Sofia Blanco Sequeiros: Evidential discordance and scientific inference

Tuesday March 18 2025 @11:30 (CET)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
Disagreement and disunity are highly common in scientific research, even when scientists aim at conclusive evidence and well-established theories. Although in many ways useful for scientific progress, discordance also poses distinct epistemic challenges for science as it causes problems for decision making both within and outside of science and may hinder expert consensus. Despite discussion in philosophy of science on the epistemic and methodological implications that evidential discordance has for science, a clear explication of the concept of discordance remains missing.

I use the notion of scientific inference as consisting of inferences from data to phenomena and phenomena to theories to argue that these individual inferences and their variance between different lines of evidence is where discordance emerges into bodies of scientific evidence. I show that analyzing discordance in terms of inferences from data to phenomena or phenomena to theories is useful for distinguishing nontrivial from trivial discordance, and use an example from criminology to illustrate my argument.

Bio
Sofia Blanco Sequeiros is a PhD candidate at the TINT Centre for Philosophy of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. Her dissertation topic is the use of uncertain scientific evidence in policymaking, on all levels of public policy. Blanco Sequeiros is particularly interested in the methodology and epistemology of the social sciences and the evidence produced by them, but is also interested in environmental science, climate science and medicine.