The faculty of the EST Master is organizing a talk on Monday, June 5th, at 4:45pm, in HS 3D, NIG. The speaker is Prof. Simon Schaffer (Cambridge). The title of the talk is:
"Climate proxies: genealogy and epistemology"
Abstract: Proxies have come to play a decisive role in the practices of climate science: the use of substitute indicators to indicate climatic conditions for past periods when, it is argued, no direct measures of these conditions are available. It is of great historical and philosophical interest to trace the sources of this term in the sciences, its transfers across disciplinary boundaries, and the implications of such practical reasoning through arguments about the workable similarity of very different parameters. There are both genealogical and epistemic aspects of such techniques - replication, calibration and proxy reasoning - that have much to teach about how such inferences have worked in the past of the sciences and during the climate crisis.
Everybody welcome -- though EST students and staff get preferential treatment in case we run out of space. Sorry!