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There are two problems in the history and philosophy of genetics that seem to be related. One is the problem of causal selection in cellular and developmental processes. The other is the general approach of seeking genetic explanations, characterized by Ken Waters (2006) as ‘gene centrism.’ I ar...

Conflicting accounts of thought insertion share the assumption of realism: that the subject of thought insertion has a thought that corresponds to the description of her thought insertion episode. I argue against realism on the grounds that we should adopt a fictionalist, anti-realist interpretation...

Several philosophers have argued that “constraints” constrain (and thereby explain) by virtue of being modally stronger than ordinary laws of nature. In this way, a constraint applies to all possible systems in a broader (i.e., more inclusive) sense of “possible” than the sense in play when ...

The precautionary principle is often put forward as potentially useful guide to avoiding catastrophe under conditions of uncertainty. But finding an adequate formulation of the principle runs into a problem when needed precautionary measures also have potentially catastrophic consequences – the im...

Philosophical accounts of biological mechanisms have only recently attended to the crucial role free energy plays in enabling the operation of mechanisms and have not addressed how scientists discover the role of free energy in the operation of biological mechanisms. To do so, I examine research on ...

In this paper, we argue that Du Châtelet’s account of motion is an important contribution to the history of the absolute versus relative motion debate. The arguments we lay out have two main strands. First, we clarify Du Châtelet’s threefold taxonomy of motion, using Musschenbroek as a useful ...

To understand how problems of self-interaction are to be addressed in quantum electrodynamics, we can start by analyzing a classical theory of the Dirac and electromagnetic fields. In such a classical field theory, the electron has a spread-out distribution of charge that avoids some problems of sel...

Mixed methods research - the combination of qualitative and quantitative data within the same research design to strengthen causal inference - is gaining prominence in the social sciences, but its benefits are contested. Social scientists and philosophers have sought to cash out the epistemic ration...

Astonishingly large datasets are now relatively easy to come by in many scientific fields. The availability of open datasets means that it is possible to acquire data on a problem without formulating any hypothesis whatsoever. The idea of an exploratory data analysis (EDA) predates this situation, b...

In this talk, I present different strategies for evaluating the adequacy of a given model in context of high uncertainties, all based on the idea of iterative coherence testing, i.e., a methodology that anchors the improvement of the models accuracy in an iterative process of solving the discrepanci...

Philosophers of science and scholars in science and technology studies have recently focused their attention on civic participation in research processes, commonly described as ``citizen/participatory science'' (Irwin 1995, Curtis 2018). This paper provides evidence from an exemplary case of such pa...

The astrophysical media are extremely (if not impossible) difficult to probe. Their chemical characterization can only be done through the analysis of the emission spectra registered by telescopes. Since the lines composing the spectra represent the emission energy between quantified and variously p...

Extant accounts of trust in science focus on reconciling scientific and public value judgments, but neglect the challenge of learning audience values. I argue that for scientific experts to be epistemically trustworthy, they should adopt a cooperative approach to learning about the values of their a...

Philosophical concern with epistemological challenges presented by opacity in deep neural networks does not align with the recent boom in optimism for AI in science and recent scientific breakthroughs driven by AI methods. I argue that the disconnect between philosophical pessimism and scientific op...

“According to [Bayesian] models” says a recent textbook in cognitive neuroscience, “the human mind behaves like a capable data scientist”. Do they? That is to say, do such models show we are rational? I argue that Bayesian models of cognition, perhaps surprisingly, do not and indeed cannot, ...

In her second edition of the Foundations of Physics, Du Châtelet advocates a three-fold distinction of explanation: the metaphysical, the mechanical, and the physical. While her use of metaphysical explanation (i.e., explaining via the Principle of Sufficient Reason) has received some attention in ...

Several authors have recently argued that the overly strong focus on equilibrium models in mainstream economic analysis prevents economists from providing accurate representations of the complex and dynamic nature of real economic systems. In response, this paper shows that, since many economic syst...

Astronomy shares many similarities with historical sciences: the reconstruction of token events, the lack of manipulation, and the reliance on traces. I highlight two benefits of viewing astronomy as a historical science. First, the methodology of historical sciences constitutes a more sufficient de...

With the advent of ‘Big Data’ came an abundance of computational and statistical techniques to analyze it, somewhat vaguely grouped under the label of `Data Science'. This invites philosophical reflection and systematization. In this paper we will focus on exploratory data analysis (EDA), a wide...

This paper elucidates an important feature of type-level causal relationships that is critical for understanding why disasters occur in sociotechnical systems. Using an interventionist theory, the paper explicates a concept, causal delay, to characterize differences between how rapidly or slowly int...

Scientism has recently experienced a resurgence of interest in philosophy. One version of scientism often defended is ontological scientism—the view that any kind or property not mentioned in the theories of science has only a subordinate, secondary kind of reality. It is worth noting that a domin...

It has been argued that climate modeling can be partially characterized as exhibiting ontic competitive pluralism (i.e., that models compete for truth in some sense). I argue that (1) because climate models are all of the same model-type, they are not ontic competitors; instead (2) they compete in t...

The technology of Machine Learning (ML), arguably, is one of the most significant general purpose technologies of our age. The appealing promise of machine learning is that it can take a given large corpus of “raw” data packaged up into a “dataset”, learn and discover various patterns, and d...

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...

How should one discount utility across time? The conventional wisdom in social science is that one should use an exponential discount function. Such a function is a representation of the axioms that provide a well-defined utility function plus a condition known as stationarity. Yet stationarity does...

An important insight of scholarship on epistemic iteration is that scientists have to start from somewhere, but without sufficient justification to determine which ‘somewhere’. The engine of epistemic iteration is supposed to help us see how the epistemology of science gets along anyway. By adop...

It has been standard in the philosophy of models to distinguish between their having epistemic value and ‘mere’ heuristic value. This dichotomy has divided philosophers of economics: sceptics deny the epistemic value of theoretical economic models; optimists argue how-possibly explanations offer...

Proponents of the extended evolutionary synthesis have argued that there are explanatory gaps in evolutionary biology that cannot be bridged by standard evolutionary theory. In this paper, we consider what sort of explanatory gaps they are referring to. We outline three possibilities, data-based gap...

Forber and Smead (2014) analyze how increasing the fitness benefits associated with prosocial behavior can increase the fitness of spiteful individuals relative to their prosocial counterparts, so that selection favors spite over prosociality. This poses a problem for the evolution of prosocial beha...

Field theory offers a new account of how teleology and goal directed systems work. Under field theory, goal-directedness arises from fields that are external to, and envelope, the entities they direct (McShea 2012, 2016; Babcock and McShea 2021). A teleological entity immersed in a field behaves per...