Research Projects
Ongoing Projects
Collective Decision-Making
Relevance
- Titel: Relevance
- Time span: 2018-2023
- Sponsor: DFG (Emmy-Noether Programm)
- Director: Dr. Stephan Krämer
Web: http:// relevanceproject.wordpress.com
Distinctions between what is relevant and what is not are ubiquitous, they pervade every-day thought and talk as much as scientific and philosophical debate. In some cases, relevance is a mostly pragmatic or psychological matter, e.g. of how efficiently an agent’s cognitive state is influenced by a piece of information. But in other cases, a more abstract, semantic connection is intended, which obtains independently of our capacity to recognize and efficiently process it. Relevance in this latter sense is the topic of the proposed project.
Relevance, thus understood, plays an important role in a wide range of philosophical debates. In particular, many philosophically central relations – e.g. confirmation, explanation, causation, grounding – imply relevance, and it appears to be a unifying feature of this otherwise highly diverse set of relations that they do so. However, the theory of relevance is in an unsatisfactory state. Most previous work targets some specific kind of relevance, offering no account of what relevance comes to in general, and how the various kinds of relevance relate. Second, extant theories tend to treat relevance as intensional, not distinguishing between necessarily equivalent statements. But in general, relevance is hyperintensional; e.g. that 3 divides 6 is relevant to whether 6 is prime, but that 7 is greater than 2 is not, even though the two claims are necessarily equivalent. Thirdly, most existing formal work on relevance operates within a framework ill-suited to the study of hyperintensional relations, namely probability theory or possible worlds theory.
The project aims to rectify this situation. Its central assumptions are
- relevance is a unified phenomenon, admitting of a unified theoretical treatment
- relevance is hyperintensional; necessarily equivalent propositions may differ with respect to relevance
- relevance is a matter of providing reasons; e.g. to be relevant to a hypothesis is to provide reasons for accepting or rejecting it the recently developed hyperintensional theory of truthmaker semantics is an ideal framework for the study of reason and relevance-relationships
The project divides into three phases. In the first phase we show that relevance is a unifying feature of the relevance-implying relations. To this end, we examine a range of debates in which such relations take center stage and identify commonalities and systematic connections between them. Here we will focus on logical relevance-implying relations (e.g. relevant entailment), explanatory ones (e.g. causation), and epistemic ones (e.g. confirmation). In the second phase we develop a general theory of relevance. We will provide a novel account of the nature of relevance, a systematization of its various forms and their interrelations, and a unified formal framework within which relevance relations may be studied and compared. In the third phase we apply our theory to further areas, such as the theory of practical reasons.
Schuldhaftes Unwissen in Organisationen; Culpable Ignorance
- Titel: Schuldhaftes Unwissen in Organisationen
- Laufzeit: 2021-2026
- Förderer: Volkswagen Stiftung (Freigeist Programm)
- Leitung: Dr. Dr. Marco Meyer
Moralisches Fehlverhalten von Firmen und anderen Organisationen beruht oft nicht auf bösen Absichten, sondern auf Unwissen. Dringen, zum Beispiel, Erkenntnisse über Nebenwirkungen aus der Forschungsabteilung nicht zum Vorstand durch, verzögert sich der Rückruf eines Medikaments. Tauschen Polizeibehörden sich nicht über Spuren aus, bleibt der Serienmörder länger unentdeckt. Solches Unwissen ist dann schuldhaft, wenn die Organisation es besser hätten wissen können.
Die von der Volkswagenstiftung geförderte Nachwuchsforschungsgruppe untersucht, welche Erkenntnispflichten Organisationen haben, und welche Eigenschaften Organisationen auszeichnen, die schuldhaftes Unwissen vermeiden. Die Erkenntnispflichten von Organisationen werden durch die Linse epistemischer Tugenden und Laster betrachtet, deren Theorie in der Philosophie ausgearbeitet wird.
Zur Klärung, welche Eigenschaften Organisationen bei der Erfüllung ihrer Erkenntnispflichten unterstützen, wenden die Forschenden quantitative und qualitative Methoden an. Zunächst analysieren sie eine Datenbank über historisches Fehlverhalten von Unternehmen, um die Bedeutung schuldhafter Unwissenheit zu bewerten. Zweitens identifizieren sie durch Interviews mit Mitarbeiter/innen die Ursachen für schuldhaftes Unwissen von Organisationen. Drittens entwickelt die Forschungsgruppe einen Fragebogen, um epistemische Laster in Organisationen zu identifizieren.
