Lecture
LTP Colloquium "Evidence generation across the QUALitative-QUANTitative spectrum"
- Date
- Thursday 3 April 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.48
The Leiden University Centre Theoretical Philosophy is pleased to announce a lecture by Prof. dr. Federica Russo, full professor in Philosophy and Ethics of Techno-Science, Utrecht University.
A reassessment and a proposal
Evidence is ubiquitous in the practices of science, from natural to social science, from medicine to linguistic. In this talk, I begin by reconstructing two main debates in PoS: the ‘formal’ approach and ‘evidential pluralism’. While the first approach does not fix what evidence is (as ‘e’ is a place holder in specific probabilistic relations to confirm a hypothesis ‘h’ based on some evidence ‘e’), the second, is rather specific in fixing the ‘content’ of evidence’ (difference-making and mechanisms provide the fundamental evidential aspects to establish causal claims). In previous work, I have argued that neither approach, while valuable, goes at the core question of what evidence is. We instead need to capture some common features of ‘evidence’, considering that evidence, or pieces of evidence, can be very different things from a p-value to a biological specimen, from an audio recording to measurements conducted in a lab. I proposed to understand evidence as semantic information, a notion borrowed from the philosophy of information, and that cashes out information in a qualitative way, needing interpretation of data in a given modelling context. Following up on this line, I will here explore the prospects of ‘evidence as semantic information’ in the context of a long-standing debate in the social sciences, namely the so-called QUAL QUAN divide. The literature is vast, and the field of Mixed Methods Research has long thematised the need of using both qualitative and quantitative methods, alongside providing protocols for research practices to combine these approaches in various ways, and for different purposes. Building on Newman and Benz’s ‘interactive continuum’ approach (1998), I propose that QUAL and QUAN constitute a spectrum of integrated practices. I describe the process of QUANtification in QUAL practices, and the process of QUALification of QUAN practices, through the idea that QUAL and QUAN are semanticised (in the sense of semantic information), through QUAN and QUAL practices respectively.
All are welcome!