Tyler Hildebrand (Dalhousie University) In this paper, I distinguish between different interpretations of best systems accounts of laws of nature. Some are metaphysical, providing a theory of the metaphysical nature of laws; others are epistemological, providing a theory of how scientists do (or sho...

Sara Goering (University of Washington, Seattle), Michelle Pham (University of Washington, Seattle) - For the past six years, Goering has led the ethics thrust in an NSF-funded engineering research center focused on neural engineering (the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering or CSNE), and Pha...

Carl Bergstrom (University of Washington), Kevin Gross (North Carolina State University) A large fraction of scientifc research funding is allocated through a system of grant proposals and awards. We use the economic theory of contests to analyze the scientifc efciency of this process. Investigators...

Noel Swanson (University of Delaware) The thermal time hypothesis (TTH) is a proposed solution to the problem of time: every statistical state determines a thermal dynamics according to which it is in equilibrium, and this dynamics is identified as the flow of physical time in generally covariant qu...

James Woodward (University of Pittsburgh) This paper describes a strategy for dealing with causal complexity involving what I call conditional irrelevance. This describes conditions under which we can legitimately replace a large number of lower-level variables mi that are causally relevant to some ...

Kate Lynch (University of Sydney), Pierrick Bourrat (Macquarie University) Heritability and GWAS are often interpreted as measures of degree of genetic causal influence. Yet the exact nature of these causal relationships is often underspecified, and sometimes disputed. As there are multiple ways in ...

Elisabeth Lloyd (Indiana University), Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University) Recently, some scientists have offered a new approach to the analysis of extreme weather events, in which an autopsy of the causes of the event is given, in contrast to the usual approach which focuses on questions of risk. Thi...

Manuela Fernandez Pinto (Universidad de los Andes) While concurring with the claim that the commercialization of science has contributed to public mistrust, I argue that the relation between commercially-driven research and trustworthiness is complex. Using examples from medical research, I first ar...

Shelbi Meissner (Michigan State University) In public health research, tracking folk racial categories is a double-edged tool. Tracking racial categories is dangerous because it reifies biological race essentialism, but ignoring racial categories risks ignoring phenomena in which marginalized commun...

Simine Vazire (University of California, Davis) In this talk I will illustrate how scientists' failure to adhere to scientific norms has contributed to the replicability crisis. I will discuss how we can increase our adherence to these norms, from changing individual researchers' practices to reform...

Evan Thompson (University of British Columbia) In 1892 Ernst Haeckel coined the term “biopsychism” to refer to the position that feeling is “a vital activity of all organisms.” He distinguished biopsychism from panpsychism, the position that “all matter is ensouled,” and from zoopsychism...

Helen Meskhidze (University of California, Irvine) The increasing precision of cosmological observations of the large-scale structure of the universe has created a problem for simulators: running the N-body simulations necessary to interpret these observations has become impractical. Simulators have...

Daniel Hausman (University of Wisconsin-Madison) - Well-being or welfare (which I take to be synonymous) play important roles in economics, psychology, and philosophy. Normative economists have linked welfare to command over consumption goods. Psychologists have been concerned with the sources of po...

Petri Ylikoski (University of Helsinki) Recent literature on case study research suggests a connection between generalization from case studies and mechanism-based theorising. The social scientists employ the notion of mechanism in two different contexts: explaining particular causal outcomes and in...

Tomasz Wysocki (University of Pittsburgh) In the paper, I propose an extension to accounts of token causation formulated in terms of structural equations models. First, I describe the target accounts. Then, I show how the case of circular causation that problems for these accounts, and I devise a wa...

Julie Jebeile (Université Catholique de Louvain), Anouk Barberousse (Université Paris-Sorbonne) Computer power and our understanding of climate processes continue to improve, and are expected to reduce the uncertainty affecting model projections. One way to assess such a reduction is to estimate t...

Stephen Inkpen (Brandon University), Ford Doolittle (Dalhousie University) Concepts of function and dysfunction are central to naturalistic accounts of health and disease, according to which an organism is in a diseased state when the normal functioning of one or more of its parts is impaired. We ex...

Atoosa Kasirzadeh (University of Toronto) The question of whether and if so how, computer simulations are engaged in the production of new knowledge has been subject to an on-going debate in the philosophy of science. This question has been mainly investigated concerning the connection between data ...

Jean Baccelli (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy) The representational theory of measurement (RTM) has long been the central paradigm in the philosophy of measurement. Such is not the case anymore, partly under the influence of the critique according to which it offers too poo...

Martin King (University of Bonn) Six years after the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, there is still a large number and variety of viable models in particle physics that offer potential explanations of particle masses via electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB). All of these are, to some degree,...

Sara Green (University of Copenhagen) This paper explores whether mechanistic research can improve predictions based on correlation-based cancer biomarkers. I examine a case where a model based on the best-characterized genetic marker for neuroblastoma was improved through connections to a mechanist...

Sharon Crasnow (Norco College) Within-case counterfactual analysis requires detailed, concrete knowledge in order to determine which potential causal factors can be varied legitimately — i.e., what counterfactuals are possible. The detail-orientation of such research is in tension with the general...

Charles Pence (Université Catholique de Louvain) I argue here that the debate over the causal status of natural selection, genetic drift, and fitness has foundered on an unrecognized issue in the metaphysics of science. It relies on a solution to what I will call "the composition question" -- defin...

Carole J. Lee (University of Washington, Seattle) Within the scientific community, there is a common understanding that its reward system drives problematic behavior and that, in order to improve science, the scientific community must coordinate across institutions to change how credit is assigned t...

Specificity-talk is pervasive in descriptions of molecular biological information, explanations of genetic causation, and arguments for and against the causal parity thesis in philosophy of biology. In my commentary, I consider the heavy epistemic and normative weight that has been put on the concep...

Max Bialek (Rutgers University) It is a standard feature of the BSA and its variants that systematizations of the world competing to be the best must be expressed in the same language. This paper argues that such single language privileging is problematic because (1) it enhances the objection that t...

Joseph Rouse (Wesleyan University) - Work on repertoires in the life sciences (e.g., Ankeny and Leonelli 2016) has primarily emphasized the expansion of traditional philosophical concern with theory and concepts, by attending to the material and social environments of research. I complement this wor...