 So, before the first start, just a few welcoming words. So I welcome you. My name is Alexandre Gaye to the fourth Olofos workshop. Olofos is what we call in Belgium a group of contact, which is an instrument, a financing instrument, to favor collaboration among Belgian people, but not foreigners. You should have seen me on the phone with the FNRS in Brussels to say, can I pay a train ticket from people, a person from Gaët? No. Can I pay a train ticket from people from Paris? Yes. And on the phone because it should not be written anywhere. Okay, so the Olofos group of contact is mostly, we mostly promote research on ontology and with the sensibility to linguistic also, language. So this year the team is from science to metaphysics. And really important, there's a question mark. So we welcome people that disagree with the mainstream, but we also welcome people in the mainstream. We're Belgian. Belgian people know how to accommodate divergence. So, and I have to say that I'm very happy of the program because we received an abnormal high number of submissions for this workshop. And it was a very difficult decision to choose to cut very good potential abstract because we wanted at least that people had at least 30 minutes to present their basic ideas, 20 minutes is often too short. Usually we hope to have more, but there was too many good abstract. By default, if you don't say you disagree, your talk will be streamed on YouTube at the same time. Of course if you disagree, please tell us. Tell me especially. Before. Also, you should all feel during the day this sheet with the name institution, if you have an institution, country, blah, blah, blah, for the Belgium financing agency that wants to know in details who is coming to the talk in case a member of parliament complain about why should finance philosophy of science. And you can tell there's people coming from blah, blah, blah. Next thing you have seen tomorrow, and I say that tomorrow afternoon is student presentation. So usually in the other of us we try to include student, master student. Most of them it will be the first research presentation in their life. And I'm telling you right now, I will not tolerate bullying people that are nasty. I've been trained in the United States. People that are nasty, these people are, we should be welcoming to new people in our field as much as possible. Of course you can disagree with them and explain why you disagree. I hope many of you will still be available tomorrow afternoon. I don't know about train tickets and this. And for those interested, we will have sandwiches for the lunch in case some of you want to continue to discuss. Of course you're free also to use the different restaurants of Louvain and Neuve if you wish. And I did not schedule a formal banquet or something like that, but there could be depending of affinity during the day, organization that we can, we finish early enough to organize something in the afternoon. If you have any questions, any difficulties, anything, please ask me whatever you want. We try this configuration this morning. If you, if you people guys are too far from the screen during the break we can change the configuration of the group. So I'll leave the rest in the hand of Shahbaz who will reside for a session. Yeah, so I'm chairing. This is easy though. Chairing one talk by someone like Anjan is not exactly a hard piece of work. So yes, it is my distinct honor and privilege to welcome our first of two keynote speakers. So we'll have another tomorrow morning as well online. Yes, unfortunately, unfortunately remotely, we're voting in. But our first keynote speaker is Anjan Chakravarti is coming to us from University of Miami. Well, it would take me too long to enumerate excellent publications and professional qualifications. So what I'll instead say briefly is, I feel like probably if you're in this room, thinking about a conference with the conference title from Science to Metaphysics, question mark, I don't actually need to introduce Anjan. You know who this is. His word now for a good 15 years has been at the forefront of exactly this kind of thing. I have learned much from him personally over the years. And so it's a distinct pleasure to see what he's up to these days. So without further ado, please take it away. Thanks a lot, Charles. Thanks everyone for coming. It's been a long time since I've been in Levenlon Earth. In fact, I looked it up. It was 12 years ago. I was here for something very unusual, I think, in our field. I was here for a debate with Stathis Silas on laws of nature. Stathis was defending a humane account of laws. I was defending a non-humane account of laws. We gave papers. It was organized by Michel Gaines. It was part of a larger series of debates. I think Bernard Phelps was involved and various other people. It was really a lot of fun. It was fantastic. But that was 12 years ago. So as time goes by, these things become increasingly precious memories. So I wanted to express my thanks to Michel. But also, of course, to Alexander and the current team here at UCL for this really nice invitation. I'm delighted to be back and also with a number of old friends. So I don't know whether everybody back there can see. I think I can see just about everyone. If you can't hear me at any point, just wave. Everybody can see the screen, I hope. Okay, good. So, as some of you know, I've been interested in debates about scientific realism and anti-realism for quite a long time now. Thanks, Charles, for reminding me of my long time. But in my last book, which was called Scientific Ontology, I was keen to focus on what I take to be some deeper philosophical, actually metaphilosophical issues that underpin debates about realism. And as it happens, these issues are all about the theme for this conference, right, from science to metaphysics. Because they concern the question of how and to what extent empirical science can serve as a basis for theorizing about the ontology of the world. So what I'd like to do today is to briefly introduce you to some of those ideas. And then, since the book has been out for a little while now, I want to consider some challenges that have emerged since in response. And I do all of this with apologies to Sam to her, not all, but part of this, an overlapping part of this at a conference in Berlin not so long ago. All right, so here's what's on the menu for today. First, I want to start by talking just a little bit about how I see the evolution of debates about scientific realism and anti-realism over the last few decades. I think the debate has shifted in some interesting ways that are actually relevant and probably important for us to consider if we're thinking about questions of how to move from science to metaphysics. After that, I want to give you just a little snapshot, a praisy of some of the things that I've said about what I will more generically call scientific ontology. And spell out in not a lot of detail, but just to give you the gist of it, how I think about this in terms of the role played by underlying epistemic stances in determining how we think about scientific ontology. And then for the rest of the talk, I want to talk about a couple of objections that have emerged since. One of them has to do with what is perhaps the most controversial part of the picture that I suggest, which ultimately claims that there are in fact different ways we might think about scientific ontology, different and conflicting ways we might think about scientific ontology, and that more than one of these possibilities is likely rational. In other words, there are likely rationally defensible takes on scientific ontology that we might take and we need not agree with one another necessarily about how far we can go into metaphysics from science. And there are some people who I think understandably worry about this. Some people think, no, there really should be some sort of rational obligation or rational requirement to believe what we believe about scientific ontology. And so I want to consider a particular objection to that effect in section three. And then finally in section four, I want to talk about something that's related and that is the idea that once we have a permissive enough conception of rationality that allows for the idea that we might think differently about how far we can go into metaphysics from science and that that's okay from a rational point of view, that this actually opens the door to all kinds of worrying things. It opens the door to pseudoscience, it opens the door to pretend science to various forces of science denialism, and that's obviously a bad thing. And so I'll end by talking a little bit about that concern about the project as well. All right, so that's the menu. Let's get stuck in. So to begin, what's at issue between realists and anti-realists? Well, as you know, what's at issue is nothing less than the most important, the most central question in our field, namely, how should we interpret our best science? What details and beliefs are warranted by it? What knowledge does it yield? At a certain level of abstraction, everybody knows that realism is the idea that our best theories and models are epistemically impressive, and increasingly so over time, they yield truths or something close by about both observable and unobservable aspects of the world. Their central terms refer successfully to things in the world and so on. Anti-realism is any sort of denial of realism thus broadly construed. In