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This talk will look at a ubiquitous methodology in condensed matter physics and materials science that aims to understand bulk behaviors of many-body systems. The focus is on finding and characterizing structures that exist at scales in between the so-called fundamental or atomic, and that of the c...

It has been suggested that particle physics has reached the "dawn of the post-naturalness era." I provide an explanation of the current shift in particle physicists' attitude towards naturalness. I argue that the naturalness principle was perceived to be supported by the theories it has inspired. Th...

How and to what end can we “derive” natural kinds and categories from large data sets? This is a question of interest to philosophers of science, natural scientists, and data scientists, who each offer rich but disciplinarily siloed insights. Cluster analysis refers to a variety of algorithmic p...

Leibnizian metaphysics underpins the near universally held view that spacetime must be inextendible – that it must be “as large as it can be” in a sense. But here we demonstrate a surprising fact within the context of general relativity: the property of inextendibility turns out to be “unsta...

In a recent paper Winsberg (2021) argues in favor of research into geoengineering by relying on Good's theorem, which states that conducting research maximizes one's expected utility. However, Good's theorem sometimes fails for risk-avoidant agents (Buchak 2010). Since risk-avoidance captures some o...

Recent science funding policy scholars and practitioners have advocated for the use of lotteries, or elements of random chance, as supplementations of traditional peer review for evaluating grant applications. One of the primary motivations for lotteries is their purported openness to innovative res...

We present a computational model of reflective equilibrium with precedent. Each agent considers a rule by which to accept or reject cases. Cases are represented as labeled binary strings: intuitive accept, intuitive reject, or no intuition. Rules are represented as a pair: a binary string and a tole...

Although quantum gravity is often described as empirically inaccessible, in fact astrophysics and cosmology teem with situations in which both gravitational and quantum-mechanical effects are relevant, and so we have abundant observational constraints on quantum gravity at energy levels low compared...

Race is frequently treated as an explanatory variable in causal models throughout the social sciences. Yet, there is lively disagreement about the causal status of race. This disagreement arises from three claims that jointly form a paradox: (1) all causes are manipulable; (2) race is a cause; and (...

Research in evolutionary ecology on random foraging ignores the possibility that some random foraging is an adaptation not to environmental randomness, but to what Wimsatt called "perceived randomness". This occurs when environmental features are unpredictable, whether physically random or not. Mere...

Scientists engage in relative significance controversies when they investigate the importance of a cause in producing a phenomenon of interest. In order to engage in these controversies, however, a reference class must be specified. In what follows, I explore how the problem of reference class choic...

Participatory modeling in sustainability science allows scientists to take stakeholders’ interests, knowledge and values into account when designing model-based solutions to sustainability problems, by incorporating stakeholders in the model-building process. This improves the chance of generating...

Robustness of climate models is considered by philosophers of climate science to be a crucial issue in determining whether and to what extent the projections of the Earth’s future climate that models yield should be trusted—and in turn whether society should pursue policies to address mitigation...

When does science progress? I argue that recently proffered accounts of scientific progress are untenable. In contemporary discussions, a distinction between a scientific episode constituting progress and promoting progress is made: An episode may promote scientific progress even though it does not ...

Is cancer a natural kind? On the one hand, the question is whether we are right to split cancer into the categories we use. According to Plutynski (([2018]), cancer nosology yields “a multimodal and cross-cutting family of classificatory schemes” which seems to warrant “pluralist realism” ab...

Broadly speaking, this paper shows how the interaction between scientific practices may be subject to strategic constraints—that is, fruitful interaction between practices may require finding ways to adapt one practice to the strategies informing the other. One way, therefore, that the concepts wi...

Taking the formal analogies between black holes and classical thermodynamics seriously seems to first require that classical thermodynamics applies in relativistic regimes. Yet, by scrutinizing how classical temperature is extended into special relativity, I argue that it falls apart. I examine four...

Inferences from clinical research results to estimates of therapeutic effectiveness suffer due to various biases. I argue that predictions of medical effectiveness are prone to failure because current medical research overlooks the impact of a particularly detrimental set of biases: meta-biases. Met...

Consider a study indicating that police performing traffic stops in Pittsburgh search minority drivers at a higher rate than non-minority drivers. This result would be insufficient for establishing discrimination against minorities. This is because it is compatible, e.g., with the hypothesis that th...

A new argument is given for the thesis that only symmetry-invariant physical quantities are real. Non-invariant quantities are dynamically epiphenomenal in that they have no effect on the evolution of invariant quantities, and it is a signifcant theoretical vice to posit epiphenomenal quantities.

According to the Humean Best Systems Account, laws of nature are contingent generalizations in the best systematization of particular matters of fact. Recently, it has become popular to interpret the notion of a best system pragmatically. The best system is sensitive to our interests—that is, to o...

South Africa has some of the most genetically diverse and the most genetically admixed human population groups on the planet. This is due to South Africa’s peculiar history, both social and biological. Nevertheless, people in the country are divided into four ‘population groups’ by which offic...

Certain philosophers claim the No-Miracles Argument (NMA) for realism commits the base-rate neglect fallacy. I argue that it does not. In general, one commits a base-rate fallacy only when one has access to the relevant base rate. And in the case of scientific realism, we lack access to the relevant...

Most commentators have assumed that while Émilie Du Châtelet’s Foundations of Physics (1740) is an important and original work that demonstrates her commitment to Leibnizian metaphysics and the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), Du Châtelet herself does not have an original argument for eith...

Astrochemistry is “the study of the formation, destruction and excitation of molecules in astronomical environments and their influence on the structure, dynamics and evolution of astronomical objects” as stated by Alexander Dalgarno the pioneer of this field. Astrochemistry comprises observatio...

In 1945, Carl Hempel proposed a simple theory of confirmation that eventually came to be seen as unacceptably unsophisticated: it failed to incorporate the impact of epistemic context, of the "superempirical virtues" such as simplicity and explanatory elegance, and it was purely qualitative, determi...

Court cases involving sexual assault and police violence rely heavily on victim testimony. We consider what we call the “Traumatic Untrustworthiness Argument (TUA)” according to which we should be skeptical about victim testimony because people are particularly liable to misremember traumatic ev...

Why are quantum probabilities encoded in measures corresponding to wave functions, rather than by a more general (or more specific) class of measures? Whereas orthodox quantum mechanics has a compelling answer to this question, Bohmian mechanics might not.

Black hole complementarity is an influential set of ideas that respond to the black hole information paradox. Unpacking this literature, I argue that black hole complementarity is about the consistency of quantum characterizations of an evaporating black hole and I delineate two consistency claims�...

Motivated by a desire to make precise the position of structural realism, David Wallace recently articulated a framework for understanding the relationship between metaphysical and scientific theories. In this paper, I demonstrate two particularly significant consequences of this framework for the m...

Equilibrium climate sensitivity is a measure of the sensitivity of earth’s near-surface temperature to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. When numerous state-of-the-art climate models recently indicated values for climate sensitivity outside of a range that had been stable for decades, clim...

It is widely accepted by physicists and philosophers of physics alike that there are certain contexts in which general relativity will "break down". In such cases, one expects to need some as-yet undiscovered successor theory. This paper will discuss certain pathologies of general relativity that mi...

There is a substantial amount of discussion in the philosophical literature on multiscale modeling in physical and material contexts. But there is less such discussion when it comes to the social sciences. This paper earmarks economics as a promising area for multiscale exploration for a number of r...

I explain that a target of Newton's example is the inadequacy of Descartes’s definition of motion. But I also a raise a serious problem for the current reading which comes from the attribution of “absolute and true circular motion” to the water revolving inside the bucket. The solution resides...

Many philosophers present dispensability or indispensability arguments that presuppose a specific conception of dispensability. The present paper explores and critiques the reigning conception of dispensability. In particular, I argue that it entails that too many things are dispensable to our best ...

Standard articulations of Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) imply the uniqueness claim that exactly one explanation should be inferred in response to an explanandum. This claim has been challenged as being both too strong (sometimes agnosticism between candidate explanatory hypotheses seems th...

Godfrey-Smith recently introduced the idea of representational ‘organization’. Representations from an organized family are tokened on different occasions and systematically interrelated (eg. analogue magnitude representations). Organization has been elided with structural representation, but th...

Replication of a finding is a sign – for some, the only sign – of scientific truth. Evidential discordance compromises truth, because discordance in scientific evidence means that a finding has not been reliably replicated. We distinguish between different types of evidential discordance, and si...

The 1950/51 UNESCO statements on race were opposed by a group of scientists who rejected the post-WWII scientific consensus that the human species does not divide neatly into races. Both sides of this dispute had explicit political purposes. The dispute turned on a difference between two models of ...

Does quantum mechanics accommodate chemical intuitions about bonds, or sweep them away in favour of something new? In this paper I look at foundational issues arising for two revisionary efforts to embed the chemical bond into quantum mechanics. Energy and structure: Since the 1930s, a standard way ...

The end of Richard Towne’sTreatise of the Diseasesmost Frequent in the West Indies (1726) takes up the description of “diseases to which the blacks are no strangers, but as far as I am informed they are utterly unknown in Europe.” Given that these afflictions seemed to be limited to a single r...

In Defending the Axioms: On the Philosophical Foundations of Set Theory, Penelope Maddy introduces two methodologically equivalent but philosophically distinct positions, termed Thin Realism and Arealism, which presumably respect set-theoretic practice. Further, Maddy concludes that for her idealize...

In the literature on enactive approaches to cognition, representationalism is often seen as a rival theory. In this paper, I argue that enactivism can be fruitfully combined with representationalism by adopting Frances Egan’s content pragmatism. This representational enactivism avoids some of the ...

In the recent debate about scientific concepts, pluralists claim that scientists can legitimately use concepts with multiple meanings, while eliminativists argue that scientists should abandon such concepts in favor of more precisely defined subconcepts. While pluralists and eliminativists already s...

The concept of scaffold is widespread in science and increasingly common in evolutionary biology (Chiu and Gilbert 2015; Love and Wimsatt 2019; Black et al. 2020). While this concept figures in causal explanations, it is far from clear what scaffolds are and what role they play in those explanations...

A comprehensive ontology of mind includes some mental phenomena that are neither (a) explanatorily fecund posits in any branch of cognitive science that aims to unveil the mechanistic structure of cognitive systems nor (b) ideal (nor even progressively closer to ideal) posits in any given folk psych...

Large-scale numerical simulations are increasingly used for scientific investigation; however, given that they are often needed precisely because ordinary experimental and observational methods cannot be used, their epistemic justification is often in question. Drawing on the adequacy-for-purpose fr...

The function of many biological systems is made possible by a network along which items of interest whether nutrients, goods, or information–can be routed. The human brain is a notable example. It is comprised of regions that perform specific functions and engage in particular computations. Those...

My goal here is to explain why it is harder than one might expect to find a satisfying package that combining the Best System Account of chance and the Principal Principle. One can show that for a certain prima facie attractive version of the Best System Account of chance, the only priors that satis...

My aim in this talk is to consider the increasingly contested topic of how to integrate Indigenous expertise and science as it applies to the case of integrating African Traditional Medicine (ATM) and modern biomedicine in South Africa’s healthcare system. One prevalent narrative against integrati...

It is well known that the path to greater precision in physics is not smooth. Because differences in subsequent experiments often fall outside the nominal uncertainties of the prior art, science often has to deal with discordance that stimulates increased focus on what were presumed to be small effe...

Philosophers and metrologists have refuted the view that measurement’s epistemic privilege in scientific practice is explained by its theory-neutrality. Rather, they now explicitly appeal to the role that theories play in measurement. I formulate a challenge for this view: scientists sometimes asc...

This paper draws on Quill Kukla’s “Institutional Definition of Health” to provide a definition of “psychiatric condition” that delineates the proper bounds of psychiatry. I argue that this definition must include requirements that psychiatrization of a condition benefit the well-being of 1...

Philosophers of science tend to adjudicate debates about the value-free ideal by appealing to case-studies of value-laden science. Interpreting case-studies, however, faces a methodological challenge: measuring the causal impact of values where values interact with myriad causal factors. This challe...

Precision medicine offers a precious opportunity to change clinical practice and disrupt medicine’s reliance on crude racial, ethnic, or ancestral categories by focusing on an individual’s unique genetic, environmental, and lifestyle characteristics. However, precision medicine and the genomic s...

Orthodox quantum theory tells us that properties of quantum systems are represented by self-adjoint operators, and that two properties are incompatible just in case their respective operators do not commute. We present a puzzle for this orthodoxy, pinpointing the exact assumptions at play. Our solut...

I defend pain eliminativism against three recent challenges for its adequacy as a prediction of and a prescription for the fate of folk psychology in the face of mature neuroscience. While some challenges consist in showing that folk psychology is thriving in coexistence with advanced pain neuroscie...

Terminological inconsistency in neuroscience obscures ontological relations between neural circuits and cognition. Meanwhile, the dominant view among philosophers is that human cognition is neurally realized. It remains an open question whether the extensive philosophical literature on (multiple) re...

Two conceptions of thermodynamics are distinguished. On one, thermodynamics is a resource theory, a theory about how agents with specified means of manipulating a physical system can exploit its physical properties to achieve specified ends, such as obtaining useful work. On the other, thermodynamic...

In the literature on explanation, philosophers have proposed different conceptions of structural explanations. In this paper, I explore how several seemingly disparate accounts of structural explanation can be tied together with a central notion of abstraction borrowed from the philosophy of mathema...

I defend the use of early Covid-19 models in support of social distancing measures against criticisms. Paying close attention to the epistemology of scientific modeling and to what is required of models for the purpose of underwriting precautionary reasoning suggests that epidemiological models were...

Studying consciousness in prelinguistic infants presents a challenge. We cannot ask them what they saw, and they cannot understand complex task instructions. This paper offers an optimistic methodology for studying infant consciousness, by drawing on philosophical work concerning natural kinds. I ar...

Mathematics is the “language of nature,” a privileged mode of expression in science. We think it latches onto something essential about the physical universe, and we seek theories that reduce phenomena to mathematical laws. Yet, this attitude could not arise from the philosophies dominant before...

Traditional theories of health and disease have a tendency to focus on either the evaluative aspect of health at the cost of capturing its descriptive character or they focus on the descriptive character at the cost of capturing its evaluative aspect. We provide a naturalistically respectable accoun...

In the paradigm of Lewis-Skyrms signaling games, the emergence of linguistic conventions is a matter of equilibrium selection. What happens when an equilibrium has ``natural salience'' -- stands out as uniquely attractive to the players? We present two models. We find that the dynamics of natural sa...

Wilhelm (2021) has recently defended a criterion for comparing struc- ture of mathematical objects, which he calls Subgroup. He argues that Subgroup is better than SYM∗, another widely adopted criterion. We argue that this is mistaken; Subgroup is strictly worse than SYM∗. We then formulate a ne...

We approach the debate over “causal effects of race” from a social constructionist perspective. Our first main thesis is that on a broad range of social constructionist views about race, an individual’s race is manipulable, i.e., it is conceptually coherent to posit counterfactuals about a per...

Lange (2017) has done groundbreaking work on the explanatory role of constraints. However, besides having an explanatory role, some constraints, such as perspectival ones, can also have a pragmatic role in explanation. In this talk, I develop an account of perspectival constraints based on erotetic ...

Paleoclimate proxy data are playing an increasingly central role in contemporary climate science. First, proxy data about key paleoclimates in Earth’s history can be used to benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art climate models by providing crucial “out of sample” tests. Paleoclimates p...

This paper relates discussions of scientific ontology to debates about the value-ladenness of science. First, I distinguish three types of pluralism about kinds and argue that none of them threatens realism. Then I argue that pluralist realism about kinds has implications for the debate about the ro...

In this talk we will provide a philosophical account of purposiveness grounded in the organization of biological organisms. The core of the argument consists in establishing a connection between purposiveness and organization through the concept of self-determination. Our account relies and elaborat...

Permutations play an important role in both metaphysics and philosophy of physics: metaphysicians are interested in how (if at all) possible worlds are affected by permutations of the objects that inhabit those worlds; philosophers of physics are interested in how (if at all) permutations affect phy...

In a Bayesian framework, Goodman's `New Riddle of Induction' boils down to the choice of priors. I argue that if we assume random sampling, we should assign a low prior probability to all emeralds being grue. This is because random sampling and the observation-independence of green and blue imply th...

Reconstructions of quantum theory are a novel research program in theoretical physics aiming to uncover the unique physical features of quantum theory via axiomatization. I argue that reconstructions represent a modern usage of the axiomatic method as successors to von Neumann’s axiomatizations in...

Epistemic stances are collections of attitudes, values, aims, and policies relevant to assessing evidence, eventuating in belief or agnosticism in relation to scientific theories and models. If more than one stance is permissible, this would seem to undermine certain debates between scientific reali...

Robustness analysis faces a confirmatory dilemma. Since all of the models in a robust set are idealized, and therefore false, the set provides no confirmation. However, if a model is de-idealized, there is no confirmatory role for robustness analysis. Against this dilemma, I draw an analogy between ...

According to the Matthew effect, scientists who have previously been rewarded are more likely to be rewarded again. Although widely discussed, it remains contentious what explains this effect and whether it's unfair. Using data about neuroscientists, we examine three factors relevant to clarifying t...

Some philosophers understand natural kinds to be the categories which are constraints on enquiry. In order to elaborate the metaphysics appropriate to such an account, I consider the complicated history of scurvy, citrus, and vitamin C. It may be tempting to understand these categories in a shallow ...

Why is this so hard?

A well-known result by Diaconis and Zabell examines when a shift from a prior to a posterior can be represented by conditionalization. This paper extends their result and connects it to the reflection principle and common priors. A shift from a prior to a set of posteriors can be represented within ...

Once acquired, status as a theoretical virtue is rarely lost. But recent philosophical criticisms of parsimony argue its scope is rather limited and its justificatory basis quite thin. In fact, psychological studies cast a pall on positive assessments of parsimony. They show simplicity consideration...

This paper examines the axioms of algebraic quantum field theory (AQFT) that aim to characterize the theory as one that implements relativistic causation. I suggest that the spectrum condition (SC), microcausality (MC), and primitive causality axioms (PC), taken individually, fail to fulfill this go...

Cancer cells keep accumulating alterations leading to a diversification through space and time. This diversity in the composition of cancer cells represents a major challenge for cancer treatment as it is difficult (if possible, at all) to find a treatment that works on all the cancer cells. The clo...

Natural history collections are repositories of diverse information, including collected and preserved biological specimens. These specimens are sometimes integrated into conservation decision-making, where some practitioners claim that specimens may be necessary for conservation. This is an oversta...

The cultural red king effect occurs when discriminatory bargaining practices emerge because of a disparity in learning speed between members of a minority and a majority. This effect has been shown to occur in some Nash Demand Game models and has been proposed as a tool for shedding light on the ori...

Philosophical studies of complex scientific concepts are predominantly “adaptationist”, arguing that conceptual complexity serves important purposes. This is a historical artifact. Having had to defend their views against a monist presumption favoring simpler concepts, pluralists and patchwork t...

Newton’s startling conclusion in Book III of the Principia that all bodies gravitate defied easy interpretation. Whereas the editor of the Principia’s second edition (1713), Roger Cotes, claimed that gravity is a primary quality, Newton himself was more cautious. He claimed only that all bodies ...

The sciences make progress through inquiries that address human problems. Many of those problems are practical, although some arise from detached curiosity. I think of this progress as pragmatic (Kitcher 2017): improving problematic situations, rather than aiming towards some goal (e.g. the fundamen...

There are major three schools of thought in statistics: frequentism, Bayesianism, and likelihoodism. They are often thought to be in fundamental disagreement, but I don't think so. My goal is to develop a simultaneous unification of the three camps, and defend it against the most urgent of the alleg...

I will use the simple case of a harmonic oscillator to introduce and resolve three novel puzzles about physical symmetries. One puzzle is that the fact that boosts are symmetries of Newtonian mechanics is not particularly important for explaining why a spring inside a ship remains invariant under co...

This paper argues that there are two different types of causes that we can wish to understand when we talk about wanting machine learning models to be explainable. The first are causes in the features that a model uses to make its predictions. The second are causes in the world that have enabled tho...

It is common to distinguish classificatory, physical, and formal unification. Of these, only physical unification seems to have anything to do with explanation and hence understanding. In this paper, I argue that that view is incorrect. Classificatory and formal unification facilitate understanding....

Measurement of subjective animal welfare creates a special problem in validating the measurement indicators. Validation is required to ensure indicators are measuring the intended target state, and not some other object. While indicators can usually be validated through looking for correlation betwe...

Recent philosophical work on explanation explores the notion of “constraints” and the role they play in scientific explanation. An influential account of “explanation by constraint” is provided by Lange (2017), who considers these topics in the context of the physical sciences. Lange’s acc...

This joint work between a philosopher and two chemists illustrates the practical scientific need for improved approaches to multiscale modeling. Nucleation models are essential to predicting the composition, structure, and growth rate, of nanoscale materials synthesis, and many models of nucleation...

Cancer researchers and clinicians speak of both cancer “drivers” and “actionable” mutations. In this paper, we explore how these two concepts are overlapping, and how they are different. Cases like the BCR-ABL1 gene fusion found in people with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) have served a...