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Consider a study indicating that police performing traffic stops in Pittsburgh search minority drivers at a higher rate than non-minority drivers. This result would be insufficient for establishing discrimination against minorities. This is because it is compatible, e.g., with the hypothesis that th...

Cancer cells keep accumulating alterations leading to a diversification through space and time. This diversity in the composition of cancer cells represents a major challenge for cancer treatment as it is difficult (if possible, at all) to find a treatment that works on all the cancer cells. The clo...

Non-discrete quantities such as mass and length are often assumed to be real-valued. Rational-valued measurement outcomes are typically thought of as approximations of the `real' values of their target quantity-instances. For example, the representational theory of measurement (RTM) models measureme...

Natural history collections are repositories of diverse information, including collected and preserved biological specimens. These specimens are sometimes integrated into conservation decision-making, where some practitioners claim that specimens may be necessary for conservation. This is an oversta...

For as long as astrophysicists have considered the large-scale structure of the cosmos, discoveries on the subject have been taken to provide critical empirical insights relevant to theorizing in fundamental physics. This close connection between the two subjects is most familiar in the context of t...

Philosophical studies of complex scientific concepts are predominantly “adaptationist”, arguing that conceptual complexity serves important purposes. This is a historical artifact. Having had to defend their views against a monist presumption favoring simpler concepts, pluralists and patchwork t...

It is well known that the path to greater precision in physics is not smooth. Because differences in subsequent experiments often fall outside the nominal uncertainties of the prior art, science often has to deal with discordance that stimulates increased focus on what were presumed to be small effe...

Michael Soulé, co-founder of the Society for Conservation Biology and its first President, is widely considered to be the founder of conservation biology (Sanjayan, Crooks, and Mills 2000). In setting out his vision for the field, Soulé argued that it is a crisis-oriented discipline like cancer-bi...

Under any inferential paradigm, statistical inference is connected to the logic of probability. Well-known debates among these various paradigms emerge from conflicting views on the notion of probability. One dominant view understands the logic of probability as a representation of variability (freq...

A new argument is given for the thesis that only symmetry-invariant physical quantities are real. Non-invariant quantities are dynamically epiphenomenal in that they have no effect on the evolution of invariant quantities, and it is a signifcant theoretical vice to posit epiphenomenal quantities.

The cultural red king effect occurs when discriminatory bargaining practices emerge because of a disparity in learning speed between members of a minority and a majority. This effect has been shown to occur in some Nash Demand Game models and has been proposed as a tool for shedding light on the ori...

South Africa has some of the most genetically diverse and the most genetically admixed human population groups on the planet. This is due to South Africa’s peculiar history, both social and biological. Nevertheless, people in the country are divided into four ‘population groups’ by which offic...

This symposium considers various aspects of “The New Demarcation Problem” (i.e., distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate uses of values in science). Ty Branch and Heather Douglas argue that a successful solution must also renegotiate the scientific social contract. Bennett Holman expl...

Few would deny that contemporary western medicine is scientific, but what exactly is implied by this claim? Recent work in philosophy of science has brought research on the demarcation problem to bear on this question and has argued that medicine is a science. Authors disagree on what demarcates sci...

It is well known that the path to greater precision in physics is not smooth. Because differences in subsequent experiments often fall outside the nominal uncertainties of the prior art, science often has to deal with discordance that stimulates increased focus on what were presumed to be small effe...

Ten years into the replication crisis, many scientists are experiencing a deep sense of worry and scepticism. In reaction to this problem, an optimistic wave of researchers has taken the lead, turning their scientific eyes onto science itself, with the aim of making science better. These metascienti...

The general consensus amongst philosophers is that values play an integral role in scientific inquiry. This requires a reorientation towards delineating legitimate from illegitimate values in science, or the new demarcation problem. Although it has been argued that alternatives to the value-free ide...

Philosophers and metrologists have refuted the view that measurement’s epistemic privilege in scientific practice is explained by its theory-neutrality. Rather, they now explicitly appeal to the role that theories play in measurement. I formulate a challenge for this view: scientists sometimes asc...

According to the Humean Best Systems Account, laws of nature are contingent generalizations in the best systematization of particular matters of fact. Recently, it has become popular to interpret the notion of a best system pragmatically. The best system is sensitive to our interests—that is, to o...

This paper draws on Quill Kukla’s “Institutional Definition of Health” to provide a definition of “psychiatric condition” that delineates the proper bounds of psychiatry. I argue that this definition must include requirements that psychiatrization of a condition benefit the well-being of 1...

Philosophers of science tend to adjudicate debates about the value-free ideal by appealing to case-studies of value-laden science. Interpreting case-studies, however, faces a methodological challenge: measuring the causal impact of values where values interact with myriad causal factors. This challe...

The demarcation problem has been one of the most important problems in philosophy of science for centuries. Still, the problem has never been solved. The failures, in fact, have been so numerous and so diverse and they have gone on for so long that Larry Laudan issued a death warrant for the problem...

Certain philosophers claim the No-Miracles Argument (NMA) for realism commits the base-rate neglect fallacy. I argue that it does not. In general, one commits a base-rate fallacy only when one has access to the relevant base rate. And in the case of scientific realism, we lack access to the relevant...