Cord Friebe (University of Seigen) The paper provides a coherent, unified view to save Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII) in the quantum domain. The discerning defense of PII can be applied to non-entangled, (anti)symmetric states, and the summing defense is successful in th...

Cristian Soto (Universidad de Chile), Diego Romero-Maltrana (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaíso) We articulate a local form of selective realism in view of the shifting from classical to quantum electrodynamics. Section 1 briefly reviews the challenge to selective realism and the local r...

William Bechtel (University of California, San Diego) Machine-learning tools, including tools for analyzing network representations of big data in cancer research, do not seem to characterize mechanisms. By annotating the results with information from Gene Ontology (GO), researchers attempt to inter...

Joe Roussos (London School of Economics), Roman Frigg (London School of Economics), Richard Bradley (London School of Economics) Increasingly many policy decisions take input from collections of scientific models. Such decisions face significant, poorly understood uncertainty. We rework the recently...

Michael Matthews (University of New South Wales) - This paper acknowledges the long life (born September 1919) and extraordinary contributions to physics, philosophy, social science and much else of Mario Bunge. The paper focuses on the importance of theoretical debates in science education that hin...

Elaine Landry (University of California, Davis) - I will use a structuralist account of mathematics to critically examine the claim, typically made against structural realists, that one cannot speak of structures without objects, because relata are prior to relations. I will argue that such priority...

Mary Morgan (London School of Economics) - There are a number of important umbrella terms in economics that are well defined, and even invite quantification in their framing, yet whose measurement is, in practice, deeply problematic. They have acquired measurements, in the sense that the state and s...

Nancy Cartwright (University of California, San Diego) Orthodox medical opinion is sceptical about methodology for singular causal claims. It is widely maintained that we cannot establish causation in the single case; and, if we could, this would be fairly useless because such claims would not be ge...

Arieh Schwartz (University of California, Davis) Recent analyses of memory (Robins, 2016; Cheng & Werning, 2016; Michaelian, 2016; Bernecker, 2017) propose accuracy as one of the necessary conditions for a mental state to count as memory. This paper shows that the accuracy condition on memory im...

Katherine Valde (Boston University) - This talk examines the use of processual concepts in the context of carcinogenesis research. There has recently been an increased interest in the prospect of a process framework for biology, and much of the attention has been focused on whether a process ontolog...

Travis LaCroix (University of California, Irvine) I propose a formal framework for measuring the amount of information contained in a complex signal. The basis for this model is the relative entropy of the complex signal as a whole compared to the entropy of its constitutive parts when decomposed. O...

Naftali Weinberger (University of Pittsburgh) In my talk, I consider a strategy for causally modeling complex systems by dividing them up into semi-independent 'near-decomposable' subsystems. I use simple examples to show how descriptions of such subsystems in terms of their degree of interaction re...

Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira (University of Cincinnati) A powerful idea put forward in the recent philosophy of science literature is that scientific models are best understood as instruments, tools or, more generally, artifacts. This view ('artifactualism') is independent from the traditional phil...

Attilia Ruzzene Contextualization is often invoked in the social sciences as a strategy to deal with any "excess of generality" by bringing to light the idiosyncrasy of the specific. It is achieved by research designs that express two features: context-specificity, that is, permeability to the idios...

Karen Kovaka (Virginia Tech) This talk contrasts two primary mechanisms of sexual selection. In the first mechanism, potential mates select for traits that are accurate signals of mate quality. The second mechanism is an aesthetic one in which potential mates select for traits they find aestheticall...

Michele Luchetti (Central European University) This paper analyses the case study of Ohm's law of electric current in order to exhibit a novel approach to coordination between theory and measurement procedures. Ohm's scientific practice suggests that there are different 'layers' of constitution iden...

Emanuele Ratti Ratti (University of Notre Dame), Ezequiel López Rubio (University of Málaga) We argue that mechanistic models elaborated by machine learning cannot be explanatory by discussing the relation between mechanistic models, explanation and the notion of intelligibility of models. We show...

Dan Sperber (Central European University), Mathieu Charbonneau (Central European University) While the word "meme" has become extremely popular, Dawkins' actual idea of a meme has had little scientific success. Dennett stand on his own in relying heavily on the idea of a meme to pursue several impor...

Michael Stuart (London School of Economics) Imagination is part of the scientist's toolbox, but it is unlike the other tools. In experiment, mathematical reasoning, computer simulation, etc., we mostly try to filter out random fluctuations and unpredictable or uncontrolled events. But we would not r...

Carlos Santana (University of Utah) Mineral species are, at first glance, an excellent candidate for an ideal set of natural kinds somewhere beyond the periodic table. Mineralogists have a detailed set of rules and formal procedure for ratifying new species, and minerals are a less messy subject mat...

Wes Anderson (Western New England University) Philosophers such as Glymour and French, and Okasha aim to causally conceptualize group, neighborhood, multi-level, or kin selection, and thereby reconceptualize the inferential practices regarding this research area. Their applications of causal modelin...

Mark Tonelli (University of Washington) with Jon Williamson (University of Kent) Over the last two decades, medical epistemology has been largely focused on epidemiologic information derived from various forms of clinical research and from statistical manipulations of empirical data. With this pr...

Greg Lusk (Michigan State University), Wendy Parker (Durham University) Climate services is an emerging area of climate science meant to provide "scientifically-based information and products that enhance users' knowledge and understanding about the impacts of climate on their decisions and actions....

Cailin O'Connor (University of California, Irvine), James Owen Weatherall (University of California, Irvine) In this talk, we ask: how can funding agencies and scientific communities make use of credit incentives to protect the public from industry? Low powered studies are more likely to spuriously ...

Otávio Bueno (University of Miami) - Structural realism, as a realist form of scientific structuralism, crucially relies on there being suitable interpretations of mathematical structures (particularly those used in successful applications in the sciences) in order to derive ontological conclusions...

Nicole Hassoun (Binghamton University) - How should we measure welfare? Doing so is important for many reasons. Policy makers have recently turned towards various measures and indicators of well-being in addition to purely economic measures, such as GDP per capita. The hope is that these indicators ...

Jacob Stegenga (University of Cambridge) The best methods that clinical scientists employ to test medical interventions, including the randomised trial and meta-analysis, often said to be the pinnacle of research methods in medicine, are, in practice, not nearly as good as they are often made out to...

Rosa Cao (Stanford University) As informational entities, memes are not bound to any particular physical expression or specific causal mechanisms of interaction. Nonetheless, in order to participate in evolutionary explanations, they must have the right characteristics to be subject to Darwinian pro...

Vadim Keyser (California State University, Fresno) I show that in complex methodological contexts, representational and intervention-based roles require re-conceptualization. I analyze the relations between representation and intervention by focusing on the role of intervention in mediating represen...

Matteo Colombo (Tilburg University) An adequate explication of miscomputation should do justice to the practices involved in the computational sciences. Unfortunately, relevant practices outside computer science have so far been overlooked. In this paper, I begin to fill this gap by distinguishing d...