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Comparisons of gravitational theories and the structures they posit have a long and fruitful history in the philosophy of physics literature. Studying the relation between General Relativity (GR) and Newton-Cartan theory (NCT), for example, has been a valuable means to deepen our understanding of the ontology and structures each theory posits. Simi...

Bayesian approaches to human cognition have been extensively advocated in the last decades, but sharp objections have been raised too. We outline a diagnosis of what has gone wrong with prevalent strands of Bayesian cognitive science (pure Bayesian cognitive science), relying on selected illustrations from the psychology of reasoning and tools from...

In this article I briefly introduce a Hybrid Theory of Induction (HTI) and illustrate the kind of work it can do for us. I do so by exploring a particular kind of causal inference in comparative group studies from the perspective of the HTI. I show how the HTI provides a useful common framework to understand ongoing debates, methodological guidance...

Most previous scholarship on the topic of values in science has focused on individuals. The time is now ripe to study how values permeate science through institutional systems. In order to move this scholarship forward, the present paper develops a taxonomy of major ways in which institutional systems can shape the influences of values on scientifi...

Despite efforts to teach agents about their privilege by minimizing cost of information, Kinney & Bright argue risksensitive frameworks like Buchak's allow privileged agents to rationally shield themselves from this costless and relevant information. In response, I show that uncertainty about information's relevance may block one from rationally up...

Morgan’s original canon (1894) was intended as a prophylactic against an anthropomorphic bias that he thought stemmed from the double inductive method, which explains seemingly identical behavior in animals and humans in terms of the same underlying causes. However, his defense of the method of variation, which introduces a bias of its own toward...

In this paper, I introduce a novel approach to a problem that is, in the dominant literature, often thought to admit of only a partial solution. The problem of quantity is the problem of explaining why it is that certain properties and relations that we encounter in science and in everyday life, can be best represented using mathematical entities l...

Climate scientists frequently employ heavily idealized models. How should these models be interpreted? Some philosophers have promoted a possibilist interpretation, where climate models stand in for possible scenarios that could occur, but don't provide information about how probable those scenarios are. The present paper argues that possibilism is...

Carbon emissions must be halved over the next decade to hold the global average temperature increase to the range in the Paris Agreement, “recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.” But even this bold mitigation will not eliminate the risks humans face from climate change. In the coming years we e...

In this essay I examine Roche and Sober’s (R&S) thesis that explanation is evidentially irrelevant, clarify the nodal points of disagreement, and defend explanationism. To do this, I utilize William Lycan’s categories of explanationism (2002) and a distinction between per se explanatoriness and particular explanatoriness. These help show that e...

There has been a widening divide between two broad approaches to theoretical equivalence in physics: to what we mean when we say that two physical theories are fully equivalent, saying all the same things about the world but perhaps in different ways. On the one side is the formal approach to equivalence. Formal accounts say that physical theories ...

It has been argued that possibilistic assessment of climate model output is preferable to probabilistic assessment (Stainforth et al. 2007; Betz 2010, 2015; Katzav 2014; Katzav et al. 2012 and 2021). I aim to articulate a variant of a possibilistic approach to such assessment. On my variant, the output of climate models should typically be assessed...

Microaggressions have received increasing attention in recent decades because, although individually they may seem minor, they are hypothesized to have significant harmful psychological and social effects in aggregate. However, correct usage of the term “microaggression” is contested; authors across disciplines defend a variety of inconsistent ...

The accuracy-first program attempts to ground epistemology in the norm that one’s beliefs should be as accurate as possible, where accuracy is measured using a scoring rule. We argue that considerations of scientific progress suggest that such a monism about epistemic value is untenable. In particular, we argue that counterexamples to the standar...

The replication crisis describes an ongoing phenomenon, particularly in the social and medical sciences, in which there is a high frequency of unsuccessful replications which has been a cause of deep concern in the fields in question. But how did we get here? What exactly is at issue in this “crisis”? Our symposium is broadly concerned with pro...

Recent work in the metaphysics of race that’s focused on the nature and reality of race as understood in the dominant race talk of current American English speakers—hereafter US race talk—has produced three main categories of race theories. Biological anti-realists—like Appiah (1992), Blum (2002), and Glasgow (2009)—have argued that, in U...

I develop a constructivist account of the ecosystem health concept. I argue that plausible naturalist accounts of ecosystem health are unsuccessful—they do not accurately track and explain common judgments about ecosystem health. I show that specific values pertaining to aesthetics, authenticity, and human wellbeing help explain contemporary judg...

It has been argued that possibilistic assessment of climate model output is preferable to probabilistic assessment (Stainforth et al. 2007; Betz 2010, 2015; Katzav 2014; Katzav et al. 2012 and 2021). I aim to articulate a variant of a possibilistic approach to such assessment. On my variant, the output of climate models should typically be assessed...

In this paper, I aim to develop a virtue epistemological account of scientific explanation and understanding. In so doing, I build a link between intellectual virtue and scientific explanation through understanding. The central epistemological question I will focus on is how human beings understand the world through scientific explanation. The answ...

Statistical analysis is often used to evaluate the strength of evidence for or against scientific hypotheses. Here we consider evidence measurement from the point of view of representational measurement theory, focusing in particular on the 0-points of measurement scales. We argue that a properly calibrated evidence measure will need to count up fr...

Adaptationism is often taken to be the thesis that most traits are adaptations. In order to assess this thesis, it seems we must be able to establish either an exhaustive set of all traits or a representative sample of this set. Either task requires a more systematic and principled way of individuating traits than is currently available. Moreover, ...

We examine arguments for and against the use of mechanistic evidence in assessing treatment efficacy and find that advocates of EBM+ and their critics have largely been talking past each other due to difference in focus. We explore aducanumab for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease as a case which may (eventually) speak to the role of EBM+ in ph...

We study the epistemic success of different data collection strategies. We develop a computational multi-agent model of the scientific process that jointly formalizes its core aspects: data collection, data explanation, and social learning. We find that agents who choose new experiments at random develop the most accurate accounts of the world. On ...

Scientists have started to use algorithms to manufacture a consensus from divergent scientific judgments. One area in which this has been done is the interpretation of MRI images. This paper consists of a normative epistemic analysis of this new practice. It examines a case study from medical imaging, in which a consensus about the segmentation of ...