The philosophy of the special sciences is concerned with philosophical questions which arise in the various individual sciences. Our interests here lie above all in physics, psychology, the social sciences, statistics, and artificial intelligence research. Here we are interested in questions such as the following.
In philosophy of physics, we are interested primarily in quantum theory and theories of space and time. What is the status of gauge symmetries? What are the consequences of the practice of effective field theories for the discussions around emergence and reduction? Is the thermodynamics of black holes more than a formal analogy? Is the universe an open system? What is the epistemic value of discretization methods in physics? Are space and time fundamental or are they emergent in a certain sense? How do physicists use mathematics to explain the world? What role do symmetries play in these explanations? Are quantum-mechanical probabilities subjective probabilities?
In the philosophy of the social sciences, we are interested in the emergence of social norms, the role of biases, and how groups make decisions. What are the advantages and disadvantages of group deliberations which ultimately lead to a consensus? And how can certain biases (such as the anchoring effect) be corrected? In the philosophy of statistics and artificial intelligence, we work on alternative representations of uncertainty (such as the theory of imprecise probability) and conduct research in the foundations of the mathematical theory of machine learning. In the philosophy of psychology and neuroscience, we ask whether one can deduce from the success of the predictive processing theory of the human mind that the brain is a Bayesian machine. And: what implications does a naturalistic theory of memory have for questions of personal identity and ethics? In the philosophy of medicine, we examine how different kinds of evidence can be combined with one another. Finally, in the philosophy of climate science, we pursue the question of how the IPCC committee evaluates the degree of understanding of certain aspects of climate change and how progress in climate science can be measured.