A project led by philosophers Mathias Frisch and Torsten Wilholt (Institut für Philosophie at Leibniz Universität Hannover) on science and trust has received a 4,020,000 million euro grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG). The project, “Social Credibility and Trustworthiness of Expert Knowledge and Science-Based Information” (SOCRATES), “aims to investigate the philosophical preconditions that are relevant to trust in knowledge and scientific credibility in general [and the] processes through which scientific expertise can be undermined,” according to an announcement from the DFG. A press release from Leibniz Universität Hannover, where the project will be based, says: SOCRATES intends to tackle the challenge of understanding how science can continue to serve as a source of shared knowledge that not only enjoys trust but actually earns it. The group will investigate philosophical requirements relevant for trust in science.
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Philosopher Nathan Ballantyne (Arizona State University) and psychologist Norbert Schwarz (University of Southern California) have won a $3.4 million grant for their project, “Humility in Inquiry”. “The project focuses on humility in inquiry—the practices and processes that encourage humble, open-minded thinking,” says Professor Ballantyne. “The project’s aim is to support intensive collaborations between philosophers and scientists, and ultimately to establish a new paradigm of interdisciplinary research.” The grant supporting the research was awarded by the John Templeton Foundation. Professors Ballantyne and Schwarz will in turn be distributing subawards totaling $1.3 million. These will support research by multidisciplinary teams with members drawn from philosophy, psychological science, and related fields to address one or more of the themes of “Applying Epistemic Ideals, Science and Organizations, and Mindsets and Metacognitive Perspectives”.
A project is underway to study self-control in contexts of poverty in the Global South, directed by professor of philosophy Juan Pablo Bermúdez (Universidad Externado de Colombia & Imperial College London). The project is supported by a $300,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Professor Bermúdez provides the following description of it: Research suggests that poverty reduces our ability to pursue long-term goals, but it is yet unclear how this effect occurs. Does poverty make temptations greater, and self-control failures more frequent? Or do agents respond to poverty’s harsher conditions by abandoning their longterm aspirations, choosing shorter-term goals instead? To our knowledge there is no direct test of these two possible mechanistic explanations. Using a method that allows us to take ‘psychological snapshots’ of everyday experiences, we will map out the influence of context on people’s decision-making process, in order to better understand the mechanisms of self-control in contexts of poverty. Our study will include the most diverse population yet in self-control studies: people from high and low SES backgrounds in urban Colombia.
Last year, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, created a Center for Philosophy and Children (see this post). Now the Center has won a $250,000 grant to support its programs. The grant will support the Center for Philosophy and Children’s residential summer philosophy program for high school students. The program includes scholarships for all of the participants that covers tuition, room and board, and transportation. The Center also provides assistance to summer program participants during the school year to help them with the college application process. Besides the summer program, the Center facilitates the Philosophy in Public Schools program, which sends undergraduates, graduate students, and professors into public schools in Western Massachusetts to explore philosophical concepts with children. It also has plans to train school teachers to bring philosophy programs into the classroom. The grant is from the “Knowledge for Freedom” program of the Teagle Foundation. The Center for Philosophy and Children is co-directed by Julia Jorati and Ned Markosian. You can learn more about it here.
The Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy (BIAP) has been awarded the María de Maeztu Prize by the Spanish government’s Ministry of Science and Innovation. The prize includes official recognition for BIAP as a “unit of excellence” and a €2 million (approximately $2.12 million) grant to support its research over the next five years. BIAP was the only institute in the humanities in Spain to have been awarded a María de Maeztu prize this year. BIAP is comprised of researchers from the University of Barcelona, the University Pompeu Fabra, and the University of Girona, and the project will involve researchers at all three institutions. The research program the prize will support is on the nature and role of evidence. It aims to: 1. explore and systematize the different roles, and scope, assigned to evidence in a variety of well-defined contexts of enquiry, 2. develop a coherent overall conception of the nature of evidence, and of evidential support, across the aforementioned contexts of enquiry, synthesizing the results obtained in pursuit of the first principal research objective, and 3.
Florian J. Boge, currently an interim professor for philosophy of science at Wuppertal University and a postdoc in the interdisciplinary research unit The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider, has recently obtained a €1.35 million (≈ $1.44 million) grant by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for research on the impact of artificial intelligence on scientific understanding. The project, “Scientific Understanding and Deep Neural Networks,” according to Dr. Boge, “keys in on the impressive recent successes of Deep Neural Networks within scientific applications and inquires into whether, or in what sense and to what extent, this means an advancement of prediction, classification, and pattern-recognition over scientific understanding.