The Australian Research Council has announced the winners of its latest round of Discovery Grants, and several philosophers are among them.

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The principal investigators, co-investigators, and their projects are listed below:

Samuel Baron (University of Melbourne) with Elizabeth Sonenberg, Piers Howe, Kate Lynch, James Norton, Finnur Dellsén, Sander Beckers, Emily Sullivan, and Rach Cosker-Rowland

An Interventionist Approach to Explainable Artificial Intelligence
This project aims to develop a new approach to explaining and understanding decisions generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Popular approaches rely on counterfactuals, which focus on how an outcome would change, given different inputs. Such explanations are criticised in philosophy for failing to provide causal understanding. Interventionism is a theory of explanation from philosophy designed to yield such understanding. This project aims to develop new strategies for explaining AI decisions using interventionism. Expected outcomes include improved understanding of AI and better AI decision-making. Anticipated benefits include new knowledge and support for government to use AI effectively while protecting the interests of individuals. (AU$573,060)

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Pierrick Bourrat (Macquarie University) with David Raubenheimer, Paul Griffiths, Charles Pence, and Cynthia Beall

Health, Biological Fitness and Environmental Diversity
Health is often impaired when evolved biological mechanisms interact with modern environments. But the idea that an ‘ancestral’ lifestyle will maximise health has been rightly derided as ‘paleofantasy’. Our team includes leaders of two fields that have taken a more productive approach to the impacts of diverse environments on biological fitness and on health: nutritional ecology and the evolutionary anthropology of altitude adaptation. Making explicit the ways in which these fields define reference environments and assess biological fitness will facilitate research on other health impacts of environmental diversity. This interdisciplinary collaboration will demonstrate the value of philosophy in science as opposed to philosophy of science. (AU$600,146)

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Yuri Cath (La Trobe University) with Richard Skarbez, Mary Walker, Margot Strohminger, and Tim Bayne

Virtual Reality and Knowing What It Is Like
This project aims to investigate the idea that virtual reality (VR) is an ‘empathy machine’ that can simulate the experiences of other people and thereby give us knowledge of what it is like to have those experiences. The project expects to advance our understanding of this issue by bringing together philosophical work on ‘what it is like’ knowledge and work in psychology on immersive VR. Expected outcomes include a theory of how VR can give us degrees of ‘what it is like’ knowledge, and a normative analysis of what can go wrong when we try to use VR to understand other people. This should provide significant benefits, including guidelines for the ethical use of these ’empathy machines’, and practical advice on improving their accuracy. (AU$536,635)

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Regina Fabry (Macquarie University) with Emily Hughes, Marilyn Stendera, and Becky Millar

Grief at the Margins: Conceptualising the Diversity of Loss
Grief is a fundamental human experience, yet varies significantly between individuals and cultures. Philosophical research has focused on the universality of grief, neglecting its diversity. Addressing this gap, this project aims to characterise the diversity and variability of grief experiences. It will generate new knowledge about marginalised groups who, due to intersecting forms of discrimination and disadvantage, are at particular risk of prolonged and complicated forms of grief. This project will lead to socio-cultural and economic benefits by offering theoretical foundations for future applied research on more inclusive and sensitive grief interventions addressing the unique needs of marginalised members of Australian society. (AU$292,294)

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Fiona Fidler (University of Melbourne) with Kate Williams and James Wilsdon

Evaluating the Impact of Metascience and Its Role in Research Policy
The ‘replication crisis’ has raised concerns over the credibility of published scientific research. Metascience—or the ‘science of science’—has risen in its wake, aiming to influence and improve the way science is practised, funded, evaluated and disseminated. Metascience has grown rapidly in recent years, and it is now having a significant impact on research policy in the UK and elsewhere. This project aims to document Metascience’s origins, connections to prior reform efforts and to other science studies disciplines. Grounded in an understanding of its history and purpose, the expected output is a framework for evaluating Metascience impact, ensuring it delivers relevant, high-quality evidence for research policy in Australia. (AU$1,155,503)

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John Gardner (Monash University) with Adrian Carter

