News

Belief polarization occurs when individuals diverge in their beliefs about some hypothesis when updating on certain kinds of evidence. It a persistent feature in society, with important ramifications for scientific, political and cultural discourse. Conventionally, belief polarization has often been...

Science journalism is an under-examined topic in our field. This is surprising, given the many points of connection between the presumptive goals of science journalism and topics of perennial interest in philosophy of science (discussed in detail in the long description below). The primary goal of t...

The ‘psychologist’s green thumb’ stands for the assertion that an experimenter needs an indeterminate set of subtle skills or “intuitive flair” (Baumeister, 2016) in order to be able to successfully show or replicate an effect. This argument is sometimes brought forward by authors whose wo...

Orthodox quantum theory tells us that properties of quantum systems are represented by self-adjoint operators, and that two properties are incompatible just in case their respective operators do not commute. We present a puzzle for this orthodoxy, pinpointing the exact assumptions at play. Our solut...

According to the robust mapping account we propose, a mapping from physical to computational states is a legitimate basis for implementation only if it includes only physical states relevant to the computation, the physical states have enough spatiotemporal structure to map onto the structure of the...

Is social and cognitive diversity beneficial for scientific knowledge production? How do we promote diversity in science? Are there gender or racial gaps in productivity, quality, or citation in academic publications? What are the potential causes for such gaps, and how do we close them? In the past...

I will discuss attempts to modify Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to explain current observational puzzles in cosmology. Focusing on the late-time acceleration of the universe, I will discuss guiding principles in modifying General Relativity, the theoretical issues that arise, and the fun...

Precision medicine offers a precious opportunity to change clinical practice and disrupt medicine’s reliance on crude racial, ethnic, or ancestral categories by focusing on an individual’s unique genetic, environmental, and lifestyle characteristics. However, precision medicine and the genomic s...

How should one remove “excess structure” from a physical theory? Dewar (2019) presents two ways to undertake such a task: first, one could move to a reduced version of the theory, where one defines the models of the theory only in terms of structure that is invariant under the symmetries of the ...

During an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI), lower-level entities interact in such a way that they produce higher-level entities that become new units invoked in evolutionary explanation at this higher level (Michod, 2005; Okasha, 2006). In this paper, we will argue that to understand a...

Arthur Jensen (1923-2012) was one of the most prolific and well-cited psychologists of the twentieth century. We have two pictures of Arthur Jensen. The first is the meticulous and careful psychologist crowned “a king among men” by his colleagues. The second Jensen repeatedly voiced eugenicist c...

Astrochemistry is “the study of the formation, destruction and excitation of molecules in astronomical environments and their influence on the structure, dynamics and evolution of astronomical objects” as stated by Alexander Dalgarno the pioneer of this field. Astrochemistry comprises observatio...

I defend pain eliminativism against three recent challenges for its adequacy as a prediction of and a prescription for the fate of folk psychology in the face of mature neuroscience. While some challenges consist in showing that folk psychology is thriving in coexistence with advanced pain neuroscie...

Precision medicine is motivated by the insight that patients and their problems show great variability and ideally should be treated in way that accounts for the individual’s biology and context. Realizing this vision rests on the development of new model systems that can recapitulate the physiolo...

I formulate an account of theoretical equivalence for effective quantum field theories. To start, I propose the `Easy Ontology' approach to interpreting what effective theories say about the physical world. Then I show how the Easy Ontology approach can be used to articulate an account of theoretica...

Newton’s startling conclusion in Book III of the Principia that all bodies gravitate defied easy interpretation. Whereas the editor of the Principia’s second edition (1713), Roger Cotes, claimed that gravity is a primary quality, Newton himself was more cautious. He claimed only that all bodies ...

Most commentators have assumed that while Émilie Du Châtelet’s Foundations of Physics (1740) is an important and original work that demonstrates her commitment to Leibnizian metaphysics and the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), Du Châtelet herself does not have an original argument for eith...

The way that I seek to redirect the realism debate is away from the question of the reality of unobservable posits of scientific theories and models, and towards the question of whether those theories and models should be interpreted realistically. This makes it easier to include within the realism ...

Quantities are central to a number of important facets of scientific practice. They are the properties over which our theories generalize, and which many of our experiments provide measurements of. Our contemporary understanding of quantities stems in large part from the Representational Theory of M...

The scientific status of folk psychology (FP) is a topic of ongoing debate (Hochstein 2017). One common criticism of the use of FP in the sciences is that FP accounts produce feelings of understanding when in fact they are poor guides to truth. For example, in the context of comparative psychology, ...

The sciences make progress through inquiries that address human problems. Many of those problems are practical, although some arise from detached curiosity. I think of this progress as pragmatic (Kitcher 2017): improving problematic situations, rather than aiming towards some goal (e.g. the fundamen...

The tradition of a strict conceptual dichotomy between space(time) and matter--all entities and structures in our universe are to be categorised and conceptualized as either spacetime or matter, never both, never neither--originates with Democritus’ atomism--everything in our universe is ultimatel...

There are major three schools of thought in statistics: frequentism, Bayesianism, and likelihoodism. They are often thought to be in fundamental disagreement, but I don't think so. My goal is to develop a simultaneous unification of the three camps, and defend it against the most urgent of the alleg...

In 1945, Carl Hempel proposed a simple theory of confirmation that eventually came to be seen as unacceptably unsophisticated: it failed to incorporate the impact of epistemic context, of the "superempirical virtues" such as simplicity and explanatory elegance, and it was purely qualitative, determi...