Christopher Suhler (Nanyang Technological University), Liam Kavanagh Philosophers and other cognitive scientists sometimes find themselves embroiled in debates over the precise bounds (or defining "mark") of cognition. Animating these debates is the belief that precisely defining 'cognition' wi...

Bennett Holman (Underwood International College, Yonsei University) - Last year may be remembered as the pivotal point for artificial “deep learning” and medicine. A large number of different labs have used Artificial intelligence (AI) to augment some portion of medical practice, most notably in...

Jay Odenbaugh (Lewis & Clark College) Along with (Maclaurin and Sterelny, 2008), I argued the best account of ecosystem functions are systemic capacity functions (Cummins, 1975). Two approaches to ecological function in ecosystem ecology have sprung up: the organizational account (Nunes-Neto et ...

Eran Tal (McGill University) The upcoming redefinition of metric units may strike philosophers as counterintuitive. How can the uncertainties associated with some fundamental constants be reduced through definition alone? Answering this and related puzzles calls for a reconsideration of the epistemi...

Kevin Elliot (Michigan State University) - This talk will focus on practical strategies that can help promote successful efforts at socially relevant, or engaged, philosophy of science. It will begin by clarifying and illustrating a wide range of activities that could potentially fall under the labe...

Alistair Isaac (University of Edinburgh) Recent philosophy of measurement has emphasized the existence of both diachronic and synchronic "loops," or feedback processes, in the epistemic achievements of measurement. A widespread response has been to conclude that measurement outcomes do not convey in...

Chris Smeenk (Western University), Sarah Gallagher (Western University) Cosmologists have pursued a variety of strategies to assess the reliability of N-body simulations. We will focus on the viability of robustness analysis (Weisberg 2006). We argue that robustness analysis alone is not sufficient ...

Paige Harden (University of Texas, Austin) Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) perform “hypothesis-free” statistical tests of the correlation between millions of genetic variants and a measured phenotype, such as height, body mass index, psychiatric disease, sexual orientation, or educational...

Richard Prum (Yale University) Philosophical discussions of the existence and implications of subjective experience have focused mainly on humans, but these issues have rich and diverse implications for the process of organic evolution. Following Nagel, I view the subjective experience of animals as...

Calvin Lai (Washington University, St. Louis) - In a meta-analysis (Forscher, Lai, et al., 2018), we synthesized evidence from 492 experiments (87,418 participants) to investigate the effectiveness of procedures to change performance on implicit measures and their effects on explicit measures and be...

Michael Hardimon (University of California, San Diego) Recent philosophers have argued that the folk concept race can be placed on an empirically and conceptually sound footing. Where does this leave folk racial classification — i.e., classification into particular races (black, white, Asian)...

Jamie Shaw The emerging consensus in the secondary literature on Duhem is that his notion of 'good sense' is a virtue of individual scientists that guides them while choosing between rival theories (Stump 2007; Ivanova 2010; Kidd 2011; Fairweather 2012; Bhakthavatsalam 2017). More specifically, it i...

Antoine Dussault (Collège Lionel-Groulx) This paper argues that ecological role functions (ERF) should be defined as contributions to resilient ecosystem functioning. I draw on accounts of ERF in terms of Cummin's causal role theory of function, and argue that, although the causal role account adeq...

Eric Scerri (University of California, Los Angeles) - The dual sense of the term ‘element has attracted a great deal of attention from contemporary philosophers of chemistry. Roughly speaking one sense of the term refers to Lavoisier’s element or simple substances that can be isolated. Secondly,...

Jan-Willem Romeijn (University of Groningen), Remco Heesen (University of Cambridge) This paper offers a new angle on the common idea that the process of science does not support epistemic diversity. Under minimal assumptions on the nature of journal editing we prove that editorial procedures, despi...

Justin Biddle (Georgia Institute of Technology) - Cancer screening—or testing for cancer in the absence of symptoms—is the subject of much debate. Screening has the potential to save lives by identifying and treating cancers in early stages. However, not all cancers cause symptoms, and the diagn...

Yoichi Ishida (Ohio University) Weisberg and others argue that equations are not mathematical models; equations are statements describing a model. I argue that equations function as iconic representations of physical systems. In the qualitative analysis of ordinary differential equations (ODEs), sci...

Lachlan Walmsley (Australian National University) Models are essential scientific tools that scientists use to make inferences and build theories and that policy-makers use to inform their decisions. But models are imperfect representations of their real-world targets, containing simplifications and...

Beckett Sterner (Arizona State University) Evolutionary conceptions of species place special weight on each species having dynamic independence as a unit of evolution. However, the idea that species have their own historical fates, tendencies, or roles has resisted systematic analysis. Growing evide...

Irina Mikhalevich (Rochester Institute of Technology) The classic "Baconian" view holds that science is characterized by experiment and experiment is characterized by active intervention on nature. Many scientific investigations, such as natural experiments, observational studies, model and simulati...

Kerry McKenzie (University of California, San Diego) - Mathematical structuralism and scientific structuralism both aspire to provide a metaphysics of objects based on the structure of theories. But separating them is the fact that only the latter must accommodate the historical fact of radical theo...

Felipe De Brigard (Duke University) Although cognitive systems are commonly posited in explanations in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, there is uncertainty as to how to precisely characterize them. Recently, I (De Brigard, 2017) argued against a prominent characterization of cognitive system ...

James Justus (Florida State University) Perhaps no concept has been thought more important to ecological theorizing than the niche. Without it, technically sophisticated and well-regarded accounts of character displacement, ecological equivalence, limiting similarity, and others would seemingly neve...

Nancy Tuana (Penn State University) - Based on almost a decade of practicing “embedded philosophy” through working with scientific teams on climate change risk management, I will discuss opportunities for such work as well as the challenges philosophers face when trying to engage scientific comm...

Anke Bueter (Leibniz Universität Hannover) My paper supports calls for an increased integration of patients into taxonomic decision-making in psychiatry by arguing that their exclusion constitutes a special kind of epistemic injustice: Pre-emptive testimonial injustice, which precludes the opportun...

Julie Zahle (University of Bergen) Case Study research is characterized by the employment of multiple data gathering methods. In this paper, I examine the concurrent use of participant observation and qualitative interviews. The question I address is: what is the rationale behind their combination i...

Alan Richardson (University of British Columbia) - Philosophers of science sometimes like to distinguish philosophical concern regarding science from (mere) historical concern regarding science by stressing the normativity of philosophy of science (and correspondingly the descriptive nature of histo...

Donal Khosrowi (Durham University), Julian Reiss (Durham University) This paper has three sections. Section 1 advances a novel critique of 'evidence-based policy'. The core of the critique is that the demand that policies be 'evidence-based', when this involves preferences for specific methods to ge...

Grose Jonathan (University of Southampton) Elselijn Kingma argues that philosophical literature typically adopts a biologically suspect "container" model of pregnancy. She suggests that the maternal-foetal relation is part-whole rather than container-contents. I examine whether support for the part-...

Paco Calvo (University of Murcia) My talk introduces plant intelligence in terms of neo-Gibsonian ecological psychology and embodied cognitive science. Plants take action in response to their needs. We may understand how plants perceive and act purposefully in terms of the coupling of an embodied sy...