Description (podcaster-provided):
Mathematical Philosophy - the application of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy - is about to experience a tremendous boom in various areas of philosophy. At the new Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, which is funded mostly by the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, philosophical research will be carried out mathematically, that is, by means of methods that are very close to those used by the scientists.
The purpose of doing philosophy in this way is not to reduce philosophy to mathematics or to natural science in any sense; rather mathematics is applied in order to derive philosophical conclusions from philosophical assumptions, just as in physics mathematical methods are used to derive physical predictions from physical laws.
Nor is the idea of mathematical philosophy to dismiss any of the ancient questions of philosophy as irrelevant or senseless: although modern mathematical philosophy owes a lot to the heritage of the Vienna and Berlin Circles of Logical Empiricism, unlike the Logical Empiricists most mathematical philosophers today are driven by the same traditional questions about truth, knowledge, rationality, the nature of objects, morality, and the like, which were driving the classical philosophers, and no area of traditional philosophy is taken to be intrinsically misguided or confused anymore. It is just that some of the traditional questions of philosophy can be made much clearer and much more precise in logical-mathematical terms, for some of these questions answers can be given by means of mathematical proofs or models, and on this basis new and more concrete philosophical questions emerge. This may then lead to philosophical progress, and ultimately that is the goal of the Center.
Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ Mathematical philosophy of science • logical empiricism • inductive logic, Bayesian inference • scientific explanation, causation • modeling, idealization, measurement • reduction, emergence, micro–macro links • physics foundations • climate/economic/social-science methods • information, decision theory
This podcast presents research talks in philosophy of science and mathematical philosophy, emphasizing how logical, mathematical, and formal modeling tools can clarify traditional philosophical questions about knowledge, explanation, confirmation, truth, and rationality. Across the episodes, speakers analyze how scientists use models—computational, statistical, mechanistic, and dynamical—to learn about the world, and what kinds of inferences those models support. A recurring focus is scientific explanation: causal explanation and difference-making, the possibility of mathematical explanations of physical facts, and pluralism about explanatory styles in areas such as particle physics.
Many discussions center on relationships between levels of description, including reduction, emergence, and cross-level linkages. Examples span physics (statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, renormalization methods, chaos and limits of prediction, relativity’s postulates, time-asymmetry, quantum gravity programs, holography, and the status of string theory), biology and neuroscience (mechanisms, structure, information, and measurement), and the social sciences and economics (microfoundations, intentionality, agent-based simulations, methodological triangulation, and the division of cognitive labor in scientific communities).
The show also engages with foundations in logic, probability, and decision theory, including inductive logic for expressive languages, Bayesian and non-Bayesian rationality, belief-updating dynamics, and formal approaches to risky policy evaluation. Several episodes address conceptual and semantic issues in scientific theorizing, such as theoretical terms, structural realism, idealization, empirical significance, and how scientific language connects to measurement practices and the “lifeworld.” Overall, the content is oriented toward rigorous, often formal, analysis of how science represents, explains, and justifies claims about complex phenomena.
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Episodes:
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The Completion of Logical Empiricism: Hempel's Pragmatic Turn
2014-Oct-23
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Computational Model as Generic Mechanisms
2014-May-22
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Inductive logic for rich languages
2013-Dec-27
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The Physics of Ontological Emergence
2013-Nov-17
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Chaos beyond the Butterfly Effect: The Poison Pill of Structural Model Error
2014-Jan-29
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Reduction in Economics: Causality and Intentionality in the Microfoundations of Macroeconomics
2013-Nov-18
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Emergence and Explanation
2013-Nov-17
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String Theory and the Scientific Method
2014-Jan-29
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Explaining Macroscopic Systems from Microscopic Principles
2015-Jun-15
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On the Role of the Light Postulate in Relativity
2015-Jun-15
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A Model-Based Epistemology of Measurement
2013-Jul-03
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Persistence of the lifeworld? On the relation of lifeworld and science
2014-May-30
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Evaluating Risky Prospects: The Distribution View
2013-Apr-12
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Rational Routines
2014-Jun-30
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Theory convergence in approaches to quantum gravity?
