Roberto Fumagalli (King's College London) In recent years, several authors have called to ground descriptive and normative decision theory on neuro-psychological measures of utility. In this paper, I combine insights from the best available neuro-psychological findings, leading philosophical concept...

Nicholas Alonso (Department of Philosophy Georgia State University and Neuroscience Institute) The emotions paradox consists of the following two widely held beliefs, which are incompatible but appear true: 1) emotions exist as natural-kinds, and 2) scientists have been unable to produce any natural...

Ilmari Hirvonen (University of Helsinki), Ilkka Pättiniemi (University of Helsinki) In their book Every Thing Must Go (2007, Oxford: OUP) James Ladyman and Don Ross defend modal realism, which we argue is in conflict with their programme of naturalistic metaphysics. Ladyman and Ross ...

Paul Hoyningen-Huene (Leibniz Universität Hannover) In a series of papers from 2000 on, Robert Sugden has analyzed the epistemic role of theoretical models in economics. His view is that these models describe a counterfactual world that is separated from the real world by a gap. This gap has to be ...

Marian J. R. Gilton (University of California, Irvine) The property of charge is conceptually central to the various gauge theories of fundamental physics. This project develops a geometrical interpretation of charge by comparing and contrasting electric charge and color charge. Color charge is usua...

Hannah Howland (Pyatok), Vadim Keyser (California State University, Fresno)  Current philosophy of science literature focuses on the relations between natural, experimental, and technological systems. Our aim is to extend philosophical analysis to engineering and architectural systems. The purp...

Alison Springle (University of Pittsburgh), Alessandra Buccella (University of Pittsburgh) Sometimes, perception seems to present the same thing in different ways – a phenomenon we will refer to as phenomenal variation. Several philosophers have argued that some phenomenal variation is systematic ...

Mikio Akagi (Texas Christian University)  William Ramsey (2007) and others worry that cognitive scientists apply the concept “representation” too liberally. Ramsey argues that representations are often ascribed according to a causal theory he calls the “receptor notion,” according to wh...

Elizabeth Miller (Yale University) - In their theorizing about the world, two groups of philosophers give starring roles to basic local concreta—objects arrayed in space-time or, if we prefer, points or (bounded) regions of space-time itself bearing intrinsic states (of “occupation” or other m...

Hajo Greif (Technical University of Munich) There are various ways in which models and simulations in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are designed to relate to cognitive phenomena. In order to get a systematic grasp of these approaches, a taxonomy is developed here. It is based on the coordinates of th...

Boris Babic (California Institute of Technology) The Stanford Open-Policing Project, launched in 2017, currently contains information on more than 60 million police stops across 20 US states conducted between 2011-2015 (Pierson et al., 2017). The dataset was initially compiled through a series of pu...

Rick Shang (Washington University, St. Louis)  I first argue that philosophers' interest in unique and distinctive forms of knowledge in engineering cannot explain the epistemic collaboration between science and engineering. I then argue that, using the early history of neuroimaging as my case ...

Erica Dietlein (University of Nevada, Reno) In vitro systems are commonly used within the fields of molecular biology and biochemistry. However, despite the prevalent use of these systems, discussion regarding the nature of in vitro modeling has thus far captured only a limited scope of what goes on...

W. Ford Doolittle (Dalhousie University) Although molecular biology’s “central dogma” (DNA → RNA → protein; Crick 1958) emphasized the causal primacy of genes, many molecular biologists held to a naïve, organism-centered panadaptationism until the publication in 1976 of The Selfish Gene (...

Kelle Dhein (Arizona State University) Philosophers working on the problem of intentionality in non-linguistic contexts often invoke the historical process of natural selection as the objective grounds for attributing intentionality to living systems. Ruth Millikan’s (1984) influential teleosemant...

Zachary Shifrel (Virginia Tech) Little research has been done on the application of structural realism to sciences beyond physics. It is unclear, for example, whether biology should lend itself precisely to talk of structural continuity. If biology does support such considerations, it is further unc...

Jessica Pfeifer (UMBC) It is commonly argued that probabilities in evolutionary theory result from abstraction (e.g., Sober 1984, Matthen and Ariew 2002, Matthen 2009). I delineate different modes of abstraction, and show these different modes affect how we think about fitness, selection, and drift....

Mingjun Zhang (University of Pennsylvania) In the sixth edition of the Origin, Darwin wrote that, “I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification” (Darwin 1872, 4). The idea that natural selection is the most important, if not the ...

Holly VandeWall (Boston College), Margaret Turnbull (Boston College), Daniel McKaughan (Boston College) In a democratic system non-experts should have a voice in research and innovation policy, as well as in those policy issues to which scientific and technological expertise are relevant – like cl...

Steven Peck (Brigham Young University) I begin this paper with a look at the general background behind the way ecologists create and use theories, and then I assess how agent-based models (ABMs) address problems in theory construction and testing. I use three of my models to illustrate (a) how model...

Foad Dizadji-Bahmani (California State University, Los Angeles) The main challenge for the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics (EQM) is the Probability Problem': If every possible outcome is actualized in some branch, how can EQM make sense of the probability of a single outcome as given by ...

Vincent Bergeron (University of Ottawa) A primary goal of cognitive neuroscience is to identify stable relationships between brain structures and cognitive functions using, for example, functional neuroimaging techniques. Aside from the many technical, theoretical, and methodological issues that acc...

Valerie Racine (Western New England University), Wes Anderson (Western New England University) Within recent discussions about how to conceptualize and understand the behavior of biological systems, such as the genome, philosophers have presented arguments for non-reductionism. John Dupré (2012), i...

TJ Perkins (University of Calgary) Bas van Fraassen’s book, Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective (2008) addresses what he takes to be one of the central aims of science: representation. However, instead of merely asking, ‘what is representation?’ van Fraassen shifts the question...

Joshua Eisenthal (University of Pittsburgh) I argue that the notion of force in classical mechanics does not have a uniform meaning. In particular, I argue that the traditional formulation of classical mechanics appeals to at least two distinct notions of force which are not obviously compatible wit...

Alison McConwell (University of Calgary) Major transitions are events that occur at the grand evolutionary scale and mark drastic turning points in the history of life. They affect evolutionary processes and have significant downstream consequences. Historically, accounts of such largescale mac...

Mara McGuire (Mississippi State University)  Muk Wong (2016) has recently developed a theory of mood and mood function that draws on Laura Sizer’s (2000) computational theory of moods. Sizer argues that moods are higher order functional states, biases in cognitive processes such as attention ...