bayesian picture of scientific advice” (BPSA). It involves two essential commitments: scientists should communicate their subjective probabilities (vs. outright beliefs) in hypotheses and doing so upholds a political division of labour (i.e., scientists bring the epistemic input; policy-makers bring the evaluative judgments). We argue that communicating credences doesn’t deliver the division of labour—the idea that such a prize is secured by the Bayesian picture is an artifact of the idealizations behind the debate around the inductive risk debate. Basically: scientists’ role in policy advice goes well beyond reporting credences (or outright beliefs for that matter) for a hypotheses previously specified by policy makers. Scientists are necessarily involved in the framing of policy (decision) problems, i.e., in the curation of the policy actions, the states-of-nature, and outcomes that are worth considering. (They are even needed to come up with utility numbers!) And these tasks cannot be done without making value-judgments. This is easy to see when looking at well-studied cases of scientific advice such as large-scale environmental assessments—we focus on the IPCC reports in the talk—but the point generalizes.

The seminar will take place at 3:30pm on Wednesday Oct 15 in the Philosophy Seminar Room (N494).

Enquiries about the seminar series can be directed to ryan.cox at sydney.edu.au

Ryan Cox
Lecturer in Philosophy
Discipline of Philosophy
School of Humanities
University of Sydney
ryan.cox at sydney.edu.au