Simon Huttegger (University of California, Irvine) Kolmogorov's concept of conditional expectation can be thought of as a very general way of updating on new information, including Bayesian conditioning as a special case. This role of conditional expectation can be explored in terms of the reflectio...

Christof Koch (Allen Institute for Brain Science) I abduce the existence of conscious states in other humans as an inference to the best explanation of the facts. The same principles can be applied to other mammals, for their behavior and their brains are similar to mine and, mutatis mutandis, to sp...

John Beatty (University of British Columbia) One might think that aiming for consensus in a group would be aiming for the agreement of all, or at least a high proportion of its members. But that's not what "consensus" means in the case of the IPCC, nor in many other decision-making settings where it...

Thomas Barrett (University of California, Santa Barbara) My aim in this talk is to demonstrate that the following two questions are closely related. The question of content: What is the content of a physical theory? The question of equivalence: When should we consider two theories to be equivalent? ...

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.

Fiona Jordan (University of Bristol) Social scientists who seek explanations for the foundations of social norms and conventions must engage with primary data: the diversity of contemporary and ethnographically-attested cultural phenomena. Explaining cultural diversity requires a multi-level approac...

Quayshawn Spencer (University of Pennsylvania) In the early 2000s, Esteban Burchard and his colleagues advanced a hypothesis in medical genetics that has since become controversial among medical scientists, philosophers of medicine and biology, and race scholars. The hypothesis, which I'll call Burc...

Balazs Gyenis (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Centre for the Humanities) We call attention to different formulations of how physical laws relate to what is physically possible in the philosophical literature, and argue that it may be the case that determinism fails under one formulation but...

James Bullock (University of California, Irvine) Several potential problems with the standard Cold Dark Matter model of dark matter involve non-linear predictions on scales where galaxies matter. Galaxy formation is an unsolved problem. In this talk I will discuss how our potential inability to self...

Eleanor Knox (King's College London) This paper discusses the distinction between internal and external symmetries. I argue (in line with the suggestions of the other papers at the symposium) that no purely mathematical distinction between these symmetries can be made. Instead, the distinction can o...

Michael Rescorla (University of California, Los Angeles) Kolmogorov's theory of conditional probability generalizes the ratio formula so as to define conditional probabilities when the conditioning proposition has probability 0. Recently, several authors have suggested that Kolmogorov's theory can i...

Kristin Schaupp (University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire) Recent philosophical work on disagreement and consensus provides insight into how apparent consensus proceedings can mask disagreement. I demonstrate the undeniable impact that decision-making procedures have by examining the events leading up to ...

Richard Lauer (St. Lawrence University) Much discussion about social ontology is concerned with broadly intuitive a priori considerations, as well as technical tools drawn from analytic metaphysics. However, Kincaid (2015) argues for social realism by motivating a realistic interpretation of social ...

Brian Epstein (Tufts University) Prevailing economic theories of institutions and organizations treat them as rational solutions to strategic problems of interaction and coordination. In this paper, I argue against this approach to institutions, and in particular against the idea that institutions b...

Rosa W Runhardt (London School of Economics and Political Science) Causal claims in case study research are arguably singular causal claims. So-called 'actualist' methodologists have argued that these claims ought to be evidenced with 'actual' case observations. I show that such evidence is insuffic...

David Kinney (London School of Economics) In this article, I consider Curie's Principle from the point of view of graphical causal models, and demonstrate that the usual adequacy conditions for causal graphs---i.e. the Causal Markov Condition and Minimality---do not require anything like Curie's Pri...

Susan Kennedy (Boston University) - While biological reproduction may be a natural phenomenon, the fact that biological parents are responsible for raising their children is not. It is a matter of convention that our social and legal institutions are designed in such a way that procreation leads to ...

Trey Ideker (University of California, San Diego) Although artificial neural networks capture a variety of human functions, their internal structures are hard to interpret. In the life sciences, extensive knowledge of cell biology provides an opportunity to design 'visible' neural networks (VNNs) wh...

Jonathan Birch (London School of Economics) Animal sentience is often regarded as an all-or-nothing property, or one that varies along a single dimension such that some animals are simply "more sentient" than others. I argue that animal sentience varies continuously along several dimensions, and I c...

David Haig (Harvard University) We divide the flux of life into identifiable things that we call individuals, with beginnings and ends, for pragmatic purposes. One seemingly convenient beginning is the fertilization of an egg by a sperm, but are genetic individuals useful ways to carve nature at the...

Rory Smead (Northeastern University), Patrick Forber (Tufts University) Are ownership norms conventional? And if so, why are they so prevalent? A conventional origin for a norm, behavior, or social practice often contrasts with an explanation that appeals to intrinsic values or superior payoffs. To ...

Miriam Solomon (Temple University) Medicine, including psychiatry, is an applied science. Consensus is more important in applied sciences than in basic research, because contexts of application require some common understanding to engage in joint action and justify it to the rest of society. Psychia...

Samuel Schindler (Aarhus University) Einstein famously distinguished between constructive and principle theories. He believed only the former to be explanatory. Lange has recently argued that principle theories explain, too, by virtue of putting necessary constraints on the laws of physics. In this ...

Peter Vanderschraaf (University of California, Merced) Conventions are often analyzed via an equilibrium-in-beliefs approach or a dynamical limit approach. A purely equilibrium-in-beliefs analysis can only explain the origins of a convention with reference to higher-order coordinated beliefs, threat...

Jennifer Jhun (Lake Forest College) We explore the explanatory upshot of supplementing traditional economics with econophysics models by investigating more contemporary models that are popular among economists. Two popular contemporary approaches to modeling in macroeconomics are: dynamic stochastic...

Aaron Novick (University of Pittsburgh) Evolutionary-developmental biology (evo-devo) is often claimed to mark a return of typological thinking to evolutionary biology, in part due to its emphasis on deep conservation of body plans. I argue that the basis of evo-devo's explanation of deep conservati...

Jan Sprenger (University of Turin) Statistical significance tests cannot quantify evidence in favor of the null or default hypothesis. Hence, many experimental findings which do not speak "significantly" against the null do not get published and end up in the proverbial "file drawer", contributing t...

James DiFrisco (Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research & KU Leuven) Recently, several theorists have argued against the prevailing phylogenetic conception of homology in favor of a novel developmental view. They argue that homologues must be tied to their developmental caus...

Matthias Egg (University of Bern) This paper critically assesses the proposal that scientific realists do not need to search for a solution of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, but should instead dismiss the problem as ill-posed. James Ladyman and Don Ross have sought to support this pro...

Haixin Dang (University of Pittsburgh) I argue in this paper that collaborators do not, in fact, need to reach board agreement over the justification of a consensus claim. This is because maintaining a diversity of justifiers within a scientific collaboration has important epistemic value. Existing ...