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Cancer biology features ascriptions of normal function to cancer. Normal functions are activities that parts of systems, in some minimal sense, should perform. Cancer biologists’ ascriptions pose difficulties for two main approaches to normal function, leaving a gap in the literature. One approach...

Haag’s theorem is a valuable result for foundations of physics because it supplies direct information about relativistic QFT, which is a framework theory. Constructing theories within this framework (e.g., lattice QCD, φ 2 4 , the Standard Model) using the wide variety of strategies found in main...

A venerable narrative says that teleology died during the Scientific Revolution. McDonough (2020) recently objected that the principle of least action (PLA) shows teleology surviving into Enlightenment physics. Both narratives get the story wrong. The PLA’s history shows that what really happened ...

Haag’s theorem is traditionally viewed as a no-go theorem for the mainstream physicists’ approach to interacting quantum field theory, i.e. the interaction picture and its attendant methods of perturbation theory. Mainstream quantum field theory employs the interaction picture to model interac...

Much of the literature on the nature and limits of using race as a scientific variable in medicine focuses primarily on United States (US) racial categories. This focus on the US is seemingly justified by ‘contextualism’ - the assumption that we must limit discussion of race and its deployment t...

Research on the credit economy in academic science has typically assumed that academics are expected credit maximizers without argument. How might this assumption be justified? And how might the measure-theoretic foundations of credit be secured? Two approaches are considered. One in which credit is...

This paper criticises the Waltonian fiction view for providing a misleading role of imagination in scientific modelling, and for failing to provide an adequate account of the epistemology of modelling. Imagination cannot be simultaneously constrained by the model descriptions and relevant for modell...

This paper provides a formal treatment of the argument that syntax alone cannot give rise to compositionality in a signalling game context. This conclusion follows from the standard information-theoretic machinery used in the signalling game literature to describe the informational content of signal...

This paper shows how institutional values influence the design and evaluation of arguments in funding proposals for scientific research. We characterize a general argument made within proposals and several kinds of subarguments that contribute to it. We indicate that funders’ values inform the kin...

Thermodynamics is an unusual theory. Prominent figures, including J.C. Maxwell and E.T. Jaynes, have suggested that thermodynamics is anthropocentric. Additionally, fruitful contemporary approaches to quantum thermodynamics label thermodynamics a ‘subjective theory’. Here, we evaluate some of th...

Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) is a key metric when trying to understand the past, present and future behavior of Earth’s climate. Several models used in the latest IPCC report’s Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) have failed to yield an ECS value within the consensus range e...

Racial health disparities are a pervasive problem in the United States. While these disparities are mainly due to structural racism, genomicists have been attempting to find a genetic cause to these largely social problems. Disparities in disease rate and outcomes for asthma and diabetes present opp...

New mechanists forward an influential account of mechanisms in which entities (or parts) and their activities are organized so as to produce the phenomenon that calls out for explanation; and to explain is to describe that mechanism. However, critics charge that new mechanists have not provided a st...

The tension between axiomatic, mathematically rigorous formulations of quantum field theory (AQFT) and Lagrangian quantum field theory (LQFT) as employed in the Standard Model of particle physics has been much discussed by philosophers and physicists alike. While debate was heated in the last deca...

There is surprisingly little philosophical work on conceptually spelling out the difference between the traits on which natural selection may be said to act (e.g. “having an above average running speed”) and merely circumstantial traits (e.g. “happening to be in the path of a forest fire”). ...

Absolute and relative outcome measures measure a treatment’s effect size, purporting to inform treatment choices. I argue that absolute measures are at least as good as, if not better than, relative ones for informing rational decisions across choice scenarios. Specifically, this dominance of abso...

Immunology is a notoriously complex field with a distinct vocabulary and concepts. Yet immunologists regularly and effectively collaborate with other researchers, notably clinicians and experts in population health. How does this work? This paper proposes a multifaceted answer. Immunology exhibits t...

Frank Cabrera argues that informational explanatory virtues—specifically, mechanism, precision, and explanatory scope—cannot be confirmational virtues, since hypotheses that possess them must have a lower probability than less virtuous, entailed hypotheses. We argue against Cabrera’s character...

Behavioural systems present a relevance problem: there’s too much information about them to include all of it in our explanations, so we must decide what information should be included in and excluded from explanation. One popular solution is to (a) include only information at a single level and (...

Organisms use cues differently as they navigate their environments. One distinction researchers use to characterize differences between cues is the distinction between proximal and distal cues. The standard way of thinking about this distinction involves thinking of distal cues as beyond an experime...

In this paper we examine “gain of function” (GOF) research in virology, which results in a virus that is substantially more virulent or transmissible than its wild antecedent. We examine the typical animal model, the ferret, arguing that it does not easily satisfy potential desiderata for an ani...

In his landmark “State of the Planet” speech in 2020, UN Secretary-General Guterres said what many scientists believe: “The state of the planet is broken” (Guterres 2020). This language reflects a view of global processes as functional in the sense that components have roles to play in the w...

The spin-2 view on GR has been extremely influential in the particle physics community, including for the development of string theory. Leaving no doubt on its heuristic value, we argue that a foundationalist spin-2 view of GR, as often tacitly taken up as well, runs into a dilemma: either the spin-...

The perils of excessive idealization in constructing the underlying mathematical framework for fundamental physical theories are illustrated with some examples taken from relativistic quantum field theory: the triviality issue for standard model field theories, the nonexistence of the S-matrix in ...

In this paper, we assess the extent to which contemporary observations of black holes---particularly those of the LIGO-Virgo and Event Horizon Telescope Collaborations---are ``theory laden''. General relativistic assumptions enter into the methods of both experiments through the use of simulations o...

Over the past decade, scientific researchers and applied data scientists have steadily adopted machine learning (ML) techniques, particularly highly parameterized deep neural networks, Deep Learning (DL). Trained estimators resulting from such ML processes, referred to as models, are now commonly us...

Two factors give rise to the need for an iterative approach to evidence, inexactness of measurement and complexity of the phenomena being represented. As Duhem emphasized, the first of these alone entails any number of alternatives at a comparable level of agreement with any one representation. Duhe...

The philosophical foundations of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis were built in opposition to an allegedly essentialist and teleological view of nature going back to Aristotle (Sober 1980). Because essentialism and teleology were regarded as core hindrances for a science of evolution, neo-Darwinian...

Is race real? If so, what exactly is it? These questions have captivated both philosophers and social scientists alike. Participants in these debates frequently appeal to race’s role in explaining various social phenomena, though they rarely engage with empirical social science. In this paper, we ...

A core tenet of Bayesian epistemology is that rational agents update by Bayesian conditionalization. Accuracy arguments in favor of this norm are well-known. Meanwhile, in the setting of quantum probability and quantum state estimation, multiple updating rules have been proposed, all of which look p...