Das Projekt wird dazu beitragen, eine wesentliche Ursache für Fehlverhalten von Unternehmen zu verstehen, und Organisationen und Aufsichtsbehörden dabei unterstützen, schuldhaftes Unwissen zu vermeiden.
- Title: Culpable Ignorance – Moral Knowledge in Organizations
- Time Span: 2021-2026
- Sponsor: Volkswagen Foundation (Freigeist programmme)
- Director: Dr. Dr. Marco Meyer
Organizational misconduct often stems not from bad motives, but from ignorance. For instance, silence of research departments about side effects delays the recalling of drugs. Lack of coordination between police departments hampers finding serial killers. Such ignorance is culpable if organizations could have known better.
The project investigates what organizations have a duty to know, and which qualities help them to fulfil these duties. The research group approaches the question of organizational duties to know through the lens of vice epistemology, a branch of philosophy. An epistemic vice is a blameworthy intellectual failing that systematically gets in the way of knowledge.
To answer the question of which qualities help organizations to fulfil their duties to know, the research group applies quantitative and qualitative research methods. First, the research group analyzes a database of corporate misconduct to assess the importance of culpable ignorance. Second, the research group identifies root causes of culpable ignorance through interviews with young professionals. Third, the research group develops a survey instrument to identify and measure epistemic vice in organizations.
The project will help to better understand an overlooked cause of corporate misconduct, providing guidance to organizations and regulators to prevent culpable ignorance.
Completed Projects
Grounding and Ontological Dependence in Medieval Philosophy
- Title: Grounding and Ontological Dependence in Medieval Philosophy
- Time Span: 2017-2020
- Sponsor: DFG (Eigene Stelle)
- Director: Dr. Magali Roques
The aim of this project is to investigate the conception of grounding in fourteenth-century medieval philosophy, with a special emphasis on the realist Duns Scotus (1266-1308) and his nominalist opponent William of Ockham (1285-1345). The notion of “grounding” is closely related to the term “explaining” in ordinary language. More precisely, many philosophers take “grounding” to refer to a distinctive kind of metaphysical explanation. Indeed, grounding typically expresses a relation of priority and dependence between things. In this sense, grounding distinctively links metaphysics to explanation and is a core notion in the metaphysics of fundamentality, i.e. the research domain which investigates how some phenomena are built from more fundamental phenomena.
Until recently the generally held view has been that sustained discussion of grounding is, with a few exceptions such as Bolzano and Husserl, a recent phenomenon. However, it has sometimes been argued that philosophical reflection on grounding goes back to antiquity. The recent renewal of Aristotelianism in metaphysics has given rise to a renewed interest in scholastic views on the metaphysics of fundamentality, but the conceptions of grounding in the Aristotelian tradition of the Middle Ages are widely unknown. The main aim of this project is to fill this gap in our knowledge of the history of the notion of grounding.
Until now, scholars have identified the medieval counterpart to grounding as the relation that holds between substance and accident. I aim at correcting this identification by arguing that when Scotus and Ockham invoke the relations of ontological dependence they did not do so in order to give a correct definition of substance as that which is independent or subsists per se. Rather, they appealed to a kind of non-causal dependence that corresponds to the contemporary notion of grounding in order to explain the idea of logical validity, the relation between the Persons of the Trinity and their properties, the hypostatic union, and the truthmakers of modal truths.
Apart from its exegetical and historical objective, the project also has a philosophical goal. It aims to bring together two debates that are currently more or less kept apart, namely the current debate on metaphysical explanation and the old but ongoing debate on explanation in philosophy of science. Due to an emphasis on natural sciences, physics in particular, philosophy of science tends to centre on causal explanation, while marginalizing notions of non-causal explanation. However, mathematical explanations are non-causal. And if non-causal mathematical explanations are no less legitimate than causal explanations in natural science, what justifies there being these two distinct kinds of explanation? The medieval concept of scientific explanation can be used in order to show that causal and non-causal explanations have a common root and are thus specific kinds of a unified genus of explanation.
