Eric Saidel (George Washington University) According to Povinelli and Eddy (1996) chimpanzees do not know very much about seeing. Specifically, they do not know what others can and cannot see. According Hare et al (2000, 2001) chimpanzees know what other chimpanzees can see. How can we resolve this ...

Craig Fox (University of Western Ontario) Are there areas of science that focus directly on the construction of narratives and, if so, what role do such narratives play in interpreting data and garnering evidence? This paper argues in the affirmative, and shows that in sciences that reconstruct long...

Gil Hersch (Virginia Tech) - There are a variety of measures that are considered by their proponents to be good ways of operationalizing well-being. These include the traditional economic measures, such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, Subjective Well-Being (SWB) measures, such as questio...

Alison Springle (University of Pittsburgh) According to orthodox representationalism, perceptual states are representational in the sense of having constitutive truth, veridicality, or accuracy conditions. Burge (2010) justifies realism about perceptual representations posited by perceptual science ...

Kenneth Aizawa (Rutgers University) Polger and Shapiro believe that an individual being a member of a kind is a species of realization. This has important ramifications for some of their other views and for their critiques of the work of others. First, by their own lights, Polger and Shapiro should ...

Alan Love (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) Although philosophers have long compared the relative importance of genes to other causes, no consensus has emerged about whether the privileging of genetic causation in biological investigation and explanation is justified. However, little effort has...

Karim Bschir (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH), Lydia Braunack-Mayer (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH) In this paper, we challenge a claim made by Frigg et al. (2014) that uncertainty about the true structure of a nonlinear model debilitates our ability to make decision-rele...

Elselijn Kingma (University of Southampton), Suki Finn (University of Southampton) Kingma (forthcoming) tentatively argues that fetuses are not merely inside the pregnant organism, but part of it. This raises questions about the status of fetuses and pregnant mammals as individuals. To answer them I...

David Wallace (University of Southern California) Most interpretative work on quantum theory assumes not just that a quantum system is isolated but that it is the entire Universe. Likewise for a large part of the philosophical literature on the direction of time in statistical mechanics. All this go...

M. A. Hunter (University of California, Davis) - In this paper, I highlight an incredibly important issue for epidemiology and the attempt to assess and mitigate population-level health disparities. Populations are taken as the bearers of health-related properties, and are routinely stratified by ra...

Gemma De las Cuevas (University of Innsbruck) It is one thing to assert that one should consider taking an open systems viewpoint to be fundamental; it is another to be able to do so in practice. In this talk I discuss how it is possible to effectively and efficiently describe the evolution of open ...

Josh Armstrong (University of California, Los Angeles) Contemporary linguistic theory takes the generative features of language use as a central focus of study. Noam Chomsky has maintained that explaining these generative features requires an appeal to a human language faculty. In this talk, I argue...

Kenny Easwaran (Texas A&M University) There are two major families of proposals for probabilities conditional on events of measure zero. One family (associated with Popper, De Finetti, Dubins, and their followers) fixes a conditional probability for every pair of events. The other (associated wi...

Melinda Fagan (University of Utah) We consider philosophy of science in practice as interdisciplinary research, using a long-term project on philosophy of stem cell research as a case study. Results of this project put the philosophical and scientific sides of this project at odds: the philosophical...

Colin Klein (Australian National University) Biologically realistic models of neural spiking take into account spike timings, yet the relevance of spike timing beyond individual neurons is often unclear. In Izhikevich's (2006) model, spike timing plays a crucial role in allowing for the natural form...

Peter Lewis (Dartmouth College) Pragmatism about quantum mechanics provides an attractive approach to the question of what quantum mechanics says. However, the conclusions reached by pragmatists concerning the content of quantum mechanics cannot be squared with the way that physicists use quantum me...

Marina DiMarco (University of Pittsburgh), Kareem Khalifa (Middlebury College) In this paper, we offer a new account of the role of values in theory choice that captures a temporal dimension to the values themselves. We argue that non-epistemic values sometimes serve as 'prediction tickets:' they ca...

Stephen Esser (University of Pennsylvania)Quantum physics is the foundation for chemistry, but the concept of chemical bonding is not easily reconciled with quantum mechanical models of molecular systems. The quantum theory of atoms in molecules (QTAIM), developed by Richard F.W. Bader and colleague...

Jared Millson (Agnes Scott College), Kareem Khalifa (Middlebury College), Gabe Doble (Harvard Law School) A growing consensus holds that all explanations, causal or otherwise, support change-relating (CR) counterfactuals. Unfortunately, this proposal, which we call CR-monism, has not been precisely ...

Hakob Barseghhyan (University of Toronto), Greg Rupik (University of Toronto) - From a philosophical perspective, one major rationale for an integrated HPS was the idea that the historical record of transitions in sciences could be used to test general philosophical claims about science. Once establ...

Corey Dethier (University of Notre Dame) In spite of its massive influence, Duhem's argument for testing holism rests on a mistake: it conflates the assumptions necessary for the derivation of an empirical consequence with the assumptions necessary for that consequence to be evidence. Using examples...

Wayne Myrvold (The University of Western Ontario) Two prima facie puzzling phenomena are the existence of relatively autonomous laws for the evolution of macroscopic variables, which permit us to disregard details of the microstate, and dissipative, irreversible behaviour of the macrostate. In this ...

Eden Smith (University of Melbourne) - In neuroimaging experiments, the scientific concepts of mental imagery and hallucinations are each used as tools that are independent of the other, uses that simultaneously reflect and obscure the enduring historical connections between these concepts. Examinin...

Heidi Grasswick (Middlebury College) When commentators lament the apparent lack of public trust in science, they often do so in exactly those very general terms, referring to “the” public and to “science” in the singular, as though there is a single attitude of trust across the board that is...

John Matthewson (Massey University) Populations are ubiquitous in science. However, what counts as a population varies from instance to instance, and they are employed in many different investigative contexts. I present a general framework that is inclusive enough to describe the various kinds of po...

Agnes Moors (KU Leuven) - Recent meta-analyses show low correlations between implicit attitude measures and behavior, suggesting that these measures are weak predictors of behavior. This has led some authors to challenge the validity of implicit measures (Oswald et al., 2013), whereas others argue t...

Laura Franklin-Hall (New York University) The most prominent single consideration philosophers of biology have offered against the possibility of biological laws comes from John Beatty (1995), who suggests that it is the contingency of evolution that makes it impossible for biological generalization...

Gab Abramowitz (UNSW Sydney) Most climate projection studies utilise simulations from a range of different climate models, nominally to obtain a collection of independent projection estimates. Yet the community has no agreed metrics for quantifying climate model independence and explicit attempts to...

Sean Valles (Michigan State University) I argue that race concepts can, and must, be used in biomedicine, but that each use must contribute to ameliorating racism. I apply two population health science concepts to help clarify how and why it is important to explicitly address race and racism in biom...

Maria Jimenez (UNED) The upsurge in social science experimentation that has taken place in the last two decades is partly (if not mainly) based on the idea that experiments have a privileged access to causal identification and inference. In the case of laboratory experiments with humans, though, a p...