Spring 2026 Colloquium Series

About

This series is jointly hosted by the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science (MCPS), the Program in History of Science and Technology, and the Program in the History of Medicine. Each semester we invite scholars from around the country and the world to present on scholarship in the history and philosophy of science, technology and medicine.

Seminars will not be held on the following date(s):

3/6/26
3/13/26

Lectures begin at 3:35pm in 216 Pillsbury Drive (formerly Nicholson Hall), Room 125 on the East Bank of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus.

At this time, all events will be in-person unless otherwise stated. Some events may be subject to change. Please check back for updates or contact [email protected] for more information.

Learn more about MCPS-sponsored lectures.

Felipe De Brigard, February 13, 3:35 p.m.

Professor of Philosophy, Institute for Brain Sciences, Duke University

Title: Remembering as Inverse Causal Inference

Abstract: The causalism/simulationism debate has become central in contemporary philosophy of memory. Recently, however, I have suggested that the debate is largely ill conceived and have offered instead a particular view of memory reconstruction that, I think, can reconcile a causal and a simulationist view of remembering (De Brigard, 2023). The current paper seeks to elaborate on that suggestion by pursuing two aims. The first one is to clearly articulate why the debate between causalism and simulationism is ill conceived. The second aim is to show how the version of remembering I defend can provide an answer to the causal question that makes causation central to the nature of memory, but in a way that is different from how it features in the causalism/simulationism debate.

Jay Aronson, February 20, 3:35 p.m.

Department of History, Carnegie Mellon University

Title: Countering Official Ignorance on State-Sanctioned Murder from Lynching to George Floyd and Renee Nicole Good

Abstract: The United States significantly undercounts the number of people who die in law enforcement custody each year, and fails to investigate the circumstances behind these deaths, despite a legal mandate and moral responsibility to do so accurately. Our government intentionally produces ignorance with almost no shame. We don't know how many people die in custody each year or why they die, whether in an encounter with police on the street, during transport, or while in jails, prisons, or detention centers. In order to make a real difference and address this human rights and public health crisis, researchers and policy makers need reliable data.

In this talk I will share stories of individuals who have died in custody and chronicle the efforts of activists, journalists, and academic researchers to uncover the true scope and cause of deaths in custody over the past century. I will show that the roots of this work lie in Ida B. Wells's enumeration of extrajudicial lynchings in her 1895 pamphlet “The Red Record.”

Joseph November, February 27, 3:35 p.m.

Department of History, University of South Carolina

Title: The Broken PROMIS of the Electronic Health Record

Abstract: This paper examines why the electronic health record (EHR), long promised as a tool to rationalize medicine, reduce error, and improve care, has instead become a source of frustration, inefficiency, and professional burnout. Rather than treating this outcome as a technical failure or an institutional inevitability, I situate it historically, drawing on firsthand accounts and long-neglected publications, to trace contemporary EHR dysfunctions to the unfulfilled ambitions of early medical computing pioneers.

Focusing on Dr. Lawrence Weed and the development of the Problem-Oriented Medical Information System (PROMIS) in the 1960s and '70s, I present evidence that early advocates understood computerization as inseparable from reforming clinical reasoning itself. PROMIS aimed not merely to digitize records, but to streamline medical judgment, expose hidden assumptions, and restructure decision-making around explicitly defined problems. The limited success of PROMIS revealed deep tensions between information abundance, professional autonomy, and institutional inertia. When later EHR systems prioritized billing, compliance, and scalability over epistemic reform, they preserved the form of but abandoned the foundational ideals of computer-assisted medicine. The result, what Weed calls today’s “non-system,” is at once technically sophisticated, administratively powerful, and clinically misaligned.

Kathryn Maxson Jones, March 20, 3:35 p.m.

History, Purdue University

Title: Sea Change: The Squid Giant Axon and the Transformation of Neurobiology in the 20th Century

Abstract: In this talk, Kathryn Maxson Jones will explore selected episodes from her book-in-progress, Sea Change: The Squid Giant Axon and the Transformation of Neurobiology in the 20th Century. In 1952, the physiologists Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley published a quantitative description of the action potential, an electrical impulse central to the process by which nerve cells send signals. The Hodgkin and Huxley (HH) description was based on data gleaned from experiments with a uniquely large nerve fiber, the “squid giant axon” (SGA), and the central premise that the electrical activity of the axon arose from voltage-dependent permeabilities in the nerve fiber membrane to specific ions. By 1977, the HH model had become so fundamental to brains and nervous systems, including for human biology, that one prominent scientist wrote of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology and medicine, for which Hodgkin and Huxley had received a two-thirds share: It was like awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature for “knowledge of typewriters, or of ink!”

Drawing on the published scientific literature and archival correspondence, Maxson Jones will discuss the little-known history of the HH model after 1952. Focusing on how this model became so central to the study of nerve cells and nervous systems between 1952 and 1977, she will explore several sets of experiments wherein biologists, including Hodgkin and Huxley, actively worked to test and expand the HH description from squid to other organisms. The talk will end with a discussion of the historical and historiographical implications, examining scientific and institutional developments associated with the rise of “neuroscience” from the 1950s to the 1970s. Overall, the talk will argue that marine creatures and coastal laboratories played integral roles in these developments.

