Mariam Thalos
I am a Distinguished Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. After earning my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1993, I taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and then at the University of utah, before joining the faculty of the University of Tennessee Department of Philosophy in 2018.
I describe myself as a Philosopher of Science, focusing on physical, decisional (including formal decision and game theories) and human sciences, with additional specialisms on philosophical topics around practical reasoning, including action theory, phenomenology and freedom. There is no one single key or unifying element to my work, but there is in it a general concern for resisting a tendency (in philosophy and elsewhere) to oversimplify via reductionist programs.
I conceive of the antithesis to reductionism as a positive view about the plurality of scales at which entities interact in the universe. This is the major theme of my monograph Without Hierarchy; The Scale Freedom of the Universe, (Oxford, 2013).
It’s simply not true, as I argue in that monograph, that all “activity” (as I call it) transpires at the most minute spatial scale (if there is even such a thing). The antithesis of reductionism is assertion of the scale freedom of the universe, the assertion that the universe is active at every size scale, which has a consequence that interactions of macro entities are emphatically not to be viewed under a cipher or code that “interprets” or otherwise “translates” for beasts who live at our size scale the putatively “true” interactions of the universe—the “causal” interactions among the micro entities. Throughout my work I have criticised causal theories committed to that causal-reductive conception of the universe (calling on features of our best-confirmed quantum theories of the micro); I have advanced work on scientific explanation that resists reduction; I have articulated a notion of fundamentality as a genus term, embracing the many disciplines of social science (including economics) in a democratic rather than hierarchically organized scientific enterprise; and when it comes to causation, I have offered a positive account of it that is compatible with a nonreductive framework.
My second book, A Social Theory of Freedom (Routledge, April 2016), offers a new answer to the timeless philosophical question of human freedom, one that engages with social science but repulses the relevance of questions around determinism, biological and otherwise. It advances the cause of an existential theory of freedom in new ways—and it does so without denying the relevance of science, especially social science, for illuminating human agency.
I apply as much of my findings as I can to issues of public policy. I am currently being funded by the NSF to study precautionary decision making in relation to catastrophic risk, especially in public contexts. The goal is a prescriptive theory of precaution (an account of how best to proceed in the context of major uncertainty) that does more than simply endorse aversion to risk. And I'm developing these ideas in the context of a larger book-length project: Foundations for a comprehensive decision science (see more on this below).
I’ve authored numerous articles on causation, explanation and how relations between micro and macro are handled by a range of scientific theories; as well as articles in political philosophy, action theory, metaphysics, epistemology, logical paradox and feminism. My work has won the Royal Institute of Philosophy inaugural Essay Prize (2012), and again in 2013, and the American Philosophical Assn’s Kavka Prize (1999). I’m a former fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Australian National University, the Tanner Humanities Center, the University of Sydney Center for Foundations of Science, and the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
I describe myself as a Philosopher of Science, focusing on physical, decisional (including formal decision and game theories) and human sciences, with additional specialisms on philosophical topics around practical reasoning, including action theory, phenomenology and freedom. There is no one single key or unifying element to my work, but there is in it a general concern for resisting a tendency (in philosophy and elsewhere) to oversimplify via reductionist programs.
I conceive of the antithesis to reductionism as a positive view about the plurality of scales at which entities interact in the universe. This is the major theme of my monograph Without Hierarchy; The Scale Freedom of the Universe, (Oxford, 2013).
It’s simply not true, as I argue in that monograph, that all “activity” (as I call it) transpires at the most minute spatial scale (if there is even such a thing). The antithesis of reductionism is assertion of the scale freedom of the universe, the assertion that the universe is active at every size scale, which has a consequence that interactions of macro entities are emphatically not to be viewed under a cipher or code that “interprets” or otherwise “translates” for beasts who live at our size scale the putatively “true” interactions of the universe—the “causal” interactions among the micro entities. Throughout my work I have criticised causal theories committed to that causal-reductive conception of the universe (calling on features of our best-confirmed quantum theories of the micro); I have advanced work on scientific explanation that resists reduction; I have articulated a notion of fundamentality as a genus term, embracing the many disciplines of social science (including economics) in a democratic rather than hierarchically organized scientific enterprise; and when it comes to causation, I have offered a positive account of it that is compatible with a nonreductive framework.
