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Hey there!

My name is Jacob. I am a PhD student in philosophy at McGill. My work is focused on the relationship between science and philosophy, both from an epistemological and ethical perspective. I hold the Richard H. Tomlinson Fellowship and the Rising Star Scholarship from Fonds de Recherche du Québec.

I am particularly interested in using computational methods to answer philosophical questions as shown by my ongoing PROJECTS and PUBLICATIONS. For more information, please consult my CURRICULUM VITAE.

If you are interested by what I am doing, don't hesitate to contact me at

jacob.hamel-mottiez.1@ulaval.ca.

RECENT NEWS

Mention d'Honneur au tableau de la FESP

Prix Grands Sages

De riches projets en humanités numériques

PUBLICATIONS

The Economics of JEM: Evidence for Estrangement

2024

Le problème corps-esprit relève-t-il d'un mystère?

2022

Projects

These are the ongoing projects on which I currently work.

This project investigate the scientifc production of women from Quebec in STEM. We specifically look at the scientific production which get done at the PhD level.

Women in STEM

Transparency and Open Science

This article contributes to the characterization of media bias by analyzing how Canadian news media select and contextualize messages originating from think tanks, an influential yet ideologically marked form of expertise. Drawing on a large media corpus (2017–2020), it shows that journalists make relatively limited use of textual indicators of credibility, but that these indicators systematically reflect the ideological preferences already evident in source selection. Think tanks that are more frequently solicited thus benefit from more favorable contextualization, corroborating the hypothesis of a doubly preferential treatment. The study concludes by discussing the normative implications of these practices for journalistic impartiality in the face of contested expertise.

Bias and Expertise in Canadian Media

This project is called "What is Philosophy of Biology" (WIPOP). Is is part of my master's thesis in philosophy of science. In this master, one of my goal was to investigate the thematic diversity of philosophy of biology. Given that it is often the case that philosophy of biology of biology discribes itself as on a continuum with biology, I wanted to know if the thematics of the two endeavors matched, at least partially.

Some previous results, notably Gayon (2009), Pradeu (2017) and Malaterre et al. (2021) looked at the thematic diversity of philosophy of biology through one main journal : Biology and Philosophy. Gayon and Pradeu classified manually all the articles. The categories in which they fall have been built iteratively. Malaterre leveraged well-known topic modeling algorithm Latent Dirichilet Allocation (LDA). Howerver, given that Gayon and Pradeu manual annotation attribute a unique theme per article whereas Malaterre with LDA gives the probability to find a topic in a document (which have many of them), the two analysis are hard to compare.

Thus, we decided to use a state of the art topic modeling algorithm : BERTopic (Grootendorst, 2022). With it, we were able to attribute a single theme by article, thus making our analysis comparable with the one of Pradeu, himself extending the previous work of Gayon.

What Is Philosophy of Biology?

In this project, I will defend the view that the IASP definition of pain is prone to an epistemic tension when one try to reduce its assessment to either self-report or physical states. Once this epistemic tension has been highlighted, I will consider a candidate to go beyond the challenges posed by pain assessment—functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). I will argue that fMRI claimed ability to assess “objectively” pain rests on unchallenged conceptual and empirical issues, notably regarding the kind of evidence that fMRI provides.

Pain and Measurement

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