Emanuele Ratti

My wonderful colleague Poppy Mankowitz is advertising two 3-yr postdocs & one funded PhD on her ERC project Expressing Value in Language, which investigates evaluative adjectives (‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘beautiful’, ‘tasty’, etc.) from the perspective of philosophy & theoretical & experimental linguistics.

FULLY FUNDED PHDs IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

I'm looking for *two* PhD students to join my ERC project on refugee-led approaches to displacement justice. The positions are funded for four years, and you get to join our lovely community in Bristol. Please share widely!

philjobs.org/job/show/30997

🚨 Our Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Computer Simulations in Science is now live. It was a lot of work but I’m proud of this substantial update. I hope it helps those in #philsci interested in the philosophical implications of computational methods.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/simu...

4/4 This helps explain the generality and transferability of ML methods across scientific disciplines, and suggests shifting the debate from:

“How is ML theory-laden?” → “When should ML be theory-laden?”

Very curious to hear thoughts from philosophers of modelling, data, and AI.

3/4 The key claim: core stages of ML model building (e.g., parameter optimisation, architectural selection) can proceed without necessary reference to domain-theory — even though theoretical assumptions can still enter via data and downstream interpretation

2/4
By analysing #ML models via a comparison with phenomenological models, we introduce two notions:
• Theory-indifference in model construction
• Theory-infection as a weaker form of #theoryladenness

Machine learning and theory-ladenness: a phenomenological account - Synthese Synthese - We provide an analysis of theory-ladenness in machine learning (ML) in science, where ‘theory’ (that we call ‘domain-theory’) refers to the domain knowledge of...

New #philsci #philsky paper on #ML and #scientificmodelling! link.springer.com/article/10.1...
“Machine learning and theory-ladenness: a phenomenological account”
We revisit a widespread assumption in #philsci that modelling practices are inevitably shaped by domain-theoretical knowledge
1/4

Looking forward to reading a paper on this!

Two-year postdoc position at Bristol on the Leverhulme-funded Foundations of Longtermism project.

If there’s someone you know working in moral philosophy, decision theory, or formal epistemology more broadly who might be interested, please do encourage them to apply.

and challenges have shifted as AI becomes part of everyday clinical practice.

This dual perspective gives a unique view of both where we are now and how we got here—highlighting the growing need for ethical frameworks that keep pace with real-world innovation.
#AIethics #MedicalEthics #BioEthics

Our two-pronged approach does more than just summarize the latest (2021–2023) research on AI ethics in healthcare. By also mapping how narratives in scoping reviews from 2014 onward have evolved, we reveal how core debates, frameworks...

Ethical and social considerations of applying artificial intelligence in healthcare—a two-pronged scoping review - BMC Medical Ethics Background Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being designed, tested, and in many cases actively employed in almost every aspect of healthcare from primary care to public health. It is by now well establ...

🚀Publication alert!
How have our conversations about #AIethics in healthcare changed? Where are they headed?
Excited to share my paper in BMC #MedicalEthics: “Ethical and social considerations of applying artificial intelligence in healthcare- a two-pronged scoping review”
doi.org/10.1186/s129...

I worked at Notre Dame for a few years, and I have to admit that there were lounges with free coffee

Reviewer: "what about x, eh? The author does not consider it, checkmate! Oh, I'm so smart, you are so dumb" : rejection. But there is a 4-page section explicitly discussing x. #coolrejections #philsky #philsci #peronirotte

Interesting to know about their reaction when they know more precisely what their salary will be

In an open access article in American Philosophical Quarterly 62.1, @emratti.bsky.social & Mark Graves ( @aiandfaith.bsky.social ) conceptualizes AI ethics via the capability approach, to help clarify and guide the ethical considerations of AI design. buff.ly/42YlLHs

1/ I am seeing a lot of comments on the slashing of NIH support along the lines of “universities should just spend their huge endowments.”

I’m the last person to cheer on the institutional stratification rising endowments have contributed to. But let me explain why this is not a solution.

Very cool!

Here is the Turing centenary conference we organized at BU's Center for Philosophy & History of Science when I was director:
www.bu.edu/cphs/colloqu...
& the Boston Studies volume Juliet & I edited from conference referenced below:
link.springer.com/book/10.1007... #philsky #HPS 🏳️‍🌈

...and generate data, should get priority. Here we dismantle this prejudice, by unveiling the experimental dimension of bioinformatics 5/5 END

Who has the claim to the narrative of a complex project? The person who worked at the bench, or the one analyzing data? More concretely: who gets first names, and why? There is a well-documented epistemic prejudice arguing that wet lab biologists, because they do experiments... 4/5

While this may look like an academic exercise in trying to philosophically justify an unusual idea, our motivations are very political and rooted in a real problem: how do power dynamics in academic settings shape the relationship between computational biologists and 'wet lab' biologists? 3/5

We argue that computational biology is an experimental science. This is not just a provocative stance: we substantiate our claim using both theoretical and empirical arguments, through a case study in #singlecell RNA sequencing (RNA velocity) and other #genomics examples.
But why this claim? 2/5

Happy to share with you the final result of two years of work (with Giuseppe D'Agostino) at the intersection between #PhilSci and #Bioinformatics and recently accepted on Perspectives on Science.
philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24609/
(thread below) 1/5

Thanks Eran!

A Capability Approach to AI Ethics Abstract. We propose a conceptualization and implementation of AI ethics via the capability approach. We aim to show that conceptualizing AI ethics through the capability approach has two main advanta...

New paper in American Philosophical Quarterly:
A Capability Approach to AI Ethics.
We propose a conceptualization of #AIEthics via the capability approach, and show the significant theoretical and concrete benefits of using this approach #PhilTech
scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/apq/arti...

Back to the office today at Politecnico, and I had a nice parcel waiting for me – the new Routledge Handbook of Causality and Causal Methods, with my and @emratti.bsky.social chapter on big data for causal inference and competing views on quantity and quality of data.

dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781...

Can you please add me? Thanks!

Would love to be included!

Please add me!