Society for Womens' Advancement in Philosophy

This last weekend FSU hosted the S.W.A.P. conference which consisted of a series of grad-student lectures as well as two keynote speakers.
The keynote speakers were Louise Antony and Marilyn Friedman. Both of them are in my philosophy textbooks this semester which is pretty freaking cool.
Antony presented an objection to Dragnet theory, which is the idea that science is entirely objective and is only concerned with fact and it tells us to ignore any ideas we have about probability. Antony thinks objectivity is something to strive towards, but it does not make sense to ignore our intuitions and our ideas about the plausibility of theories. One of the reasons she presents for the rejection of Dragnet theory is the underdetermination of data. If we were operating purely on "just the facts" with and ignoring all of our biases then we cannot even conclude that the material world (everything outside of just our minds) exists.
Science at any given point involves all kinds of fundamental assumptions about the way the world works, without which no progress would be made. Without assumptions we are not conducting science, we are doing philosophy.

-Beatrice