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Biases in Science (10 - 12 April 2019)

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Idea and Motivation

One of the main obstacles of reliable scientific research is the occurrence of explicit or implicit biases. Well-known examples of such biases include the confirmation bias, the ingroup bias, and biases resulting from industry-sponsored research. Each of these biases may impede the objectivity of scientific inquiry by, among other things, influencing one’s judgement as to what counts as relevant evidence, or one's selection of research problems and methods of inquiry. All this, in turn, may ultimately affect the explanations, the predictions, as well as the broader theoretical accounts accepted by scientists. What is more, as research results often provide direct input for policy making, the problem of biases in science is also of socio-political relevance.

This conference aims at bringing together scholars from philosophy, the sciences, and science policy, to advance our understanding of biases in science by addressing questions such as:

How do psychological mechanisms for scientific biases differ from those underpinning everyday biases in categorization, diagnosis, induction, etc.?
What social mechanisms catalyse biased research?
How can biased reasoning and information sharing be formally modelled?
How are general hypotheses concerning bias supported by concrete cases of biased research?
How are answers to the above questions helpful in mitigating the risks of biased research?

Program

Day 1 (10 April 2019)

TimeEvent
09:30 - 10:00 Registration
10:00 - 11:15 Jacob Stegenga (Keynote Talk): Debiasing Inference
Chair: Stephan Hartmann
11:15 - 11:45 Coffee Break
11:45 - 12:15 Alexander Reutlinger: Why Some Non-Epistemic Influences on Science Are Illegitimate – An Evidential Account
Chair: Jan Sprenger
12:15 - 12:45 David Teira: Replication and Biases: a Contractarian Approach
Chair: Jan Sprenger
12:45 - 13:15 Charles Beasley: Bias in Comparative Psychology: Reconsidering The Neyman-Pearson Method
Chair: Jan Sprenger
13:15 - 14:45 Lunch Break
14:45 - 15:15 Torsten Wilholt: Bias, Fraud and Interests in Science
Chair: Matteo Colombo
15:15 - 15:45 Boaz Miller: Group Knowledge: Beyond Aggregation versus Deliberation
Chair: Matteo Colombo
15:45 - 16:15 Bennett Holman: An Agenda for the Formal Modeling of Bias
Chair: Matteo Colombo
16:15 - 16:45 Coffee Break
16:45 - 17:15 Stephan Hartmann and Soroush Rafiee Rad: Anchoring in Deliberations
Chair: Manuela Fernández Pinto
17:15 - 17:45 Inkeri Koskinen and Rusanen Anna-Mari: AI, Objectivity and Epistemic Risks
Chair: Manuela Fernández Pinto
18:30 Informal gathering at Max Emanuel

Day 2 (11 April 2019)

TimeEvent
10:00 - 11:15 Inmaculada de Melo-Martín (Keynote Talk): Biases and the Commercialization of the Biomedical Sciences: Where We Ought to Go Depends a Great Deal on Where We Want to Get to
Chair: Lorenzo Casini
11:15 - 11:45 Coffee Break
11:45 - 12:15 Manuela Fernández Pinto: Industrial Selection Bias: How Serious Is It and What to Do About It
Chair: Torsten Wilholt
12:15 - 12:45 Simon Scheller: Are Democratically Organised Research Teams More Resilient Against Biases and Special Interests?
Chair: Torsten Wilholt
12:45 - 13:15 Annemarie Borg, Daniel Frey, Dunja Šešelja, and Christian Straßer: Modeling Bias and Deception in Scientific Inquiry
Chair: Torsten Wilholt
13:15 - 14:45 Lunch Break
14:45 - 15:15 Vlasta Sikimic: The Sunk Cost Bias and the Halting Problem in Science
Chair: Simon Scheller
15:15 - 15:45 Lorenzo Casini and Jan Sprenger: Meta-Analyses and Conflicts of Interest
Chair: Simon Scheller
15:45 - 16:15 Stijn Conix and Andreas De Block: Bias in Moral Philosophy
Chair: Simon Scheller
16:15 - 16:45 Coffee Break
16:45 - 17:15 Jitka Paitlová and Petr Jedlička: Objectivity in the Natural Sciences: An Empirical Investigation
Chair: David Teira
17:15 - 17:45 Silvia Ivani, Matteo Colombo and Leandra Bucher: Uncertainty in Science: A Study on the Role of Non-Cognitive Values in the Assessment of Inductive Risk
Chair: David Teira
19:00 Conference Dinner (Restaurant Arabesk)

Day 3 (12 April 2019)

TimeEvent
10:00 - 11:15 Ulrike Hahn (Keynote Talk): Another Look at Confirmation Bias
Chair: Marcel Weber
11:15 - 11:45 Coffee Break
11:45 - 12:15 Joshua Mugg and Muhammad Ali Khalidi: The Self-Reflexive Bias Paradox
Chair: Bennett Holman
12:15 - 12:45 Juergen Landes: Less is More: On the Value of Agents’ Testimony
Chair: Bennett Holman
12:45 - 13:15 Christoph Merdes, Ulrike Hahn and Momme Von Sydow: Modeling Confirmation Bias with Sequential Reliability Learning
Chair: Bennett Holman
13:15 - 14:45 Lunch Break
14:45 - 15:15 Alexander Krauss: How our Mind Constrains and Biases our Scientific Theories
Chair: Alexander Reutlinger
15:15 - 15:45 Noah van Dongen and Michał Sikorski: Objectivity for the Research Worker
Chair: Alexander Reutlinger
15.45 - 16:15 Tobias Henschen: The Role of Non-Scientific Values in Macroeconomics
Chair: Alexander Reutlinger
16:15 - 16:45 Coffee Break
16:45 - 18:00 Olivier Roy (Keynote Talk): Deliberation, Single-Peaknedness, and Voting Cycles
Chair: Dunja Šešelja

Acknowledgement

The conference is organized by the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (LMU Munich) and funded by Stephan Hartmann and Marcel Weber's DFG-SNF Research Grant "Inferentialism, Bayesianism and Scientific Explanation".