the recent history of philosophy of science, debates about realism and anti-realism were typically carried out almost exclusively at that level of abstraction. So many of you will be familiar with the early heyday of these discussions in the 1970s and the 1980s. Since then, though, I think that discussions have become more nuanced and more refined in ways that are important for us to take into account. So let me just skate over this briefly because I think it provides a motivation for what I want to say about how we go from empirical science to ontology or to metaphysics more broadly. Oh, by the way, I should just mention that a moment ago I described what's at stake in terms of both warranted belief and also knowledge. I did that just to be inclusive because different people prefer to talk one way or the other but for the sake of simplicity, I'm just going to talk about beliefs for the rest of today. So if you prefer, you can translate that into talk about knowledge in your heads if you like. I'm happy either way. So here are just a couple of examples of what I'm describing as more refined discussions in the recent evolution of debates about realism. So first, in the relatively recent past, there's been a much greater focus on philosophy of science in practice. So thinking about, for example, specific techniques of abstraction, of idealization, of approximation, and it's not always clear whether or how particular aspects of theories and models can be regarded as true or approximately true. So the moral I take from this is that the relevant unit of analysis here is generally going to be much smaller than talk of models and theories Simplicitor would suggest. So I think that's one way in which discussions of realism have become more refined. People are paying more and closer attention to particular aspects of theories rather than treating theories as a whole as the correct unit of analysis for thinking about these issues. The second thing that I wanted to flag is the idea that there's been a diversification of more or less selective forms of realism. So for example, entity realism, that's focusing on a very particular aspect of theories, structural realism, that's suggesting that we should be realists about certain structural features of our best science. Semi-realism was the view that I argued for back in the day. That's a realism about well-detected properties in the first instance, and then we can build up our conceptions of objects and structures, entities and so on from there. All of these are selective in the sense that they don't take theories as the right unit of analysis, but they take some particular thing about theories as being what's most defensively endorseable in a realist way. A lot of this is in response to the pessimistic induction. That's the idea that the history of science has shown that what we believe today is unlikely, what we will believe 50 years from now or 100 years from now, and so we need to be more refined, so a lot of these more selective people think, about what it is in particular that we think will last past the test of time. Another motivation I think is just wanting to do justice to the idiosyncratic differences between different subject matters and sub-disciplines in the sciences. I don't think it makes sense to think that we should have one size fits all attitude towards how we should think about the ontology of our theories. You can't hear me at the back over this at any point. Just wait. You have to try to speak a bit louder. Okay. Is this part of the building's theory? Kind of. Oh, so sad. Do that again next time. So the moral of this greater selectivity, I take it, is that, again, the relevant unit of analysis is often described here in terms of increasingly metaphysical proposals for what we should be realists about exactly. So if we're going to be entity realists, what are entities exactly? And what sorts of descriptions do we think we need in order to successfully refer to that? Or if we're going to be a structural realist, as many of you will know, there are huge debates on what the metaphysics of structure is such that we can be realists about it. Or if you're a semi-realist, what are properties, what are their relations, and how should we think about their relation to things like laws of nature and so on. So with this greater selectivity comes, I think, a greater focus on certain metaphysical issues that are required to actually just articulate what it is that we're being realists about. And all of this motivates, I suggest, a different way of thinking, a more fine-grained way of thinking about what's going on in disputes between realists and anti-realists about science. So let me turn to that now. So as I just mentioned, the morals that I want to take seriously here are that the relevant units of analysis are more focused than theories and models of simplicity, and that in order to articulate realist commitments so that we know what we're talking about in these debates, we're going to have to do at least some metaphysics. So let me introduce the term scientific ontology just to label this finer-grained approach. Ontology, of course, is the branch of philosophy that's concerned with questions regarding what things and what types of things exist and what those things are like. In other words, what properties they have, how they relate to one another, if at all, what we usually characterize in terms of laws and principles. Scientific ontology, then, is simply the ontology of the world as revealed by our best science. And thinking about this in a more fine-grained way than traditional thinking about realism may allow, I think, manifest itself in at least a couple of different ways. So for one thing, it allows for discriminations between what we should believe and what we shouldn't that cut across what we previously characterized more coarsely as forms of realism or anti-realism. So just for example, consider some more traditional versus more contemporary forms of instrumentalism. So for those of you who are familiar with this work, I'm thinking of people like Kyle Stanford or Daryl Roboto. These more contemporary forms of instrumentalism, they're actually realist about some unobservables and they're not about others. So they characterize their instrumentalism in a way that actually cuts across the categories of realism and anti-realism as they were traditionally conceived. And that's true of realism as well. As realism has become more selective, it's become more skeptical about things that don't fall under the remit of what selective realists think we should be realists about. So that's one way in which it manifests. Another way, I think, is that it allows for more fine-grained discriminations within the traditional categories of realism. So I've just mentioned the idea that some realists are more fulsome in what they think we can endorse and others are more selective. It goes without saying, but I think I should just highlight this because it'll become important later. It goes without saying that these debates about scientific ontology are engaged by people who are all champions of science. I mean, none of them are science denialists, like vaccine skeptics or flat earthers. What they can test is how far we should go in interpreting our best science as giving something like true descriptions of the world. So what limits, for example, might there be on scientific or naturalized metaphysics or the metaphysics of science such that it's distinct from some other kinds of metaphysical projects? Let me flag two features of scientific ontology that I think are crucial to understanding how we might conceive of those limits and let's show how different agents come to hold different beliefs about the epistemic upshot of any given part of science. So the first has to do with what I call assessments of epistemic risk which concerns how confident we are in judging an ontological claim to be true or false. So if you think the claim that there is dark matter is especially epistemically risky, good luck. I'm very sensitive to this at the moment because we're doing some renovations in our house. So there are people bashing walls and drilling things all over the place and so I'm used to it, I might not even notice it. Alright, so if you think that the claim that there is dark matter is especially epistemically risky, that means you don't feel confident in assessing the truth value of that claim. Perhaps you'd feel more comfortable just suspending judgment and remaining agnostic instead. On the other hand, if you view the claim as not being especially epistemically risky that means you have confidence in your ability to judge based on the evidence that you have. So that's what I mean by epistemic risk. The second feature of scientific ontology that I want to flag concerns how in any given case, assessments of risk are made. So one crucial factor is what I'm going to call empirical vulnerability. That's just a measure of the susceptibility of a hypothesis or a claim or a theory to confirmation on the basis of our empirical evidence. Another desideratum or at least factor is explanatory power. Explanatory power is a measure of the quality of the explanation furnished by a hypothesis, a theory of other things that we may want to know or understand better. So quality here is assessed contextually, but it's typically informed by virtues that I think will sound familiar to all of you. Things like consistency, coherence with our background