Nedah N. Nemati, March 27, 3:35 p.m.

Center for Science and Society, Columbia University

Title: What Counts as Behavior? AI and Behavioral Ontology in Neuroscience

Abstract: The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is now widespread in neuroscience. In behavioral neuroscience, AI techniques are expanding the capacity to study the complexity of real-world animal behavior while aiming to avoid imposing human conceptual frameworks onto nonhuman animals. Despite widespread adoption and enthusiasm for AI in behavioral neuroscience, this technological turn has introduced epistemic and conceptual complications. Some tracking tools quantify animal movement through predictive models that are not fully interpretable, methodologically risking a revival of pathognomy, or reading of mental and behavioral states from the body’s movement. Unsupervised behavioral tracking approaches, meanwhile, generate different kinds of opacity and uncertainty about what exact features algorithms have extracted about behavior.

Adding a new dimension to these methodological concerns, I argue that both philosophers and neuroscientists have overlooked the entanglement between the material conditions under which these tools are developed and the forms of opacity they produce. Drawing on qualitative, semi-structured interviews conducted through sustained engagement with software developers and various neuroscientific research groups, I reveal a crucial role for external demands – hardware constraints, user design, and funding priorities – in actively shaping how behavioral tracking algorithms are designed, built, and used. I discuss how seemingly peripheral conditions, such as material and institutional demands, exert conceptual pressure on what counts as “behavior,” constraining both experimental practice and the ontology of behavior itself.

Gregory Radick, April 3, 3:35 p.m.

School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds

Title: Salience traditions as a theme in the pedagogical epistemology of science: The case of genetics

Abstract: Since Kuhn, philosophers of science have appreciated the role that exemplar-based reasoning plays in organizing a body of scientific knowledge as well as in organizing the research and teaching efforts of the scientific community that emerges around that knowledge. As Kuhn emphasized, it’s in the conservative nature of exemplar extension that scientific problems which more obviously lend themselves to solution via modest adjustments in the existing reasoning skills, apparatus, presuppositions etc. attract attention, with problems lying outside that domain regarded as uninteresting (except by mavericks, whose status is underscored precisely by that sort of interest), and with some unassimilable phenomena dropping away from scientific attention entirely (“Kuhn loss”). The result is that choices made at the start of inquiry about what to emphasize and what to marginalize – or even outright ignore – can have ramifying consequences for how a science develops.

For over a century, what has been made salient to the beginning student in genetics are the binary traits which Gregor Mendel studied in his crossbred peas, the patterns of dominance and recessiveness that he discovered by tracking those binaries, and the atom-like entity – the gene – which, according to textbooks anyway, Mendel introduced in order to explain those patterns. Unquestionably, a curriculum that anchors students in elementary Mendelism can be highly successful on its own terms, step-by-step guiding students into genetic problem-solving as the gradual extension of Mendel’s reasoning to ever more complex cases. But it does so at the price of having students imprint on basic examples of inheritance in which – unlike the vast majority of inherited traits in the real world – nothing matters to explaining why they are as they are except the combination and recombination of genetic variants or “genotypes.” What is made salient in elementary Mendelism is, then, scientifically misleading. Many have long worried that it might be even worse than that, in that elementary Mendelism seems also to bring with it a determinism about genes that can shade into essentialism about people, related to an incuriosity about real-world variability and the multifactorial causation that brings it about.

Drawing on my recent book Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology (U. Chicago, 2023), I’ll describe how historical inquiry into the early twentieth-century debate over Mendel – and in particular, into the work of the leading critic of emerging Mendelism, W. F. R. Weldon (1860-1906) – opened up the historical possibility that genetics as a body of knowledge might have had an alternative, traits-are-modifiable-in-environments salience pattern. I’ll then look at how that historical possibility in turn prompted a counterfactual or “what-if?” question: what difference would it have made to genetics and society had genetic knowledge been organized not in line with Mendelian emphases but with Weldonian ones? I’ll also discuss my attempt to answer that counterfactual question by way of a novel classroom experiment, reflecting on the potential significance of the experiment for the history and philosophy of science, for genetics and its pedagogy, and for the disruption of salience traditions in science more widely.

S Wright Kennedy, April 17, 3:35 p.m.

Department of History, University of South Carolina

Title: Separate but Dead: Mapping Disease & Segregation in New Orleans, 1880-1915

Abstract: In the late nineteenth century, life expectancy rose dramatically in Western societies, yet this unprecedented public health triumph was starkly divided along racial lines in the United States. This talk examines public health and demographic trends in New Orleans from 1880 to 1915, showing how intersections of race, environment, and disease produced profound disparities that reflect broader patterns of racial inequality in the United States. Using historical GIS, the study integrates diverse historical records, including death certificates, census data, topographic surveys, and municipal records, to map inequalities driven by residential segregation and environmental injustice.