Supporting Responsible Psychedelic Therapies with Ethical Risk Management
Psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT), which is being implemented to treat debilitating mental health conditions, presents complex ethical challenges. This project employs sociological methods and bioethical analysis to develop a novel tool—an Ethical Risk Management Tool—that enables PAT service providers to responsibly address these challenges. It aims to help PAT practitioners routinise good ethical conduct in clinical service settings, thereby reducing the risk of moral harm to patients, therapists, and communities. Additionally, the project will contribute to bioethics scholarship by generating new knowledge about the relationship between organizational factors and ethical challenges in healthcare settings. (AU$529,427)

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Toby Handfield (Monash University) with Brian Hedden

Democracy’s Knowledge Problem: from Polarization to Collective Wisdom
This project aims to understand how democratic societies can track knowledge despite increasing polarization and technological change. The research will develop mathematical models to analyze how beliefs become signals of group identity in social networks and evaluate institutional designs for promoting epistemic accuracy while respecting social bonds. This will provide significant benefits through identifying effective governance interventions for digital platforms, developing metrics to distinguish healthy from dysfunctional opinion clustering, and creating principles for reform. The findings will help Australian policymakers design better democratic institutions and regulatory frameworks while fostering epistemic robustness. (AU$558,890)

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Kate Lynch (University of Melbourne) with Cordelia Fine, Ilan Dar-Nimrod, Maureen O’Malley, and Euzebiusz Jamrozik

Genes, Germs & Gender: The Reach and Impact of Bioessentialism
Scientific misconceptions are enabled by simplistic explanations, such as bioessentialism: beliefs that biological agents (e.g. genes) dictate meaningful categorisations (e.g. gender) by determining traits and behaviour. Bioessentialism about genetics, microbiology, and sex and gender has significant social costs, yet how it is perpetuated is unresolved. Combining philosophical analysis with AI classification models, this project will establish when and where bioessentialism arises, and which interventions are likely to mitigate such misunderstandings. National benefits include new strategies to combat costly scientific misconceptions in various domains inlcuding public health messaging and science communication. (AU$572,779)

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Catherine Mills (Monash University) with Neera Bhatia, Karin Hammarberg, Molly Johnston, and Giselle Newton

Ethical, Social and Regulatory Implications of Informal Sperm Donation
This project aims to address ethical, social and regulatory issues in sperm donation for family formation in Australia to ensure that all people who need the assistance of a sperm donor to become a parent can do so safely. The project expects to generate new knowledge to address the the informal provision of sperm via the internet, while also improving the formal and regulated system of sperm donation. Expected outcomes include a more ethically robust and equitable system for accessing donor sperm for family formation achieved through cohesive, stakeholder-informed recommendations. It is expected to have long-lasting benefits for people who donate sperm, people who need to access donor sperm and for people conceived through sperm donation. (AU$777,889)

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Maureen O’Malley (University of Sydney) with Nicolas Rasmussen and Claas Kirchhelle

Symbiotic Synergies: How the Body Became a Chimera (1950-2000)
This project aims to investigate how central concepts in today’s revolutionary microbiome paradigm formed in earlier microbiology. We seek to study how the microbes inhabiting us came to be seen as symbiotic, and how certain concepts of symbiosis led to a new view of human bodies as multi-species chimeras. The project aims to generate historical and philosophical knowledge that can inform the metamorphoses biomedicine is now undergoing in the light of discoveries showing that health and disease depend on our microbes. Expected outcomes are novel interdisciplinary insights into the conceptual transformations that led to microbiome science. Benefits include a public-facing combination of scientific, historical and philosophical knowledge. (AU$448,400)

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Katie Steele (Australian National University) with Susumu Cato

Ethics, Sustainability and Future Generations
This project aims to evaluate conceptions of the renowned Principle of Sustainability in terms of their underlying ethical and scientific commitments. It expects to provide a philosophical basis for debating and applying Sustainability, and to advance ethical theory through new models and ways of analysing the possible long-term consequences of choice options. The expected outcomes include a novel conceptual toolkit that can facilitate ethically robust consideration of the future in policy deliberations across diverse contexts. This should provide significant benefits, in addressing a key obstacle to achieving the far-sighted public decision making that is required to safeguard the wellbeing of present and future generations of Australians. (AU$333,294)

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You can learn more about the Discovery grants here.