Knowledge and Decision
- Title: Knowledge and Decision
- Time Span: 2016-2021
- Sponsor: DFG (Emmy-Noether Programm)
- Director: Jun.-Prof. Moritz Schulz
The project Knowledge and Decision is located at the interface of epistemology and decision theory. Its ultimate goal is to devise an integrated theory of theoretical and practical rationality. Epistemologically, it takes up the recent trend to reassign the concept of knowledge a fundamental role. The decision-theoretic implications of this approach are still under-explored. On the other hand, there is currently a renewed interest in decision theory. This provides great research opportunities for exploiting the feedback loops running both ways between epistemology and decision theory. More specifically, the project is structured into seven subprojects concerned with: knowledge, uncertainty, belief, desire (preferences), representation, causation, and rationality.
The Semantics and Pragmatics of Knowledge Claims
- Title: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Knowledge Claims
- Time Span: 2016-2019
- Sponsor: DFG (Eigene Stelle)
- Director: Alexander Dinges
Our willingness to ascribe knowledge seems to vary from context to context. For instance, I might be happy now to say that I know my bicycle is standing in front of the university building because I have left it there this morning. I might become at least more hesitant, though, when it turns out that I need it in order to make it on time to a very important doctor’s appointment and once I realize that there is at least some chance that the bicycle has been stolen. This seemingly innocuous observation is the starting point for an entire range of recent theories on the semantics and pragmatics of knowledge claims. On the semantic side, these include epistemic contextualism and relativism, according to which the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary from context to context. On the pragmatic side, there are various attempts to explain the data by appeal to varying conversational implicatures (or related pragmatic phenomena). Some metaphysical views even go so far as to claim that we should modify the definition of knowledge such that it makes reference not only to parameters like true belief and justification but also to what is stake for the subject or which error-possibilities the subject has in mind. The goal of this project is two-fold. On the one hand, I will critically examine the theoretical costs that come with each of these proposals by exploring their respective relations to general question in the philosophy of language and linguistics. On the other hand, I will propose a more conservative alternative account, according to which the data in question should be explained in terms of cognitive biases familiar from psychology.
Acting: Between Freedom and Rationality
- Title: Acting: Between Freedom and Rationality
- Time Span: 2015-2018
- Sponsor: DFG (Eigene Stelle)
- Director: Dr. Sonja Schierbaum
Ontology after Quine: Fictionalism and Fundamentality
- Title: Ontology After Quine
- Time Span: 2013-2018
- Sponsor: DFG (Emmy-Noether Programm)
- Director: Dr. Richard Woodward
- Web: https://carvingnature.net/
This is a research project funded by the DFG, based at the University of Hamburg, and led by Richard Woodward. As its name suggests, the project focuses on a variety of issues in metametaphysics and metaontology, set against the backdrop of the Quinean conception of ontological inquiry that became orthodox in the latter half of the last century.
The Logic and Metaphysics of Ground
- Title: The Logic and Metaphysics of Ground
- Time Span: 2014-2017
- Sponsor: DFG (Eigene Stelle)
- Director: Dr. Stephan Krämer
- Web: http://logicofground.net
Metaphysics, it is often said, asks what things there are, and what things are like. But there is also an alternative conception, historically associated with Aristotle, and recently revived in the work of Kit Fine and others, according to which there is another central question of metaphysics: What facts depend on, are grounded in, what other facts? The first conception of metaphysics is adequate only given a view of reality as a mere collection of facts, the second takes into account that reality has structure: some facts obtain because others do.
Now, because and cognate terms often describe causal structures, such as when we say that the glass broke because it was dropped. But in the cases of most interest to metaphysics, because tracks non-causal relations, e.g. when we ask whether moral facts obtain because of facts concerning mental events, and whether the latter obtain because of certain physical facts; neither question plausibly concerns causality. Call this other notion of because the metaphysical because, and the relation it denotes (metaphysical) grounding.
Even though the picture of reality as structured in this way seems very plausible, and seems to appear in philosophical discourse no later than Plato’s Euthyphro and Aristotle’s theory of the four causes, the theory of metaphysical grounding is in a very poor state as compared to notions similarly central to metaphysics, like existence, generality, necessity and possibility - largely because during the 20th century, it was almost entirely neglected. This can be attributed in part to the lingering anti-metaphysical stance of the logical positivists, and in part to the special difficulty of the concept of ground, which has made it appear to many to resist systematic theorizing. Things changed only in 2001, with Kit Fine’s influential paper The Question of Realism; since then, a highly productive debate on grounding has developed, in which some first steps towards a developed theory of grounding have already been made.
