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There is a substantial amount of discussion in the philosophical literature on multiscale modeling in physical and material contexts. But there is less such discussion when it comes to the social sciences. This paper earmarks economics as a promising area for multiscale exploration for a number of r...

It has been suggested that particle physics has reached the "dawn of the post-naturalness era." I provide an explanation of the current shift in particle physicists' attitude towards naturalness. I argue that the naturalness principle was perceived to be supported by the theories it has inspired. Th...

How and to what end can we “derive” natural kinds and categories from large data sets? This is a question of interest to philosophers of science, natural scientists, and data scientists, who each offer rich but disciplinarily siloed insights. Cluster analysis refers to a variety of algorithmic p...

Leibnizian metaphysics underpins the near universally held view that spacetime must be inextendible – that it must be “as large as it can be” in a sense. But here we demonstrate a surprising fact within the context of general relativity: the property of inextendibility turns out to be “unsta...

Lange (2017) has done groundbreaking work on the explanatory role of constraints. However, besides having an explanatory role, some constraints, such as perspectival ones, can also have a pragmatic role in explanation. In this talk, I develop an account of perspectival constraints based on erotetic ...

In a recent paper Winsberg (2021) argues in favor of research into geoengineering by relying on Good's theorem, which states that conducting research maximizes one's expected utility. However, Good's theorem sometimes fails for risk-avoidant agents (Buchak 2010). Since risk-avoidance captures some o...

I explain that a target of Newton's example is the inadequacy of Descartes’s definition of motion. But I also a raise a serious problem for the current reading which comes from the attribution of “absolute and true circular motion” to the water revolving inside the bucket. The solution resides...

Many philosophers present dispensability or indispensability arguments that presuppose a specific conception of dispensability. The present paper explores and critiques the reigning conception of dispensability. In particular, I argue that it entails that too many things are dispensable to our best ...

Climate change policy—including matters involving both mitigation and adaptation—is informed by assessments of the risks and damages caused by climate change. Such assessments, in turn, depend on our ability to attribute specific impacts to climate change. Of particular interest is the exacerbat...

What is the connection between capitalism and racial hierarchy? In line with the theoretical tradition known as “the theory of racial capitalism” we show that the latter can functionally support the former. As a social construction, race has just those features which allow it to facilitate stabl...

This presentation explores the relationship between values in scientific and technological research, on the one hand, and features of the organizations that conduct that research, on the other. Organizational features to be highlighted include organizational aims and strategies, organizational struc...

Paleoclimate proxy data are playing an increasingly central role in contemporary climate science. First, proxy data about key paleoclimates in Earth’s history can be used to benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art climate models by providing crucial “out of sample” tests. Paleoclimates p...

In the paradigm of Lewis-Skyrms signaling games, the emergence of linguistic conventions is a matter of equilibrium selection. What happens when an equilibrium has ``natural salience'' -- stands out as uniquely attractive to the players? We present two models. We find that the dynamics of natural sa...

Social oppression is generally understood to be “structural”: formal and informal rules and common patterns of interaction cause disparate and inequitable outcomes for members of certain social groups. However, it is common—especially in psychology and some philosophical subfields—for work t...

Wilhelm (2021) has recently defended a criterion for comparing struc- ture of mathematical objects, which he calls Subgroup. He argues that Subgroup is better than SYM∗, another widely adopted criterion. We argue that this is mistaken; Subgroup is strictly worse than SYM∗. We then formulate a ne...

We approach the debate over “causal effects of race” from a social constructionist perspective. Our first main thesis is that on a broad range of social constructionist views about race, an individual’s race is manipulable, i.e., it is conceptually coherent to posit counterfactuals about a per...

We have previously argued that masking, censoring, or ignoring scientific dissent can be detrimental for several ethical and epistemic reasons, even when such dissent is considered to be normatively inappropriate (de Melo-Martín and Intemann 2018). Masking dissent can be inappropriately paternalist...

Standard articulations of Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) imply the uniqueness claim that exactly one explanation should be inferred in response to an explanandum. This claim has been challenged as being both too strong (sometimes agnosticism between candidate explanatory hypotheses seems th...

The use of racial categories in medical research and practice remains a topic of contestation and heated debate. However, much of the philosophical debate has been geographically limited, focusing primarily on the United States (US) context and the use of race in the US sense. Given that racial cate...

Godfrey-Smith recently introduced the idea of representational ‘organization’. Representations from an organized family are tokened on different occasions and systematically interrelated (eg. analogue magnitude representations). Organization has been elided with structural representation, but th...

Paleoclimate proxy data are playing an increasingly central role in contemporary climate science. First, proxy data about key paleoclimates in Earth’s history can be used to benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art climate models by providing crucial “out of sample” tests. Paleoclimates p...