Grants News – Arche

WIKI project funded with 500K pounds by the Leverhulme Trust

Stroma Galbraith — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 12:54:22 +0000

‘What if?’-counterfactual questions are of momentous importance for scientific explanations (Would we see that particle track if the atom was ionized?), to ascertain responsibilities (Would he have hit the brakes, had he not been distracted?), to choose what to do (Would I get to the other side if I jumped the stream?). We address them by imagining that a hypothetical situation obtains and wondering what would follow.
But how can imagination give us knowledge of reality, if it’s free departure from reality? WIKI will apply in the philosophy of imagination tools from formal epistemology, in particular epistemic and probabilistic logic, to address this issue. If we start by taking counterfactual imagination as a kind of simulated belief revision, we can then analyse it using formal theories of belief revision, in qualitative (focusing on full, all-or-nothing belief) and quantitative clothing (focusing on credences/degrees of belief).
In three interrelated sub-projects funded by the , WIKI will (1) develop a logic and formal epistemology of imagination as suppositional thinking, (2) apply them to analyse the workings of scientific thought experiments, and (3) compare them to empirical results from the psychology of reasoning, to provide an account of how we can become better hypothetical reasoners.

Download the full description of the WIKI project here.

Research Grant Success: Dr Simon Prosser

Stroma Galbraith — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 18:57:17 +0000

Dr Simon Prosser has been awarded a 12-month Leverhulme Research Fellowship. This will enable him to spend the 2023/24 academic year writing a book provisionally entitled Conscious Experience: A Defence of External World Functionalism.

Research Grant Success: Dr Aaron Cotnoir

Stroma Galbraith — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 15:48:46 +0000

AJ Cotnoir has been selected for an ERC Consolidator grant of €1.7 million for a 5-year project studying the metaphysics of unity. The planned start date is January 2024.

Instruments of Unity: The Many Ways of Being One

How do many things come together into single unified entity? What is it to be whole? How is a group united? How do we carve the world into its most natural units? We perceive unities everywhere: from ant colonies to cellular automata, from organisms to organisations. Yet we have little understanding about the general constraints by which they unified. The Instruments of Unity Project tackles this abstract question in a way that provides concrete applicable answers. The core hypothesis: unity is a complex pluralistic phenomenon, requiring a multifaceted theoretical approach. We identify unity relations across a variety of formal settings, using tools from part/whole theory, theories of location, qualitative dimensions, modal logics, graph theory, weighted networks, topology, mathematical morphology, and more. In sum: there are many ways to be one.

The project goals include: pioneering novel formal paradigms for unity; developing a measurement-theoretic ‘Guide for Naturalness’; applying the framework to problems in metaphysics, including social and formal ontologies; and even addressing the ‘meta’-question of whether there’s any unity to the different types of unity. Along the way, we will rehabilitate a more holistic ‘carving’-based metaphysics over against the dominant reductionistic ‘building’-based paradigm.

Using the proven method of expert-led collaborative research, and advised by a Board of researchers from Europe and the US, the project progresses over three phases in five years. The team (composed of the PI, three postdocs, and a fully-funded PhD student) will deliver: over twenty articles in top journals, a research monograph, an open-access PhD thesis, a small workshop, a major conference, an annotated open-source bibliography, a downloadable reference database, and shareable infographics to facilitate accessible knowledge exchange to non-experts.

Research Grant Success

Lynn Hynd — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 10:30:35 +0000

Jessica Brown has been awarded a two-year Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to investigate the moral responsibility of groups, commencing September 2021.

Leverhulme Project Grant extension

Lynn Hynd — Thu, 21 May 2020 06:11:25 +0000

Leverhulme project grant and its funding has been extended to 31 July 2021 because of the disruption caused by COVID-21. Further details on the grant can be found here.

Blame and Responsibility

mga10 — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 10:37:14 +0000

Jessica Brown has been awarded a grant from the RSE for a project on Blame and Responsibility.

Funding award

Lynn Hynd — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 08:55:29 +0000

Derek Ball has been awarded AHRC funding for his project “What Kind of Mind? Engaging Children and the Public with Research on Animal and Infant Minds from Philosophy and Psychology”. The funding will allow Derek and collaborators in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience to work with primary school teachers and pupils in Fife and the Highlands to create materials and activities related to recent philosophical and empirical research on animal and infant minds, and to put on classes and activities in local prisons.

Research Grant Success

mga10 — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 12:06:26 +0000

Jessica Brown has been awarded a Mind Association Senior Research Fellowship (12-month) for her project, Blame: Epistemic and Moral. The project focuses on the way in which we can be blamed for failing to follow epistemic standards or norms governing belief or action.

Wholes: more than just the sum of their parts

Lynn Hynd — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 12:14:21 +0000

2017/18 Leverhulme Research Fellowship for project ‘Wholes: Wholes: more than just the sum of their parts’ (Cotnoir). The fellowship will support the research for a book that argues that whole objects are unified yet genuinely new — distinct from mere sums of their parts. The book will put forward an original metaphysics of the structure of ordinary objects.

What’s so special about first-person thought

Lynn Hynd — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 12:45:52 +0000

What’s so special about first-person thought’ (Project lead Stephan Torre (Aberdeen)
The Network is comprised of researchers from ,��, , , ,��Ի� seeking to understand the nature of first-person thought.
There is a deep disagreement over the philosophical significance of first-person thought. Many philosophers take it to be well-established that thoughts about the self fundamentally differ in nature from thoughts about other individuals and raise deep philosophical questions. Others maintain that their colleagues have succumbed to an attractive, yet unmotivated, myth and in fact there is nothing special or philosophically profound about first-person thoughts.

This radical difference of opinion cries out for further exploration: is there really something special about first-person thought?

The project is structured into three phases, each attempting to answer distinct questions about the nature of first-person thought:
The first phase of the project will aim to clarify and demarcate what unique problems are raised by the phenomenon of first-person thought. The second phase of the project will consider the relation between the phenomenon of first-person thought and the more general phenomenon arising from so-called Frege puzzles.
The third phase of the project will employ the results of the first two phases to address implications for the nature of thought and the self.

For more information, please visit the .