Enacting Chance
Ignorance Insight and Intuition
Participants
Keynotes
Presentations
Activities led by
Organisers
Samantha Copeland is a philosopher and assistant professor at Delft University of Technology in the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology section. She is also the co-founder and co-chair of the Serendipity Society, an international and multidisciplinary network of people interested in figuring out how to garner the benefits of chance in all sorts of places, from the workplace to the urban environment.
This conference is, for Samantha, an amazing opportunity to gather together experts from various fields of research to talk intensely about what role the body, emotions, and intuitions play in our ability to see chance events as opportunities for change and new knowledge, and she has a particular interest in the ethical aspects of how we understand chance.
One goal she has is to witness the emergence of a network from this chance-filled gathering, and she is excited to see how the different ideas and approaches that Wendy and Selene have expertly assembled come together over the week.
Wendy Ross is an experimental psychologist and senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University. She is broadly interested in the role of things in higher cognitive processes, particularly creativity and problem solving. Her experimental work is grounded in kinenoetic analysis, that is an observational method which uses highly granular descriptions of object movements analysed at an aggregate and individual level to track cognition as it unfolds in the world. This is reliant on embedded knowing-through-doing which leaves measureable material traces for the psychologist to interpret. Her work has led her to question models which centre human agency and intentionality and she sees the role of chance as vital to understanding how we think with and through things.
For Wendy, this conference is the chance to learn from an interdisciplinary mix of philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists about the role of chance in moving from ignorance to insight. She is thrilled to be working alongside Samantha and Selene who had both inspired her with their work on serendipitous moments in discovery and innovation as well as astonishing breadth of vision about the possibilities of tackling this complex yet essential topic.
Selene Arfini is a postdoctoral fellow in Philosophy of Science and Adjunct Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Pavia. Her research interests fall in the domains of epistemology, philosophy of science, epistemic cognition, and philosophy of cognitive science: she is especially interested in understanding how human agents fall into, ignore, and exploit their own ignorance while performing creative reasoning, decision-making, and problem-solving activities.
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This week-long conference is, for Selene, a golden opportunity to move from ignorance to insight, both thematically and phenomenologically, on how accidents and chance encounters productively affect our cognitive and creative processes.
She looks forward to discussing this multifaceted topic within the interdisciplinary context of the conference and to continuing working together with Samantha and Wendy to enjoy and learn from this serendipity-prone and exciting event.