2014-Feb-20
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On Mathematical Explanation of Physical Facts
2014-Feb-20
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Cross-Level Linkages in Neurobiology
2013-Nov-17
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On the Conception of Fundamentality of Time-Asymmetries in Physics
2013-Jan-31
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From Shannon's Axiomatic Approach to a New Sense of Biological Information
2013-Apr-28
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The Varieties of Explanations in the Higgs Sector
2014-Dec-02
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The Mathematical Route to Causal Understanding
2015-May-04
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Separating Truth from Its Idealization
2013-Apr-28
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Theoretical Terms, Ramsey Sentences and Structural Realism
2013-Apr-09
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Avoiding Reification
2013-Apr-09
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Simplicity and Measurability in Science
2013-Jan-17
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Reduction and Emergence in Physics
2014-Jan-29
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The Criteria for the Empirical Significance of Terms
2013-Apr-09
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Descriptivism about Theoretical Concepts Implies Ramsification or (Poincarean) Conventionalism
2013-Apr-03
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Making sense of multiple climate models' projections
2013-Apr-12
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How Almost Everything in Space-time Theory Is Illuminated by Simple Particle Physics: The Neglected Case of Massive Scalar Gravity
2013-Feb-13
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Evolving Perceptual Categories
2013-Jul-23
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Vindicating Methodological Triangulation
2015-Jan-12
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Structures, Mechanisms and Dynamics in Theoretical Neuroscience
2015-May-11
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Reason-based rationalization
2013-Oct-09
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The Causual Nature of Modeling in Data-Intensive Science
2015-Jun-15
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Context, Conversation, and Fragmentation
2015-Jun-29
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The epistemic division of labour revisited
2014-Feb-20
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Rationality and the Bayesian Paradigm
2013-Apr-12
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To map or not to map: or, how to represent auditory space
2013-Nov-05
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Causal-descriptivism Revisited
2013-Apr-09
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Theoretical Terms and Induction
2013-Apr-09
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Theoretical Terms, Ideal Objects and Zalta's Abstract Objects Theory
2013-Apr-09
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The epsilon-reconstruction of theories and scientific structuralism
2013-Apr-09
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Holography and the Emergence of Gravity
2013-Nov-17
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"Reversed Reduction" in Gibbsian Statistical Mechanics
2013-Nov-17
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Heterogeneity and Emergence in the Social Sciences
2013-Nov-17
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On Bell's local causality in local classical and quantum theory
2014-Apr-14
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Agent-based simulations in empirical sociological research
2014-Jun-05
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On the Justification of Deduction and Induction
2014-May-08
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Convergence of Iterated Belief Updates
2015-Jun-15
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Philosophy of Statistical Mechanics from an Emergentist Viewpoint
2015-May-06
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Predicting Outcomes in Five Person Spatial Games: An Aspiration Model Approach
2015-May-18
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Navigating the Twilight of Uncertainty: Decisions from Experience
2015-Jun-29
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Typicality in Statistical Physics and Dynamical Systems Theory
2013-Apr-09
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Leibniz Equivalence
2013-Apr-09
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Unifying Causal and Non-Causal Knowledge
2014-Sep-11
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Modeling Cognitive Representations with Evolutionary Game Theory
2015-May-11
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Science, Metaphysics, and Understanding
2014-Dec-22
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Mathematical Explanations of Non-Mathematical Facts?
2015-Jan-12
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Occam's Razor in Algorithmic Information Theory
2015-Feb-12
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On Einstein's Reality Criterion
2015-Jun-01
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Cooperation and (structural) Rationality
2013-Apr-12
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Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge. A Model of Knowledge Integration and its Limitations.
2015-Jun-29
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From Dressed Electrons to Quasiparticles: The Emergence of Emergent Entities in Quantum Field Theory
2013-Nov-17
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Inter-theoretic relations: The Brønsted Lowry theory of acids and microphysics
2013-Nov-17
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How Can One and the Same Thing be Subject to Different Theories? On the Proper Logic for Non-Reductive Monism
2013-Nov-17
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An Explication of Emergence
2013-Nov-17
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Novelty and autonomy as bases for, or alternatives to, a conception of emergence in physics
2013-Nov-17
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Agent-based models as mixed-level: lessons from E.coli
2013-Nov-17
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Technical Aspects of Reduction and Multiple Realizability
2013-Nov-17
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Completeness, Categoricity, and Dismissal
2013-Jul-23
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The Topology of Intertheoretic Reduction
2013-Nov-17
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Scarecrow’s Brain and Homunculi: Neurobiological Reductionism as Ensoulment-Objectification Process Seen Through Anthropological Lenses
2013-Nov-17
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Theory Reduction in Physics: A Model-Based, Dynamical Systems Approach
2013-Nov-17
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Against Grue Mysteries
2015-Jun-01
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Definition, elimination and introduction of theoretical terms
2013-Apr-09
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Implicitly defining mathematical terms
2013-Apr-09
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Causality and Theoretical Terms in Physics
2013-Apr-09
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Idealization, Prediction, Difference-Making
2013-Apr-12
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An Analogical Inductive Logic for Partially Exchangeable Families of Attributes
2014-May-23
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Fifteen Dimensions of Evaluating Theories of Causation. A Case Study of the Structural Model and the Ranking Theoretic Approach to Causation
2015-Jul-08
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Propensities, Chance Distributions, and Experimental Statistics
2014-Nov-13
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Use-novelty and double-counting: new insights from model selection theory
2014-Dec-02
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Model Tuning and Predictivism
2014-Jun-27
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On the Distinction between Internal and External Symmetries
2014-Aug-06
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On de Finetti's Instrumentalist Philosophy of Probability
2014-Dec-02
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