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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...

Frank Cabrera argues that informational explanatory virtues—specifically, mechanism, precision, and explanatory scope—cannot be confirmational virtues, since hypotheses that possess them must have a lower probability than less virtuous, entailed hypotheses. We argue against Cabrera’s character...

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 ...

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...

The philosophical foundations of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis were built in opposition to an allegedly essentialist and teleological view of nature going back to Aristotle (Sober 1980). Because essentialism and teleology were regarded as core hindrances for a science of evolution, neo-Darwinian...

Behavioural systems present a relevance problem: there’s too much information about them to include all of it in our explanations, so we must decide what information should be included in and excluded from explanation. One popular solution is to (a) include only information at a single level and (...

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...

Thermodynamics is an unusual theory. Prominent figures, including J.C. Maxwell and E.T. Jaynes, have suggested that thermodynamics is anthropocentric. Additionally, fruitful contemporary approaches to quantum thermodynamics label thermodynamics a ‘subjective theory’. Here, we evaluate some of th...

Organisms use cues differently as they navigate their environments. One distinction researchers use to characterize differences between cues is the distinction between proximal and distal cues. The standard way of thinking about this distinction involves thinking of distal cues as beyond an experime...

Two factors give rise to the need for an iterative approach to evidence, inexactness of measurement and complexity of the phenomena being represented. As Duhem emphasized, the first of these alone entails any number of alternatives at a comparable level of agreement with any one representation. Duhe...

This paper provides a formal treatment of the argument that syntax alone cannot give rise to compositionality in a signalling game context. This conclusion follows from the standard information-theoretic machinery used in the signalling game literature to describe the informational content of signal...

This paper shows how institutional values influence the design and evaluation of arguments in funding proposals for scientific research. We characterize a general argument made within proposals and several kinds of subarguments that contribute to it. We indicate that funders’ values inform the kin...

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...

Is race real? If so, what exactly is it? These questions have captivated both philosophers and social scientists alike. Participants in these debates frequently appeal to race’s role in explaining various social phenomena, though they rarely engage with empirical social science. In this paper, we ...

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...

A core tenet of Bayesian epistemology is that rational agents update by Bayesian conditionalization. Accuracy arguments in favor of this norm are well-known. Meanwhile, in the setting of quantum probability and quantum state estimation, multiple updating rules have been proposed, all of which look p...