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Arthur Jensen (1923-2012) was one of the most prolific and well-cited psychologists of the twentieth century. We have two pictures of Arthur Jensen. The first is the meticulous and careful psychologist crowned “a king among men” by his colleagues. The second Jensen repeatedly voiced eugenicist c...

In recent years, more and more authors have called attention to the fact that the theoretical foundations of psychology are shaky. This has led to a lively debate on the “theory crisis” in psychology, which is argued to be more fundamental than the replication crisis that has received much more ...

Descriptive Summary: Participants in this symposium will bring diverse perspectives to philosophical issues arising out of cancer science and medicine. Speakers will discuss conceptual and epistemic issues arising in cancer research, such as how best to define cancer “drivers” and “actionable�...

Over the past twenty years, philosophers of science have given sustained examination to the role that values play in science, identifying positive roles for both cognitive and noncognitive values. These include value judgments made during research, such as the conceptualization of phenomena, data se...

While many by now acknowledge that wide-spread replication failures are indicative of a crisis in psychology, there is less agreement about questions such as (a) what this “replication crisis” is a crisis of, precisely (i.e., whether it is really, at heart, a crisis of replication) and (b) what ...

Equilibrium climate sensitivity is a measure of the sensitivity of earth’s near-surface temperature to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. When numerous state-of-the-art climate models recently indicated values for climate sensitivity outside of a range that had been stable for decades, clim...

This paper examines the importance of the concept of magnitude to the philosophy of measurement. Until the mid-twentieth century, magnitude was a central concept in theories of measurement, including those of Kant (1781 A162/B203), Helmholtz (1887), Hölder (1901), Russell (1903, Chapter XIX), Campb...

The tradition of a strict conceptual dichotomy between space(time) and matter--all entities and structures in our universe are to be categorised and conceptualized as either spacetime or matter, never both, never neither--originates with Democritus’ atomism--everything in our universe is ultimatel...

I will discuss attempts to modify Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to explain current observational puzzles in cosmology. Focusing on the late-time acceleration of the universe, I will discuss guiding principles in modifying General Relativity, the theoretical issues that arise, and the fun...

Standard methodological and statistical texts divide research methodology into two strictly separated categories: confirmatory and exploratory research. In some fields, like scientific psychology, almost all research reports are written up as if they are confirmatory, i.e., involve rigorous tests of...

Philosophical critique of scientific levels or candidate level-systems often blends into critique of the activity of leveling. Here I defend leveling, the activity, with no commitment to any given scientific system of levels or the notion that within a given scientific system there is necessarily on...

The poor replicability of scientific results in psychology, the biomedical sciences, and other sciences is often explained by appealing to scientists’ incentives for productivity and impact: Scientific practices such as publication bias and p-hacking (which are often called “questionable researc...

Philosophers have the impression that evolutionary medicine is plagued by naive adaptationism (e.g., Murphy 2005, Valles 2011, Méthot 2012), leading to poor science through the proliferation of untestable ‘just-so stories’ and to poor medicine through not considering alternative explanations wi...

The central aim of the nutrition sciences is to understand how nutrition impacts health. One problem supposedly plaguing this endeavor is nutritionism—a ‘reductive’ focus on the role of nutrient composition or isolated nutrients (e.g., macronutrients or vitamins) for explaining a food’s effe...

Precision medicine is motivated by the insight that patients and their problems show great variability and ideally should be treated in way that accounts for the individual’s biology and context. Realizing this vision rests on the development of new model systems that can recapitulate the physiolo...

I formulate an account of theoretical equivalence for effective quantum field theories. To start, I propose the `Easy Ontology' approach to interpreting what effective theories say about the physical world. Then I show how the Easy Ontology approach can be used to articulate an account of theoretica...

When, in 2015, the replication crisis was identified in the field of psychology, many researchers took up the task of working on methodology and suggesting practices that would help improve the replicability of findings in psychology. More recently, it has been noted that many of the identified prob...

Scholarship on values in science has exploded in recent years. Nevertheless, with the exception of some work on topics like patent policies, funding structures, and corporate influences on science, most scholarship on science and values has focused on the influences of values on individual scientist...

No-go theorems attract widespread interest in the philosophy of physics. These results from the foundations of physics are distinctive for their logical force and counter-intuitive implications. A classic example that has attracted much philosophical attention is Haag's theorem, a result in quantum ...

Levels-eliminativists, including this symposium’s participants, have raised a variety of criticisms about specific conceptions of levels as well as the broad use of levels as a metaphor or heuristic in science. The general question inspired by such criticisms and explored in this symposium is: the...

Debates about racism and calls for racial equality have recently surged. This shift is reflected in the EU’s expansion of its anti-discriminatory policies to include race and ethnicity as categories. To determine the extent of racial/ethnic discrimination and the success of ‘positive action’ m...

Current approaches to resolving psychology’s theoretical problems converge in their call for the further formalization of psychological theory (e.g., Fried, 2020; Van Rooij & Baggio, 2021; Borsboom et al., 2021; Robinaugh et al., 2021; Guest & Martin, 2021). In contrast, we have argued that psycho...