Visiting Speaker Series

The Distinguished Speaker Series invites distinguished scholars to present their work in the history and philosophy of science. The Allan Franklin New Ideas Speaker Series invites scholars to present their new and exciting work in the history and philosophy of science. It is named in honor of Allan Franklin, for his decades of unparalleled contributions to the history and philosophy of science. Dr. Franklin is best known for his work on the methods of physics.

Upcoming Schedule for AY 25/26:

• Wednesday, February 25th, 4:00pm, JILA Auditorium: New Ideas Speaker, Adam Koberinski (Rotman Institute), "Transcendental conditions for the successful use of effective field theories"
  • Abstract: Effective field theories (EFTs) form the basis of our most successful theories of matter, both in particle physics and in condensed matter physics. But the structure of EFTs poses a challenge to many standard philosophical accounts of theory structure and content. In particular, the inability to cast EFTs in terms of exact mathematical objects defined at all scales suggests that philosophical accounts of theory interpretation ought to be modified to deal with approximate, scale-relative ontologies. In this talk, I take some preliminary steps toward an alternative approach to theory interpretation, suitable to EFTs as well as other mathematized theories. Starting from the assumption that EFTs currently allow us to successfully learn about the world, I explicate some features the world must have for that to be true.
• Friday, February 27th, 3:30pm, HLMS E210: New Ideas Speaker, Kathleen Creel (Northeastern), "Against the Platonic Representation Hypothesis"
  • Abstract: The Platonic Representation Hypothesis posits that “neural networks, trained with different objectives on different data and modalities, are converging to a shared statistical model of reality in their representation spaces” (Huh et al. 2024).  This realist explanation for the success of contemporary large language and image models has gained traction within computer science, particularly as an explanation for some of the striking large model convergence results found using mechanistic interpretability techniques.  In this talk, I undermine the Platonic Representation Hypothesis by positing alternative explanations for the phenomenon of model convergence and propose a different test of meaningful convergence to replace it.  
• March 6th, 3:30pm, HLMS E210: Distinguished Speaker, Craig Callender (UC, San Diego), TBA