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According to a view that is gaining traction in current philosophy of science, what best describes the aim of scientific inquiries is not truth or knowledge about some target phenomenon, but understanding, which is taken to be a distinct cognitive accomplishment. At the same time, scientific inquiry...

Why do scientific disciplines appear, disappear, merge together, or split apart? We might point to major events: the creation of new journals and departments, significant innovations, or new technologies. However, at the heart of things is a social process involving interactions among individual sci...

This symposium focuses on a constellation of issues concerning climate risks and responses to these risks. In the climate policy literature, this is often referred to as adaptation or climate change impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation. The last decades have seen not only substantial improvements ...

Michael Soulé, co-founder of the Society for Conservation Biology and its first President, is widely considered to be the founder of conservation biology (Sanjayan, Crooks, and Mills 2000). In setting out his vision for the field, Soulé argued that it is a crisis-oriented discipline like cancer-bi...

Under any inferential paradigm, statistical inference is connected to the logic of probability. Well-known debates among these various paradigms emerge from conflicting views on the notion of probability. One dominant view understands the logic of probability as a representation of variability (freq...

For as long as astrophysicists have considered the large-scale structure of the cosmos, discoveries on the subject have been taken to provide critical empirical insights relevant to theorizing in fundamental physics. This close connection between the two subjects is most familiar in the context of t...

The demarcation problem has been one of the most important problems in philosophy of science for centuries. Still, the problem has never been solved. The failures, in fact, have been so numerous and so diverse and they have gone on for so long that Larry Laudan issued a death warrant for the problem...

Science journalism is an under-examined topic in our field. This is surprising, given the many points of connection between the presumptive goals of science journalism and topics of perennial interest in philosophy of science (discussed in detail in the long description below). The primary goal of t...

How should one remove “excess structure” from a physical theory? Dewar (2019) presents two ways to undertake such a task: first, one could move to a reduced version of the theory, where one defines the models of the theory only in terms of structure that is invariant under the symmetries of the ...

During an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI), lower-level entities interact in such a way that they produce higher-level entities that become new units invoked in evolutionary explanation at this higher level (Michod, 2005; Okasha, 2006). In this paper, we will argue that to understand a...

I will critically evaluate a science communication strategy – ‘Value-Based Reporting’ – which researchers in science communication are increasingly recommending to science journalists. According to Value-Based Reporting, science reporters should, whenever feasible, report a scientific hypoth...

It is shown that supposedly paradigmatic examples of classic architecture do not contain local representations. In particular, Turing Machines (TMs) carry out transformations over sub-symbols where only the initial and final states may involve interpretable strings. In contrast, examples of computin...

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Ten years into the replication crisis, many scientists are experiencing a deep sense of worry and scepticism. In reaction to this problem, an optimistic wave of researchers has taken the lead, turning their scientific eyes onto science itself, with the aim of making science better. These metascienti...

The general consensus amongst philosophers is that values play an integral role in scientific inquiry. This requires a reorientation towards delineating legitimate from illegitimate values in science, or the new demarcation problem. Although it has been argued that alternatives to the value-free ide...

Few would deny that contemporary western medicine is scientific, but what exactly is implied by this claim? Recent work in philosophy of science has brought research on the demarcation problem to bear on this question and has argued that medicine is a science. Authors disagree on what demarcates sci...

The ‘psychologist’s green thumb’ stands for the assertion that an experimenter needs an indeterminate set of subtle skills or “intuitive flair” (Baumeister, 2016) in order to be able to successfully show or replicate an effect. This argument is sometimes brought forward by authors whose wo...

Quantities are central to a number of important facets of scientific practice. They are the properties over which our theories generalize, and which many of our experiments provide measurements of. Our contemporary understanding of quantities stems in large part from the Representational Theory of M...

The scientific status of folk psychology (FP) is a topic of ongoing debate (Hochstein 2017). One common criticism of the use of FP in the sciences is that FP accounts produce feelings of understanding when in fact they are poor guides to truth. For example, in the context of comparative psychology, ...

Cancer is often conceptualized in terms of selective conflict between cell and organism (Greaves 2015, Aktipis 2020). On this view, cancer involves a form of multi-level selection in which the cancerous cell phenotype is favored by selection at the cell level but opposed by selection at the organism...

I argue that considerations analogous to those van Fraassen raises in connection with physicalism support regarding ontic structural realism as a stance also. Like physicalists, structuralists prescind from defining structure too carefully, in large part because they want the notion of structure to ...

It is well known that the path to greater precision in physics is not smooth. Because differences in subsequent experiments often fall outside the nominal uncertainties of the prior art, science often has to deal with discordance that stimulates increased focus on what were presumed to be small effe...

Non-discrete quantities such as mass and length are often assumed to be real-valued. Rational-valued measurement outcomes are typically thought of as approximations of the `real' values of their target quantity-instances. For example, the representational theory of measurement (RTM) models measureme...

This symposium considers various aspects of “The New Demarcation Problem” (i.e., distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate uses of values in science). Ty Branch and Heather Douglas argue that a successful solution must also renegotiate the scientific social contract. Bennett Holman expl...

Belief polarization occurs when individuals diverge in their beliefs about some hypothesis when updating on certain kinds of evidence. It a persistent feature in society, with important ramifications for scientific, political and cultural discourse. Conventionally, belief polarization has often been...

The way that I seek to redirect the realism debate is away from the question of the reality of unobservable posits of scientific theories and models, and towards the question of whether those theories and models should be interpreted realistically. This makes it easier to include within the realism ...

According to the robust mapping account we propose, a mapping from physical to computational states is a legitimate basis for implementation only if it includes only physical states relevant to the computation, the physical states have enough spatiotemporal structure to map onto the structure of the...

Is social and cognitive diversity beneficial for scientific knowledge production? How do we promote diversity in science? Are there gender or racial gaps in productivity, quality, or citation in academic publications? What are the potential causes for such gaps, and how do we close them? In the past...