News

Recent science funding policy scholars and practitioners have advocated for the use of lotteries, or elements of random chance, as supplementations of traditional peer review for evaluating grant applications. One of the primary motivations for lotteries is their purported openness to innovative res...

A central concern of good reporting is to try to convey a sense of the range of opinions on an issue. This is part of the way in which a free press is understood to fulfill its essential role in functioning democracies. By presenting the electorate with an explanatory survey of plausible positions o...

In recent years, a new generation of scholars have begun searching for physical signatures of computation. That is, they have begun investigating what it takes for a physical system to implement a computation with unprecedented attention to the scientific practices involving computation, including c...

Directly after the release of Nicholas Wade’s *A Troublesome Inheritance*, population geneticists, biologists, and biomedical researchers wrote an open letter to the *New York Times* stating that “We reject Wade’s implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork." Given their clear den...

We present a computational model of reflective equilibrium with precedent. Each agent considers a rule by which to accept or reject cases. Cases are represented as labeled binary strings: intuitive accept, intuitive reject, or no intuition. Rules are represented as a pair: a binary string and a tole...

In this talk we will provide a philosophical account of purposiveness grounded in the organization of biological organisms. The core of the argument consists in establishing a connection between purposiveness and organization through the concept of self-determination. Our account relies and elaborat...

Permutations play an important role in both metaphysics and philosophy of physics: metaphysicians are interested in how (if at all) possible worlds are affected by permutations of the objects that inhabit those worlds; philosophers of physics are interested in how (if at all) permutations affect phy...

The end of Richard Towne’sTreatise of the Diseasesmost Frequent in the West Indies (1726) takes up the description of “diseases to which the blacks are no strangers, but as far as I am informed they are utterly unknown in Europe.” Given that these afflictions seemed to be limited to a single r...

Acknowledging that scientific research today is mainly conducted in the private sphere with commercial interests (or values) in mind, becomes crucial for understanding the roles of values in science today, as well as to imagining ways of counteracting some of the undesirable influence of such values...

Replication of a finding is a sign – for some, the only sign – of scientific truth. Evidential discordance compromises truth, because discordance in scientific evidence means that a finding has not been reliably replicated. We distinguish between different types of evidential discordance, and si...

This paper relates discussions of scientific ontology to debates about the value-ladenness of science. First, I distinguish three types of pluralism about kinds and argue that none of them threatens realism. Then I argue that pluralist realism about kinds has implications for the debate about the ro...

In current practice, psychological explanations typically present a narrative in which a theory renders a putative empirical phenomenon intuitively likely. However, whether the theory actually implies the phenomenon in question is also left to this intuition. To design a test for such a theory, diff...

Although quantum gravity is often described as empirically inaccessible, in fact astrophysics and cosmology teem with situations in which both gravitational and quantum-mechanical effects are relevant, and so we have abundant observational constraints on quantum gravity at energy levels low compared...

Race is frequently treated as an explanatory variable in causal models throughout the social sciences. Yet, there is lively disagreement about the causal status of race. This disagreement arises from three claims that jointly form a paradox: (1) all causes are manipulable; (2) race is a cause; and (...

Race science recruits scientific work in the biological, behavioral, and social sciences in the service of legitimating the presupposition that there are biological races which map on to social racial systems. But the biological structure of human populations is not synonymous with particular racial...

In a Bayesian framework, Goodman's `New Riddle of Induction' boils down to the choice of priors. I argue that if we assume random sampling, we should assign a low prior probability to all emeralds being grue. This is because random sampling and the observation-independence of green and blue imply th...

Early scales developed to measure experiences of everyday racial discrimination employ an interpersonal schema of the racial discrimination construct (e.g, McNeilly 1996; Williams 1997; Krieger et al. 2005). For example, the Perceived Racism Scale conceives of racial discrimination as “a belief or...

In this talk, I attend to three main tasks. First, I locate the main rationale for my perspectival realism in what I call historical naturalism (drawing on Massimi 2022, Ch 8). I argue that our realist commitments originate from a thoroughgoing naturalistic stance. However, by contrast with classica...

In this symposium, we use the history of philosophy to illuminate specific, grounded aspects of contemporary practice in machine learning, raising new problems and proposing new frameworks for the philosophy of machine learning. Our symposium draws on 200 years of empiricism and its critics, ranging...

Belief polarization is the tendency for individuals with opposing beliefs to predictably disagree more upon being exposed to certain types of evidence. A variety of recent papers have argued that many of the core empirical results surrounding this effect are consistent with standard Bayesian or appr...

In this paper, we consult the philosophical literature to improve suboptimal practices in psychology. We discuss several practices in psychology that in our view hamper its scientific development. We then argue that these practices are rooted in certain methodological and philosophical commitments. ...

The 1950/51 UNESCO statements on race were opposed by a group of scientists who rejected the post-WWII scientific consensus that the human species does not divide neatly into races. Both sides of this dispute had explicit political purposes. The dispute turned on a difference between two models of ...

Does quantum mechanics accommodate chemical intuitions about bonds, or sweep them away in favour of something new? In this paper I look at foundational issues arising for two revisionary efforts to embed the chemical bond into quantum mechanics. Energy and structure: Since the 1930s, a standard way ...

Efforts to rationalize racial injustice and colonialism by appealing to the epistemic authority of science — race science — have waxed and waned over the last several decades. Even when it is regarded as discredited or pseudoscientific, race science has been actively maintained on the fringes of...

Many normative questions about race have been addressed by social and political philosophers. These philosophers use philosophical approaches quite distinct from those found in the philosophy of science. The merits of these approaches notwithstanding, the complexity of social phenomena involving rac...

Research in evolutionary ecology on random foraging ignores the possibility that some random foraging is an adaptation not to environmental randomness, but to what Wimsatt called "perceived randomness". This occurs when environmental features are unpredictable, whether physically random or not. Mere...