The Australian Research Council (ARC) has announced the recipients of its latest round of large grants, and a few philosophers are among them.
These are ARC’s “Future Fellowships”, which support projects for four years.
The winning philosophers and their projects are:
Mark Alfano (Macquarie University)
Building Robust Networks of Trust in the Anthropocene
This project aims to inform an evaluation of discourse about global warming. Social media data will be collected to construct an international network that discusses global warming. Using both social network analysis (clustering, identification of central nodes) and natural language processing to identify climate skeptics and anti-immigrant sentiment, the project examines trust-related language in the network, enabling tracking of changes in discourse, identification of vectors of mistrust, and collocations of terms, hashtags, and emoji. From this empirical basis, interventions to foster better patterns of trust will be proposed. This will result in better policies and regulations for social media communication about controversial topics.
(AU$1,258,732)
Samuel Baron (University of Melbourne)
New Causal Foundations for Space and Time
The project aims to solve a philosophical problem arising from physics. Recent developments suggest space and time don’t exist at certain scales. This poses a serious conceptual challenge: scientific experiments usually happen in space and time and so when these are missing we have no idea what experimentation means. Drawing on methods from philosophy, the project will explore causation as a replacement for space and time in our conceptual framework for science. The expected outcome is a seed-bank of models that philosophers and scientists can use to study nature. Anticipated benefits include generating new knowledge in philosophy, strengthening international collaboration and enhancing interdisciplinary research capacity in Australia.
(AU$1,238,320)
Suzy Killmister (Monash University)
The Moral Significance of Being Human
This Fellowship aims to explain and justify the moral significance of being human. This will be done through the development of an original philosophical framework, focused on addressing three critical challenges: human rights, aged care, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The resulting framework will enable the generation of new knowledge about the foundations of human rights; which practices constitute dehumanisation; and what separates humans from AI. Expected outcomes of the project include advances in philosophical theorising; enhanced research capacity, through the development of an Early Career Researcher Network; and cross-disciplinary collaborations.
(AU$1,067,196)
The full list of recipients is here.
Congratulations to all the grant winners! It is impressive that Australia is funding projects like these, when the US is cutting back so much research funding.