Image de couverture
Séminaire
Séminaire général
Nous aurons le plaisir d'accueillir Harry Long (University College London).
Titre de l'intervention : The Granularity Tradeoff
Résumé :
A common method in philosophy describes examples, cases, scenarios or vignettes and asks whether readers agree with certain judgements about them. Call this reasoning from examples. The philosophico-scientific species of that method takes scientific inference as its model, and a prominent variant of that species—the experimental variant—balances cases by stipulation, on the model of the controlled experiment. Writers including Kagan (1988) and Wilson (2016) have raised objections to the reasoning on various grounds. This paper situates those objections in a broader context. There is an overarching tradeoff concerning the granularity of the cases involved. Underspecified cases—the philosopher’s usual choice—invite among other things failures of internal and external validity, undetected non-monotonicity, and divergent completion by readers. But more specific cases invite disagreement, the exclusion of commonplace phenomena, misleading effect-estimates, and an analogue of the bias-variance tradeoff in statistical learning. The tradeoff is not peculiar to philosophy; it is the philosophical form of a problem facing any case-based method. It can be mitigated but not avoided. Newly aware of the modelling decisions at stake, we ought to continue to reason from examples in a cautionary spirit.
Organisation : Rachel Boddy, Bernardo Marques, Auguste Nahas