Eric Winsberg (University of South Florida) I explore a novel account of robustness according to which multiple lines of evidence for a hypothesis add cumulative support for the hypothesis whenever each one rules out a plausible alternative explanation. I show that we can make sense of a number of c...

Devin Gouvea (University of Chicago) Recent philosophical work on biological homology has generally treated its conceptual fragmentation as a problem to be solved by new accounts that either unify disparate approaches to homology or specify sharp constraints on its meaning. I show that several propo...

Michael Dietrich (University of Pittsburgh), Nathan Crowe (University of North Carolina) - Understanding scientific change in terms of the components of repertoires (Ankeny & Leonelli 2016) can shed important insight into how science is conducted, organized, and communicated. Following Silvia Culp a...

Ravit Dotan (University of California, Berkeley) Being sensitive to evidence is very important for the success of epistemic endeavors. However, I argue that resistance to evidence is also important. I start the paper by explaining what resistance is and arguing that it is essential for epistemic end...

Klodian Coko (University of Western Ontario) I argue that the epistemic strategy of multiple determination (i.e. the epistemic strategy of using multiple, independent procedures to establish "the same" result) is not a form of robustness. There are many characteristics that distinguish multiple dete...

Alexandru Marcoci (London School of Economics), James Nguyen (University of Notre Dame) The fragmentation of academic disciplines forces individuals to specialise. In doing so, they become experts over their area of research. But under certain innocuous assumptions, this gives rise to an impossibili...

Inkeri Koskinen (University of Helsinki), Kristina Rolin (University of Helsinki) Whereas much of the literature in the social epistemology of scientific knowledge has focused either on scientific communities or research groups, we examine the epistemic significance of scientific/intellectual moveme...

Pierre-Hugues Beauchemin (Tufts University) Signature-based model-independent searches for new physics at the LHC seem to correspond to Steinle and Burian's conception of exploratory experiments. They also seem to support Bogen and Woodward's conception of phenomena. This paper however demonstrates ...

Jonathan Tsou (Iowa State University) This paper addresses the question of how human science categories yield projectable inferences through a critical examination of Ron Mallon's 'social role' account of human kinds. Mallon contends that human categories are causally significant and projectable whe...

Jun Otsuka (Kyoto University) This paper argues that biological species should be construed as abstract models, rather than biological or even tangible entities. Various (phenetic, cladistic, biological etc.) species concepts are defined as set-theoretic models of formal theories, and their logical ...

Viorel Pâslaru (University of Dayton) I examine in this article the role of descriptions of recurrent mechanisms in explanation and prediction. I show that the new mechanistic philosophy is committed to the symmetry explanation-prediction. Contrary to this thesis, I examine the work of ecologist D....

Zina B. Ward (University of Pittsburgh)Individual differences complicate the neuroscientific task of aggregating and comparing data across human brains. Many researchers have adopted a "cartographic approach" in response to this challenge, in which they register data from multiple subjects to a comm...

Manolo Martínez (Universitat de Barcelona) Information is widely perceived as essential to the study of communication and representation; still, theorists working on these topics often take themselves not to be centrally concerned with "Shannon information", as it is often put, but with some other,...

Rebecca Korf (University of Montana) Criticism of the value-free ideal has motivated attempts to formulate a criterion for the legitimacy of non-epistemic value influence in science. I argue that this search aims to protect two main components of legitimacy, scientific integrity and justice. While i...

David Teira (UNED), Mattia Andreoletti (European Institute of Oncology) Over the last decade, philosophers of science have extensively criticized the epistemic superiority of Randomized Clinical Trials (RCTs) for testing safety and effectiveness of new drugs, defending instead various forms of evide...

Luis Mireles-Flores (TINT, University of Helsinki)How is it possible to infer reliable token-level policy interventions from scientific causal generalisations? Causal accounts make a number of assumptions to define truth conditions for causal generalisations. Deciding on using one set of assumptions...

Justin Bruner (Australian National University), Bennett Holman (Underwood International College, Yonsei University) Concern over the reproducibility of experimental work in the social sciences has motivated some to re-examine the extent to which science can be said to be self-correcting. We consider...

Samuel Fletcher (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) The concept of emergence, as it is implemented in modern physics, is commonly invoked but rarely defined; even when it is, it is typically only done so informally. Building on recent influential work by Butterfield (2011a,b), I provide precise...

Makmiller Pedroso (Towson University) Groups can dynamically respond to multiple types of environmental cues, such as disturbance events, even when they are composed by 'simple' microbial cells. The theory of group selection provides a useful account of how groups shape social evolution, but it omit...

Justin Bzovy (MacEwan University) Species pluralists argue that there is more than one legitimate species concept, but fail to fully explore the ways concepts interact if we accept pluralism. Since different concepts often cross-classify, most pluralists stress the separation of legitimate species c...

Vanessa Seifert (University of Bristol), Geoffrey Blumenthal (University of Bristol), James Ladyman (University of Bristol) - Reference to chemical kinds is often considered in the case of terms such as ‘gold’ and ’water.’ This paper considers the history of reference to types of colourless ...

Russell Powell (Boston University), Eric Scarffe (Boston University) The debate over the concept of disease is cast as one between naturalism and normativism, with a hybrid view staked out in between. In light of widely discussed problems with each account, some theorists recommend eliminating the d...

Moira Howes (Trent University) Immunology was once considered the science of "self-nonself discrimination" and early research in pregnancy immunology was strongly influenced by this view. The accrued evidence, however, supports neither a static definition of self nor a clearly delineated self-nonsel...

Morgan Thompson (University of Pittsburgh) I argue for a second type of robustness analysis that has not yet been expounded upon in the philosophical literature. The two types of robustness analysis are most appropriate when researchers are in different epistemic situations regarding the target syst...

Michael Weisberg (University of Pennsylvania), Deena Weisberg (University of Pennsylvania) Galapagueños, the full-time residents of the Galápagos Archipelago, are simultaneously the source of the greatest stress on the islands and potentially their most effective protectors. But there is a deep di...

Henk de Regt (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) The understanding that comes with scientific explanation is regarded as one of the central epistemic aims of science. In my Understanding Scientific Understanding (OUP, 2017) I have argued that scientists achieve understanding of phenomena by basing their ...

Sebastian Murgueitio Ramirez (University of Notre Dame) Throughout this paper, I  argue that in Einstein's late texts there is not one but two "principles of separability."  I show that  both  principles are compatible with  entanglement and that both are necessary in order ...

Kathryn Tabb (Columbia University) The Precision Medicine Initiative introduced by the Obama administration in 2015 has been heralded as a paradigm shift in medicine. Here I make both historical and philosophical arguments against the virtue of medical precision, and in favor of a competing virtue t...

JB Manchak (University of California, Irvine) It has been argued that "it is a general feature of the description of physical systems by mathematics that only conclusions which are stable, in an appropriate sense, are of physical interest'' (Geroch, 1971, 70). Here, we consider the spacetime propert...

Paul Franco (University of Washington, Seattle) I draw upon speech-act theory to understand the speech-acts appropriate to the multiple aims of scientific practice and the role of nonepistemic values in evaluating speech-acts made relative to those aims. First, I look at work that distinguishes expl...