Uljana Feest

Thanks for this super-interesting thread!

already looking forward to the episode where you disect this :-)

it's an odd name for sure, but it's not pronounced with an ü

and as a German prof I can tell you that that's correct!

how did you figure this out?

no words

If you want to do an MA in North American Studies, you should come to Hannover (see cool video below). And if you want to do an MA in Philosophy of Science, you should ALSO come to Hannover. We may not have a video (yet), but we are also smart, international, and fun :-)

"Feest demonstrates how there is no such thing as a theory-free exploration of psychological phenomena: exploration demands operationisation of some kind, which in turn reflects some kind of theoretical commitment about the object of research."

The brilliant Suilin Lavelle (Edinburgh) wrote a very kind and thorough review of my book (see below).
#HPS #philsci #metascience #psychology #STS

you still are!

I warmly recommend snowpants (from dog-parent to dog-parent)

Know a promising undergrad who wants more time before applying to grad school? Pitt has a funded postbac program for students from underrepresented groups.

This year, my lab will consider applications for solo supervision or to be co-supervised by @mehrgol.bsky.social!

App deadline is March 15!

Just in case you don't know this and are interested in reaching out to her, Susanna Schellenberg is also on Bluesky

Yes, this is what good science journalism should look like

OMG. This is horrific. Thanks for the reminder that things are not OK in Minneapolis

I enjoyed another episode of the podcast Maintenance Phase:
www.maintenancephase.com/about
With @michaelhobbes.bsky.social and @yrfatfriend.bsky.social
#philsci #STS #sciencepolicy

“I Have Been Here Too Long”: Read Letters from the Children Detained at ICE’s Dilley Facility Hundreds of children are currently being held with their parents at an immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas. In letters and drawings, eight kids convey the pain of feeling trapped with no end...

Please take the time to read what the children detained in Dilley wrote me in their own words: www.propublica.org/article/ice-... 10/

WTAF

Looking at your profile, I now understand better that by "frameworks" you probably mean different disciplinary toolboxes in an interdisciplinary field. This interesting bc interdisciplinary endeavors presuppose some understanding of dealing with the same subject matter

but it sounds like that's not quite what you have in mind anyway

I just don't think that justification of prior commitments is that central to the research process. I think of such commitments more as starting points that can be reflected upon and that enable researchers to engage in iterative investigative processes (similar to Hasok Chang)

Yeah, maybe I was responding to a different notion of robustness. I would have assumed that things don't "just show up" across frameworks. If they are shared, it's because of a prior comitment. On my understanding, robustness reasoning was meant to justify this commitment

So, I'm all for pluralism, but it has to be guided by some thinking about why a plurality of methods might be relevant to the same question/research object. (I try to explain some of this in my book, Operationism in Psychology ;-))

I think I might be responding not so much to Wimsatt as to triangulation in the Reichenbach/Salmon tradition, where one precondition of robustness is that the effects are generated in theoretically independent ways.

A lot of theoretical work would have to go into identifying the relevantly similar contexts, in which two effects are indicative of the same thing. But in that case, it's the theory that guides our thinking about whether effects (and the inferences drawn from them) are robust, not vice versa.

It's just that I have a hard time imagining a scenario where robustness would be helpful for cog sci (which is not to say that there is none). Take the robustness of effects: They can be replicable but also highly context-dependent.

me neither... I thought this was just a reference to the E-files

you two crack me up :-)

I am skeptical about the desirability of old-school robustness, which strikes me as too mechanical. You may be right that cog sci tends to "fall in love" with specific frameworks, but I think the answer has to be some kind of theoretically motivated pluralism, not robustness

ok, I see. Wimsatt indeed means at least two (perhaps three) very different things: (1) robustness of effects under varying auxiliaries and (2) robustness/reality of an entity as detected by different instruments, (3) robustness of inference from various effects/measurements