Lecture by Avril Styrman

Lecture by Avril Styrman

16 SEPTEMBER 2026, 4pm - 5pm

Academic Conference Center (AKC), Husova 4a, Prague 1

The systematization of evaluation criteria for scientific theories, also known as theoretical virtues, aims to enhance understanding and objectivity in theory evaluation, and thereby to facilitate consensus formation. Explanatory virtues play a crucial role here. They are well known individually, but lack a widely accepted organization, especially with regard to how simplicity integrates with the other explanatory virtues. In this speech, Avril Styrman introduces an unificatory model of virtues (UM), in which simplicity is integrated in a way that yields a concise hierarchical organization of the explanatory virtues (Styrman 2026). In UM, a theory’s accuracy, explanatory depth, internal consistency, and ontological simplicity are components of its unifying power, while its consistency and explanatory relations with other theories are components of both its external coherence and the unifying power of the set of theories under consideration. He illustrates by examples how unifying power can be applied quantitatively in assessing the evolution of physical theories over time. He also illustrates how the virtues listed by Douglas (2013) and classified by Hvorecký and Miłkowski (2024) in the below graph are interrelated and organized in UM.

Avril Styrman is a post-doctoral researcher at Department of Philosophy, History and Art Studies, University of Helsinki. His current research focuses on the methodology of physics and philosophy, with particular emphasis on the evaluation criteria of physical theories, and on the application of naturalist methods to some of the hard problems of philosophy.

The lecture is preceded from 3pm by a talk by Paavo Pylkkänen: Interactive Dual Aspect Monism: A View Inspired by Bohm's Interpretation of Quantum Theory.

This lecture has been funded by a grant from the Programme Johannes Amos Comenius under the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, CZ.02.01.01/00/23_025/0008711.