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I will critically evaluate a science communication strategy – ‘Value-Based Reporting’ – which researchers in science communication are increasingly recommending to science journalists. According to Value-Based Reporting, science reporters should, whenever feasible, report a scientific hypoth...

Cancer is often conceptualized in terms of selective conflict between cell and organism (Greaves 2015, Aktipis 2020). On this view, cancer involves a form of multi-level selection in which the cancerous cell phenotype is favored by selection at the cell level but opposed by selection at the organism...

Large-scale numerical simulations are increasingly used for scientific investigation; however, given that they are often needed precisely because ordinary experimental and observational methods cannot be used, their epistemic justification is often in question. Drawing on the adequacy-for-purpose fr...

It is shown that supposedly paradigmatic examples of classic architecture do not contain local representations. In particular, Turing Machines (TMs) carry out transformations over sub-symbols where only the initial and final states may involve interpretable strings. In contrast, examples of computin...

Broadly speaking, this paper shows how the interaction between scientific practices may be subject to strategic constraints—that is, fruitful interaction between practices may require finding ways to adapt one practice to the strategies informing the other. One way, therefore, that the concepts wi...

A well-known result by Diaconis and Zabell examines when a shift from a prior to a posterior can be represented by conditionalization. This paper extends their result and connects it to the reflection principle and common priors. A shift from a prior to a set of posteriors can be represented within ...

TEST

Inferences from clinical research results to estimates of therapeutic effectiveness suffer due to various biases. I argue that predictions of medical effectiveness are prone to failure because current medical research overlooks the impact of a particularly detrimental set of biases: meta-biases. Met...

Some philosophers understand natural kinds to be the categories which are constraints on enquiry. In order to elaborate the metaphysics appropriate to such an account, I consider the complicated history of scurvy, citrus, and vitamin C. It may be tempting to understand these categories in a shallow ...

Is cancer a natural kind? On the one hand, the question is whether we are right to split cancer into the categories we use. According to Plutynski (([2018]), cancer nosology yields “a multimodal and cross-cutting family of classificatory schemes” which seems to warrant “pluralist realism” ab...

The function of many biological systems is made possible by a network along which items of interest whether nutrients, goods, or information–can be routed. The human brain is a notable example. It is comprised of regions that perform specific functions and engage in particular computations. Those...

This symposium focuses on a constellation of issues concerning climate risks and responses to these risks. In the climate policy literature, this is often referred to as adaptation or climate change impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation. The last decades have seen not only substantial improvements ...

My goal here is to explain why it is harder than one might expect to find a satisfying package that combining the Best System Account of chance and the Principal Principle. One can show that for a certain prima facie attractive version of the Best System Account of chance, the only priors that satis...

My aim in this talk is to consider the increasingly contested topic of how to integrate Indigenous expertise and science as it applies to the case of integrating African Traditional Medicine (ATM) and modern biomedicine in South Africa’s healthcare system. One prevalent narrative against integrati...

Why do scientific disciplines appear, disappear, merge together, or split apart? We might point to major events: the creation of new journals and departments, significant innovations, or new technologies. However, at the heart of things is a social process involving interactions among individual sci...

Why is this so hard?

I argue that considerations analogous to those van Fraassen raises in connection with physicalism support regarding ontic structural realism as a stance also. Like physicalists, structuralists prescind from defining structure too carefully, in large part because they want the notion of structure to ...

Taking the formal analogies between black holes and classical thermodynamics seriously seems to first require that classical thermodynamics applies in relativistic regimes. Yet, by scrutinizing how classical temperature is extended into special relativity, I argue that it falls apart. I examine four...

Once acquired, status as a theoretical virtue is rarely lost. But recent philosophical criticisms of parsimony argue its scope is rather limited and its justificatory basis quite thin. In fact, psychological studies cast a pall on positive assessments of parsimony. They show simplicity consideration...

This paper examines the axioms of algebraic quantum field theory (AQFT) that aim to characterize the theory as one that implements relativistic causation. I suggest that the spectrum condition (SC), microcausality (MC), and primitive causality axioms (PC), taken individually, fail to fulfill this go...