Despite sanitary improvements such as drainage, sewerage, and clean water infrastructure in the early twentieth century, health benefits overwhelmingly accrued to white residents. African Americans, increasingly segregated into flood-prone and poorly serviced neighborhoods, faced severe disease burdens, particularly tuberculosis among adults and diarrheal diseases among infants. Consequently, Black life expectancy stagnated or even declined, while white life expectancy steadily increased. By 1915, the racial gap in life expectancy at birth exceeded fifteen years, with an eleven-year disparity among those surviving to age fifteen.

This research demonstrates that the mortality transition, a hallmark of demographic progress, was fundamentally unequal, shaped by deliberate racial policies and violent grassroots actions, including strategic arson by white residents to establish and enforce racial boundaries. Connecting spatial and demographic analyses, this study underscores the lasting legacies of segregation and the enduring relevance of historical injustices in contemporary discussions about health equity, infrastructure, and urban policy.

Roman Frigg, April 24, 3:35 p.m.

Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics

Ronald Giere Memorial Lecture

Title: Cyclones, Forecasts, and Uncertainty: How Model-Ensembles Can Be an Effective Guide to Anticipatory Action

Abstract: Many important decisions are based on models offering detailed representations of physical systems. However, these models are often subject to uncertainty, which is reflected in the use of model ensembles in decision-making processes. We present a version of the confidence approach that uses model ensembles as input and show how this approach can be employed to build a confidence-sensitive decision support tool for anticipatory humanitarian action. We apply the tool to Cyclone Kenneth, which made landfall in Mozambique in April 2019. Comparing the level and timing of the alerts actually triggered with those recommended by the tool shows that a decision-maker would have acted earlier had they used the tool, considerably reducing the cyclone's impact.

Wendy Kline, May 1, 3:35 p.m.

Department of History, Purdue

Title: Mapping the Criminal Brain: Murder, Morphology, and the Rise of the Psychiatric Expert Witness

Abstract: In 1901, medical student Edward Anthony Spitzka autopsied Leon Colgosz’s brain just after he was executed for assassinating President McKinley. It was a transformative moment not just for his career, but also for the psychiatric profession. Mapping the brain – its size and structure, its electrical impulses, its composition, and its injuries – enabled psychiatric knowledge to enter the criminal courtroom. Forensic psychiatrists presented judges, lawyers, and jurors with a new way of understanding the mind of the murderer, and, more generally, the secrets of the human brain.

Amy Riegelman, January 23, 3:35 p.m.

Social Sciences & Evidence Synthesis Librarian from UMN Libraries

Title: Comprehensive Literature Searching for Evidence Synthesis Methods

Abstract: Systematic reviews, meta-analyses and related evidence synthesis (ES) methodologies provide the highest level of evidence to inform policy and practice. Synthesizing all the available evidence requires a comprehensive literature search which typically includes both peer-reviewed and grey literature. The rigor of the literature searches could influence the validity of the synthesis and recommendations which could have downstream implications (e.g., policy, practice). Medical librarianship has supported (ES) methods for decades; with disciplines outside of the health sciences engaging more with ES methods, social science and science librarians have had to adapt through training. To meet the needs of subject librarians supporting disciplines outside the health sciences, librarians at the University of Minnesota, Carnegie Mellon, and Cornell (with funding from IMLS) created the Evidence Synthesis Institute, a training program and online course.

Matthew Hersch, January 30, 3:35 p.m.

History of Science, Harvard University

Title: Human and Machine in Spaceflight’s Second Century

Abstract: Throughout the first decades of America’s space program, its astronauts sought opportunities to advance in their careers despite signs that their chosen profession would not sustain and fulfill them. Automation, spaceflight’s inherent dangers, America’s limited ambitions in space, NASA’s growing frustration with astronauts as a labor pool, public calls for the democratization of crewed missions, and the rise of commercial space activities all threatened to make astronauts peripheral to the exploration of the cosmos. By 1988, nearly a third of the astronauts NASA recruited only a decade earlier had died or retired. Space wasn’t a “career” astronaut James van Hoften found, echoing the experiences of many of his colleagues. “There’s no upward mobility. With so many astronauts, there aren’t going to be many chances to fly.”

The third of three, interconnected research monographs on the history of American human spaceflight, my new book project, Untethered: Human and Machine in Spaceflight’s Second Century, will explore how a late-twentieth-century technical profession was transformed by massive systemic failure, including the loss to two space shuttle orbiters and their crews in 1986 and 2003. Stretching from the science fiction of the nineteenth century through the rise of space robotics and space tourism in the twenty-first, this project will examine the struggles, transformation, and eventual contraction of America’s professional astronaut corps.

Hilary Smith, February 6, 3:35 p.m.

Department of History, University of Denver

A Charles E. Culpeper Lecture in the History of Medicine

Title: Nutritional Imperialism: How Science Turned Difference into Sickness in China

Abstract: In this talk, I will argue that starting in the early twentieth century, the acolytes of a new discipline called nutrition science began to research Chinese bodies and diets in ways that made them appear to be inherently deficient and even pathological. Seeking to explain the unequal power relations that underlay the imperialist world order, both foreign and some Chinese scientists blamed the Chinese nation’s political weakness and poor health on bad food choices. Although the age of formal empires is past, the traces of what I call nutritional imperialism persist.