My second book, A Social Theory of Freedom (Routledge, April 2016), offers a new answer to the timeless philosophical question of human freedom, one that engages with social science but repulses the relevance of questions around determinism, biological and otherwise. It advances the cause of an existential theory of freedom in new ways—and it does so without denying the relevance of science, especially social science, for illuminating human agency.
I apply as much of my findings as I can to issues of public policy. I am currently being funded by the NSF to study precautionary decision making in relation to catastrophic risk, especially in public contexts. The goal is a prescriptive theory of precaution (an account of how best to proceed in the context of major uncertainty) that does more than simply endorse aversion to risk. And I'm developing these ideas in the context of a larger book-length project: Foundations for a comprehensive decision science (see more on this below).
I’ve authored numerous articles on causation, explanation and how relations between micro and macro are handled by a range of scientific theories; as well as articles in political philosophy, action theory, metaphysics, epistemology, logical paradox and feminism. My work has won the Royal Institute of Philosophy inaugural Essay Prize (2012), and again in 2013, and the American Philosophical Assn’s Kavka Prize (1999). I’m a former fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Australian National University, the Tanner Humanities Center, the University of Sydney Center for Foundations of Science, and the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.
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Draft of new book: Fault-lines of Philosophy by Mariam Thalos
Books by Mariam Thalos
Thalos illuminates these counters to the tradition principle, in order to assemble them in support of a vaster (and at its core Aristotelian) philosophical vision of sciences in which they are not organized within a hierarchy. In so doing, she articulates the principle that the universe is active at absolutely all scales of measurement.
Papers in progress by Mariam Thalos
analysis of Logical truth that will emerge here will be analogous to H.L.A. Hart’s analysis of legal authority; it too will invoke the idea of a rule of recognition.
Upcoming and recently delivered talks by Mariam Thalos
What I wish to argue is that we change--no surprise there. But not by throwing off youthful ways. We do it, instead, by acquiring new ways of coping (“grown-up postures”) that have to live alongside, and maybe on top of, the youthful postures. We end up having to manage a large repertoire of attitudes and postures on the world, and the grownup part of us is not so much the new postures we learn to inhabit, but the managerial characteristics of moving between them that we develop in the arc of experience, that mark a distinctive pattern of inhabiting the different postures by turns.
One moral of my tale is a cautionary one: I will be arguing that the postures that are prescribed to us in modern, formal decision theories (for example, in the Theory of Expected Utility and its descendants), are the postures of youth—indeed, the least mature ones—and not the postures of adulthood.
Thalos illuminates these counters to the tradition principle, in order to assemble them in support of a vaster (and at its core Aristotelian) philosophical vision of sciences in which they are not organized within a hierarchy. In so doing, she articulates the principle that the universe is active at absolutely all scales of measurement.
analysis of Logical truth that will emerge here will be analogous to H.L.A. Hart’s analysis of legal authority; it too will invoke the idea of a rule of recognition.
What I wish to argue is that we change--no surprise there. But not by throwing off youthful ways. We do it, instead, by acquiring new ways of coping (“grown-up postures”) that have to live alongside, and maybe on top of, the youthful postures. We end up having to manage a large repertoire of attitudes and postures on the world, and the grownup part of us is not so much the new postures we learn to inhabit, but the managerial characteristics of moving between them that we develop in the arc of experience, that mark a distinctive pattern of inhabiting the different postures by turns.
One moral of my tale is a cautionary one: I will be arguing that the postures that are prescribed to us in modern, formal decision theories (for example, in the Theory of Expected Utility and its descendants), are the postures of youth—indeed, the least mature ones—and not the postures of adulthood.
