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Machine learning (ML) and Deep learning (DL) modeling applications in science are becoming increasingly common. Despite their growing pervasiveness in the sciences, the potential implications of these models for philosophy of science have just scratched the surface. So far interest has largely cente...

With the advent of ‘Big Data’ came an abundance of computational and statistical techniques to analyze it, somewhat vaguely grouped under the label of `Data Science'. This invites philosophical reflection and systematization. In this paper we will focus on exploratory data analysis (EDA), a wide...

This paper elucidates an important feature of type-level causal relationships that is critical for understanding why disasters occur in sociotechnical systems. Using an interventionist theory, the paper explicates a concept, causal delay, to characterize differences between how rapidly or slowly int...

Cancer biology features ascriptions of normal function to cancer. Normal functions are activities that parts of systems, in some minimal sense, should perform. Cancer biologists’ ascriptions pose difficulties for two main approaches to normal function, leaving a gap in the literature. One approach...

Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) is a key metric when trying to understand the past, present and future behavior of Earth’s climate. Several models used in the latest IPCC report’s Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) have failed to yield an ECS value within the consensus range e...

Haag’s theorem is a valuable result for foundations of physics because it supplies direct information about relativistic QFT, which is a framework theory. Constructing theories within this framework (e.g., lattice QCD, φ 2 4 , the Standard Model) using the wide variety of strategies found in main...

Racial health disparities are a pervasive problem in the United States. While these disparities are mainly due to structural racism, genomicists have been attempting to find a genetic cause to these largely social problems. Disparities in disease rate and outcomes for asthma and diabetes present opp...

Proponents of the extended evolutionary synthesis have argued that there are explanatory gaps in evolutionary biology that cannot be bridged by standard evolutionary theory. In this paper, we consider what sort of explanatory gaps they are referring to. We outline three possibilities, data-based gap...

Forber and Smead (2014) analyze how increasing the fitness benefits associated with prosocial behavior can increase the fitness of spiteful individuals relative to their prosocial counterparts, so that selection favors spite over prosociality. This poses a problem for the evolution of prosocial beha...

Field theory offers a new account of how teleology and goal directed systems work. Under field theory, goal-directedness arises from fields that are external to, and envelope, the entities they direct (McShea 2012, 2016; Babcock and McShea 2021). A teleological entity immersed in a field behaves per...

Much recent philosophical attention has been given to the concept of validity in psychometrics (Alexandrova 2017; Angner 2013; McClimans 2010). By contrast, the question of whether and when a psychometric instrument is fit for its intended purpose has been largely neglected. Here we argue that fitne...

A popular account of evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs) postulates a crucial change in the nature of fitness during an ETI. Fitness at the collective level is supposedly “transferred” or “decoupled” during the process (Michod, 2005; Okasha, 2006). Recently, this view of ETIs ha...

In this paper we examine “gain of function” (GOF) research in virology, which results in a virus that is substantially more virulent or transmissible than its wild antecedent. We examine the typical animal model, the ferret, arguing that it does not easily satisfy potential desiderata for an ani...

In his landmark “State of the Planet” speech in 2020, UN Secretary-General Guterres said what many scientists believe: “The state of the planet is broken” (Guterres 2020). This language reflects a view of global processes as functional in the sense that components have roles to play in the w...

Astonishingly large datasets are now relatively easy to come by in many scientific fields. The availability of open datasets means that it is possible to acquire data on a problem without formulating any hypothesis whatsoever. The idea of an exploratory data analysis (EDA) predates this situation, b...

In this talk, I present different strategies for evaluating the adequacy of a given model in context of high uncertainties, all based on the idea of iterative coherence testing, i.e., a methodology that anchors the improvement of the models accuracy in an iterative process of solving the discrepanci...

Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) is a key metric when trying to understand the past, present and future behavior of Earth’s climate. Several models used in the latest IPCC report’s Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) have failed to yield an ECS value within the consensus range e...

Indigenous expertise has become increasingly recognized in a wide range of academic fields including agricultural sciences, ecology, public health, and sustainability studies (Chilisa 2019, Kimmerer 2013). The recognition of Indigenous expertise in academia interacts with a wider shift in the scienc...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...