knowledge, maybe possible unification and so on. All of the sorts of things that we think make an explanation compelling. Here's the thing, empirical vulnerability and explanatory power both admit of degrees. And I think there's a serious question here, a question that looms large for any vaguely naturalistic deference to science as a source of warranted beliefs regarding how empirically vulnerable an ontological claim needs to be or how compelling an explanation needs to be in order to lower epistemic risk sufficiently to warrant belief. In fact, different perceptions of epistemic risk are precisely what's at stake in debates about scientific ontology. And this brings me to the idea of epistemic stances. So a stance is something that underwrites our judgment about how far we should go along the spectrum of epistemic risk in making ontological claims. So I mentioned my position before in the realism debate or realism about well-detected properties. But then of course we can always ask further questions, what are these properties? Are they categorical properties? Are they in some sense modal properties? Are they propensities in quantum mechanics? Or are they dispositions in chemistry? What are these properties? What are the natures of these properties? That's a further question one might ask. And then why not might ask a question beyond that, given if they are modal in some sense, what is their relationship to laws of nature? Do we even need laws of nature? Are laws of nature just ways of talking about the modal natures of properties? And then you can ask further questions. And of course I'm not going to iterate all of the questions that one might ask, but the idea is that the more and more you ask and the deeper and deeper the metaphysical account you give of the thing that you began with, the less scientifically well-detected properties, the further you're moving along what I'm calling a kind of spectrum of epistemic risk. You're going deeper and deeper into the metaphysical analysis of the thing you began with, which were scientifically well-detected properties. So an epistemic stance is something that underwrites our judgments about how far we should go along this spectrum of epistemic risk. It shapes our interpretations of the epistemic upshot of our best science. And I think perhaps the best way to introduce this idea is just to contrast stances with propositions or claims about matters of fact. So here's a claim. Levin-Leneuve has a larger population than Brussels. That's a claim. Alexander has two children. I mean, these are claims about putative matters of fact, whether they're true or false. A stance, on the other hand, isn't a claim about the world. It isn't propositional as such. Rather, it's an orientation. It's a cluster of values, attitudes, and commitments that incorporate strategies that are relevant to the production of factual beliefs, or at least putatively factual beliefs, such as those expressed in claims about ontology. So a stance isn't something that's believed as such. Rather, it's something that's adopted and exemplified in attempts to produce knowledge. In shaping the ways that we interpret the outputs of scientific work, stances inform assessments about whether a claim that something exists is supported by empirical investigation, or whether, say, the explanatory power associated with a hypothesis is something that supports the claim that something exists and so on. So the primary function of a stance is to determine where an epistemic agent draws lines between domains of theorizing, domains of inquiry, theorizing about laws of nature, theorizing about the metaphysics of structure, drawing lines between domains in which belief seems appropriate, and domains in which it seems as though, well, it's probably better just to suspend belief or remain agnostic there. So a stance isn't sufficiently compelling. Now, one of the key ingredients of an epistemic stance is a kind of set of guidelines, something like a collection of instructions or policies for how to behave epistemically. So just to give you the basic idea of what I have in mind, let me contrast the epistemic policies that seem to underwrite many of the debates that I mentioned earlier about realism. So I'm not going to do this justice, I'm just going to throw up some, what are really caricatures, I think. I mean, for actual people, policies like these will presumably be more nuanced and complex, qualified in various ways. But with that caveat, here are some of the core epistemic policies associated with one white call, the deflationary stance, which underwrites many pragmatist and neo-continent views of scientific knowledge. The empiricist stance, which underwrites many instrumentalist-type views. And the metaphysical stance, which underwrites many realist-type views. So I'm not going to go through this in any detail, but just to give you the idea. So here are a couple of policies that are often associated with what I'm calling a deflationary stance. One thing that deflationists are unimpressed by are traditional, realist understandings of scientific ontology. The idea that what we're doing when we give an ontology is describing things that exist in a mind-independent world about which we can successfully make claims. Deflationists are typically concerned about that kind of hubris, in their view. Afortiori, they would typically reject analyses of truth, truth about mind-independent facts, reference with respect to things in a mind-independent reality, in terms of which traditional ontology, which I mean realist ontology, are generally understood. The empiricist stance. The empiricist stance, as Van Frosten characterized it, as a perennial rebellion against the excesses of metaphysics. It rejects demands for explanation in terms of things underlying the observable. And so afortiori, it rejects attempts to answer these demands by theorizing about the unobservable. Of course, this has to be understood in a certain way. Of course, you can accept demands and theorize in a sense. What you shouldn't do is take that kind of exercise as something that yields truths about the world that you should believe. Maybe heuristically or otherwise interesting to do. The metaphysical stance is one that accepts demands for explanation in terms of underlying observable things and attempts to answer those demands by theorizing about the unobservable. So there's much more that can be said about all of this, of course, but with an eye on the clock, let me spend the rest of my time talking about a couple of what I think are quite interesting objections to this way of thinking about ontology. So in some recent work, Chris Pincock, who some of you will know, raises concerns about all of this for realism about various aspects of the metaphysics of science. So those of you who are familiar with Pincock's work will know that he's argued for a number of views concerning scientific entities, about a form of structuralism, about laws of nature, and many other things besides. His worry about the picture that I've just sketched concerns the idea that, as I argue in the book, and as I mentioned right off the top, different stances may be rational in the sense of meeting certain minimal conditions of consistency and coherence. I'll talk about that a little bit more later. If different stances can be rational, then there's a sense in which we have a kind of choice regarding what stands to a dot, which is really just to say that so far as epistemic rationality is concerned, there are different ways one might go. So the idea of choosing one among rational options is familiar, will be familiar to all of you. It's part of tradition of volentrism in epistemology, which suggests in at least some context what we believe is a function of our philosophical temperament or the will. As you know, William James, for instance, argued that there are different paths we might take between the risks of believing too much, thus courting false beliefs, and believing too little, and just missing out on truths, possible true beliefs. Pincox worries that if volentrism is correct, and as a consequence, the ontological commitments he derives from interpreting our best science aren't, in fact, rationally obligatory. That would actually undermine his beliefs. I think this is a very common and understandable reaction, but I also think that it's premised on a couple of misunderstandings. I'd explain why that's so. So, Pincox offers a couple of arguments. The first one targets volentrism directly. So here he goes for some big gums right away. He cites Bernard Williams with approval. So this is on the slide. If I could acquire a belief at will, it is unclear that I could seriously think of it as a belief, as something purporting to represent reality. Now, I think that there's something right about that. I mean, the idea that you might just believe it will in ways that conflict with, say, what's readily apparent to you, say, in perception, or in ways that are insulated from an active consideration of the relevant evidence. Say, maybe just by, you know, flipping a switch, as it were, internally, and thereby changing your doxastic attitude from belief or disbelief or agnosticism, agnosticism to some other attitude, just on that basis alone, that does seem problematic. I mean, to do that would be to sever links to evidence that are crucial, presumably, to any genuine attempt to represent reality. So I do think that there's something right about this. But what if we