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New mechanists forward an influential account of mechanisms in which entities (or parts) and their activities are organized so as to produce the phenomenon that calls out for explanation; and to explain is to describe that mechanism. However, critics charge that new mechanists have not provided a st...

The perils of excessive idealization in constructing the underlying mathematical framework for fundamental physical theories are illustrated with some examples taken from relativistic quantum field theory: the triviality issue for standard model field theories, the nonexistence of the S-matrix in ...

There is surprisingly little philosophical work on conceptually spelling out the difference between the traits on which natural selection may be said to act (e.g. “having an above average running speed”) and merely circumstantial traits (e.g. “happening to be in the path of a forest fire”). ...

Absolute and relative outcome measures measure a treatment’s effect size, purporting to inform treatment choices. I argue that absolute measures are at least as good as, if not better than, relative ones for informing rational decisions across choice scenarios. Specifically, this dominance of abso...

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,...

A venerable narrative says that teleology died during the Scientific Revolution. McDonough (2020) recently objected that the principle of least action (PLA) shows teleology surviving into Enlightenment physics. Both narratives get the story wrong. The PLA’s history shows that what really happened ...

The spin-2 view on GR has been extremely influential in the particle physics community, including for the development of string theory. Leaving no doubt on its heuristic value, we argue that a foundationalist spin-2 view of GR, as often tacitly taken up as well, runs into a dilemma: either the spin-...

Haag’s theorem is traditionally viewed as a no-go theorem for the mainstream physicists’ approach to interacting quantum field theory, i.e. the interaction picture and its attendant methods of perturbation theory. Mainstream quantum field theory employs the interaction picture to model interac...

In this paper, we assess the extent to which contemporary observations of black holes---particularly those of the LIGO-Virgo and Event Horizon Telescope Collaborations---are ``theory laden''. General relativistic assumptions enter into the methods of both experiments through the use of simulations o...

Over the past decade, scientific researchers and applied data scientists have steadily adopted machine learning (ML) techniques, particularly highly parameterized deep neural networks, Deep Learning (DL). Trained estimators resulting from such ML processes, referred to as models, are now commonly us...

This paper criticises the Waltonian fiction view for providing a misleading role of imagination in scientific modelling, and for failing to provide an adequate account of the epistemology of modelling. Imagination cannot be simultaneously constrained by the model descriptions and relevant for modell...

"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 ...

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...

The tension between axiomatic, mathematically rigorous formulations of quantum field theory (AQFT) and Lagrangian quantum field theory (LQFT) as employed in the Standard Model of particle physics has been much discussed by philosophers and physicists alike. While debate was heated in the last deca...

Much of the literature on the nature and limits of using race as a scientific variable in medicine focuses primarily on United States (US) racial categories. This focus on the US is seemingly justified by ‘contextualism’ - the assumption that we must limit discussion of race and its deployment t...

Research on the credit economy in academic science has typically assumed that academics are expected credit maximizers without argument. How might this assumption be justified? And how might the measure-theoretic foundations of credit be secured? Two approaches are considered. One in which credit is...

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 �...

Immunology is a notoriously complex field with a distinct vocabulary and concepts. Yet immunologists regularly and effectively collaborate with other researchers, notably clinicians and experts in population health. How does this work? This paper proposes a multifaceted answer. Immunology exhibits t...