Building Bridges Between the Philosophical and Modeling Communities

Hosted by the University of Pittsburgh's Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS) 
National Center for Excellence in the graduate School of Public Health, and the Center for 
Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

The three-day conference will focus on philosophical issues that arise within the practice 
and application of contemporary research using modeling and simulation.  The goal is to bring 
together sophisticated work in philosophy of science and ongoing efforts in modeling in order 
to build more effective collaboration between philosophers of science and those who build and 
employ models in a range of disciplines and applications.  There is NO REGISTRATION FEE for 
this event but pre-registration is requested at the following link:  
www.modelingepistemology.pitt.edu/registration.

Topics will include:
Theory, experiment, modeling, and simulation
Validation and verification of models and simulations
Does simulation require a new epistemology?
Analytic models versus simulations
How do models succeed?  When do models fail?
Modeling in different domains: infectious disease, behavior, economics, and more
Modeling, science, and policy

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Mark Bedau
Editor-in-Chief, Artificial Life, co-editor of Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and 
Science and Protocells: Bridging Nonliving and Living Matter

John H. Miller
Santa Fe Institute and Carnegie Mellon University Social and Decision Sciences, Associate Editor 
of the Journal of Computational Economics and co-author of Complex Adaptive Systems.

Paul Thagard
Computational Philosophy of Science; How Scientists Explain Disease; Coherence in Thought and Action; 
Hot Thought; Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning, and Discovery.

Marc Lipsitch
Bacterial and human population genetics, mathematical modeling of infectious disease.  Director of 
the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Havard School of Public Health and author of over 100 
papers on topics including population genetics and mathematical modeling of infectious disease dynamics.

Wendy Parker
Models and computer simulation, especially climate modeling, science and public policy. Widely published 
in philosophy of science and meteorological models: methodology, uncertainty, success and failure.

Ian Lustick
Agent-based modeling of political dynamics and violence.  Trapped in the War on Terror; Unsettled States, 
Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West-Bank Gaza.  

Nicholas Rescher
Epistemology: On the Scope and Limits of Knowledge; Epistemetrics; The Limits of Science; Epistemic Logic; 
Scientific Explanation; Scientific Progress; Risk: An Introduction to the Theory of Risk Evaluation and 
Management; Error; and Predicting the Future.

Patrick Grim
Meeting Co-Chair
Group for Logic & Formal Semantics
Department of Philosophy
SUNY at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY   11794-3750
Phone: 631-790-2356
Email: pgrim@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

Philip D. Palmer, Ph.D.
MIDAS Education  & Outreach Coordinator
Office of the Associate Vice Chancellor for Science Education Outreach, Health Services
University of Pittsburgh
Suite M-252A, Scaife Hall
3550 Terrace Street
Pittsburgh, PA   15261
Phone: 412-624-6957
Email: php9@pitt.edu