were to add evidence back into the equation? Say, scientific evidence of the sort that is taken seriously in all debates about scientific ontology. I mean, this is why I was at some pains at the beginning to say all of these people are champions of science. In that case, I think this point is more contentious. There's a substantive question here as to whether evidence all by itself yields uniquely rational doxastic attitudes towards scientific claims or hypotheses or theories. I mean, just think, for example, about debates about the underdetermination of theory by data. Those are in part debates about how far the evidence can carry us in favor of one hypothesis or another. And there are plenty of other debates of that sort. All of that said, though, right, in favor of there being a kernel of something right here, I do think that something has gone wrong. More specifically, I think that there's a problematic conflation here between doxastic volunteerism, that is a direct sort of choice regarding what to believe, and Stan's volunteerism, which is much more indirectly connected to belief, and as a result, I think it involves a much less contentious sense of choice. So, PIMCOG's examples... Sorry, guys. You manage them? No, you're good. So, PIMCOG's examples are all examples of, well, you might believe P, or you might believe not P. A volunteerist says, well, you can believe either one. It's all rational, as though you might simply choose one or the other. And in analytic epistemology, a lot of the literature on this concerns beliefs of that type. That's doxastic volunteerism. But no, if two people are arguing about P and not P, if they think the evidence is sufficient for us to determine, say, that there are standard model Higgs bosons, or that there aren't standard model Higgs bosons, and they're arguing about it, then those people share a stance. Remember, the primary function of a stance is to determine domains of inquiry in which an agent thinks the evidence licenses belief. So people arguing for P versus not P clearly think the evidence licenses belief. What a person holding a different stance, say, in this case, might say, is not P or not P, but they might say, well, I'm agnostic. I don't think the evidence supports belief here at all. So here, there's no question of severing connections to evidence and considerations of evidence. A stance is an orientation involving attitudes and policies that are relevant to assessing evidence. Stances are thus at a kind of remove from or upstream from the doxastic attitudes that we end up forming regarding aspects of theories and models. And choice here, the notion of choice inherent in volunteerism here, simply means that there are rationally permissible options among stances, not that you can flip a switch and believe what you like. So I think that we can set PINCOCK's first objection to one side here. What about his second objection? Well, I think the second one can, in fact, be read in such a way as to target stance volunteerism. So in other words, it presents a challenge that's unaffected by what I've just said in response to his first concern. The basic idea is that if a realist were to view stances that conflict with her own as rationally permissible, that would render her own incoherent and thus, indefensible. So as PINCOCK puts it, this is on the slide, volunteerism about stances requires one to admit that there is no reason in favor of one's own stance. By no reason, I mean that there is no rational obligation to adopt that stance. And then from this, he argues that realists such as himself must then take their own stance to be rationally obligatory. And he goes on to argue that given some natural assumptions about connections between explanation and inference that some sort of realism is, in fact, required. So let me generalize this worry in a way that I think PINCOCK would accept, actually, just by parody of reasoning. If he's right about the dire consequences of volunteerism, then no one would have a reason to adopt their own or any other rational stance. I mean, the concern presumably applies across the board because there would be no obligation to go one way or the other. So lacking rational obligations and recognizing the rationality of those with conflicting stances, it would be indefensible, incoherent even to adopt any such option. And that all sounds very self-defeating for everyone. So I think it's a genuine concern. So I think there is a way of understanding this argument that makes it compelling. But it requires an illicit conflation. Illicit in the sense that it begs the question against stance volunteers. The argument runs together the idea of choosing a rational stance with the idea of choosing a stance that's rationally required. But the very idea that a stance must be rationally obligatory in order to be rationally chosen is precisely what stance voluntarism denies. Remember that voluntarism rests on a permissive conception of epistemic rationality according to which, at least in some cases, different options may be rational and thus permitted. So on this view, rational choice and rational obligation are distinct concepts. They can't be run together. In order to argue in a non-question-begging way the only stances underpinning realism are rational. So to achieve the kind of requirement or rational obligation that he's looking for, one would have to show that alternative stances are in fact not rational after all. But that would require a compelling argument for a different theory of rationality. And that's actually not an easy thing to do, I think. Lee Cog doesn't provide this, and fair enough, it's a tall order. As I mentioned, his basic idea is that given certain attitudes and epistemic policies regarding demands for explanation, the evidential weight of certain kinds of explanations, once you've taken all that on board, then realism is, we use his term, mandatory. But note the conditional nature of that prescription. The obligation to draw realist conclusions from an adoption of an underlying stance concerning evidence and explanation. So granted, given realist-friendly stances, one ought to believe as realists do, but that has no implication for the rationality of stances generally. Different agents may adopt different but nonetheless rational stances reflecting the sorts of things that they value epistemically, yielding different combinations of ontological commitments and agnosticism. So let me move on now to one last word about stance-voluntarism. So Pincock's strategy for undermining stance-voluntarism is direct, right, in the sense that it attempts to demonstrate that there's something wrong with the idea itself. But even if I'm right that his strategy doesn't really work, I think there are also indirect strategies to consider. And perhaps the most striking example of this attempts to go the indirect route with arguments to the effect that volunteerism in this arena has unacceptable consequences that surely we should reject. So earlier when I was explaining the idea of epistemic stances, I focused on what are commonly viewed as philosophically, historically respectable interpretations of the epistemic upshot of scientific inquiry. I mean maybe you don't think that pragmatism is respectable or maybe you don't think that neocontainism is respectable, but I'm looking at this historical perspective that maybe you don't think that realism is respectable. But all of these things are, I think, philosophically, historically respectable interpretations of the upshot of scientific inquiry, and realism, empiricism, pragmatism, etc. are all on the table in contemporary debates on how best to interpret science. But what about so-called practices of inquiry in quotation marks that masquerade as science? Like pseudoscience. Or what I sometimes call pretend science, which is where people aren't committed to a pseudoscientific doctrine necessarily, but they represent falsehoods about science, or they represent something false as science to serve some sort of agenda. So these sorts of views, pseudoscience and pretend science represent a science denialism when they conflict with, or are used to undermine genuine science. Here's the word. Doesn't permissive conception of rationality open the door to all of that as well? If so, then that surely demonstrates indirectly that there's something terribly wrong with a voluntarist conception of epistemic stances. So to just put the concern in the form of a reductio, accepting stance voluntarism would entail, ex-hypothesy, that pseudoscience is rational, meets minimal requirements of consistency and coherence. But surely that's an absurd consequence from what was supposed to be an account of scientific ontology. So surely an account of how we theorize about ontology in the world on the basis of our best science shouldn't license that sort of epistemic malpractice. So just to sharpen up the question here, let me first clarify something that I think gets a little bit confused in some of these worries. Pseudoscientific theories, astrology, flat birth theory, homeopathy, those aren't stances. They're bodies of putatively factual claims about the world. The target of concern here in the first instance is the epistemic stances underlying those theories. And so with that clarification in mind, the worry here must be that what we'll find upon examination, if we drill beneath the surface and try to figure out what attitudes towards evidence are being taken by pseudoscientists, et