Classifying Philosophy: Problems and Strategies

Venue: online (Zoom link: https://buffalo.zoom.us/j/95542747628?pwd=UDY0bjI3ZGxscjVyRU5iZEU2TUZ0Zz09; password: workshop)

Date: Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Schedule

2:00 pm Barry Smith: Introduction and Welcome

2:10 pm Giulio Carducci & Marco Leontino: Semantically Aware Text Categorization for Metadata Annotation

2:40 pm Colin F. Allen: Classifying Philosophy – InPho by the People and for the People

3:10 pm Jaimie Murdock: Comparing Philosophy Categorization Systems

3:40 pm Break

3:50 pm Christophe Malaterre: Categorizing Philosophy of Science by means of Topic-modeling

4:20 pm Louis Chartrand: Explorations into the Language Model Revolution

4:50 pm Joe Ulatowski: Truth Under the Macroscope

5:20 pm Gloria Sansò & Yusheng Xia: Some proposals to Improve the PhilPapers Categorization System

Abstracts

Truth Under the Macroscope

Joe Ulatowski

The Macroscope (macroscope.tech) is a user interface consisting of a client-server interaction, which permits users to query and analyse synchronic contextual structure of words and diachronic word embeddings to uncover in the former which words are most semantically similar and in the latter which words most often co-occur. The Macroscope uses over 155 billion words of historical text from 1800-2009, and the corpora adjust automatically in accordance with the English Google Ngram Book corpus. In this presentation, I show how to examine ‘truth’ and its cognates using The Macroscope and what such an exploration tells us about the nature of truth, in particular whether truth evolves in a way that favours alethic relativism.

Participants

Barry Smith is a well-known contributor to both theoretical and applied ontology.

Giulio Carducci works as an R&D software engineer at Synapta, a company based in Turin which operates in the field of public procurement. Previously, he won a research grant for the REPOSUM project from the University of Turin, where he studied a corpus of metadata about PhD theses using several data analysis and natural language processing techniques.

Marco Leontino has recently been involved in the PRiSMHA project from the University of Turin, where he contributed in the development of an annotation platform about historical events. Previously, he won a research grant for the REPOSUM project from the University of Turin, where he studied a corpus of metadata about PhD theses.

Colin F. Allen is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. His main areas of research are neuroscience and the philosophical foundations of cognitive science. He is the director of Internet Philosophy Ontology (InPho) who received many research grants for its work in computational humanities.

Jaimie Murdock is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. He works on digital history, and he is particularly interested in intellectual development. For ten years, he has been the lead developer of the InPho Project.

Christophe Malaterre is Professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His main area of research is philosophy of science with a special focus on astrobiology and the origins of life; he is also interested inon digital humanities

Louis Chartrand is a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pittsburgh and an associate researcher at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is an expert in concept mining and corpora, currently working on the Geography of Philosophy Project

Joe Ulatowski is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Director of the Experimental Philosophy Research Group at the University of Waikato, in New Zealand. His research focuses on facts, and the nature and the value of truth

Gloria Sansò is a Phd student at the University at Buffalo. Her main area of research is social ontology.

Yusheng Xia is a Master’s student at the University at Buffalo. He is currently working on metaphysics and digital approaches to the humanities.