There is a long tradition of fruitful interaction between philosophy and the sciences. Logic and statistics emerged, historically, from combined philosophical and scientific inquiry into the nature of mathematical and scientific inference; and the modern conceptions of psychology, linguistics, and computer science are the results of sustained reflection on the nature of mind, language, and computation. In today's climate of disciplinary specialization, however, foundational reflection is becoming increasingly rare. As a result, developments in the sciences are often conceptually ill-founded, and philosophical debates lack scientific substance.
In 2006, the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University will launch a three-week summer school in logic and formal epistemology for promising undergraduates in philosophy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, and other sciences. The goals are to introduce promising students to cross-disciplinary fields of research at an early stage in their career, and forge lasting interdisciplinary links between the various disciplines. This year's lectures will address causal statistical inference, foundations of computability, and philosophical logic.
