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The concept of levels has been used broadly across the history of science and across diverse areas of contemporary science as a principle for organizing investigation and knowledge of the natural world. Invoking levels has also played key roles in philosophy of science work about scientific explanat...

Levels-eliminativists, including this symposium’s participants, have raised a variety of criticisms about specific conceptions of levels as well as the broad use of levels as a metaphor or heuristic in science. The general question inspired by such criticisms and explored in this symposium is: the...

Eliminativism about levels is an over-reaction to a real problem that demands instead principled pluralism. Levels eliminativism is motivated in part by the recognition of systematic failures of entailment between seemingly related but distinct ways of talking about levels. Levels pluralism, in cont...

The intuitive notion of level is often employed by social scientists and philosophers of social science to conceptualize tricky theoretical challenges. While it serves as an organizing metaphor for thinking, its assumptions and implications are never fully articulated. Consequently, unacknowledged a...

Philosophical critique of scientific levels or candidate level-systems often blends into critique of the activity of leveling. Here I defend leveling, the activity, with no commitment to any given scientific system of levels or the notion that within a given scientific system there is necessarily on...