Insa Lawler

Insa Lawler joined UNCG in 2019. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2018 and her MA and BA degrees from Bielefeld University. She also spent time at the Ruhr University Bochum, the University of Salzburg, the University of Edinburgh, and NYU. Prof. Lawler's research focuses on the epistemology of scientific inquiry. She works on the nature of (answers to) why questions, knowing why, scientific understanding, scientific models and idealizations, progress in science, applied statistical reasoning, and measurement in cognitive science. Until 2022, Prof. Lawler is the Co-Investigator of the research project “Understanding Progress, in Science and Beyond”, which is generously funded by the Icelandic Research Fund. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Scientific Understanding and Representation (SURe) Workshop Series, and a member of the executive committee of the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) Germany, where she co-runs a mentoring program for female philosophers. Prof. Lawler teaches on topics in logic, critical thinking, epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language. In 2019, she was awarded a teaching certificate for higher education teaching. More information can be found on her website (above).

There are 17 included publications by Insa Lawler :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Dirk Koppelberg and Stefan Tolksdorf (eds.): Erkenntnistheorie - Wie und wozu? [book review] 2016 399 To what end should or do we pursue philosophy and how? Meta-philosophical questions along these lines have gained more and more interest recently. The collected volume “Erkenntnistheorie—Wie und wozu?” (Engl.: “Epistemology—How and to what end?”) asp...
Gesture meaning needs speech meaning to denote – A case of speech-gesture meaning interaction 2017 569 We deal with a yet untreated issue in debates about linguistic interaction, namely a particular multi-modal dimension of meaning-dependence. We argue that the shape interpretation of speech-accompanying iconic gestures is dependent on its co-occurren...
Gesture semantics reconstruction based on motion capturing and complex event processing 2013 278 A fundamental problem in manual based gesture semantics reconstruction is the specification of preferred semantic concepts for gesture trajectories. This issue is complicated by problems human raters have annotating fast-paced three dimensional traje...
Integrating gesture meaning and verbal meaning for German verbs of motion 2013 434 When verbs of motion are accompanied by gestures, this comes along with a relatively complex relation between the two modalities. In this paper, we investigate the semantic coordination of speech and event-related gestures in an interdisciplinary way...
Introduction to the edited volume “Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences 2022 58 Successful science, it would seem, is an effective means of both understanding and representingthe empirical world. Although important antecedents can be found all the way back to theancients, it is somewhat surprising that these themes have gained p...
Levels of reasons why and answers to why questions 2019 1229 According to Skow, correct answers to why questions cite only causes or grounds, but not nonaccidental regularities. Accounts that cite nonaccidental regularities typically confuse second-level reasons with first-level reasons. Only causes and ground...
Misalignment between research hypotheses and statistical hypotheses: A threat to evidence-based medicine? 2019 1947 Evidence-based medicine frequently uses statistical hypothesis testing. In this paradigm, data can only disconfirm a research hypothesis’ competitors: One tests the negation of a statistical hypothesis that is supposed to correspond to the research h...
Model explanation versus model-induced explanation 2020 1128 Scientists appeal to models when explaining phenomena. Such explanations are often dubbed model explanations or model-based explanations (short: ME). But what are the precise conditions for ME? Are ME special explanations? In our paper, we first rebu...
Multi-modal meaning – An empirically-founded process algebra approach 2020 1167 Humans communicate with different modalities. We offer an account of multi-modal meaning coordination, taking speech-gesture meaning coordination as a prototypical case. We argue that temporal synchrony (plus prosody) does not determine how to coordi...
Philosophical methods under scrutiny: Introduction to the Special Issue “Philosophical Methods” 2018 267 This special issue (short: S.I.) is dedicated to the study of philosophical methodology. Until recently, the debate about philosophical methods in analytic philosophy primarily focused on the method of conceptual analysis, linguistic intuitions, thou...
Reductionism about understanding why 2016 1257 Paulina Sliwa (2015) argues that knowing why p is necessary and sufficient for understanding why p . She tries to rebut recent attacks against the necessity and sufficiency claims, and explains the gradability of understanding why in terms of knowled...
Scientific understanding and felicitous legitimate falsehoods 2019 1084 Science is replete with falsehoods that epistemically facilitate understanding by virtue of being the very falsehoods they are. In view of this puzzling fact, some have relaxed the truth requirement on understanding. I offer a factive view of underst...
Thinking about Progress: From Science to Philosophy 2021 272 Is there progress in philosophy? If so, how much? Philosophers have recently argued for a wide range of answers to these questions, from the view that there is no progress whatsoever to the view that philosophy has provided answers to all the big phi...
Understanding why, knowing why, and cognitive achievements 2018 1196 Duncan Pritchard argues that a feature that sets understanding-why apart from knowledge-why is that whereas (I) understanding-why is a kind of cognitive achievement in a strong sense, (II) knowledge-why is not such a kind. I argue that (I) is false a...
Understanding, explanation, and intelligibility. Review of H. de Regt: Understanding Scientific Understanding [book review] 2018 224 Science aims at understanding phenomena. One natural candidate for illuminating scientific understanding is explanation. Certainly, an explanation could contribute to someone’s understanding. But it is controversial whether explanations must produce ...
What is philosophical progress? 2024 120 What is it for philosophy to make progress? While various putative forms of philosophical progress have been explored in some depth, this overarching question is rarely addressed explicitly, perhaps because it has been assumed to be intractable or un...
Would Disagreement Undermine Progress? 2023 92 In recent years, several philosophers have voiced concerns about philosophical progress, worrying that their discipline makes no progress, or not enough compared to the “hard” sciences.1 The most prominent line of argument for this pessimistic positi...