Hannah O'Riain (University of Calgary) Pregnancy is a neglected but useful case study for investigating biological individuality. Existing accounts of individuality in pregnancy use substance ontology to define the conceptus as a separate individual (as in Smith and Brogaard’s container model, 200...

Olaf Wolkenhauer (University of Rostock) The claim that the primary goal of modeling is explanation, not prediction rings particularly true in the life sciences, where the complexity of the systems under consideration renders most representations more abstract than desirable, and thereby less predic...

P. Kyle Stanford (University of California, Irvine) Stanford suggests that the historical evidence used to challenge scientific realism should lead us to embrace Uniformitarianism, but many recently influential forms of scientific realism seem happy to share this commitment. I trace a number of furt...

Kino Zhao (University of California, Irvine) At its strongest, Hume's problem of induction denies the existence of any well justified assumptionless inductive inference rule. At the weakest, it challenges our ability to articulate and apply good inductive inference rules. This paper examines an anal...

Mousa Mohammadian For a long time, it was assumed that Peircean abduction and Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) were virtually the same. Recently, however, it has been claimed that they are radically different. I argue that these positions rely on a misinterpretation of abduction and lack a hi...

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 explai...

Marie Gueguen (University of Western Ontario) Simulations are a crucial part of evaluating the standard cosmological model. Understanding in which case a simulation can succeed in (dis)confirming a model is, however, still a challenge. When simulations do not match observations, it is not clear how ...

Jonathon Hricko (National Yang-Ming University), Yafeng Shan (Tel Aviv University) This paper examines the nature of analogical reasoning in Humphry Davy's work in electrochemistry in order to shed light on the nature of analogical reasoning in scientific practice more generally. We examine Davy's r...

Stephen John (University of Cambridge) This paper sets out six possible reasons in favour of "anti-vaccination" attitudes. The first and second are grounded in the is/ought distinction. The other four focus on epistemic issues: problems with inferring from "population-level" to "individual-level" kn...

Rebecca Livernois (University of British Columbia) - An externality in economics is broadly defined as an unpriced spillover effect between agents. There is little consensus, however, among economists or philosophers on a more precise characterization of the term (Arrow 1969; Meade 1952; Berta 2017;...

Susan Sterrett (Wichita State University) In mid-November 2018, an international body, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) will meet to vote on a proposal to revise the International System of Units ("the SI"). The proposed revision is considered revolutionary, although the motivat...

Caroline Stone (Washington University, St. Louis) Psychologists say a measure has construct validity when it, in fact, measures the construct it is intended to measure (3). Construct validity is both an important notion in psychological research methods, and the source of much confusion and debate a...

Julia Haas (Rhodes College) An agent exercises instrumental rationality to the degree that she adopts appropriate means to achieving her ends. Adopting appropriate means to achieving one’s ends can, in turn, involve overcoming one’s strongest desires, that is, it can inv...

María Ferreira Ruiz (University of Geneva) Against claims that, in biology, 'information' is used merely metaphorically, or that it cannot be rigorously accounted for, a very recent approach sets out to provide a rich, substantial concept of biological information by analyzing the information talk ...

Kareem Khalifa (Middlebury College) Accuracy monism is the idea that accurate representation (paradigmatically: the acquisition of true beliefs and the avoidance of false beliefs) is the only ultimate epistemic aim of scientific inquiry. Arguments against it are threefold. First, past inquiries that...

Philippos Papayannopoulos (University of Western Ontario) 'Algorithm' is traditionally accepted as an informal-though-precise concept. In the domain of integers, all offered explications of it (Turing machines, recursive functions, etc.) are extensionally equivalent. Nevertheless, the situation is d...

Kathryn Plaisance (University of Waterloo), Alexander Graham (University of Waterloo), John McLevey (University of Waterloo), Janet Michaud (University of Waterloo) - As the motivation for this workshop session stipulates, more and more philosophers of science are expressing interest in doing work t...

Elizabeth Schechter (Washington University) In some sense, we contain multitudes: each of us is composed of multiple cognitive subsystems - cognitive agents, let's say. This paper concerns whether an animal is nonetheless a necessarily unitary agent of some kind to which no mere proper part of an an...

Bryan Roberts (London School of Economics) I argue that there are circumstances in which an antiparticle really is 'physically equivalent' to a particle moving backwards in time. I begin with an account of what the latter means, which I call the 'Many Arrows' account of temporal direction. After dis...

Peter Fazekas (University of Antwerp) Gergely Kertesz (Durham University) This paper provides a detailed analysis and explores the prospects of the arguments for higher-level causal autonomy available for the proponents of the mechanistic framework. Three different arguments (a context-based, an org...

S. Andrew Schroeder (Claremont McKenna College) There is a growing consensus among philosophers of science that core parts of the scientific process require an appeal to non-epistemic values. This undermines the traditional foundation for public trust in science. In this paper I consider two proposa...

Jeffrey Barrett (University of California, Irvine), Calvin Cochran, Brian Skyrms (University of California, Irvine) We present a hierarchical model for the evolution of compositional language. It has the basic structure of a two-sender/one receiver Lewis signaling game augmented with executive agent...

Colin Allen (University of Pittsburgh) Advocates of non-representationalist models of cognition frequently tout their extension to organisms traditionally regarded as unminded or noncognitive. They bring at least two kinds of considerations to bear. One set is empirical: traditionally non-minded org...

Sinan Sencan (University of Calgary) This article focuses on recent discussions about holobionts and evolutionary individuality to evaluate the merits of integrative pluralism. I argue that integrative pluralism is the wrong approach to take when it comes to holobiont research. Because integrative p...

Sara Weaver (University of Waterloo) I offer a feminist analysis of the aesthetic evolution hypothesis. I examine the concept of sexual coercion in the sexual selection literature, particularly the recent literature on aesthetic evolution by mate choice. I argue that sexual coercion should be unders...

James Tabery (University of Utah) The All of Us Research Project was launched in 2016 by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The ambitious plan of the project is to enroll 1,000,000 Americans in a long term study of the causes of health and disease in the U.S. The program is designed as a very l...

Kent Staley (Saint Louis University) When experimental data in particle physics serve as the basis for inferences regarding phenomena, estimates of statistical and systematic uncertainty play a crucial role in determining the empirical value of those inferences. Physicists share no consensus regardi...

Georg Theiner (Villanova University) Canvassing the extant literature on group cognition, I reveal the influence of anthropocentric bias with respect to 1) the presupposition that a robust account of group cognition ought to show that groups are minded in the same sense (although not necessarily to ...

Charlie Kurth (Western Michigan University) According to psychological constructivism, emotions result from projecting folk emotion concepts onto felt affective episodes (e.g., Barrett 2017, LeDoux 2015, Russell 2004). Moreover, while constructivists acknowledge there's a biological dimension to emo...

Silvia Milano (University of Oxford) The Sleeping Beauty problem has attracted considerable attention in the literature as a paradigmatic example of how self-locating uncertainty creates problems for the Bayesian principles of Conditionalization and Reflection. Furthermore, it is also thought to rai...