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The volume and variety of data in astrophysics creates a need for efficient heuristics to automate the discovery of novel phenomena. Moreover, data-driven practices suggest a role for machine-led exploration in conceptual development. I argue that philosophical accounts of exploratory experiments sh...

This note scouts a broad class of explanations of central importance to contemporary computer science. These explanations, which I call 'limitative' explanations, explain why certain problems cannot be solved computationally. Limitative explanations are philosophically rich, but have not received th...

The popular metaphysical view that concrete objects are grounded in their ultimate parts is often motivated by appeals to realist interpretations of contemporary physics. This paper argues that an examination of mainstream interpretations of quantum mechanics undercuts such atomist claims. First, me...

Recent accounts of multiscale modeling investigate ontic and epistemic constraints imposed by relations between component models at varying relative scales (macro, meso, micro). These accounts often focus especially on the role of the meso, or intermediate, relative scale in a multiscale model. We a...

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...

Over the past several decades, philosophical analyses have shown that reasoning about purposes in nature is epistemically respectable. However, less attention has been paid to the heterogeneity of aims and commitments that motivate inquiry into apparent purposiveness. Our aim in this paper is to map...

There remains no consensus amongst social scientists as to how to quantify and understand forms of information deprivation such as misinformation. Measures of information deprivation typically employ a deficient conception of truth that should be replaced with measurement methods grounded in certain...

Elselijn Kingma (2018, 2019) argues that the popular view that the foetus is merely contained by the mother is inconsistent with the biology of pregnancy. Instead, she argues that the foetus is a part of the mother based on various physiological criteria. I argue that immune tolerance, a criterion o...

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...

Abstract We defend a noetic account of intramathematical explanation. On this view, a piece of mathematics is explanatory just in case it produces an appropriate type of understanding. We motivate the view by presenting some appealing features of noeticism. We then discuss and criticize the most pro...

Many philosophers have explored the extensive use of non-universal generalizations in different sciences for inductive and explanatory purposes, analyzing properties such as how widely a generalization holds in space and time. We concentrate on developmental biology to distinguish and characterize t...

One of the core charges against explanationist scientific realism is that is too epistemically optimistic. Taking the charge seriously, alternative forms of scientific realism -- semi-realism and theoretical irrealism -- are designed to be more modest in their epistemic claims. I consider two cases ...

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 ...