Kikyung Lee (University of Pennsylvania) The aim of this paper is to make a positive contribution to Slater’s stable property cluster account of natural kinds via two endeavors. First, I argue that Slater’s account is better than its two main rival theories (homeostatic property cluster theory a...

Aida Roige (University of Maryland, College Park) How can we determine whether non-human animals are phenomenally conscious? This paper reviews the best naturalistic attempts to make attributions of consciousness to animals, and why they fail. To address the problems they face, I elaborate some guid...

Bengt Autzen The paper examines the relationship between the effects a trait has on survival and reproduction, and notion of functional efficiency underlying the biostatistical theory of health. The paper argues two points. First, the paper criticises the notion of functional efficiency used in the ...

Stephen M. Downes (University of Utah) I argue that we should not be surprised at the disparity between the claimed success of Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) and lack of success at isolating underlying genetic mechanisms for the relevant human traits. I proceed by examining the mismatch in m...

Heather Douglas (Michigan State University) What are the proper aims of science? With concerns over dual-use research and the commercialization of science, neither truth nor significant truth are adequate responses. Rising demands for responsible innovation have raised the bar. This talk will addres...

Sarah Roe (Southern Connecticut State University) Within this paper, I utilize Feyerabend's work to better understand the new citizen scientist movement, namely the utilization of nonscientists for certain scientific tasks. Feyerabend teaches us that while the current citizen science movement is pri...

Cameron Buckner (University of Houston) This presentation will focus on the way anthropomorphism/anthropocentrism interface in attempts to solve the "interpretation problem" facing deep learning neural networks. For example, researchers have begun using methods to correlate network performance with ...

Anna Leuschner (Leibniz Universität Hannover) As shown by science studies, strategic climate change denial has caused scientists to display significant conservatism in conducting and presenting their research. This will be illustrated by two examples: the history of the five 'reasons for concern', ...

Max Dresow (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) Ecology has long been in the grips of a discipline-wide inferiority complex. This can be characterized by three worries: that the subject matter of ecology fails to 'hang together' (the coherence worry), that the discipline lacks a theory to determin...

Axel Gelfert (Technical University of Berlin), Elay Shech (Auburn University) The paper builds on recent work on the exploratory function of models in science and, using three examples from mesoscopic many-body physics, argues that, in spite of introducing falsehoods into scientific inquiry, idealiz...

Conor Mayo-Wilson (University of Washington, Seattle) Robins, Ritov, and Wasserman argue that, when a parameter space is infinite-dimensional, principles and intuitions that guide thinking about simpler statistical models are no longer reliable. For this reason, Wasserman concludes that statistics o...

James Weatherall (University of California, Irvine) I will connect recent discussions of the (in)equivalence of different formulations of electromagnetism in philosophy of science with the large literature in physics on "electromagnetic duality", a special case of "S duality". I will argue that the ...

Pablo Ruiz de Olano (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) In this paper, I study the manner in which symmetries and conservation laws relate to each other in quantum and in classical mechanics. The paper contains two main claims. First, I argue that the nature of the connection between s...

Ben Kerr I develop new aspects of the interaction between model types, showing how computational models can be 'tested' by experimental microbial model systems. To demonstrate how this works, I propose a framework of 'foreground' and 'background' features of models. In my case study of diversity mai...

Moti Mizrahi (Florida Institute of Technology) In this paper, I argue that Philosophy of Science faces a methodological problem: philosophers of science frequently appeal to anecdotal evidence, but anecdotal evidence is not good evidence. To show that, I present the results of a systematic survey of...

Jessica Cohen (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) Recent advances in neuroimaging methods and analysis have led to an expanding body of research that investigates how large-scale brain network organization dynamically adapts to changes in one's environment, including both internal state chan...

Javier Suárez (University of Barcelona) Biological individuality is a central problem in biology and philosophy of biology. A recent revolutionary view on this field claims that holobionts, biological assemblages composed by a multicellular host plus all its symbiotic microorganisms are biological ...

Felipe Romero (University of Groningen) The social structures that govern scientists' work undermine replication and therefore self-correction. How can we intervene in such structures to make science more replicable? To address this question, I introduce the notion of "self-corrective labor schemes"...

Rachel Ankeny (University of Adelaide), Sabina Leonelli (University of Exeter) - It is widely acknowledged that models come in an endless variety of forms, a combination of which is always required by their use in scientific practice. Given this dramatic diversity, much attention has been paid to th...

Samuel Hall (University of Notre Dame) I offer a new taxonomy of values in science, clarifying and rejecting an epistemic/non-epistemic distinction in favor of distinguishing between cognitive values, characteristics of theories, and conative values, valued ends. The set of cognitive values is a fun...

Fabien Gregis (Cohn Institute, Tel Aviv University) The successive discoveries of the Josephson effect (1962) and the quantum Hall effect (1980) revolutionized electrical measurements and opened the era of quantum electrical metrology. It enabled physicists to perform much more accurate measurements...

Neil Dewar (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) This paper considers the following question: what is the relationship between supervenience and reduction? I investigate this formally, first by introducing a recent argument by Christian List to the effect that one can have supervenience without...

Bryce Gessell (Duke University) Many studies on long-term memory formation conceptualize this process as a series of three steps. The first, encoding, is the modification of neural structures in response to incoming information. The second step is consolidation, during which molecular and cellular c...

Oliver Lean (University of Calgary) Recent work in the philosophy of biology has focused on "causal specificity" as a means of comparing the causal importance of genes versus other causal factors in development. In this paper, I aim to bring philosophical attention to a quite different sense of spec...

Rafael Ventura (Duke University) Science is a social enterprise. To make progress, scientists must assume that the results of others are at least in principle reproducible. But empirical studies show that researchers across different disciplines often fail to reproduce results from previous experime...

Carl Craver (Washington University) Critics of GWAS in behavioral and psychiatric genetics charge that the method faces a coherence problem: that the genes it is certain to identify as risk factors for a disorder or trait will fail to point to any coherent etiological mechanism. As the critics expre...

Maya Goldenberg (University of Guelph) Public controversies over scientific claims such as the safety and efficacy of vaccines are commonly understood as wars over scientific evidence (Largent et al. 2016). Against the huge body of literature supporting the scientific consensus view, opponents pick ...

Naomi Scheman (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) Discussions of trust in science initially focused on trust within scientific communities, as well as on deficit models to explain public distrust. There has recently been salutary attention to why diverse lay publics might rationally mistrust, if ...

Chris Haufe (Case Western Reserve University) I propose to model scientific consensus as a population-level state akin to fixation in population genetics. Using this analogy, we can derive a variety of interesting theses regarding the nature of scientific consensus and the processes which lead to it...

Hanti Lin (University of California, Davis) The problem of theory choice and model selection is particularly hard when the standard of statistical consistency is too high to be achievable, that is, when no inference procedure is guaranteed in a statistical sense to eventually identify the true theor...