Elay Shech

Education

PhD, University of Pittsburgh

About Me

Elay Shech is a philosopher of science. He works in ethics and philosophy of AI, metaphysics, and philosophy of physics, mathematics, logic, and biology. He also lectures and writes for the public about these topics. See his “Science keeps changing. So why should we trust it?” in the New York Times, “If it looks like a dire wolf, is it a dire wolf?” in The Conversation, and a public lecture on AI ethics in AU’s “EagleCast Webinar series.” His first book, Idealizations in Physics (Cambridge University Press), discusses the nature and role of idealization and falsehoods in science, with an essay on the topic in The Institute of Art and Ideas. See also a related co-edited anthology Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences (Routledge). His second book (with Michael Watkins), The Metaphysics of Color (Cambridge University Press), defends an objectivist account of colors. The main ideas are discussed in an article in The Washington Post: “Is green really ‘green’? He is currently working on a new book (under contract with Cambridge University Press) tentatively titled, Bias in AI: Aligning Algorithms with Human Values.

Among his papers are “The Mitonuclear Compatibility Species Concept, Intrinsic Essentialism, and Natural Kinds” in Philosophy of Science, “Bias, Machine Learning, and Conceptual Engineering” in Philosophical Studies, “Machine Understanding and Deep Learning Representation”  in Synthese, “Historical Inductions Meet the Material Theory” in Philosophy of Science, “Idealizations, Essential Self-Adjointness, and Minimal Model Explanation in the Aharonov-Bohm Effect” in Synthese, “Two Approaches to Fractional Statistics in the Quantum Hall Effect: Idealizations and the Curious Case of the Anyon” Foundations of Physics, and and “What is the ‘Paradox of Phase Transitions?” Philosophy of Science.

Research Interests

Ethics and philosophy of AI, philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, metaphysics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics