Teddy Seidenfeld

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Teddy Seidenfeld is H.A. Simon University Professor of Philosophy and Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University (Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences). He works on foundations at the interface between philosophy and statistics, often being concerned with problems that involve multiple decision makers. For example, in collaboration with M.J. Schervish and J.B. Kadane (Statistics, CMU), they relax the norms of Bayesian theory to permit a unified standard, both for individuals acting as separate decision makers and collectively, in forming a cooperative group agent. By contrast, this is an impossibility for strict Bayesian theory. For a second example, in collaboration with Larry Wasserman (Statistics, CMU), they examine the short-run consequences of using Bayes rule for updating a set of expert Bayesian opinions with shared information. They focus on anomalous cases (they call dilation), where an experiment is certain to result in new evidence that increases the experts: uncertainty about an event of common interest where uncertainty is reflected in the extent of probabilistic disagreements among the experts.

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His current collaborations with Kadane and Schervish include a theory for indexing the degree of incoherence in non-Bayesian statistical decisions, work on the representation of coherent choice-functions using sets of probabilities, and investigations involving scoring rules for probabilistic forecasts. The three also work together on the development of finitely additive expectations for unbounded random variables.

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https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/philosophy/people/faculty/seidenfeld.html

Jan Sprenger

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Jan Sprenger (*1982) is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the 
University of Turin. After an undergraduate degree in mathematics, he 
completed a PhD in Philosophy (University of Bonn/Germany, 2008) with a  thesis on the foundations of inductive inference. Then he took up a post as Assistant Professor at Tilburg University (2008–13), where he also directed the Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics and Philosophy of Science (2014–17, in the position of a Full Professor).

Sprenger has been awarded various major grants by Dutch, German and European funding agencies, most recently a Starting Investigator Grant on objectivity in inference by the European Research Council (ERC, 2015--20).

His papers are regularly published in the leading philosophy journals as well as in reputed interdisciplinary venues. They span a wide range of topics, mainly in philosophy of science (e.g., scientific method, explanation, causality, values in science) and uncertain reasoning (e.g., foundations of Bayesian inference, statistical reasoning), but also covering logic, group decision-making, and empirical work on human cognition. This summer, his first book publication, “Bayesian Philosophy of Science” (with Stephan Hartmann), will appear with Oxford University Press.

In his leisure time, Sprenger is an active chess player who also holds the Grandmaster title of the World Chess Federation.

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http://www.laeuferpaar.de/