OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
This talk will introduce the basic principles of Bayesian reasoning, which provides a modern, rigorous, and intuitive methodology to help social scientists make better inferences from qualitative, case-study evidence. Bayesianism provides prescriptions for rational reasoning under uncertainty, with the goal of making well-justified assessments about how strongly the information in hand supports a given explanation over rival hypotheses. The talk will draw on coauthored work with A.E. Charman (UC Berkeley, Dept. of Physics), Social Inquiry and Bayesian Inference: Rethinking Qualitative Research (forthcoming, CUP) and will include illustrations from the author’s research on the politics of progressive taxation in Latin America.