This project is based on the conviction that the metaphysical because is as central to metaphysics as concepts like existence, identity, and necessity. And while our theoretical grasp of the latter has improved immensely over the last century, not least through the methods of formal logic and semantics, our theory of grounding is much less developed. The main aim of my project, accordingly, is to help fill this deficit. To that end, I shall investigate in systematic fashion the most important structural properties of grounding and in particular its interaction with the other mentioned core concepts of metaphysics, especially those of existence and generality. This inquiry will be informed by the formal methods of logic and semantics, while at the same time keeping in focus the genuinely philosophical questions which those methods are supposed to help us answer.
Grounding - Metaphysics, Science, & Logic
- Title: Grounding - Metaphysics, Science, & Logic
- Time Span: 2013 - 2016
- Sponsor: SNF
- Director: Prof. Dr. Benjamin Schnieder
- Web: https://groundingproject.wordpress.com/
The idea that reality is not constituted by a mere juxtaposition of facts, but is rather a complex network of interconnected facts of various degrees of ‘fundamentality’ or ‘basicness’ is probably as old as philosophical and scientific thinking about reality. What determines these degrees of fundamentality is most naturally thought of as the relation of one fact holding in virtue of other facts – or, as philosophers currently like to say, the relation of one fact being grounded in other facts.
Yet grounding has only really become a proper object of serious philosophical inquiry in the last decade or so. And because this renaissance of grounding research is a recent phenomenon, the contemporary debate about a number of central issues concerning the notion – e.g., how it is exactly to be understood, what its connections with other important notions are, what role it can be taken to play in various debates and areas of inquiry – is only in an inchoate state, with many issues still to be addressed.
This project purports to further this debate, by addressing some of the most important of these issues. Our general goal is to further the efforts made by philosophers to understand grounding in its various species, to critically examine its connections to other central notions, and to detail some of its major applications in various areas of inquiry.
John-Stuart-Mill Chair
Von 2013 bis 2016 gab es am Philosophischen Seminar eine DAAD-Gastprofessur, den John-Stuart-Mill Chair. Um die interdisziplinäre Ausgestaltung des Gastlehrstuhls zu dokumentieren, wurde John Stuart Mill als Namenspatron gewählt. Mill ist einer der großen Theoretiker der Freiheit, der gleichzeitig in der Philosophie, Politikwissenschaft und praktischen Politik sowie der Ökonomie einflussreich war.
Inhaber des John-Stuart-Mill Chairs waren:
| SoSe 2016 | Emanuela Ceva (Pavia) |
| WiSe 2015/16 | Christine Straehle (Ottawa) |
| SoSe 2015 | Michael Moehler (Virginia Tech) |
| WiSe 2014/15 | David Schmidtz (Arizona) |
| SoSe 2014 | Dale Miller (Old Dominion) |
| WiSe 2013/14 | David Weinstein (Wake Forest) |
| SoSe 2013 | Jonathan Riley (Tulane) |
Modelling and Normative Evaluation of Collective Decisions
- Title: Modelling and Normative Evaluation of Collective Decisions
- Time Span: 2012 - 2016
- Sponsor: Nachwuchsinitiative der Universität Hamburg
- Director: Prof. Dr. Thomas Schramme
Everyday examples of collective decisions are electoral processes, governmental actions and the treatment of minorities. Based on collaboration between economics and philosophy we conduct fundamental research in behavioral economics, ethics and philosophy of science. Our priorities are the debate on normative standards of evaluation, models of behavioral economics and methods of measurement of welfare. Our aim is to make an inovative, interdisciplinary and collaborative contribution by using both theoretical and empirical methods with a special focus on economic experiments.
Nominalizations: Issues in Linguistics & Philosophy
- Title: Nominalizations: Issues in Linguistics and Philosophy
- Time Span: 2011 - 2015
- Sponsor: DFG/ANR
- Director: Prof. Dr. Benjamin Schnieder
- Web: https://nominalizations.wordpress.com/
Nominalization figure prominently in both linguistics and philosophy. There is as yet very little interaction, though, between linguists working on the syntax and semantics of nominalizations and philosophers interested in the objects to which nominalizations apparently refer. This research project aims to fill that gap, bringing together a number of linguists especially on the French side, some of which are involved already in research groups studying nominalizations, with a group of German philosophers with a focus on ontology. They will systematically explore questions that require the joint contribution of the two disciplines.