(Thanks to Bill D’Allessandro for the excellent photos from the event!)
SURe Program 2022
4th Scientific Understanding and Representation (SURe) Workshop April 21-23, 2022
Fordham University, New York, NY
Co-hosts of 2022 meeting:
Stephen Grimm
Peter Tan
Thursday, 21 April
1:00-2:30pm
(19:00-20:30 CEST)
Book symposium: Michela Massimi (Edinburgh), Perspectival Realism
Symposiasts: Catherine Elgin (Harvard), Mauricio Suárez (Madrid)
3:00-3:50pm
(21:00-21:50 CEST)
In person:
Claire Murphy (Notre Dame) –
“Between Idol Worship and Iconoclasm: The Role of Mediation in Scientific Understanding”
Zoom:
Letitia Meynell (Dalhousie) –
“Defining Scientific Understanding as ‘Getting the Picture’”
4:00-4:50pm
(22:00-22:50 CEST)
In person:
Myron A Penner (Trinity Western / UBC) and Amanda Nichols (Oklahoma Christian University) – “Technologies, Representation, and Understanding”
Zoom:
Felipe Morales Carbonell (KU Leuven / independent) – “The Content of Understanding as Compressed Graphs”
Friday, 22 April
9:30-10:50am (15:30-16:50 CEST)
Keynote address: Michael Strevens (NYU)
11-11:50am
(17:00-17:50 CEST)
In person:
Oscar Westerblad (Cambridge) –
“The Epistemic Value of Practical Understanding”
Zoom:
Alberto Termine (Milan) and Alessandro Facchini (Dalle Molle Institute for AI Research) – “Can Explainable AI safeguard scientific understanding? Towards an XAI-related hybrid approach to scientific research”
12-12:50pm
(18:00-18:50 CEST
In person:
Michael Tamir (UC Berkeley) and Elay Shech (Auburn) – “Understanding from Deep Learning Models in Context”
Zoom:
Noelia Iranzo Ribera (Birmingham) –
“How idealising counterfactuals explain: an interventionist tale”
1-2:30pm
Lunch break
2:30-3:20pm
(20:30-21:20 CEST)
In person:
Dana Matthiessen (Pitt) –
“Technical Understanding and Representational Content: How Experimentation Informs the
Interpretation of Models”
Zoom:
Javier Anta (Barcelona) –
“Mathematical understanding in statistical mechanics”
3:30-4:20pm (2130-2220 CEST)
In person:
Nina de Boer (Radboud University) –
“Making sense of the intelligibility of network models of psychopathology”
Zoom:
Conor Mayo-Wilson (Washington) –
“Rational Choice and the Value of Understanding”
4:30-5:20pm (2230-2320 CEST)
In person:
Aja Watkins (Boston University) –
“Scale Models in Climate Science: Using Temporal Scaling to Identify a Paleoclimate Analogue”
Conference dinner at 7pm – location TBD
Saturday, 23 April
10am-12pm
(16:00-18:00 CEST)
Topical session: Transdisciplinary Modeling and Model Transfer
Speakers:
Tarja Knuuttila (Vienna) and Andrea Loettgers (Vienna) - "Transdisciplinary Model Templates: Application and Entanglement"
Peter Tan (Fordham) - "Model Templates and Practical Understanding"
Jennifer Jhun (Duke) - "Analogical Reasoning in Econophysics"
12:10-1pm
(18:10-19:00 CEST)
In person:
Phillip Kieval (Cambridge) –
“Unsupervised Discoveries, Understanding, and
Semantic Opacity”
Zoom:
Philippe Verreault-Julien (Eindhoven) –
“How-possibly explanations and the accurate representation of dispositions
1-2:30pm
Lunch break
2:30-3:20pm
(20:30-21:20 CEST)
In person:
Predrag Šustar (University of Rijeka) and Martina Blečić
(University of Rijeka) - “Explanation and understanding in biology: the case of scientific metaphors”
Zoom:
Leonardo Flamini (Northwestern Italian Philosophy Consortium) –
“What is the point of models, diagrams, and idealisations for scientific understanding? A zetetic approach”
3:30-4:20pm
(21:30-22:20 CEST)
In person:
Andres Paez (Universidad de los Andes) – “Idealization and Non-Factive Understanding in Machine
Learning”
Zoom:
Josh Hunt (Michigan) – “A Unified Account of Comparative Understanding”
4:30-5:20pm
(22:30-23:20 CEST)
In person:
Johanna Sarisoy (Edinburgh) –
“The Possibility and Limitations of Robustness Analysis in Psychopathology”
In person:
William D'Alessandro (LMU Munich) –
“Unrealistic models in mathematics”
Conference dinner at 7pm – location TBD