Elliott Sober (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Lawrence Shapiro (University of Wisconsin-Madison), William Roche (Texas Christian University) If belief N has proposition p as its content precisely when N and p are positively correlated, then it is obvious that misrepresentation is possible. H...

Peter Mattig (University of Bonn), Michael Stoeltzner (University of South Carolina) We look at the model landscape of physics beyond the Standard Model, emphasizing the importance of particle signatures for unbiased searches and exploratory experimentation at the LHC. Signatures are the stable end ...

Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla (DCLPS), Alexander Gebharter (DCLPS) Schurz (2008) proposed a justification of creative abduction on the basis of the Reichenbachian principle of the common cause. In this paper we take up the idea of combining creative abduction with causal principles and model ins...

Catherine Elgin (Harvard University) To understand a topic is to reflectively endorse a systematic, interconnected network of epistemic commitments in reflective equilibrium where that network is grounded in fact, is duly responsive to evidence, and enables non-trivial inference, argument, and perha...

Lori Maramante (Delaware Technical Community College) - Multiple science education researchers have presented findings indicating that the “scientific method” typically presented in school science does not depict what real scientists do (Abd-El-Khalick et al., 2008, Niaz & Maza, 2011, and Wong &...

John Zerilli (University of Otago) Evidence of the pervasiveness of neural reuse in the human brain has forced a revision of the standard conception of modularity in the cognitive sciences. One persistent line of argument against such revision, however, draws from a large body of experimental litera...

Pierre Boulos (University of Windsor) - It is said that on his deathbed Newton claimed that the one thing that made his head ache is the “lunar problem.” Newton’s successors inherited three major research projects: the shape of the earth, Halley’s Comet, and the perturbation of the lunar orb...

Julia Bursetn (University of Kentucky) I investigate nucleation as an example of universal behavior observable across a wide variety of physical and chemical processes. Nucleation produces phase transitions, including but not limited to those that the renormalization group models. Across the physica...

Michael Nielsen (Columbia University), Rush Stewart This essay is a corrective to an increasingly popular way to misunderstand Belot's Orgulity Argument. The Orgulity Argument charges Bayesianism with defect as a normative epistemology. For concreteness, we reply to Cisewski et al.'s recent rejoinde...

Geoffrey Blumenthal (University of Bristol), James Ladyman (University of Bristol) There are two particularly noteworthy examples in late eighteenth-century chemistry of experiments that were explicitly taken by participants on different sides to be turning points in theory choice. This paper argues...

Wei Fang (Tongji University) This essay considers a mixed-effects modeling practice and its implications for the philosophical debate surrounding reductive explanation. Mixed-effects modeling is a species of the multilevel modeling practice, where a single model incorporates simultaneously two (or e...

Arnon Levy (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Exploration involves an inherent tension: it requires creativity, which embodies a certain freedom from tracking actuality. But to provide genuine epistemic fruits, exploration must exhibit systematicity - a guarantee that it cover and properly evaluat...

Bert Baumgaertner (University of Idaho) One picture of the roles of models in the sciences is that they are downstream of theory, i.e., that in some relevant sense theories comes first and models later. For example, we start with a theory of Newtonian mechanics and then create models to ultimately m...

Matthew Brown (University of Texas, Dallas) I defend a new approach to values in science, the ideal of moral imagination, and show how it coordinates norms for science at the level of individuals, collectives, and social interactions. According to this ideal, scientists should recognize contingencie...

Robert Rupert (University of Colorado, Boulder) In domains ranging from vision to social cognition to logical inference, cognitive scientists often model behavioral data as the output of multiple processing streams. Many philosophers of mind marginalize this trend, claiming that it reveals only the ...

Michael Anderson (University of Western Ontario) This paper will examine some of the evidence that global neural function is the result of the formation of dynamic coalitions of diverse neural elements, at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Against a specifically Cartesian or modular framework, I...

Carrie Figdor (University of Iowa) This paper will consider two fundamental questions that a non-anthropocentric psychology raises for our understanding of full moral status, which is traditionally based on cognition and not just the ability to feel pain. Without an anthropocentric presupposition ab...

Frank van den Bosch (Yale University) Numerical N-body simulations have become a prime tool in modern astrophysics, and are the go-to method to study the formation and evolution of dark matter halos. I will show that such simulations are subject to a number of artefacts that are a serious roadblock ...

Melissa Jacquart (University of Cincinnati) Collaboration between astronomers and philosophers attempts to search for the universe's dark matter, investigating the hypothesis that some of it resides in dark matter galaxies. I address questions related to epistemic warrant: how do astrophysicists ble...

Kun Zhang (Carnegie Mellon Univerisity), Jiji Zhang (Lingnan University), Clark Glymour (Carnegie Mellon Univerisity) Causal discovery methods aim to recover the causal process that generated purely observational data. Despite its successes on a number of real problems, the presence of measurement e...

Armond Duwell (University of Montana) This paper has two aims. One aim is to argue against the view that explanations of phenomena are essential to understanding them, as suggested by the received view associated with Strevens (2013), Grimm (2014), or Khalifa (2017), among others. The second is to a...

Teru Miyake (Nanyang Technological University) Seismology exhibits a high degree of interdependence between models, theory, and data. Information about the objects of investigation that is contained in seismic waves must be extracted through the use of models. This use of models comes with an inhere...

Wendy Parker (Durham University) Model-data symbiosis -- a mutually dependent, yet mutually beneficial relationship between models and data -- can obtain at the level of research programs or of fields as a whole. In this talk, however, I give examples of model-data symbiosis in meteorology and clima...

Kristin Andrews (York University) This presentation will bring together recent discussions of moral practice, judgment, and decision making in artificial agents such as autonomous cars and nonhuman animals such as rats. I will examine arguments in favor of considering nonhuman animals as having a ki...

Rami Koskinen (University of Helsinki) Recent critics of multiple realizability have argued that we should concentrate solely on actual here-and-now realizations that are found in nature. The possibility of alternative, but unactualized, realizations is regarded as uninteresting because it is taken ...

Talun Huang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) How does the human mind emerge from distributed brain processes? Classical cognitive science posits central cognitive mechanisms to control and coordinate between perceptual and motor mechanisms. Proponents of embodied cognitive science, skeptical of the existen...

Shamik Dasgupta (University of California, Berkeley) - What are we doing when we use abstract entities like numbers or vectors to represent physical quantities like mass or acceleration? There has been considerable work on the *mathematics* of measurement, the task of stating representation and uniq...

Samantha Wakil (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)  Lloyd (2005) analyzes every proposed evolutionary explanation of female orgasm and argues that all but one suffer from serious evidential errors. Lloyd attributes these errors to two main biases:  androcentrism and adaptationism. ...

Fridolin Gross (Universität Kassel) Occam's razor refers to the idea that among competing but equally successful explanations the simplest should be preferred, but there are different ways in which this principle has been understood and defended. Recently, systems biologists have argued that the ap...

Daniel Molter (University of Utah) This paper argues that a plant together with the symbiotic fungus attached to its roots (a mycorrhizal collective) functions as one evolutionary individual, regardless of whether the symbionts reproduce together as a unit or propagate independently. I first show th...