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Nutrition science has traditionally relied on population-level evidence, especially evidence from observational studies. However, it is facing what could be called a ‘credibility crisis’ (Penders et al. 2017; Jukola 2021). Critics have questioned the reliability of the evidence originating from ...

The intuitive notion of level is often employed by social scientists and philosophers of social science to conceptualize tricky theoretical challenges. While it serves as an organizing metaphor for thinking, its assumptions and implications are never fully articulated. Consequently, unacknowledged a...

In From Signal to Symbol (2021, p. x) Ron Planer and Kim Sterelny argue that any “adequate” theory of language evolution “must identify a plausible trajectory from great-apelike communicative abilities to those of modern humans where each step along the way is small, cumulative and adaptive (o...

In Identifying Future-Proof Science (OUP 2022) I argue that we can confidently identify many scientific claims that are future-proof: they will last forever (so long as science continues). Examples include the evolution of human beings from fish, the fact that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, and �...

Alternatives to General Relativity (GR) are often superficially similar to GR itself, leading some physicists to take for granted that their shared structure has the same interpretation in all cases. However, following Brown (2005), several philosophers have argued that such superficial similarities...

The mental continuity thesis is an assumption shared by many philosophers and scientists who study mind in nature. It states that the difference in mind between different creatures is one of degree not kind. It is an attractive thesis, as it can serve as a basis for the application of evolutionary r...

In contemporary philosophy of measurement prominent philosophers (van Fraassen 2008; Chang 2004; Tal 2011) have explicitly or implicitly recognized the role the hermeneutic circle plays in measurement. Specifically, they have recognized its role in what is sometimes referred to as the “coordinatio...

Consensus reporting is valuable because it allows scientists to speak with one voice and offer the most robust scientific evidence when interfacing with policymakers. However, what should we do when consensus does not exist? In this paper, I argue that we should not always default to majority report...

While it is known that our current theories of quantum interactions and gravitation cannot describe the Planck scale, the effective scale at which the unification of forces into a quantum theory of gravity occurs is yet unknown. The attempts to build new theories are recently being complemented by a...

In this paper, we investigate one factor that can directly contribute to—as well as indirectly shed light on the other causes of—the gender gap in academic publications: time spent in peer review. To study our problem, we link administrative data from an economics field journal with bibliographi...

Distinguishing between physical systems that compute and those which do not requires an explanation that posits the relation between the formal concept of computation and the physical implementing system. There is confusion about how an answer to the implementation question is to be articulated lead...

Data science, and related data infrastructures and analytic tools, are frequently invoked as a major factor underpinning contemporary transformations in medical research, diagnosis and treatment. This paper discusses whether and how this is happening, and what the implications may be for philosophic...

Kinship was a central topic within anthropology during its first 100 years—roughly 1870-1970—before being made more peripheral to the discipline through several internal critiques. Foremost amongst these were critiques with a political edge to them by David Schneider, who articulated the view th...

In the mid-twentieth century, as mainstream scientific opinion turned away from eugenics and the most explicit versions of race science, two organizations were formed to preserve and continue research in defense of white supremacy. The Pioneer Fund has supported and the journal Mankind Quarterly has...

Although measurement is widespread across the human sciences, the reliability of measurement in these disciplines is often contested. Philosophers of science have developed conceptual models for how measurement practice progresses in the natural sciences, highlighting in particular the virtuous co-d...

In quantum mechanics no specific molecular structure is assigned from first principles. Franklin and Seifert (2020) argue that this is due to the measurement problem. I explore the implications of this to the metaphysical understanding of structure. Specifically, I propose two metaphysical views: th...

High powered methods, the big data revolution, and the crisis of replication in medicine and social sciences have prompted new reflections and debates in both statistics and philosophy about the role of traditional statistical methodology in current science. Experts do not agree on how to improve re...

Abstract: Many scientific fields now benefit from ‘Big Data.’ Yet along with large datasets come an abundance of computational and statistical techniques to analyze them. Many of these techniques have not been subject to sustained philosophical scrutiny. This is in part because the scant literat...

"Data dredging"--searching non experimental data for causal and other relationships and taking that same data to be evidence for those relationships--was historically common in the natural sciences--the works of Kepler, Cannizzaro and Mendeleev are examples. Nowadays, "data dredging"--using data to ...

AI systems are being used for a rapidly increasing number of important decisions. Many of these systems are “black boxes”: their functioning is opaque both to the people affected by them and to those developing them. This opacity is often due to the complexity of the model used by the AI system,...

Current institutional structures for ethics in science focus on oversight—gatekeeping or regulatory compliance. These structures ensure scientists make the ethical decisions deemed appropriate and sanction scientists who do not, and are viewed as external to the research agendas scientists choose ...

Whether widely used measures in the human sciences—e.g., measures of intelligence, happiness, empowerment, depression, etc.—count as quantitative remains a battlefront. Practitioners commonly analyze their data assuming that their measures are quantitative, but many methodologists reject this pr...

Microaggressions, as defined by psychologist Derald Wing Sue, are “the brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial, gender, sexual-orientation, and religious slights an...

This symposium investigates the relationships between the concepts of standard chemistry (e.g. bonds or molecular structure) and quantum mechanical reconstructions of these ideas. Though in many cases there is no straightforward reduction of these standard concepts into quantum mechanical terms, sti...

The aim of this symposium is to generate a more unified, yet pluralistic, framework for thinking about how similarities and differences in scientists’ modeling goals across various modeling contexts influence which multiscale modeling techniques are justified in those contexts. To accomplish this,...