This is my impersonation of a philosopher working from home, which aims at making lively a few worthy philosophical questions. The old is new again, as each generation confronts its own challenges and demons, in its own context.
https://aeon.co/essays/more-than-having-options-freedom-is-being-true-to-yourself
Keywords: statistics; distributions; risk; instrumental reasoning; expectational reasoning.
concerns regarding the dynamics and transformations of a perplexing variety of
organic and nonorganic substances—to which it must be faithful. Even if it is true that
chemical facts bear a special (reductive) relationship to physical facts, nonetheless it will
always still be true that the theoretical lenses of the two disciplines are distinct. This has
consequences for how chemists pursue their research, as well as how chemistry should be
taught.
There are several—and better—ways to conceptualize precaution. The first order of business of this essay is to show that these are nonoverlapping. The second order of business is to articulate one decided reason for taking precaution seriously. In the process we shall see also that traditional risk assessment, also known as cost-benefit analysis (CBA), does not take precaution seriously. Cost-benefit analysis is nowadays pervasive. This fact represents the ascendancy of a decision making calculus that grew out of 20th century British moral theory, especially Utilitarianism, and culminated in 1944 with publication of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s pioneering work Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, where for the first time appeared the doctrine now familiarly known as the theory of expected utility (EU). According to this theory, to be rational in practical matters is simply to maximize expected utility. And risk analysis seeks to do just that—typically by measuring expected utility in monetary terms. But EU treats risk evenly wherever it finds it: increments of hangnail (trivial) risk are treated on a par with same-size increments of catastrophic risk. This is irrational, particularly if the catastrophic outcome in question is irreversible—a point of no return. So if we are to observe precaution in such cases, we have to go beyond traditional risk analysis.
Classical analyses of this question have paid insufficient attention to the question of the propriety of using expected values to assess the St. Petersburg gamble. And extant analyses have not noted the average-maximum-debt-before-breaking-even figures, and so are incomplete.
So I am a woman. That is a social fact, where being born female (as I was) is not. What perhaps Beauvoir never appreciated is that I might have been born male, but still become the woman that is me. How might this have happened? My contention here will be that this is another, and quite independent, form of social construction that is predicated on certain features of personal, subjective experience. But whereas others (e.g. Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, forthcoming) contend that it is a rejection of the feminist mantra to appeal to subjective experience in justification of a gender appropriation for oneself, I will be arguing that is very much in harmony with that mantra, and indeed extends the scope of the social construction thesis in illuminating ways. (For our purposes I will simply assume it irrelevant to the constructionist thesis whether the appropriation of a gender category in an individual case is coordinate with the individual’s private parts at birth or counter-coordinate with them, as judged by the dominant sensibilities.) Thus I will be repulsing the contention that the appeal to one’s subjective reality (as a woman or as an androgyne or as gender fluid, or as any other of the dozens of gender identities now recognized by the transgender community) is not an appeal to anything innate; just as it is obviously not an appeal to physiology, it should not be construed as an appeal to anything else one is born with. Instead, the appeal to a subjective experience should be understood as an appeal to a fit with one’s Self-conception, some (but not all) of the features of which may be a matter of choice. I will thus be arguing that ours is a topic in the intersection of gender construction and Self construction.
There is a legitimate concern that wide endorsement of the proposition that certain elements of a self-conception that figure in the appropriation of a gender for oneself may be a matter of choice, or anyway voluntary, will in the minds of the cis majority invalidate a trans person’s expression as in some sense true to an objective reality—and therefore that expression may be subject to criticism. But this worry is ill-conceived. To appreciate this, we need to develop a nuanced account of social construction that distinguishes between construction of categories, on the one hand, and construction of identities, on the other. It will employ elements of social theory involving the concepts of self-attribution and appropriation of categories, inevitably drawing attention to the politics of attribution (first- and third-personal) sometimes referred to as identity politics. The account will cast some light on the increasing articulations of gender into ever greater refinements. More importantly, it will illuminate the increasingly political nature of certain types of social constructions, highlighting the elements of resistance and counter-resistance involved in their social evolution. The process of construction is still dark. We need to pull back the veil upon it if the notion of social construction is to continue to serve both theoretical and social needs.