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Speaker: Colin Allen, Distinguished Professor in the department of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Drawing on interviews and other work that is being done for a book about the history and philosophy of "mathematical psychology,” Colin Allen will characterize mathematical psychologists as a self-identified community within psychology, united by their approach to mathematical modeling, mentoring lineages and institutional structures such as a journal, and societies on three continents organizing conferences and summer schools.

Mathematical psychologists have recently been vocal about the need for psychology to move in a more mathematical direction, inspired partly by the so-called “replication crisis” which many of them believe is actually a “theory crisis.” In this talk,  Allen will at the arguments of three prominent mathematical psychologists and argue that while mathematical psychology does not lack small “t” theories, it has been arguably less successful in formulating big “T" Theories that have the kind of scope, generality, and predictive power that led Wigner to write of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics. 

This talk is offered both in person and online. Light refreshments will be served.

Colin Allen (PhD 1989, UCLA) is Distinguished Professor in the department of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Allen's main areas of research concern the philosophical foundations of cognitive science, particularly as these relate to scientific study of animal cognition and artificial intelligence. His publications also span topics in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, and humanities computing, with over 120 research articles and several edited and co-authored books, including Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong (Oxford University Press 2009) and Species of Mind (MIT Press 1997).