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SUMMARY:A bold hypothesis about pursuit - Adrian Currie (Centre for the St
 udy of Existential Risk)
DTSTART:20171116T153000Z
DTEND:20171116T170000Z
UID:TALK85021@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Agnes Bolinska
DESCRIPTION:Many decisions in science are not about how well-confirmed or 
 otherwise some hypothesis is\, but about which hypotheses or investigation
 s should be chased up. This is the context of pursuit. I'm developing an a
 ccount of pursuit which is built around a bold hypothesis: that questions 
 of pursuit best turn on the biproducts rather than the products of scienti
 fic investigations. I'll start by motivating my analysis via a discussion 
 of the pursuitworthiness of morphological phylogenetics in paleontology. I
 'll make a pessimistic bet that the central product of such investigations
  – knowledge of the ancestral relationships between extinct taxa – are
  unlikely to be forthcoming. But I'll then argue that a biproduct of such 
 investigations\, knowledge of the evolutionary and developmental nature of
  characters\, is forthcoming and underwrites the pursuitworthiness of the 
 practice. With this in place\, I'll then provide an account of a practice 
 or investigation's 'products' and 'biproducts' which turns on investigatio
 ns themselves (as opposed to merely scientists) having aims (I'll co-opt s
 ome recent work by Hasok Chang to do this). I'll close by considering some
  possible arguments in favour of the bold hypothesis\, and briefly conside
 ring two possible circumstances where the hypothesis might break down: inv
 estigations involving inductive risk\, and some highly controlled experime
 ntal contexts.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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