Farzad Mahhotian (New York University) - Kant’s rejection of chemistry as a science in his first Critique is well known, as is the fact that he softens that position somewhat in the important 2nd edition of that work. Kant’s work on chemistry late in his life is less familiar, and less definitiv...

Chloé de Canson (London School of Economics) There is widespread excitement in the literature about the method of arbitrary functions: many believe that it might provide a novel objective basis for non-trivial probabilities against a background of determinism. In this paper, I argue that it cannot....

Michael Cuffaro (University of Western Ontario), Stephan Hartmann (LMU Munich) We consider both the general and the more specific derivation of the Lindblad equation of open quantum systems theory in some detail and argue that in both cases one can discern clear and strong physical motivations for c...

Predrag Šustar (University of Rijeka), Zdenka Brzović (University of Rijeka) The new causal-mechanical (CM) account of scientific explanation has been acclaimed as especially suitable for molecular biology because of its closeness to scientific practice. However, it has been recently criticized as...

Bryce Huebner (Georgetown University) In this talk, I will argue that a memetic perspective offers interesting insights about the forms of moral licensing that commonly emerge in political systems. I will focus on the way that racialized codewords, slurs, and other nearby phenomena can rapidly propa...

David Hopf (Leibniz Universität Hannover) The intersection of science with society at large, and, more specifically, the issue of public trust in science as a provider of information has recently become a topic of great interest to a wide variety of disciplines and institutions. In this paper, I mo...

Helen Anne Curry (University of Cambridge) - In the 1930s, the plant biologist Edgar Anderson set out on an enormous research initiative. He was fed up with taxonomists' failure to devise methods appropriate for mapping the relationships of humans' companion plant species—that is, weeds and crops....

Daniel Swaim (University of Pennsylvania) There is a fairly longstanding distinction between what are called the ideographic as opposed to nomothetic sciences. The nomothetic sciences, such as physics, offer explanations in terms of the laws and regular operations of nature. The ideographic sciences...

Nadine de Courtenay (Université Paris Diderot) Far from pertaining to mere convention, the redefinition of base units in terms of fundamental constants entails assumptions about the validity of existing theories. These assumptions surface (i) in a social work of deliberation and calculation designe...

Karoliina Pulkkinen (University of Cambridge) Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic system is known for its predictive accuracy, but not for its completeness. Here, I describe how Mendeleev's valuing of completeness influenced development of the periodic system. After introducing five indicators of its comple...

Hugh Desmond (KU Leuven) It remains unclear whether the behavior of nonlinear feedback systems, which can include approach to equilibrium, abrupt phase transitions, and chaos, pose mere technical challenges or more fundamental problems for interventionist causal analysis. In this paper I argue for t...

Matthias Michel (Université Paris-Sorbonne) As for most measurement procedures in the course of their development, measures of consciousness face the problem of coordination, i.e., the problem of knowing whether a measurement procedure actually measures the quantity that it is intended to measure. ...

Nei Nunes-Neto, Charbel El-Hani, Victor Lefèvre (Pantheon-Sorbonne University) In this work we present a more elaborated version of the organizational approach of ecological systems, where we aim: 1) To broaden the scope of the functional items in order to include the items of geodiversity or abiot...

Jonathan Fuller (University of Toronto) Much skepticism about contemporary medical evidence concerns its relevance for individual patients. Evidence-based medicine's (EBM's) theory of evidence has an epidemiologic orientation, focusing on epidemiological, population-level outcomes. It also has an on...

Erin Nash (Durham University) I develop the 'Probability Argument', which highlights the consequences, in democratic societies, of non-experts having distorted perceptions of the probabilities that empirical hypotheses are correct. In contrast to both the 'deficit' and 'cultural cognition' models of...

Matthew Slater (Bucknell University), Joanna Huxster (Eckerd College) It is well known that large segments of the American lay public do not see anthropogenic climate change (ACC) as a serious risk. Recent social scientific research on climate change communication has suggested that acceptance that ...

Deborah Mayo (Virginia Tech) This paper discusses the 2011-2015 Reproducibilty Project, an attempt to replicate published statistically significant results in psychology. We set out key elements of significance tests, often misunderstood. While intended to bound the probabilities of erroneous interp...

Kevin Zollman (Carnegie Mellon University) Published scientifc results might be in error. That is the nature of inductive reasoning, it is never certain. For a given set of interests, there will be an appropriate balance between the importance of the result (if true) and the risk of error (if false)...

Casey McCoy (University of Edinburgh) Demarest asserts that we have good evidence for the existence and nature of an initial chance event for the universe. I claim that we have no such evidence and no knowledge of its supposed nature. Against relevant comparison classes her initial chance account is...

Eugene Chua (University of California, San Diego) The gauge/gravity duality and its relation to the possible emergence (in some sense) of gravity from quantum physics has been much discussed. Recently, however, Sebastian De Haro (2017) has argued that the very notion of a duality precludes emergence...

Tom Sterkenburg (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy) This paper poses a challenge to Schurz's proposed meta-inductive justification of induction. It contends that Schurz's argument requires a notion of optimality that can deal with an expanding pool of prediction strategies.

Jo E. Wolff (King's College London) Changing the definitions of SI units changes what can be known empirically and what is fixed by definition. In this talk I address whether we have reason to be concerned about removing the numerical value of fundamental constants like Planck's constant and the spe...

Nei Nunes-Neto (Institute of Biology. Federal University of Bahia. National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution (INCT IN-TREE). Brazil), El-Hani Charbel (Institute of Biology. Federal University of Bahia. National Institute ...

John Dupre (University of Exeter) This paper will reflect on the curious absence of sexual selection from contemporary criticisms of the Modern Synthesis, and on how sexual selection might best be incorporated into these critical revisions of the Modern Synthesis. In particular, it will be argued th...

Jennifer McDonald (The Graduate Center CUNY) In this paper, I defend strong proportionality against what I take to be its principal objection — that proportionality fails to preserve common sense causal intuitions — by articulating independently plausible constraints on representing ca...

Christopher Pincock (Ohio State University) There have been several attempts to make sense of the necessary features of life, not only as it happens to be on Earth, but as it must be anywhere it arises. These attempts seek some kind of "universal biology" that sometimes make links to universality ex...

Weixin Cai (Simon Fraser University) There are two purposes of causal modeling. One is to predict which value an endogenous variable will take given that exogenous variables have some values, while the other is to explain why an endogenous variable takes a certain value. In this paper, I argue that ...

Benjamin Eva (University of Konstanz), Stephan Hartmann (LMU Munich), Reuben Stern (LMU Munich) Does y obtain under the counterfactual supposition that x? The answer to this question is famously thought to depend on whether y obtains in the most similar world(s) in which x obtains. What this notion ...

Daniel Dennett (Tufts University) At least to some degree the evolution of culture is governed by a Darwinian process of natural selection; the replicating entities are memes. Many features of culture are excellently designed to serve various purposes, but are not the result of human intelligent des...

Filippo Vindrola (Ruhr-University Bochum) This paper proposes a philosophy of science reconstruction of reasoning research. In reasoning research, an impressive body of experimental evidence seems to suggest that sometimes we deviate from norms of rationality. But what does it take to discriminate b...