Katie Steele
Associate Professor of Philosophy, London School of Economics and Political Science
Katie Steele studied mathematics and philosophy at the University
of Queensland before completing a
Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2007
at the University of Sydney. She continued in Sydney as a Research
Fellow at the Australian Centre of Excellence for Risk Analysis
before accepting a position at the London
School of Economics
and Political Science (LSE). She is now Associate Professor at LSE
in the
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method.
Steele’s research in philosophy concerns the interface of science
and policy decision making; she has
published a number of
philosophy papers in this general area. One of her principal interests
is the
assessment and representation of scientific uncertainty,
and the question of what it means to choose
rationally under
uncertainty of varying character. This work continues, in collaboration
with several LSE
colleagues, under the project ‘Managing
Severe Uncertainty’, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities
Research Council.
Steele has recently directed her theoretical work towards issues
that arise in climate-change science and
decision making, and
since 2011 is an Associate of LSE’s Grantham Research Institute
on Climate Change
and the Environment. Steele has co-published
on the role of evidence of past climate in assessing confidence
in
climate-model predictions, and continues to work on related
evidential issues. She has also explored the
ethical dimension
of climate change, and in particular the ethical status of ‘realist’
approaches to international
climate policy. While at SCAS, Steele
will turn the ethical spotlight on uncertainty itself. One key question
is: What does it mean to make ‘conservative’ decisions in
the face of uncertainty, and is this ethically desirable?
She will
also investigate the special ethical issues that arise in the context
of collective-action decision problems,
as is the case with climate
change.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2014-15.
