*Call for abstracts*
The conference themeAgent-Based Models in Philosophy: Prospects and Limitations
March 20-22, 2019
Institute for Philosophy II, Ruhr-University Bochum
http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/defeasible-reasoning/ABM-Phil-2019.html
Over the last decade agent-based models (ABMs) have become an increasingly popular method across philosophical disciplines: from ethics and political philosophy to philosophy of science and social epistemology. They have been used to investigate the evolution of social norms, the efficiency of scientific inquiry, opinion dynamics, networks of epistemic trust, argumentation strategies, etc. At the same time, a precise, widely agreed-upon methodology of agent-based modeling in philosophy is lacking. In fact, how ABMs should be constructed and used is controversially discussed in philosophy and beyond. While some argue that ABMs require empirical calibration, others emphasize the virtue of simplicity typical for abstract, highly idealized models. These issues have been closely related to a variety of epistemic functions ABMs are designed to perform: from providing normative generalizations to offering only ‘how-possibly’ explanations.
This conference provides a forum for discussing the proper role and the limits of ABMs proposed in the philosophical literature, novel application contexts of ABMs, as well as their relation to other philosophical methods (e.g., case studies, formal models of scientific inference, conceptual analysis). It aims to bring together experts with practical modeling expertise from social sciences and philosophy and scholars who engage in methodological reflections of this method.
Keynote speakers
Corinna Elsenbroich (University of Surrey)
Cailin O’Connor (University of California, Irvine)
Samuli Reijula (University of Tampere)
Daniel Singer (University of Pennsylvania)
Kevin Zollman (Carnegie Mellon University)
Call for submissions
We invite submissions in the form of a short abstracts (= 150 words) and an extended abstract (= 1.000 words) to be sent via EasyChair by November 15: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=abmphil2019
Important dates
Deadline for submissions: November 15, 2018
Notifications: December 1, 2018
Conference: March 20-22, 2019 (starting on March 20 in the afternoon)
Program Committee
Eckhart Arnold (Bavarian Academy of Sciences)
AnneMarie Borg (Ruhr-University Bochum)
Justin Bruner (University of Groningen)
Patrick Grim (Stony Brook, University of Michigan)
Johannes Marx (University of Bamberg)
Conor Mayo-Wilson (University of Washington)
Aydin Mohseni (UC Irvine)
Ryan Muldoon (University of Pennsylvania)
Rush Stewart (LMU Munich)
Johanna Thoma (London School of Economics)
Organizers
Gregor Betz (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Dunja Šešelja (LMU Munich)
Christian Straßer (Ruhr-University Bochum)
http://homepages.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/defeasible-reasoning/index.html