cetera, what we'll find is that the underlying stances pass the test of permissive rationality. In other words, we'll find that they satisfy the constraints of consistency and coherence. So elaborating on this just a little bit, we can understand those constraints as having both logical and pragmatic dimension. Logical in the sense that a rational stance shouldn't lead inexorably to forming beliefs that violate the probability calculus. That would be a sign that something has gone wrong. It also has a pragmatic dimension in the sense that a rational stance shouldn't lead inexorably to forming beliefs that are otherwise in tension with the attitudes and values and other commitments that constitute the stance itself. So if you're more empirically inclined, if the policies that you've adopted epistemically are ones that lead you to have a lot of beliefs about unobservable entities, something has gone wrong in the way you're exercising your stance or the way you've conceived it. I think this is an interesting challenge for a lot of these what I'm calling hybrid positions now, in terms of instrumentalism that are partially realized and partially instrumentalist. What are the underlying stances such that this all works out in a way that coheres with their attitudes towards what we can know? I think it's a non-trivial question. So I take it that it's this sort of standard committed to minimal constraints of logical and pragmatic coherence that Stathasilos has in mind when he asserts, think this is on the handout, yeah. Creationism is not self-defeating. And what Ragnar Vandameru has recently had in mind when he asserted that stance-voluntarism can't exclude stances that license pseudoscientific practices like those found in Scientology. So if you did a bit of a deep dive on Scientology, pour him. I do think that these are serious concerns, right? But on reflection, I don't think that they undermine stance-voluntarism. So here's why. I mean, for starters, it's worth noting that the devil is really in the details of trying to work out what stances precisely actually underpin science pseudoscientific beliefs. That may be a considerable challenge. In some cases, I suspect that the details may be partially or even substantially opaque, right? Even to those who adopt them. And so revealing them is not an exercise that can be glossed over, right? In the way that actually I think Silos and Vandameru have done when they relatively casually suggest that advocates of pseudoscience and pretend science are generally consistent and coherent. I don't think that's something that one can just say casually. I think it requires some study of what the underlying stances are. So for instance, while the relevant focus when it comes to scientific ontology is epistemic stances, that is stances whose function is to underwrite the production of hopefully warranted beliefs, it's plausible that in cases of pseudoscience or pretend science, other types of stances function to engender a kind of destructive interference with epistemic considerations. For example, someone who recognizes the importance of taking empirical evidence seriously but who nonetheless overrides that policy whenever that evidence threatens to undermine, say, a favored religious dogma, right? Such as creationism. Well, arguably that person has fused an epistemic in a religious stance. Based on popular reporting, so I haven't done a deep dive on Scientology but I've read a little bit about it. Based on popular reporting, something similar is apparently true of prominent advocates of Scientology, right? I mean, a polite way of putting it might be to say that they appear to have fused an epistemic stance with something like an economic stance. Their own economic self-interest type consideration. As such, these sorts of cases seem to be strong candidates for cases in which what we have is an exemplification of failures of epistemic consistency and coherence and thus failures of purely epistemic rationality. In the absence of more convincing evidence, I'm not inclined to grant that there are, in fact, plausible cases of pseudo-scientific belief that are, one, underwritten by solely epistemic stances and two, that satisfy my volentistic constraints of rationality. But in closing, let me just, you know, for the sake of argument, say, let's imagine the logical possibility of that and see what follows. It should be clear, I think, that there's no challenge here for a permissive conception of epistemic rationality that isn't likewise faced in equal measure by impermissivist accounts of epistemic rationality. Because in the final analysis, all anyone can do when confronted with a conflict between epistemic stances is to engage in a dialogue in which conflicting attitudes and values and aims and policies relevant to assessing evidence can be revealed and then compared and then considered. In fact, I think that's exactly what happens, ultimately, in debates between scientific realists and anti-realists. I think it's what happens, ultimately, when experts testify in courts about what differences there would be between teaching evolution versus teaching creationism in schools. I mean, to add to this dialogue, you know, the assurance that I, not you, possess a uniquely rational epistemic stance really adds nothing to rhetorical or persuasive power. So, you know, in contrast, to elaborate, to explain, to scrutinize, to attempt to understand the nature of opposing stances, to engage in what in the book I call collaborative epistemology, and no doubt to encourage others when it seems as though our own stances pass the tests of consistency and coherence, right? Invite them to consider things, to see things our way, upon reflection. Well, to do all of those things is just to do our best. I don't think that there's any insight into epistemic rationality to be gained by demanding more than that. Thanks a lot. Do you want to field your own, or do you want me to field? Take it away, Charles. Okay. Yes. Okay, well, thank you very much, and thank you for this clear and stimulating talk. I am wondering whether the voluntary epistemology at the end of the day doesn't have to rely on some reasons for belief in truth, because I think that it's a right that in fact, when people adopt some positions, they have some commitments. But when they argue among each other as to the better reasons, better reasons to adopt an implicit stance or a metaphysical stance, they say, well, look, this kind of strategy has shown that there is less risk of being mistaken or having to revise my beliefs and things like that. So I think that in the arguments, in the defense of a specific stance, the people resort to meta-beliefs that they try to justify on, well, previous experience. And typically, also the ones who defend a metaphysical stance, well, they have to provide a justification for the truth-conceivedness of explanation, something like that. And the ones who are empiricists, they are typically panfrase, and they argue that, well, inference to the best explanation, for example, doesn't warrant belief in the truth of statements. So there are meta-beliefs in the truth, or at least the efficiency of some strategies of a certain way of proceeding to get to beliefs about science and things like that. So I think there are meta-beliefs, justifying with a belief that underpin the choice, the rational choice, a better reason to choose one specific stance better than another. Excellent. Thanks a lot, Michel. So there are, I think, perhaps three really interesting things that I want to try to tease apart in your question. So are there different, are there universally shared aspirations for truth even within the kind of volunteerist framework of some sort or another, and then we can argue about what those are, or different people may argue about what those are? I think, yes, there is, although that, in this instance, is a fairly weak claim, because I think all it suggests is that everybody is interested in sort of labeling the successful science, and then the analysis of truth may vary between different sorts of people. So a pragmatist may understand what it means to say their claim is true or in a different way than a realist and so on and so forth. But I do think that everyone is interested in taking our best science as a starting point, and then they are concerned with articulating what truths we can pull from that. And then it draws me to the second thing that I want to tease out, which is that I do think that you're right, that there are arguments that are offered to say, well, this is why we should restrict the domain of truths and things like, say, empirical adequacy, because we run less risk of revision in the future. It's been a huge part of the motivation, I think, for selective forms of realism to say that's a genuine concern, right? The risks associated with theory change are real. So here is, and then they would offer their preferred account, here's a way of thinking about the content of our best theories that makes it less likely to suffer that kind of fate of radical revision. So I do think people take that consideration seriously. And it can, now to come to the third point, take the form of meta-beliefs about what sorts of truths are, you know, warranted by our best science. But I think what I want to claim there is that while those seem like beliefs that are foundational, they're actually underwritten by the stance itself. Because I don't take those debates between someone that says, well, we should draw the line when considering risk just at the stage of empirical adequacy versus someone who says, well, we could draw that line in a somewhat more liberal way at the place where we feel as though we've used well-calibrated instruments to detect things that we can't actually see. I don't think those debates about the risk of what might happen in the future and so on and so forth are conclusive. