Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Tomasz Kwarciński , reporting from the sixth conference of the European Network for the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (ENPOSS) which took place from 20th-22nd of September at Cracow University of Economics (CUE).  The event was co-organized by the Department of Philosophy CUE and the Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies , with support of the Polish Philosophy of Economics Network . Three days of the conference were divided between keynote lectures, parallel sessions, and books symposia (a novelty in the ENPOSS conferences). The conference was preceded by the Polish Philosophy of Economics Network’s symposium. Two of the keynote talks were recorded and can be watched by clicking on the links in this post. The ENPOSS conference was officially inaugurated by Daniel Hausman ’s speech (University of Wisconsin-Madison) “Social Scientific Naturalism Revisited”, during which he posed the fundamental question of whether the social sciences differ fr...

On 4th June I attended some talks at the  Valuing Health Conference  at University College London (see picture above), where the themes of Dan Hausman’s book,  Valuing Health  (Oxford University Press, 2015) were discussed. The event was organised by Jo Wolff and James Wilson. The intended audience was philosophers, economists, and also healthcare policy makers. The conference started with a brief overview of the arguments in the book, presented by Dan Hausman (University of Wisconsin) . There are two basic problems the book was meant to address: (1) we need to be able to compare health improvements brought by different policies; (2) we need to know what to do with the information (e.g., maximise health). Thus, the book provides answers to the following questions: How do we assign values to health states? How do we assess policies on the basis of those values? What role should people play in assigning values to policies? The discussion raises further questi...