Tübinger Forum für Wissenschaftskulturen

Programm, Wintersemester 2025/26

Hörsaal, 1. Stock, 6.15 pm

10.10 - 12.10.2025
Auftakt-Wochenende

Mit: Volker Quandt, Leiter der IMPRO-AKADEMIE an der Universität Tübingen

22.10.2025
Information Transmission, Representing Noise and the Semantic Content of Transmitted Signals

Seminar

Reading: Information or Noise? In: Deacon, T. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter, 2012

Seminar Guest: Prof. Dr. Ben Jantzen (Virginia Tech, USA)

29.10.2025
Information And Meaning Cont. + Prep-Session for next Session on Classical Decision-Making

Seminar

05.11.2025
Signal or Noise? The Psychophysics of Decision-Making

Talk & Discussion

Prof. Dr. Rolf Ulrich (Psychologie, Universität Tübingen)

Prep Reading: Blogpost: The Many Schools of the Great Rationality Debate

12.11.2025
Statistical Modeling of Signal and Noise

Talk & Discussion

Dr. Sabine Hoffmann (Institut für Statistik, LMU München)

Prep Reading: The multiplicity of analysis strategies jeopardizes replicability: lessons learned across disciplines. Hoffmann et al. 2021. Royal Society Open Science.

19.11.2025
Theories of Perception: Unconscious Inferences, Constancy, and Perceptual Organization

Talk & Discussion – Abstract below.

Prof. Dr. Hanspeter Mallot (Cognitive Neuroscience, Dept. of Biology University of Tübingen)

Prep Reading: Helmholtz - Physiologische Optik 1867 Paragraph 26 / Helmholtz's Treatise on Physiological Optics - Paragraph 26

26.11.2025
Seminar Prep-Session for K. Munger's Spirals

Reading: 

Blog post „in the belly of the MrBeast“ by Kevin Munger

Vilém Flusser (2022). Communicology — Mutations in Human Relations?, Synopsis (p. 1-7)

Blog post „The Rise of Parasitic AI“ (can be skimmed)

03.12.2025
Spirals

Talk & Discussion

Prof. Dr. Kevin Munger (Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, Florence, Italy)

10.12.2025
Brainstorming Project Groups
17.12.2025
Tba

Seminar

07.01.2026
Tba

Seminar & Discussion

Prof. Dr. Robert Williamson (Foundations of Machine Learning Systems, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Tübingen)

14.01.2026
Sticking to an Information Diet: Significance, Social Media, Signal Processing

Talk & Discussion

Prof. Dr. Philipp Hennig (Methods of Machine Learning, University of Tübingen)

21.01.2026
Ontology of the Ambience: Noise, Signal, Information, and War

Talk & Discussion (Online)

Prof. Dr. Chen-Pang Yeang  (Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology, University of Toronto)

28.01.2026
Tba

Talk & Discussion (Online)

Prof. Dr. Max Raginsky  (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)

04.02.2026
Prep Session for 2 day-Seminar
2nd week February 2026
Bayesianism in Philosophy & Science

2 day-Seminar

Dr. Tom Sterkenburg  (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP), LMU München)

Rafael Fuchs  (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP), LMU München)

 

Abstracts

Theories of Perception: Unconscious Inferences, Constancy, and Perceptual Organization

Prof. Dr. Hanspeter Mallot (Cognitive Neuroscience, Dept. of Biology University of Tübingen)

How can perception tell relevant or "veridical" information about the outside world from "noise" despite accidential  inputs or disturbances produced by the sensory system? In Helmholtz' approach, this is achieved by "unconscious inferences" which are based on analogies with previous acts of perception. Unconscious inferences allow to judge the size of an object based on the visual angle it subtends in the image and its perceived distance. They also allow to judge the color of a surface independent of the color of the illuminant, and so forth. While their nature and neural implementation remain largely elusive, inconscious inferences constitute what has been called the "Laws of Vision" (Wolfgang Metzger) or the "Logic of Perception" (Irvin Rock). The talk will discuss Helmholtz' judgement theory of perception together with related ideas such as perceptual constancy and perceptual organization.