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I was drawn to the ball interest picture in the first place. I don't think those debates are conclusive. If they're not conclusive, what's actually underlying those sorts of claims? And that's what I think are these more fundamental epistemic stances, which is to say, you know, I'm just not willing to take that risk because I don't think it's so important that we have that kind of knowledge. Yeah, thanks. Super interesting, especially the part about discussion of the objections. So I take it that there are several more or less strong versions of stance for the terrarism and I think I'm still not quite sure where you would locate yourself. So the most strongest version, the hardcore version of stance for the terrarism would probably be that stances are not at targets of rational justification at all. So we couldn't make a difference between incoherent and coherent stances, for example. This is something you would reject, I take it, because you have these minimal criteria of justification, coherence and consistency. And so we get a version of stance for the terrarism where we have stances at targets of rational justification, but several stances are equally justified given these criteria. But then we can have different content for criteria of justification. And here you would seem to take quite minimal stance, only the coherent and consistency. Is that correct? Because even if one would adopt more content for criteria of justification for stances, we might still have like several equally justified stances. And so we would still have room for materialism, right? Because then which one of the equally justified stances is not a matter of rational justification anymore. And I guess what you would need for your analysis of the debate about realism is just that these specific different stances, like the standard stance and the metaphysical stance, these are equally justified given whatever criteria of justification we have. And I would assume that's even more content for a criteria of justification that would, for example, exclude these weird stances that people have pointed out, but wouldn't exclude one of those stances to discuss in your analysis of the realism debate would still be acceptable for you. So what would you say about that? Would you be ready to accept more content for criteria of justification for stances than just consistency and coherence? So first let me say something about what you describe as the most radical, the most accepting position. I'm not sure anyone holds that position, although it is a position in the logical space of positions that one might hold, in part because if there were no constraints at all, then it would be really difficult to make sense of these epistemic stances as opposed to stances of wishful thinking or stances of pure imagination or whatever. I mean, if there were no constraints, then I think it would be difficult to think of them in any sensible epistemic terms. So I'm not sure anyone holds that view exactly. But then, you're absolutely right to say that the criteria that I adduced, which were, of course, I mean, I took this as going without saying, but I should say, you know, these were famously defended by Manfrase originally in connection with the way he conceives his own appearances. People have since then done a little bit more to spell out what pragmatic coherence may mean in the context of this discussion, in part because of the way Manfrase discusses the criterion. It can't be merely logical coherence because stances are, to some significant extent, non-propositional. So it's not going to be something that you can merely constrain on the basis of some sort of logical coherence beyond that to some sort of pragmatic coherence. And then he doesn't really say very much of anything, really, about what that is. This is a little bit, but I think others have gone further since to say what that might consist of. So you're absolutely right that I want to adopt that sort of position. So then the question you come to is, would it be acceptable on this view or on my view to add more substantive constraints? And the answer is yes and no, right? Yes, it would be absolutely acceptable to add further constraints within the context of a particular stance. That's what people do. So that's what differentiates people in different stances. They add more substantive constraints and that's what makes their stances distinct from others. But no, not as a general criterion for the rational acceptability of the stance. I think those criteria are just going to be, by their nature, quite minimal. And I think it's hard to argue for anything very much more substantive without then getting into the kinds of disagreements that the account is supposed to get away from, which is to say, well, clearly, and sometimes I feel their pain. Realists are arguing with an anti-realist and saying, how can you not believe in this thing that I'm seeing under a microscope? I feel like here are 12 different ways we can detect this thing. Here's a preponderance of evidence. How can you not believe this thing? So I feel the pain, but at the same time, I do think that it's a consistent and coherent position to say, look, we need to draw a line somewhere about how far we're going to depart from what we actually see, which is an image on the screen. And that might be a place to do it. And so that's why I think that in the account of just what would qualify as epistemically rational, the constraints are going to be of their nature. The interesting question for the purposes of this conference are how maximal might they be? How far are you willing to go? One of the things that I think is interesting about this particular case, or in the case of stance volunteerism in connection with the sciences, which is what I'm most interested in, is that I think that what's not at stake, as I mentioned before, are debates about P versus not P, which I take to be internal to a stance. What we find is that there are that more and more speculative theoretical stances are inclusive of those that our mornings heard. So everything that an empiricist says is generally something, all of those things are things that realists would accept, but they add more. Everything that someone who is a scientific realist but also believes very substantive claims about the natures of properties and laws and counterfactuals and maybe possible worlds, they believe everything a realist does, but maybe they add some more. And the question is, in the process of adding, how far are we stretching the tether to what I've called empirical vulnerability and explanatory power? And where do we draw the line? Where do we think that the warrant for belief runs out? Thanks. I'm convinced by, that could just be my question. I'm convinced by your responses to Pincar's objections. I wonder whether there is a different variation on injection one in the vicinity. Not withstanding what I think is your correct response to objection one. The idea is something like this. So stances are supposed to be values and attitudes and commitments. And now if I reflect on can I choose my values? Can I choose my commitments? Can I choose my attitudes? Well, I guess psychologically, I have a little bit of control over that, but for the most part, the control that I have over that is fairly minimal. It seems that the extent to which we can choose our values, the kind of deeper commitments, not superficial commitments, but deeper commitments like we're talking about here, seems like if we can change it at all, it's not something that we can easily change. And this seems to be intention with the voluntary description of how we take stances. So, given that, I hope you see the relation to the original objection. I was hoping I could just invite you to say a little bit about what you think about that version of the objection. Yeah, yeah. So that, I think, is very insightful in a way that I think is helpful to me because it allows me to say a little bit more about what choice means in this context. So, you know, we have in everyday natural language use, I think we mean different things by choice. And some choices are more easily made than others. In this context, I think it means something quite specific. Describing this in terms of choice is misleading, in at least a couple of ways, right? One of the ways in which it's misleading is that I think often people operate as epistemic agents without reflecting on their underlying stances at all. They may not even know, right? Why it is that they think, you know, there are two scientists arguing about the implications of the data from their last experiment. And one of them says, yeah, we're ready to publish. This is a result. And the other says, you know, we just need more data. I'm not feeling it, right? We're not there yet. But in that case, is it obvious that the underlying epistemic stances that are, you know, perhaps separating them, leading one to kind of judgment of agnosticism and the other to a judgment of belief, is it clear that that's