CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) is a network of academics and students working in the philosophy of science in various parts of the University of Cambridge, including the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and the Faculty of Philosophy. The Wednesday afternoon seminar series features current research by CamPoS members as well as visitors to Cambridge and scholars based in nearby institutions.
Seminars are held on Wednesdays, 1.00–2.30pm in Seminar Room 2. Organised by Matt Farr.
Michaelmas Term 2025
15 October
Andre Curtis-Trudel (University of Cincinnati)
Hacks and explanations via program execution
This talk is about hacks – seemingly ad hoc, unprincipled bits of code used to make a program run more efficiently, or, in some cases, simply run at all. Hacks are exceedingly common, but their philosophical significance has not been fully appreciated. First, using an infamous hack for computing fast inverse square roots as a motivating example, I sketch an account of what it is to explain how hacked programs work. On this account, we cannot explain how a hacked program works without reference to facts about a system's computational architecture and notation. Then, I suggest that this has ramifications for accounts of computational explanation that foreground a system's abstract causal structure or its semantic properties. The ramification is that these accounts are in trouble.
22 October
Aditya Jha (HPS, University of Cambridge)
Do mathematical explanations impose a necessity on the natural world?
Do some physical facts have a mathematical, as opposed to causal, explanation, and do these physical facts obtain from a degree of (mathematical) necessity stronger than that of contingent causal laws? In this talk, I focus on an influential account of mathematical explanations by Marc Lange, and argue that purported mathematical explanations are actually causal explanations in disguise. I show that such explanations are no different from ordinary applications of mathematics, as they work not by appealing to what the world must be like as a matter of mathematical necessity but by appealing to various contingent causal facts.
29 October
A.C. Paseau (University of Oxford)
Is historical mathematics largely true?
(Joint work with Fabian Pregel)
Historical mathematics is widely regarded as a repository of truths. It would seem unusually sceptical to deny that, say, early Chinese, Babylonian, or Greek mathematicians established many truths about numbers and shapes, such as Pythagoras' Theorem or instances of it for specific right-angled triangles. But is this assumption correct, and if so, what exactly justifies it?
To test the assumption, I raise and address a series of objections to it. I'll look at two case studies in particular, both involving apparently extra-mathematical beliefs that 'infect', or in some way threaten the truth of, older mathematics. The first is 18th-century geometry, and the second 19th-century matricial algebra.
5 November
Tom McClelland (HPS, University of Cambridge)
Does artificial creativity require artificial consciousness?
AI has displayed notable originality across the domains of art, science and gaming. But is it right to say that such machines are creative? This question is bound up with other challenging questions about the capacities of artificial systems. Human creativity typically involves some conscious experience of the creative project. If consciousness is necessary for creativity then a case could be made that these (presumably) unconscious machines are not really creative. I argue that there is no compelling case for thinking that consciousness is generally necessary for creativity. However, lessons learned from this discussion suggest that a more localised claim about aesthetic creativity has greater promise. I argue that consciousness is required for creativity in aesthetic tasks. If an AI lacks consciousness then it is incapable of aesthetic experience, and without aesthetic experience it cannot engage in aesthetic creative projects.
12 November
Michael Bycroft (University of Warwick)
The myth of the naïve empiricist
The naïve empiricist is a stock figure in the humanities. According to legend, the naïve empiricist believes that knowledge is a direct result of experience, unmediated by theories, interests, instruments, or human labour. That this is indeed a legend – that it bears little resemblance to what the historical empiricists actually wrote – is known to scholars of Francis Bacon, Auguste Comte, Ernst Mach, Rudolf Carnap, and the like. There has been much revisionist literature on these and other empiricists in recent decades. But there has been no attempt to weave together the revisionist studies into a single story about European empiricism over the last four centuries. I argue that we can tell such a story by turning the legend on its head. The history of empiricism is the history of efforts to show just how indirect is the relationship between experience and knowledge. This has implications for a range of projects in the humanities that have taken the myth of the naïve empiricist for granted.
19 November
Rebecca Jackson (Durham University)
The Apgar score, construct realizations, and the scale of clinical judgments
The history of the Apgar score, an index of overall infant wellbeing just after birth, can help philosophers understand why instrument validation often seems to come short in practice and why clinicians continue to 'misuse' standardized instruments. I propose extending concerns about measurement realization (as being an integral part of epistemology of measurement) to constructs – that is, construct realizations. This involves including a new domain for operational coherence – clinical judgments – which themselves have a scale which may differ from the property we believe ourselves to be measuring. When the main purpose of a measuring practice is to arrive at this kind of clinical judgment, the scale of possible judgments (or courses of care) becomes how we experience the outcome of the measuring process itself. From the scale of possible judgments which results from measurement outcomes, we can deduce the construct as it is actually experienced by those involved. To understand measurement validation practices of the past or present, we must concern ourselves with construct realization; that is, what the construct actually turns out to be as it is experienced by patients, providers, and health systems.
26 November
Hasok Chang (HPS, University of Cambridge)
Kuhn and Feyerabend on pluralism, education and history
The monism inherent in Kuhnian normal science was abhorrent to Feyerabend, who advocated pluralism about the content and methodology of science and other systems of knowledge. This conflict was articulated most clearly in Feyerabend's letters to Kuhn critiquing a draft of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he also accused Kuhn of disguising his normative philosophy as history. One important place where monism and pluralism clash is education. Feyerabend, Popper and others argued that Kuhn's notion of normal science advocated dogmatic science education that would stifle democracy and innovation.
The Kuhn–Feyerabend conflict was actually not as severe as it may appear: Feyerabend respected the autonomy of diverse cultural and epistemological traditions, which are often monistic within themselves; Kuhnian revolutions require the presence of competing paradigms during periods of extraordinary science. Pluralism can accommodate local monism, allowing the advantages of both the liberal epistemology of Feyerabend and the discipline of Kuhnian normal science. Maintaining multiple paradigms within a field of study produces the benefits of toleration while keeping the advantages of normal science within each paradigm. However, a more mature pluralism would also facilitate productive interactions between different systems of practice. In science education, too, it is possible to ameliorate dogmatism while respecting the necessities of professional training. Tolerant pluralism is already present in science education to a surprising extent, and we can strengthen it, and also introduce interactive pluralism.
3 December
Rosa W. Runhardt (Radboud University)
A conceptual framework for reactivity in social scientific measurement
Reactivity takes place when being measured or categorized affects a subject's attitudes and behaviour to such an extent that it affects results in their (subsequent) measurement or categorization. Think, for example, of higher education institutions hiring temporary staff with the sole purpose of receiving a higher score on performance indicators. Or consider the effects that the act of filling out a quality of life survey may have on how a respondent ranks their quality of life compared to others. Although researchers and methodologists commonly think of reactivity as a source of measurement error, this presentation shows that some quite extreme reactive changes may be legitimate, in the sense that the measurement results before and after the shift are both accurate to the measurand. While the presentation starts from recent considerations in the psychometric literature on response shift, it shows that these considerations cannot be extended easily to social scientific phenomena. To fill this gap in the literature, the presentation presents a tailored inventory of the different types of reactivity in social scientific measurement, as well as a conceptual framework for distinguishing which type of reactivity is legitimate, based on specific properties we believe the measurand to have.