主 题：What's in a scientific perspective?
主讲人：Kino Zhao（赵雨婷）（Assistant professor at Simon Fraser University）
时 间：2023年12月22日（周五）下午15:30-17:00
地 点：蒙民伟人文楼B206（科学史系系厅）
Abstract: In the philosophy of science, a tension exists between the observation that different fields of science do not appear to paint the same picture of the world (pluralism) and the belief that the goal of science is to accurately describe that world (realism). Perspectivism is a cluster of recent developments that aims to reconcile these two observations. Existing discussions on perspectivism, with core examples drawn from climate science or physics, typically understand a scientific perspective to be a model with certain modeling limitations. To overcome these limitations, then, scientists must adopt a plurality of models. This framing leads to the worry that these limitations are either too severe to support scientific realism or not severe enough to justify pluralism.
In this talk, I develop a novel account of scientific perspectives that understand them not as unfortunate practical limitations but as epistemically constitutive of knowledge. Drawing on recent work (by myself and others) on the role scientific investigation plays in the creation of phenomena, I argue that the nature of knowledge is to make saliency judgment about signal versus noise. A scientific perspective, then, is the (deliberate) ignoring of some information as noise while keeping others as signal, and so a plurality of perspectives may be applicable to the same collection of information. This talk is part of a larger collaborative project that aims to develop a unified framework of pluralism across the sciences.
Speaker bio: Dr. Kino Zhao （赵雨婷）is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. She received her PhD from the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in the philosophy of statistics and the philosophy of social sciences. Her research projects aim to pursue one of two goals: 1) using philosophical insights to help methodological issues in the statistical social sciences move forward; 2) asking whether the social sciences are equipped to supply factual claims often invoked by philosophical theses. Her work also connects with issues in the philosophy of machine learning, logic, and epistemology.
