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Social oppression is generally understood to be “structural”: formal and informal rules and common patterns of interaction cause disparate and inequitable outcomes for members of certain social groups. However, it is common—especially in psychology and some philosophical subfields—for work t...

We have previously argued that masking, censoring, or ignoring scientific dissent can be detrimental for several ethical and epistemic reasons, even when such dissent is considered to be normatively inappropriate (de Melo-Martín and Intemann 2018). Masking dissent can be inappropriately paternalist...

The use of racial categories in medical research and practice remains a topic of contestation and heated debate. However, much of the philosophical debate has been geographically limited, focusing primarily on the United States (US) context and the use of race in the US sense. Given that racial cate...

Acknowledging that scientific research today is mainly conducted in the private sphere with commercial interests (or values) in mind, becomes crucial for understanding the roles of values in science today, as well as to imagining ways of counteracting some of the undesirable influence of such values...

A central concern of good reporting is to try to convey a sense of the range of opinions on an issue. This is part of the way in which a free press is understood to fulfill its essential role in functioning democracies. By presenting the electorate with an explanatory survey of plausible positions o...

Belief polarization is the tendency for individuals with opposing beliefs to predictably disagree more upon being exposed to certain types of evidence. A variety of recent papers have argued that many of the core empirical results surrounding this effect are consistent with standard Bayesian or appr...

In current practice, psychological explanations typically present a narrative in which a theory renders a putative empirical phenomenon intuitively likely. However, whether the theory actually implies the phenomenon in question is also left to this intuition. To design a test for such a theory, diff...

Many normative questions about race have been addressed by social and political philosophers. These philosophers use philosophical approaches quite distinct from those found in the philosophy of science. The merits of these approaches notwithstanding, the complexity of social phenomena involving rac...

Morgan’s canon is one of the most influential methodological principles in comparative psychology. It states that one should always abstain from explaining animal behavior with reference to any “higher” psychological faculties than absolutely necessary. In the contemporary literature, this pri...

The concept of levels has been used broadly across the history of science and across diverse areas of contemporary science as a principle for organizing investigation and knowledge of the natural world. Invoking levels has also played key roles in philosophy of science work about scientific explanat...

Climate change policy—including matters involving both mitigation and adaptation—is informed by assessments of the risks and damages caused by climate change. Such assessments, in turn, depend on our ability to attribute specific impacts to climate change. Of particular interest is the exacerbat...

This presentation explores the relationship between values in scientific and technological research, on the one hand, and features of the organizations that conduct that research, on the other. Organizational features to be highlighted include organizational aims and strategies, organizational struc...

Early scales developed to measure experiences of everyday racial discrimination employ an interpersonal schema of the racial discrimination construct (e.g, McNeilly 1996; Williams 1997; Krieger et al. 2005). For example, the Perceived Racism Scale conceives of racial discrimination as “a belief or...

In this symposium, we use the history of philosophy to illuminate specific, grounded aspects of contemporary practice in machine learning, raising new problems and proposing new frameworks for the philosophy of machine learning. Our symposium draws on 200 years of empiricism and its critics, ranging...

Directly after the release of Nicholas Wade’s *A Troublesome Inheritance*, population geneticists, biologists, and biomedical researchers wrote an open letter to the *New York Times* stating that “We reject Wade’s implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork." Given their clear den...

Efforts to rationalize racial injustice and colonialism by appealing to the epistemic authority of science — race science — have waxed and waned over the last several decades. Even when it is regarded as discredited or pseudoscientific, race science has been actively maintained on the fringes of...

My re-conception of realism is based on new pragmatist notions of knowledge, truth and reality, which are elaborated in the forthcoming book Realism for Realistic People. These notions are designed for better understanding and facilitation of scientific and quotidian practices. I focus on “active ...

My talk will revisit the foundations of Teleparallel Gravity (TPG), an alternative theory of gravity, observationally indistinguishable from General Relativity (GR). In contrast to the latter, gravity in TPG isn’t conceptualised as a manifestation of spacetime curvature. Instead, TPG’s gravitati...

In this symposium, we philosophically investigate the nature of contemporary and historical versions of scientific medicine as well as visions for its future, drawing on historical, empirical and scientific perspectives. Scientific medicine is the main focus of research in philosophy of science and ...

What is the connection between capitalism and racial hierarchy? In line with the theoretical tradition known as “the theory of racial capitalism” we show that the latter can functionally support the former. As a social construction, race has just those features which allow it to facilitate stabl...

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...

In this talk, I attend to three main tasks. First, I locate the main rationale for my perspectival realism in what I call historical naturalism (drawing on Massimi 2022, Ch 8). I argue that our realist commitments originate from a thoroughgoing naturalistic stance. However, by contrast with classica...

In recent years, a new generation of scholars have begun searching for physical signatures of computation. That is, they have begun investigating what it takes for a physical system to implement a computation with unprecedented attention to the scientific practices involving computation, including c...

In this paper, we consult the philosophical literature to improve suboptimal practices in psychology. We discuss several practices in psychology that in our view hamper its scientific development. We then argue that these practices are rooted in certain methodological and philosophical commitments. ...

Race science recruits scientific work in the biological, behavioral, and social sciences in the service of legitimating the presupposition that there are biological races which map on to social racial systems. But the biological structure of human populations is not synonymous with particular racial...

The debate on realism concerning science is one of the oldest and perennial topics in philosophy of science. Yet the debate has increasingly reached a stand-off with often diminished returns. In recent years there has been renewed attention to realism with an eye to re-assessing the nature of the co...

Philosophers agree that the value-free ideal is neither an accurate nor desirable model for science. Science typically requires non-epistemic value judgments. Debates remain as to what kind of non-epistemic values can legitimately influence science, and in what ways. One proposal is that “when sci...

An epistemic stance is an attitude or orientation of an agent that determines whether or not that agent’s evidence justifies their claims to know. Stances have been thought to involve debatable policies, values, and aims that distinguish, for example, the scientific realist from the anti-realist. ...