List of Publications
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Email: o.rocamartin "at sign" ub.edu / oriol_rocamartin "at sign" outlook.com
Location: Universtat de Barcelona, Faculty of Philosophy. Montalegre St, 6-8; Office 4090; 08001 Barcelona
I am a PhD candidate under the supervision of Manolo Martínez and José Díez. Before joining the Cognitive Sciences and Language (CCiL) Doctoral Programme at the UB (Universitat de Barcelona) I earned a BA in Philosophy from the UAB (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), and the CCiL MA from the UB. My doctoral research is funded by a grant (code CEX2021-001169-M-20-1) associated to the "Evidence in Science" branch of the BIAP, and I develop my current research activities within the LOGOS project Reassessing Scientific Objectivity (code PID2020-115114GB-I00). Besides, I part-time study a BE in Mathematics for Data Science at the UPF (Universitat Pompeu Fabra).My doctoral project, "So, what is real in the Real Patterns framework? Exploring its boundaries and applications for the life sciences", focuses mainly on the difficulties that arise when trying to understand the nature of the special sciences and how these disciplines successfully develop abstraction, idealisation, modelling, and evidence strategies in relation to complex dynamical, 'emergent' systems—all with a special focus on cognitive and biological systems. Based on the information-theoretic and computational notion of pattern recognition, Daniel Dennett proposed Real Patterns as a framework for understanding the special sciences that would presumably avoid the downsides associated with reductionism and emergentism, while respecting key scientific and/or metaphysical desiderata—i.e., realism, objectivity, and general physicalism. While ideas framed in terms similar to Real Patterns are very often indirectly appealed to in order to justify scientific or practical decisions—especially when it comes to fields working with big data, and statistical and machine learning methods—, this framework offers only a general, vague sketch of its philosophical basis. In this project, I take Dennett's proposal at face value and try to identify and analyse its weaknesses and strengths, ultimately aiming at: (i) developing a deeper understanding of the implications of committing to 'patterny' philosophical approaches—currently most associated with Ladyman and Ross' (2007: "Every Thing Must Go") defense of their Ontic Structural Realism, among other authors' proposals—; (ii) assessing the possible scope and systematizability of such a framework—following the investigations of Computational Mechanics pioneers such as Crutchfield and C. Shalizi, who have developed formal work directly and explicitly related to Dennett's Real Patterns (e.g., C. Shalizi et al. 2003: "An Algorithm for Pattern Discovery in Time Series")—; and (iii) evaluating whether Real Patterns can have the theoretical merits to configure a genuine (non-eliminativist), novel alternative framework for accounting for 'emergent' behaviors in the special sciences, as it was originally proposed to do.
Much more broadly, I am interested in: causal models and causal inference; statistical learning; information and computation (as such, and as sources of methodological tools); the mitigation of misinformation; the philosophy of psychiatry and medicine; and some aspects of semantics; all along with interests in some of the ethical, social, and practical derivations of all the latter topics.
When I am not sitting on a chair, I love adventures and playing music.
People > Student members > Oriol Roca-Martín
