Richard Dawid (Stockholm University)
The paper analyses non-empirical confirmation in the context of cosmology. Cosmology shows that, while empirical and non-empirical confirmation look very different from each other in clear-cut cases, there is a slippery slope that leads from one to the other.

Tushar Menon (University of Oxford)
The dynamical approach to physical geometry, developed by Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley, has been the subject of a number of papers over the last decade or so. The position asserts, among other things, that facts about physical geometry are grounded in, or explained by, facts about dynamical fields, not the other way round. One critic in particular, John Norton, is taken to have articulated a robust objection to the view. His claim is that the proponent of the dynamical approach is illictly committed to spatiotemporal presuppositions in 'constructing' spacetime from facts about dynamical symmetries. In this paper, I present an abstract, algebraic formulation of field theories, based on the mathematics of non-commutative field theories and demonstrate how to reproduce the ubiquitous model-theoretic picture of a theory like SR in algebraic terms. I then introduce an extension to the dynamical approach that does away with the requirement of a smooth manifold, the 'illicit spatiotemporal presupposition' that Norton identifies. I argue that the extended dynamical approach is thus immune to the charges that Norton levels against it.

JB Manchak (University of California, Irvine)
It has been argued that "it is a general feature of the description of physical systems by mathematics that only conclusions which are stable, in an appropriate sense, are of physical interest'' (Geroch, 1971, 70). Here, we consider the spacetime property of effective completeness (cf Manchak 2014) which rules out "local holes'' in spacetime (see Earman 1989). We show a strong sense in which effective completeness is not stable; an effectively complete spacetime can be arbitrarily "close" to spacetimes without this property.

Mike D. Schneider (University of California, Irvine)
The "Cosmological Constant Problem" (CCP) is widely considered a crisis in contemporary theoretical physics. Unfortunately, the search for its resolution is hampered by open disagreement about what is, strictly, the problem. This disagreement stems from the observation that the CCP is not a problem for any of our current theories, and nearly all of the details of those future theories for which the CCP could be made a problem are up for grabs. Given this state of affairs, I discuss how one ought to make sense of the role of the CCP in physics and generalize some lessons from it.

Siska De Baerdemaeker (University of Pittsburgh)
Cosmology at its core is an integrative science. In this paper, I focus on evidential integration and I investigate how cosmologists can overcome diffculties in integrating different sources of evidence. I draw a distinction between mediated and unmediated evidence, and I argue that unmediated evidence takes priority in two ways: in being more reliable in the integrative context, and in being more useful heuristically. I illustrate my view by drawing on contemporary dark matter research, as well as on the history of the cosmological constant.