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Carbon emissions must be halved over the next decade to hold the global average temperature increase to the range in the Paris Agreement, “recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.” But even this bold mitigation will not eliminate the risks humans ...

It has been argued that possibilistic assessment of climate model output is preferable to probabilistic assessment (Stainforth et al. 2007; Betz 2010, 2015; Katzav 2014; Katzav et al. 2012 and 2021). I aim to articulate a variant of a possibilistic approach to such assessment. On my variant, the out...

Morgan’s original canon (1894) was intended as a prophylactic against an anthropomorphic bias that he thought stemmed from the double inductive method, which explains seemingly identical behavior in animals and humans in terms of the same underlying causes. However, his defense of the method of va...

Scientists have started to use algorithms to manufacture a consensus from divergent scientific judgments. One area in which this has been done is the interpretation of MRI images. This paper consists of a normative epistemic analysis of this new practice. It examines a case study from medical imagin...

The relationship between Indigenous knowledge and science is a topic of increasing global discussion, especially regarding climate and environmental sciences. A lot of this discussion has centred around comparing or contrasting the two on a range of counts, such as epistemic merit, methodological ov...

Belief polarization occurs when individuals with opposing initial beliefs strengthen their beliefs in response to the same evidence. In previous work (“Disagreement, Dogmatism, and Belief Polarization,” Journal of Philosophy 2008), I explored the hypothesis that the psychological mechanisms that...

Anthropogenic climate change (CC) poses a serious global threat, and human responses to this problem are usually framed in terms of mitigation (the reduction of human actions that contribute to climate change) and adaptation (the response to actual or expected impacts of changes in the climate with ...

It has long been thought that observing the effects of quantum gravity is effectively impossible, since gravity is so much weaker than other forces: consider, for instance the utterly insensible gravitational attraction of a magnet, compared with the very sensible magnetic force it exerts. But by dr...

Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) characterizes the response of Earth’s temperature to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 and is one of the most important and most studied metrics in climate science. For decades, estimates of ECS have been stable around 1.5°C to 4.5°C. In the most recent coupled ...

As Lewin (1943) already noted, “there is nothing as practical as a good theory”. However, how do we determine which theories are good and which are bad? It is hard to improve theory quality without a tool to assess it in practice. In psychology, most subfields are characterized by weak theories ...

Comparisons of gravitational theories and the structures they posit have a long and fruitful history in the philosophy of physics literature. Studying the relation between General Relativity (GR) and Newton-Cartan theory (NCT), for example, has been a valuable means to deepen our understanding of th...

Microaggressions have received increasing attention in recent decades because, although individually they may seem minor, they are hypothesized to have significant harmful psychological and social effects in aggregate. However, correct usage of the term “microaggression” is contested; authors ac...

The replication crisis describes an ongoing phenomenon, particularly in the social and medical sciences, in which there is a high frequency of unsuccessful replications which has been a cause of deep concern in the fields in question. But how did we get here? What exactly is at issue in this “cris...

We discuss two different ways that the term “analog” (as opposed to “digital”) is used in the methodology of computer science and those engineering disciplines that are related to computer science. We show that formal models of computation on real numbers provide, indeed, an explication of w...

When many statistical hypotheses are tested simultaneously (e.g., when searching for genes associated with a disease), some statisticians recommend “correcting” classical hypothesis tests to avoid inflation of the false positive rate. I defend three theses. First, such “corrections” have no ...

When solving a complex problem in a group, should we always choose the best available solution? In this paper, I build simulation models to show that, surprisingly, a group of agents who randomly follow a better available solution than their own can end up outperforming a group of agents who follow ...

The conservation ecologist Robert Lackey (2005, 2013) describes stealth policy advocacy as strategy deployed in the pursuit of “policy-based science.” As a proponent of the value-free ideal, Lackey argues that the adoption of ethical values by scientists (in a professional capacity) undermines t...

Journalistic practice is guided by norms receive sparing attention from philosophers, especially in the context of science reporting. This presentation examines how a conflict between two norms manifests in science journalism due to the phenomenon of science denialism. As outlined by the Society of ...

This talk will provide commentary from the perspective of political philosophy about the other papers in the session. In particular, I will apply insights from democratic theory about the nature of representation and its corresponding responsibilities, the epistemic and moral value of deliberation, ...

Recent research in cognitive neuroscience has uncovered so-called neural manifolds that play a central role in explanations of behavior. Revealed through the use of a range of dimensionality reduction techniques, these manifolds are entities in low-dimensional spaces contained in high-dimensional ne...

There has been a widening divide between two broad approaches to theoretical equivalence in physics: to what we mean when we say that two physical theories are fully equivalent, saying all the same things about the world but perhaps in different ways. On the one side is the formal approach to equiva...

Most previous scholarship on the topic of values in science has focused on individuals. The time is now ripe to study how values permeate science through institutional systems. In order to move this scholarship forward, the present paper develops a taxonomy of major ways in which institutional syste...

In this paper, I introduce a novel approach to a problem that is, in the dominant literature, often thought to admit of only a partial solution. The problem of quantity is the problem of explaining why it is that certain properties and relations that we encounter in science and in everyday life, can...

A central problem for machine learning (ML) models is that they are “black boxes” and epistemically opaque. This means the inner workings of these models—how the model internally represents the data to reach a certain decision—are opaque or a “black box” to experts. This is concerning in...

Belief polarization occurs when the beliefs of agents diverge upon updating on certain types of evidence. Recent research indicates that belief can arise even amongst rational agents \cite{Jern_Polarization, Kelly_2008, O_Connor_Polarization}. Although the specific mechanisms differ, I distinguish t...

Analogue experiments have attracted interest for their potential to shed light on inaccessible domains. In 1981, Unruh found a striking mathematical analogy between the propagation of light waves near a black hole and the propagation of sound in fluids. In fact, a number of distinct such 'analogue' ...

While philosophers have raised many interesting questions concerning the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of food, philosophy of science has paid little attention to the nutrition sciences. In this symposium we bring together philosophers and a scientist to explore conceptual and empirical challenge...

Two ideas that run through much of Western environmentalist thought are (1) nature is that which is untouched by humans, and (2) intervening in nature is generally bad, morally and epistemically. These ideas continue to be quite influential in environmental conservation. They define what successful ...

The symposium session, Consensus and Dissent in Science: New Perspectives, will end with a commentary on the papers by Miriam Solomon. Solomon has extensively studied the social epistemology of consensus and dissent. For example, Solomon (2001) criticizes the view that consensus is an aim of, or a r...

Inequality measurements are widely used by scientists and policy makers. Social scientists use them to analyze the global distribution of income and trends over time. In policymaking, inequality measurements contribute to inform redistributive policies at national level, and to set the agenda for in...