something that's transparent to either? Probably not. So, the idea of applying the term choice to that context seems strange. If it might not even be obvious to them what precisely their underlying stances are and how they differ. Sometimes I think it takes a lot of work to actually understand what's going on, right? Why people are led to make the epistemic judgments that they make. So, it seems weird to call that choice if it isn't even transparent to the choosers. And then the second point, I think is the one you made, which is that, well, even if we were to do that work and to, you know, fully understand, right, our full epistemic lives, right, what's going on, that this is as though we could, again, not flip a switch with respect to belief, but flip a switch with respect to our stances, not just, oh, gee, you know, maybe now that I know the way I think, maybe I will be a logical empiricist instead, right? It doesn't really work that way. So, I do think that choice has to be understood here in a very particular way. And the way it has to be understood is just in terms of there being other options that quite epistemic rationality you couldn't be faulted for taking. So, there are possible options, right? But you're drawn towards one of them for the reasons that have to do with, you know, things that could be illuminated when we articulate your stance. You're drawn towards one of them, right? And that will determine how you choose. But a lot of this is, I think, as you say, what's under the surface. Is it amenable to change? Well, I think it is. And a lot of what we're doing in philosophy, when we illuminate what's going on underneath the surface, is having these discussions. That's why I said, I think that ultimately arguments even between realists and anti-realists come to a point where people are displaying their underlying epistemic stances. And I do think that over time, those kinds of conversations can be, you know, motivating for people to say, you know what, now that I see it, I kind of, I see where they're coming from, right? Maybe I feel like maybe I'm drifting a little bit in that direction, or otherwise some people stick to their guns. So, I do think that, I don't think it's the case that those kinds of discussions are in material or lack potency when it comes to the stances people adopt, because I think that people can be convinced, or they're, you know, they can change over time. But that shouldn't be surprising, because, you know, our values can change over our time, right? The things we take to be important, the things that the amount of epistemic risk we're willing to take may change over time, and from context to context. So, yes, I want to agree with everything you said, and I think that the word choice in some ways is misleading. But properly understood, I think, fits within the volatilist tradition. And we should distinguish psychology and philosophy. Well, maybe. But that's what you do. You speak about the notion of choice. Sorry? When you speak about the notion of choice, the notion of psychology, you can notice that it brings a rationality, a rationality of choice. Right. To an extent, it's rationality. Yeah. That's awesome. That's true. Although the reason I joke about it, and maybe half joke about it, is that, you know, it is, ultimately, I mean, this is something at the heart of the volatilist tradition, that, you know, ultimately, what is it? I said that you have a bunch of rational options, but you're drawn towards one of them. Right? What is that? Now let's try to cash out the metaphor. What does that mean? Why am I drawn towards one of these or another? And that, within the volatilist tradition, is often described in terms of something that I think we have to take as primitive, at least in this analysis, and that is the will. Right. And so is that a psychological notion? Or not? I mean, this is something I talked about more in Berlin. I mean, some people say, look, in order for this to be a compelling account, what you need to do is some empirical psychology to, you know, understand why is it some people go one way or another. And I'm skeptical about that myself. Because I'm not convinced, I think that there are lots of things that might be interestingly naturalized within epistemology. I don't think the nature of the will, just to put a label on it, is something that we'd get very far in trying to analyze in psychological terms. So I'm very much with you, but I think it's a philosophical question. So we have 15 minutes left, but we also have five questions on my sheet. Sonia. Thanks. So I wanted to ask about the difference between assessing stances and assessing people's reasons for adopting stances? And I was thinking that focusing on the latter might give you some more options in responding to the pseudo-science worries. So I was... When you put the list of like respectable stances up on the slides and I think about... So I think the different people I know that adopt different stances on that list many of them I think adopt the stances they have having fully considered the other stances and maybe getting drawn drawn toward one, but having fully considered everything. But I do think that there are people even working in philosophy of science who adopt one of those stances essentially because they inherited it from their dissertation supervisor or something like that. And sometimes I think when we're sort of arguing about is, hey, I don't think you've fully appreciated my stance or given it full consideration not that you have to adopt it once you do, but that you need to go through that process in order to sort of be doing it right. And then the thought was that maybe that can help with the pseudo-science cases too. So... He said something interesting about the Scientology case and that being like an economic stance, a slightly different way of putting that maybe it is like they're adopting their stance that class stance meets the minimum standards but their reasons for adopting that stance are not the right kinds of reasons. They are economic reasons or maybe in some of these cases there are certain kinds of social reasons or things like that. Right, yeah. So thanks a lot for that. A lot of really interesting things there that I'd love to unpack a little bit more. Let me say something about two of them. So one, with respect to how does it people end up adopting the stances that there are? So I don't think that notwithstanding that I said maybe the ultimate nature of the will is inscrutable, right? Notwithstanding that claim, I do think that there are things that could be illuminated about why people adopt the stances that they do. Maybe they were influenced by a particularly inspiring supervisor. Maybe they wanted to adopt a position that was the antithesis of what their supervisor adopted. Maybe they, you know, there may be interesting social, cultural, sociological reasons that accultury people in certain ways that stances are more appealing to them than others. And I do think that, you know, we might be able to say interesting things about that. I'm sort of taking for granted the idea that perhaps this is an ideal. Well, it is an ideal. But as philosophers, right, we may then subject our positions to a kind of critical scrutiny that ultimately, to some extent at any rate, will push those kinds of acculturating factors into the background as we subject them to the pure light of our reason. Now, but then my claim of the fundamentally inscrutable nature of the will will come back. And so I do think that we can do things like that. Does it help with respect to, you know, pseudo-scientists and so on and so forth? I'm not sure. So I do think that you're absolutely right. It would help to find out, like, what are the reasons? What are the stances and so on and so forth? But then I think we may come to, and this is, I think, a point of difference between the stances that I describe as the philosophically and historically respectable ones and maybe some others. The philosophically and historically respectable ones are ones that take empirical evidence seriously. And that's kind of a shared, you know, that's a datum that is shared across these traditions. It's one of the reasons why I'm comfortable talking about them and one of the reasons why I called this an account of epistemic stances. And my worry is that in some of these other contexts, a conception of what counts as empirical evidence gets skewed in, like, very interesting ways. Like, you know, is private revelation evidence? It's not intersubjectively available. Is it not? I think there are interesting conversations to be had about what will then count as evidence and how it should be, you know, treated and what way it should be given and so on and so forth. But I think you're absolutely right that when these other things that I was saying, well, maybe they're not purely epistemic, but they're economic or they're social or they're political and so on and so forth, depending on how broad a conception of pragmatic encroachment you may be willing to go along with, those might be considered epistemic. Well, thank you very much and I will address that last point. I have a question and it's two part divided about the identity criteria for our stances. The first one is related with the notion of stances and the second with the notion of systemic stances. And you mentioned at the end of your talk the deep disagreements and maybe based on realism can be characterized as deep disagreements