Faculty/department Technology, Policy and Management
Level PhD degree
Maximum employment 38 hours per week (1 FTE)
Duration of contract 1 year
Salary scale €3,193 to €4,026 per month gross
Technology, Policy and Management
The Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management (TPM) develops robust models and designs, to solve the complex challenges of today’s networked society. TPM combines insights from the engineering sciences with insights from the humanities and the social sciences.
The Department of Values, Technology, and Innovation (VTI) is one of three departments in the Technology, Policy, and Management Faculty. It comprises philosophers, economists, and risk scholars. We study how to develop and diffuse responsible technological innovations that reflect deeply held social and moral values. The department is one of the largest groups in the world studying axiology, economics, and risks for a wide range of socio-technical systems; it plays a leading role nationally and internationally in research in responsible innovation and value-sensitive design. The Ethics and Philosophy of Technology section is one of three sections within VTI. For more information please consult our website: www.fil.tbm.tudelft.nl.
The Ethics and Philosophy of Technology section invites applications for a one-year post-doctoral fellowship in social epistemology and information and communications technology (ICT). This post-doc will contribute to the interdisciplinary project “Scaffolding the Media for Intellectually Humble Discourse,” which has been funded by the Templeton Foundation via a grant from the University of Connecticut. The PI on the project is Mark Alfano.
Job description
The project is grounded in the theory that a person’s epistemic character can be embedded or extended in their material, social, and political context. We are pursuing recent developments in virtue epistemology that dilate the focus of explanation and evaluation from the individual agent to the community. In particular, we are interested in mapping and evaluating the topology and morphology of epistemic communities that discuss and debate controversial topics such as vaccination, climate change, and religious and political violence. Such a community can be modelled as a directed, weighted network, in which nodes represent cognitive agents and edges represent lines of communication. Given such a framework, we then ask two questions. First, holding topology and morphology constant, which epistemic dispositions (e.g., trust, distrust, skepticism, curiosity) are conducive to successful inquiry by nodes at different positions within the network? Second, holding the distribution of epistemic dispositions constant, which topologies and morphologies are more likely to produce epistemic goods (e.g., accuracy, sensitivity, safety) and avoid epistemic ills (e.g., bias, group polarisation, dogmatism)?
The post-doctoral fellow will work closely with Mark Alfano and participate in regular meetings of the Digital Humanities and Experimental Philosophy CollAboraTive (D-HEP-CAT). She or he will also participate in departmental colloquia, teach one or two courses in ethics and philosophy of technology, and organise two workshops (one in 2017, another in 2018).
Requirements
We are looking for applicants with the following qualifications:
• PhD degree in the field of virtue epistemology and/or social epistemology;
• Strong track record in the field(s) of virtue epistemology and/or social epistemology;
• Familiarity with or willingness to learn methods such as text-mining, data-mining, sentiment analysis, and topic modelling;
• International experience;
• Excellent English skills;
• Flexibility and readiness to work in teams.
Conditions of employment
The TU Delft offers a customisable compensation package, a discount for health insurance and sport memberships, and a monthly work costs contribution. Flexible work schedules can be arranged. An International Children’s Centre offers childcare and an international primary school. Dual Career Services offers support to accompanying partners. Salary and benefits are in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities.
