Others write about us: Postdoctoral researcher from Poland on the experience at the Institute for Advanced Studies.
My name is Patryk Dziurosz-Serafinowicz and I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Montenegro. I am also an Assistant Professor at the University of Gdansk in Poland. My research area concerns philosophy of probability, decision theory, philosophy of science and formal epistemology.
In my view, the Institute for Advanced Studies is a wonderful community of researches and a place where you can really focus on doing your research. What is particularly striking is that it is open for researchers from different areas in science, just to mention medicine, history, political science and philosophy. Moreover, people in this interdisciplinary community are always eager to discuss their research ideas with you and are happy to cooperate. They are very active, engaged in a number of research projects. Seeing this all makes you feel that you are a part of a vibrant scientific community.
When I applied for the postdoctoral position at the Institute, my main motivation was to find a place where you could really focus on your research interests and discuss your results with other researchers. Montenegro, and the Institute in particular, gave me the opportunity to achieve this goal. And I am vey grateful for this.
At the Institute, I spend most of my time thinking and writing on my research project concerning causal decision theory. I’m particularly interested in studying variants of this theory that aim to avoid the problem of unstable decisions. Causal decision theory is one of the leading theories of rational action: it tells us to perform the action that will tend to causally bring about good outcomes. But, in some decision problems, this theory is unstable, in the sense that its recommendations can change upon a shift in your confidence about which act you will choose. This looks problematic, for we would like to have a theory of rational choice whose recommendations do not depend upon how confident you are about your own choices. Nowadays, this problem is lively debated in the philosophical literature, and I hope that my anticipated results could contribute to this debate. My goal is to write at least two papers on this topic, present my results at various international conferences and prepare my draft papers for submission in international journals. Thanks to a friendly and hospitable atmosphere at the Institute, I believe those goals are achievable. Besides working on my project in the Institute, I have also established a scientific collaboration with the Faculty of Philosophy in Niksic, in particular with researchers working within the area of philosophy of science.