Dear all,

We are pleased to announce that on Friday, May 03 at 17:30 (CET), Alastair Wilson (University of Leeds) will give the talk Testing Grounds, as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Spring 2024, organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.

This hybrid talk will take place in the Multiuso room, Theology Building, USI West Campus

and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining it online, please write to events.isfi@usi.ch 

For more information: https://www.usi.ch/en/feeds/26653 

Here is the abstract of the talk:

Abstract: This paper is about grounding explanations in science (especially in physics), and how they are justified. The idea that science is an important guide to what grounds what has been growing in popularity in recent years (e.g. Schaffer 2017; Robertson and Wilson 2023; Giannotti and Kortabarria forthcoming). The thesis of the present paper is that successful theory-reductions and theory-unifications are our primary evidence base when it comes to identifying grounding relations in science. The argument applies the recent proposal of Robertson and Wilson (2023) concerning the transformability of ‘horizontal’ reductions into ‘vertical’ reductions to argue that, in general, major theoretical transitions in science are associated with the production of new evidence concerning the relevant grounding relations.