James Nguyen (University of Notre Dame) It is commonly assumed that idealised models misrepresent their target systems. And as such the role(s) of idealisations in science seem mysterious: how can misrepresentations accurately predict, explain, or generate understanding about, target system behaviou...

Steven French (University of Leeds) Are the nature and role of imagination in science the same as that in art? Here I explore this question in the context of scientific discovery. On the one hand, contrary to recent accounts of imagination in fiction, the relevant attitude in science seems closer to...

Marshall Abrams (University of Alabama, Birmingham) I argue that biological evolution and other complex processes depend on imprecise chances, i.e. imprecise analogues of real-valued objective probabilities. I give a general argument for the existence of imprecise chances in nature. I then argue tha...

John Bickle (Mississippi State University) Tool development in contemporary neurobiology exemplifies Hacking's insistence that experiment has a "life of its own" independent of theory. Previously Bickle argued for this using the development of gene targeting techniques and optogenetics/DREADDs. Here...

Andrew Buskell (University of Cambridge) - Empirical approaches across the natural and social sciences assume well-individuated cultures; that is, that cultures are individuals that differ in key features. Cultural anthropologists, for instance, highlight kin structure, marriage customs, means of ex...

Calvin Cochran (University of California, Irvine), Cailin O'Connor (University of California, Irvine) Many societies have state norms of equity---that those who make symmetric social contributions deserve symmetric rewards. Despite this, there are widespread patterns of social inequity, especially a...

Vincent Ardourel (KU Leuven), Anouk Barberousse (Paris Sorbonne Université), Cyrille Imbert (CNRS) Scientific models need to be investigated if they are to provide valuable information about the systems they represent. Surprisingly, the epistemological question of what enables this investigation ha...

Sebastian De Haro (University of Amsterdam), Jeremy Butterfield (University of Cambridge) We have elsewhere advocated a schema for understanding dualities, both in string theory and other fields of physics. In this talk, we use it to address how duality relates to logical equivalence, intertranslata...

Remco Heesen (University of Cambridge), Liam Kofi Bright (Carnegie Mellon University) Pre-publication peer review should be abolished. We consider the effects that such a change will have on the social structure of science, paying particular attention to the changed incentive structure and the likel...

Boaz Miller (Zefat Academic College) While philosophers of science formulate conditions for communal knowledge, they say little about when an individual member of an epistemic community knows. I argue that an individual member knows when she responsibly does what is practicably possible to have a tr...

Angela Potochnik (University of Cincinnati) I motivate the idea that scientific understanding is often directly benefited from the inclusion of false posits, i.e. idealizations. This is because researchers' specific aims influence what generates the cognitive state of understanding. Accordingly, gen...

Michael Brownstein (John Jay College) - What is the status of research on implicit bias? Criticism is ubiquitous. Recent meta-analytic reviews suggest that the Implicit Association Test is a “poor” predictor of behavior (Oswald et al. 2013) and that changes in scores on implicit measures may not...

Ferric Fang (University of Washington) Research reproducibility is increasingly questioned. Explosive growth of the literature and hypercompetition among scientists are not conducive to good scientific practices. Proposals to make research more reproducible emphasize scientific rigor with little gui...

Sebastián Gil-Riaño (University of Pennsylvania) - Shortly after the publication of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, UNESCO appointed Alfred Métraux, a Swiss-American anthropologist, to become director of its "race division" and lead its international anti-racism campaign. Among anthropologists...

Ruey-Lin Chen (National Chung Cheng University) "What is a gene?" is an important philosophical question that has been asked over and over. This paper approaches this question by understanding it as the individuation problem of genes, because it implies the problem of identifying genes and identifyi...

James Read (University of Oxford) The goal of this paper is to pinpoint the precise reasons for the differing status of inertial motion in TPG versus NG. In so doing, I seek to bring greater clarity to the notion of inertial motion in physical theories more generally. Along the way, I discuss Knox's...

Chrysostomos Mantzavinos (University of Athens) Scientific progress has many facets and can be conceptualized in different ways, for example in terms of problem-solving, of truhtlikeness or of growth of knowledge. The main claim of the paper is that the most important prerequisite of scientific prog...

Markus Eronen (University of Groningen) In this paper, I will argue that interventionist causal discovery faces great obstacles in psychology, due to the special subject matter of psychology (i.e., human individuals and their minds/brains). First, psychological interventions are likely to be both fa...

Joshua Luczak (Leibniz Universität Hannover) Much of the literature on modelling in science is concerned with representational models. Despite their importance, distinct nature, and presence, toy models, on the other hand, which are a kind of nonrepresentational model, are rarely discussed. This pa...

Nina Emery (Mount Holyoke College) - In this paper, I argue that laws metaphysically explain their instances, and show how this argument has implications for the debate over quantum ontology. I begin by revisiting an argument for the view that laws ground their instances that was originally presente...

Lena Kästner (Ruhr-University Bochum) Explanations in psychiatry often integrate various factors relevant to psychopathology. Identifying genuine causes among them is theoretically and clinically important, but epistemically challenging. Woodward’s interventionism appears to provide a promising t...

Luke Fenton-Glynn (University College London) The notion that imprecise *credences* are rationally permissible or even mandatory has gained increasing attention. Less well known is that there are powerful arguments that *chances* are sometimes imprecise. I propose a specific principle for how ration...

Julian Reiss (Durham University) - The main claim I am making in this paper is that there are few if any uncontroversial facts in economics. I provide three reasons to back up this claim. First, fact/value entanglement is pernicious in economics. Second, socio-economic facts tend to be sensitive to ...

Alison Wylie (University of British Columbia) I compare the trajectory of three different projects that are using the tools of archaeological science — geochemical, DNA, stable isotope, and survey analysis — to address Indigenous-led questions in the context of an Indigenous/Science re...

Konstantin Genin (University of Toronto), Kevin T. Kelly (Carnegie Mellon University) The distinction between deductive (infallible, monotonic) and inductive (fallible, non-monotonic) inference is fundamental in the philosophy of science. However, virtually all scientific inference is statistical, w...

Alex Koo (University of Toronto) The Enhanced Indispensability Argument (EIA) for mathematical realism supposedly represents an improvement over its Quinean predecessor due to the replacement of confirmational holism with Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) to infer realism. The assumption is th...

Siska De Baerdemaeker (University of Pittsburgh) Cosmology at its core is an integrative science. In this paper, I focus on evidential integration and I investigate how cosmologists can overcome diffculties in integrating different sources of evidence. I draw a distinction between mediated and unmed...

Mario Guenther (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy) We impose properties of causation, as assumed in cognitive neuroscience, upon Woodward's (2005, 2015) account of interventionism. Within the resulting framework, we investigate to what extent we are justified to derive causal relations betwe...

Aaron Wells (University of Notre Dame) Recent scholarship has highlighted Kant's contributions to debates in the life sciences, but comparatively little attention has been paid to his engagement with Linnaeus's 'Economy of Nature' program. As this paper explores, Kant argues that there is no need, e...

Fiora Salis (University of York) How do we learn through the scientific imagination involved in scientific models? I distinguish between two sorts of claims scientists can make within the modelling practice, claims about the imaginary system the model describes and claims about reality. The former r...