Philosophy

Experimental psychology is said to be having a reproducibility crisis, marked by a low rate of successful replication. Researchers attempting to respond to the problem lack a framework for consistently interpreting the results of statistical tests, as well as standards for judging the outcomes of replication studies. In this paper I introduce an error-statistical framework for addressing these issues. I demonstrate how the severity requirement (and the associated severity construal of test results) can be used to avoid fallacious inferences that are complicit in the perpetuation of unreliable results. Researchers, I argue, must probe for error beyond the statistical level if they want to support substantive hypotheses. I then suggest how severity reasoning can be used to address standing questions about the interpretation of replication results.

Diogenes of Sinope has an unusual philosophical legacy, arguably better remembered for his personality than his philosophical views. However, his philosophy appears to share interesting features with those of the classical pragmatists. In this paper, I appeal to the work of C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey to identify key characteristics of pragmatist philosophy. I then draw on the available historical evidence to argue that Diogenes may be reasonably identified as a proto-pragmatist.

Peter Singer has argued that individuals are obligated to give resources to alleviate poverty to the extent that for them to give any more would require sacrificing something that approached the moral importance of whatever bad thing they would prevent by donating. In support of this highly demanding principle, he purports to give an argument that will hold even without being committed to utilitarianism. Singer's claims about our obligation to alleviate poverty has been challenged by the fair-share theorists, who argue that one is merely obligated to act in the service of preventing bad things to the extent that they perform some "fair share" of the work. Although Singer has attempted to respond to their positions, he has not been able to defuse their objections. I will argue that in order for him to do this, he will need to take an explicit utilitarian position; while this is not fatal to his argument, it does limit its attractiveness.

Mirror-box therapy appears to be effective for alleviating discomfort associated with a variety of neurological pain conditions including phantom limb syndrome and complex regional pain syndrome. It has also shown tentative success for assisting with physical rehabilitation following certain injuries. In this paper, the author proposes use of a derivative therapeutic technique to help alleviate distress associated with Body Identity Integrity Disorder (B.I.I.D.). Other potential applications for this modified version of mirror box therapy are also discussed.

These are the slides from a lecture given on October 9, 2017 at the Philosophy Department of Fudan University (Shanghai, China). The presentation is targeted at an audience which is familiar with first order classical logic but less so with intuitionistic logic and type theory.

These are the slides from a lecture given on October 10, 2017 at the Philosophy Department of Fudan University (Shanghai, China). This lecture is a continuation of 'Logic and type theory' (October 9, 2017) and focuses on the philosophical, mathematical and computational aspects of constructive type theory, including a (very) brief introduction to homotopy type theory and some of its philosophical consequences.

The replicator dynamics and Moran process are the main deterministic and stochastic models of evolutionary game theory. These models are connected by a mean-field relationship—the former describes the expected behavior of the latter. However, there are conditions under which their predictions diverge. I demonstrate that the divergence between their predictions is a function of standard techniques used in their analysis, and of differences in the idealizations involved in each. My analysis reveals problems for stochastic stability analysis in a broad class of games. I also demonstrate a novel domain of agreement between the dynamics, and draw a broader methodological moral for evolutionary modeling.

Within the framework of evolutionary game theory, equilibrium concepts adapted from rational choice game theory are employed to identify the probable outcomes of evolutionary processes. Over the past several decades results have emerged in the literature demonstrating limitations to each of the proposed equilibrium concepts. These results rely on an undefined notion of evolutionary significance. We explicitly define evolutionary significance for evolutionary games. This definition enables an analysis of the success of equilibrium concepts across different models of evolution. We demonstrate that even under favorable assumptions as to the underlying dynamics and stability concept—the replicator dynamics and asymptotic stability—each equilibrium concept makes errors of either omission or comission; often both.

In practical decision-making, it seems clear that if we hope to make an optimal or at least defensible decision, we must weigh our alternatives against each other and come to a principled judgment between them. In the formal literature of classical decision theory, it is taken as an indispensable axiom that cardinal rankings of alternatives be defined for all possible alternatives over which we might have to decide. Whether there are any items " beyond compare " is thus a crucial question for decision theorists to consider when constructing a formal framework. At the very least, it seems problematic to presuppose that no such incommensurability is possible on the grounds that it would make formalizing axioms for decision-making more difficult, or even intractable. With this in mind, I plan to argue in this paper that a formal notion of comparability can be introduced to the classical understanding of preference relations such that the question of comparability between alternatives can be taken non-trivially. Building on the work of Richard Bradley and Ruth Chang, I argue that the comparability relation should be understood to be transitive but not complete. I contend that this understanding of comparability within decision theory can explain both why we believe that some alternatives may be incommensurable, yet we are still able to make justified decisions despite incomplete preference relations. In Section I, I lay the groundwork for understanding the conceptual relationship between comparability and commensurability with respect to decision-making. In Section II, I will argue that Bradley's definition of the preference relation with comparability leads to absurdity and contradiction due to a small oversight, which I propose to remedy. Then,