arising from the adoption of conflicting epistemic stances. But also debates within I don't know, say, the metaphysical stance can be also characterized as deep disagreements. You mentioned your own discussion with statists about loss of nature and maybe debates on the metaphysical nature of loss between Indians and non-monochical realists can be also characterized as deep disagreements having same characters and same features as the realists debate. So, can we say that we have cases of deep disagreement within the metaphysical stance, for example, or should we identify different substances in those cases? And the second question points to your last comment. How can we identify those epistemic relevant factors to consider a stance to be an epistemic stance? Because in many philosophical traditions, social, political and maybe economic factors are essential to the production of knowledge and should be considered to be epistemic in some way. Good, good. So first with respect to deep disagreement So, you know, deep disagreements for those of you who haven't dealt into that literature are, you know, disagreements that are sufficiently deep that the fundamental underlying disagreements may not be resolvable. There's some question as to whether they can be resolved by, you know, Wittgenstein suggesting that some propositions are ones that we cannot conceivably doubt with, otherwise we sacrifice our inquiry altogether, right, and so on and so forth. So ones that are sort of taken at face value as a requirement of our discourse and people may disagree about those sorts of things. So deep disagreements, I think that they can occur in different places. So you could have deep disagreements about which is ultimately a disagreement about what you value and what you take, you know, how much epistemic risk you're willing to take on or how epistemically risk averse you are and so on and so forth. You can have deep disagreements about those things. But you can also have deep disagreements within the context of the stance. So people are arguing about laws of nature, right. I take them to be operating with what I call the same epistemic stance, right, because they think that the evidence is sufficient to allow you to go one way or the other. But I'm skeptical about the resolution of all deep disagreements in those contexts as well because, you know, one of the chapters of the book, I look at structuralism about physics and what I ultimately argue is that the different positions here, these people all share a stance in the sense they're arguing about different conceptions of structure, right. Ultimately, these accounts ground out in certain primitive notions that you just have to accept or reject. And there isn't that much more to be said, but all of them are slightly strange, right. Often primitive notions are that way. You just have to take it or leave it. And we might draw different morals from that. We might draw the moral that, well maybe this debate isn't resolvable. Maybe we should draw the moral of it. Well, you know, maybe we shouldn't be thinking about these different accounts in terms of truth, but rather in terms of pragmatic conception of what kind of description of structure is useful in different contexts. But I think deep disagreements appear in all kinds of places. So they are tied necessarily just to stances. And with respect to your last point about broader conceptions of what might count as epistemic, I certainly think that everything I've said here is compatible with the idea of augmenting it in that way. But I think that's a substantive question as to how far you should go. And I won't say more about it now because I know that there are other questions. Thank you. Your presentation. I was wondering how not far you raised. Sorry, how much? How not far you raised. How far would you endorse you raised me? Because I'm very fond of what you say about empiricism, instrumentalism, the metaphysical stance and so forth. But I think in a sense that at some point dualism stops. So when it comes to creationism or scientistism they will say that well empirical argument will then be to our explanatory power will work as criteria to separate things. Whereas other philosophers and I'm thinking of Hassan time or Stefan Rufi they'll say well let them in and let them crash with evidence and let them try to sort out their lives and so forth. So my question to you would be where do you stand in this point of life? So I'm definitely a pluralist of a sort. I'm certainly a pluralist in the sense that I think there are different underlying epistemic stances that are rational right? So I'm a pluralist about the scope of rational stances. Not every stance will be rational but there's more than one. I certainly think that. But having said that I do think that we have to be careful about how we describe how we feel about these things. I'm a pluralist at a kind of meta level of analysis when I look at all these stances, right? I'm not thinking about myself as a possessor of one of those stances. I'm thinking about how I should think about some metaphilosophical question, how I should think about these things. But then when I descend to the ground level, I'm a sort of scientific realist and I take certain kinds of evidence to be compelling and to lead me to warranted beliefs about various things. So how inclusive and how exclusive I'm going to be with respect to what I take to be the right thing to say will depend on whether I'm telling you about what I think about the meta level debate as opposed to what I think about the ground level debate. That said, right, I'm not even sure what it means to say let them in. I mean, you could go so far as to let everyone in where there are no constraints at all. Make something up. Counter inductivist policy that you associate with stats and let them into. What does that even mean? The sciences are not things in which we make decisions about whom to let in exactly. Now we'll get into conversations that are interesting about the social institutional nature of science and some people will be let in and others won't and it's an interestingly perhaps historically contingent fact now that people that don't take evidence seriously in the way that all of the people I said are philosophically and historically respectable have are not considered scientists per se. If they were then I might have to say something slightly different when I'm giving an account of scientific ontology but I am taking for granted. So talking about pseudoscience and pretend science in a way is taking me beyond the domain of people that I took myself to be talking about when I originally gave this account because it was supposed to be an account of scientific ontology. Now I'm happy to be drawn outside of that domain but I do think that there are some things that are shared and a certain respect for scientific practice and its ties to what I'm calling empirical vulnerability is not something that's disputed within that domain but it is disputed beyond that domain. Many thanks for talking to me Richard. Many things have obviously said everything around the notion of evidence and I was wondering if you think that there is a unified concept of evidence. Many of these UW you were showing in your presentation are people for example creationist and sharing with scientists but probably they are having a different concept of evidence many actually think for example that the Bible this is evident from there and so they are following the evidence in the sense that they are following the Bible and when some people say okay like Chris said before let it be in our view they will share the notion of evidence that they are having how are we going to compare the evidence again my question going down to the point is that if you believe that there is a unified concept of evidence people could disagree about what they mean by evidence and there are many other notions of evidence on some. One thing that I don't do haven't done and I don't have a very good answer for you now is to give a fulsome account of evidence I think there are some people in the room who could probably give you a better answer to the question than I will right now. That said I do think that we have some paradigm examples forms of evidence that are with good reason taken seriously within the context of the sciences whatever stance you may adopt so for example and I do enumerate some of these in the book I talk about the use of novel predictions as a kind of probe for empirical vulnerability domains that generate novel predictions that can then be tested whether in experiment or observation or otherwise that's a kind of empirical vulnerability that generally speaking is taken quite seriously is something that has serious evidential weight or what I call degrees of experiential distance which is a way of talking about how closely and how well connected we are causally to the things that we're investigating how mediated is our contact with the things that we're investigating considerations like that are important to assessing the weight of the evidence so I do think that we have paradigm cases of what would constitute good evidence at least within the context of the sciences but the broader landscape of possible evidence that you're talking about is something that I haven't really tried to systematize with my apologies Alex would you like to pose your question during the 20 minute coffee break which begins presently so thanks again for a great talk