My main area of expertise is the philosophy of science, particularly the scientific realism debate, but I also have active research interests in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of artificial intelligence and meta-philosophy. Together with various colleagues, I edited a number of special issues on themes like the underdetermination of theory by evidence, the role and value of novel predictions in confirmation, the nature of unification and coherence and the extent to which observation is theory-laden. I have also co-edited the European Philosophy of Science Association 2013 Conference Proceedings (Springer 2015).
I'm currently working on various projects, including how to model analogical reasoning, a neuro-symbolic approach to automating scientific discovery, the epistemology of machine learning, a visual representation of logical inferences, a variant of the resolution principle in automated theorem proving, pedagogical experiments on conditional reasoning, and prompt engineering. The last of these is funded by a British Academy / Leverhulme Foundation SRG for a project titled ‘Reverse Engineering Prompts’, of which I'm the PI. The project seeks to determine effective and efficient ways we humans phrase queries to other humans, and then seeks to test the efficacy of those ways in the context of human-chatbot interactions.
Philosophy Faculty, Northeastern University London, Devon House, 58 St Katharine's Way, London E1W 1LP. ioannis.votsis(/a-t\)nulondon.ac.uk