Structuring Decisions Under Deep Uncertainty

Innovative research on decision making under ‘deep uncertainty’ is underway in applied fields such as engineering and operational research, largely outside the view of normative theorists grounded in decision theory. Applied methods and tools for decision support under deep uncertainty go beyond standard decision theory in the attention that they give to the structuring of decisions. Decision structuring is an important part of a broader philosophy of managing uncertainty in decision making, and normative decision theorists can both learn from, and contribute to, the growing deep uncertainty decision support literature

Why you have one trait rather than another: The failure of the explanatory-chain stragegy

In The Nature of Selection (1984), Sober argued that natural selection is in principle powerless to explain why any individual organism has the traits it does rather than the very same individual having different traits. A debate ensued, in which critics have argued against Sober by laying explanations end-to-end, to form a chain of explanation that begins with selection and passes through one or more intermediate events before reaching the target explanandum. I argue that Sober’s critics misunderstand how contrastive explananda (why p rather than q) behave in such explanatory chains, and that this strategy has so far failed

Pattern as Observation: Darwin’s ‘Great Facts’ of Geographical Distribution

Among philosophical analyses of Darwin’s Origin, a standard view says the theory presented there had no concrete observational consequences against which it might be checked. I challenge this idea with a new analysis of Darwin’s principal geographical distribution observations and how they connect to his common ancestry hypothesis

Why you have one trait rather than another: The failure of the explanatory-chain stragegy

In The Nature of Selection (1984), Sober argued that natural selection is in principle powerless to explain why any individual organism has the traits it does rather than the very same individual having different traits. A debate ensued, in which critics have argued against Sober by laying explanations end-to-end, to form a chain of explanation that begins with selection and passes through one or more intermediate events before reaching the target explanandum. I argue that Sober’s critics misunderstand how contrastive explananda (why p rather than q) behave in such explanatory chains, and that this strategy has so far failed

Why Simpler Computer Simulation Models Can Be Epistemically Better for Informing Decisions

For computer simulation models to usefully inform climate risk management, uncertainties in model projections must be explored and characterized. Because doing so requires running the model many ti..

Towards Best Practice Framing of Uncertainty in Scientific Publications: A Review of Water Resources Research Abstracts

Uncertainty is recognized as a key issue in water resources research, amongst other sciences. Discussions of uncertainty typically focus on tools and techniques applied within an analysis, e.g. uncertainty quantification and model validation. But uncertainty is also addressed outside the analysis, in writing scientific publications. The language that authors use conveys their perspective of the role of uncertainty when interpreting a claim —what we call here “framing” the uncertainty. This article promotes awareness of uncertainty framing in four ways. 1) It proposes a typology of eighteen uncertainty frames, addressing five questions about uncertainty. 2) It describes the context in which uncertainty framing occurs. This is an interdisciplinary topic, involving philosophy of science, science studies, linguistics, rhetoric, and argumentation. 3) We analyze the use of uncertainty frames in a sample of 177 abstracts from the Water Resources Research journal in 2015. This helped develop and tentatively verify the typology, and provides a snapshot of current practice. 4) Provocative recommendations promote adjustments for a more influential, dynamic science. Current practice in uncertainty framing might be described as carefully-considered incremental science. In addition to uncertainty quantification and degree of belief (present in ~5% of abstracts), uncertainty is addressed by a combination of limiting scope, deferring to further work (~25%) and indicating evidence is sufficient (~40%) – or uncertainty is completely ignored (~8%). There is a need for public debate within our discipline to decide in what context different uncertainty frames are appropriate. Uncertainty framing cannot remain a hidden practice evaluated only by lone reviewers

There is no Asymmetry of Identity Assumptions in the Debate over Selection and Individuals

A long-running dispute concerns which adaptation-related explananda natural selection can be said to explain. (The issue is conceptual, not empirical { and orthogonal adaptationism.) At issue are explananda of the form: why a given individual organism has a given adaptation rather than that same individual having another trait. It is broadly agreed that one must be ready to back up a `No' answer with an appropriate theory of trans-world identity for individuals. I argue, against the conventional wisdom, that the same is true for a `Yes' answer. My conclusion recasts the landscape and opens the door to a potential resolution

Expert Judgment for Climate Change Adaptation

Climate change adaptation is largely a local matter, and adaptation planning can benefit from local climate change projections. Such projections are typically generated by accepting climate model outputs in a relatively uncritical way. We argue, based on the IPCC’s treatment of model outputs from the CMIP5 ensemble, that this approach is unwarranted and that subjective expert judgment should play a central role in the provision of local climate change projections intended to support decision-making