Boyer-Kassem Thomas (Université Grenoble Alpes), Cyrille Imbert (CNRS) For two centuries, collaborative research has become increasingly widespread. Various explanations of this trend have been proposed. Here, we offer a novel functional explanation of it. It differs from accounts like that of Wray...

Holger Andreas (University of British Columbia) The present paper aims to complement causal model approaches to causal explanation by Woodward, Halpern and Pearl, and Strevens. It centres on a strengthened Ramsey Test of conditionals: α ≫ γ iff, after suspending judgment about α and γ, an agen...

Blake Ginsburg (Michigan State University) This paper makes a case for why anthropocentric bias must be taken seriously by feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science. I open by defending a notion of anthropocentrism that reveals the connections between forms of bias that harm humans and th...

Sarah Robins (University of Kansas) The idea that remembering involves a fixed engram, which becomes stable and permanent as a result of consolidation, has been a guiding assumption of the neuroscientific study of memory since its inception. Understanding of and commitment to the engram and consolid...

Sahotra Sarkar (University of Texas, Austin) - Besides ecology, biodiversity conservation is guided by formal decision theory and ethical analysis. This paper reports on a case where this theoretical framework was translated into practice. This experience has demonstrated the mutual value for intera...

Michael Kremer (RWTH Aachen University) All-encompassing models like supersymmetry have for many years guided the search for physics beyond the Standard Model. However, lack of experimental evidence for supersymmetry at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has led to more model-independent approaches to ...

Michael Miller (University of Toronto) Many physical theories characterize their observables with unlimited precision. Non-fundamental theories do so needlessly: they are more precise than they need to be to capture the matter of fact about their observables. A natural expectation is that a truly fu...

Nicholas Teh (University of Notre Dame), Laura Wells (University of Notre Dame), James Nguyen (University of Notre Dame)In this paper we apply the results of "Why surplus structure is not superfluous" to analyze gauge symmetry in Newtonian gravity, as well as the striking spacetime functionalist cla...

Elay Shech (Auburn University) Historical inductions, viz., the pessimistic meta-induction and the problem of unconceived alternatives, are critically analyzed via John Norton's material theory of induction and subsequently rejected as non-cogent arguments. It is suggested that the material theory i...

Greg Frost-Arnold (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) The Pessimistic Induction over the history of science argues that because most past theories judged empirically successful in their time turn out to be not even approximately true, most present ones probably aren't approximately true either. But ...

Robert Batterman (University of Pittsburgh) I will provide a definition of the concept of universality that goes beyond the simple "same/similar behavior by different systems" meme. The key feature of universality is a claim about the stability of an upper scale behavior under perturbation of lower ...

Emily Parke (University of Auckland) Microbial model systems are often productively studied in complex interaction and iteration with mathematical and other models. These sorts of studies do not fit neatly into either of two traditional categories of scientific inquiry, hypothesis-testing or explora...

Evelyn Brister (Rochester Institute of Technology) - Direct interaction with scientists and engineers is not new for philosophers of science; it is a disciplinary norm to understand scientific practice, and, frequently, to consult with scientists on our projects. However, it is rather less common to...

Jonathan Rosenberg (University of Washington, Seattle) The Flint Water Study shows that collaborations between communities facing environmental injustice and scientists/engineers are prone to unintentional, mutually-beneficial, exploitation of their non-scientific participants. The non-scientist par...

Brendan Bohannan I argue that microbiome research needs mathematical models rather than loose metaphors, and suggest a productive modelling strategy. I focus on a quantitative genetics framework that explores the differential contributions of host genes, microorganisms and environment to system-leve...

Shane Steinert-Threlkeld (Universiteit van Amsterdam) Natural language expressions fall into two categories: content and function words. While function words are essential to compositional semantics, surprisingly little has been said about their emergence. In this paper, I will show that most extant...

Elay Shech (Auburn University), Patrick McGivern (University of Wollongong) We examine arguments for distinguishing between ontological and epistemological concepts of fundamentality, focusing in particular on the role that scale plays in these concepts. Using the fractional quantum Hall effect as a...

Roman Frigg (London School of Economics) Modelling plays an important role in scientific exploration. Many aspects of both target systems and theories are explored by studying models. How and why can models be put into the service of exploration? Using the DEKI account of representation, I explain m...

Marc Ereshefsky (University of Calgary), Derek Turner (Connecticut College) John Beatty and Eric Desjardins offer a rich account of historicity and historical narrative. Here we identify four concerns with their account. We then offer an alternative account of historical narrative that draws on the ...

Hugh Lacey (Swarthmore College) Ethical and social values affect decisions made about the criteria that should be deployed (1) for identifying the range of risks, and of relevant empirical data needed for making judgments about them, that should be considered in public policy deliberations about usi...

Lauren Ross (University of California, Irvine) This talk examines causal complexity in the context of scientific explanation, with a focus on neuropsychiatric genetics. The goals of this talk are to clarify types of causal complexity in science, how they challenge efforts to explain phenomena, and h...

Miklos Redei (London School of Economics), Zalan Gyenis (Jagiellonian University and Eotvos University) Conditional expectations define a "Bayes accessibility" relation among probability measures on a Boolean algebra. If a probability measure is Bayes accessible from another, then the Bayesian Agent...

Kristen Intemann (Montana State University), Inmaculada de Melo-Martin (Weill Cornell Medical College) Dissent about widely accepted scientific claims can promote doubt about scientific evidence, intimidate scientists, stymie research, and lead the public and policymakers to oppose needed policies. ...

Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Bristol) Imagine a world in which knowledge is derided as "elitist" and in which scientific evidence is replaced by an "opinion market" on social media that determines whether a new strain of avian flu is contagious. This dystopian future is not entirely futuristic...

Jennifer Mather (University of Lethbridge) Recent research suggests that animals only distantly related to us, such as octopuses, might have sentience. Given that it is difficult to understand their mental states, how do we use criteria for such states as pain and suffering and situations like enric...

Roberta L. Millstein (University of California, Davis) I examine the use of "function" in ecologist Aldo Leopold's land ethic, invoked in two ways: 1) the healthy functioning of the land community, which is dependent on 2) the maintenance of the characteristic functions of populations that are parts...

Alyssa Ney (University of California, Davis) What justifies the allocation of funding to research in physics when many would argue research in the life and social sciences may have more immediate impact in transforming our world for the better? Many of the justifications for such spending depend on ...

Jeremy Steeger (University of Notre Dame) Recent discussions of certain non-Kolmogorovian hidden variable theories for quantum theory have used Dutch books to argue that the probabilities in these theories cannot be given a reasonable subjective interpretation (Feintzeig 2014; Feintzeig and Fletcher...

Lena Zuchowski (University of Bristol) Geomorphology faces unique epistemological challenges. The most prominent of these is the scale problem, i.e. the fact that geomorphological phenomena encompass process on many different spatial-temporal scales. I identify and compare two predominant methodolog...

Peter Tan (University of Virginia) I argue that Humean accounts of lawhood conflict with what science tells us about the laws' relation to counterfactuals. Scientific reasoning about the laws indicates that some actual laws are preserved even under counterfactual suppositions which violate other law...