Justin Garson (Hunter College, CUNY) Theories of function are conventionally divided up into historical and ahistorical ones. Proponents of ahistorical theories often cite the ahistoricity of their accounts as a major virtue. Here, I argue that none of the mainstream "ahistorical" accounts are actua...

Robert Crease (Stony Brook University) This talk uses the metric reform to highlight differences between three traditions in the philosophy of measurement — analytic, pragmatic, and continental. These philosophical traditions have different perspectives on science in somewhat the way phy...

Daria Jadreškić (Leibniz Universität Hannover) I examine the role of time-sensitivity in science by drawing on a discussion between Kevin Elliott and Daniel McKaughan (2014) and Daniel Steel (2016), on the role of non-epistemic values in theory assessment and the epistemic status of speed of infe...

Alisa Bokulich (Boston University)  Paul Edwards's (1999, 2010) notion of model-data symbiosis has two components: on the one hand models are data-laden, in that large amounts of data often go into the construction and calibration of theoretical models. On the other hand, data are also model-la...

Ben Almassi (Governors State University) While he is among the most prominent, Bruno Latour is not the only contemporary scholar to reflect on his earlier contributions to science studies with some retrospective regret and prospective resolve regarding his complicity in science denialism, climate sk...

Derek Skillings (University of Bordeaux, CNRS) This paper examines two types of difficulties encountered while reasoning about biological systems. The first, which I call the translation problem, is a difficulty with imagining and predicting the behavior of biological phenomena that stems from the s...

Collin Rice (Bryn Mawr College) Biological modelers have recently started to explicitly appeal to universality classes in order to justify their use of highly idealized computational models to investigate limiting behaviors. For example, these modelers justify their use of a very simple Eden growth ...

Sharyn Clough (Oregon State University) I argue that sexist/racist values can be understood as beliefs that are poorly supported empirically and that many values identified as feminist are beliefs that are well-supported empirically. Thus sexist/racist values should be excluded from scientific hypot...

William D'Alessandro (University of Illinois, Chicago) According to a widespread view in metaphysics and philosophy of science (the "Dependence Thesis"), all explanations involve relations of ontic dependence between the items appearing in the explanandum and the items appearing in the explanans. I ...

Cristian Larroulet Philippi (University of Colorado, Boulder) One area of science where the collective good is particularly at stake is science's research agenda. But which is that collective good that science's research agenda should promote? Kitcher has provided an ideal account: well-ordered scie...

Alice Murphy (University of Leeds) Mental model accounts of thought experiments are grounded in research in cognitive science on constructing and manipulating "structural analogues" of real world events in problem solving tasks. These accounts highlight the crucial role of the imagination in scienti...

Eddy Keming Chen (Rutgers University) In a quantum universe with a strong arrow of time, we postulate a low-entropy boundary condition (the Past Hypothesis) to account for the temporal asymmetry. In this paper, I show that the Past Hypothesis also contains enough information to simplify the quantum ...

Mélissa Berthet (University of Neuchâtel), Geoffrey Mesbahi, Aude Pajot, Cristiane Cäsar, Christof Neumann, Klaus Zuberbühler Call sequences have the potential to convey more information than single call utterances. Previous work has suggested that Titi monkeys combine two alarm calls into four ...

Alisa Bokulich (Boston University) Paul Edwards's (1999, 2010) notion of model-data symbiosis has two components: on the one hand models are data-laden, in that large amounts of data often go into the construction and calibration of theoretical models. On the other hand, data are also model-laden, o...

Aydin Mohseni (University of California, Irvine), Cole Williams (University of California, Irvine) Typically, public discussions of questions of social import exhibit two important properties: (1) they are influenced by conformity bias, and (2) the influence of conformity is expressed via social net...

Mathias Frisch (Leibniz Universität Hannover) I analyze a recent disagreement concerning the argument from inductive risk by asking how we should structure decision-making processes in the face of uncertainties in climate forecasts. I distinguish different hedging strategies (aimed at avoiding endo...

Alexander Franklin (King's College London) The universality of critical phenomena may be explained by appeal to the Renormalisation Group (RG). Batterman and Morrison, among others, have argued that this explanation is irreducible. In this paper I offer a reduction of the RG account by demonstrating...

Peter Godfrey-Smith (University of Sydney) Human conscious experience combines a number of features. Objects in our environment are presented through the senses, information from different sensory modalities are integrated, events are marked with value (positive or negative), and we have a sense of ...

Justin Price (University of South Carolina) Kendall Waltons' pretense theory of fiction has recently seen application to analysis of scientific models by Roman Frigg and Adam Toon. However, Walton's pretense theory provides a problematic interpretation of assertions referring to fictional characters...

Christopher ChoGlueck (Indiana University-Bloomington) Earlier this year, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a new division to protect providers in their right to refuse patients with certain services they deem objectionable such as abortifacients and contraceptives. ...

Lucas Matthews (University of Virginia), Eric Turkheimer (University of Virginia) Behavior genetics is advancing rapidly. Quantitative genetics evinced one provocative-yet-indisputable empirical fact: the more genetically similar, the more phenotypically similar. It became the First Law of Behavior ...

Jos Uffink (University of Minnesota) Two of the most outstanding problems in statistical physics are: (i) the problem to account for the time-reversal asymmetry of macroscopic systems vis-a-vis the time-reversal symmetry of the underlying microphysical laws, and (ii) the relative autonomy of macrosc...

Chia-Hua Lin (University of South Carolina)   Mathematical formalisms that are constructed for inquiry in one disciplinary context are sometimes applied to another, a phenomenon that I call ‘tool migration.’ Philosophers of science have addressed the advantages of using migrated tools. In t...

Kristina Hillesland I describe the way I have used both actual toys (lego bricks) and microbes as toy models to explore a topic in evolutionary biology that has had scant theoretical development: the early stages of coevolution of a microbial mutualism. Together these models generate insights that a...

Michela Massimi (University of Edinburgh) I analyse the exploratory function of two main modelling practices: targetless fictional models and hypothetical perspectival models. In both cases, I argue, modelers invite us to imagine or conceive something about the target system, which is either known t...

Katie McShane (Colorado State University) - This paper explores difficulties that can arise when units of analysis from one field (in this case, philosophy of biology) are employed by a second field (in this case, ethics). Using as a case study the debates about the nature of biological interests in...

Tyler DesRoches (Arizona State University) - There is no consensus on the normative foundations of behavioral welfare economics. Behavioral economists typically reject the traditional criterion of welfare – the satisfaction of every “raw” preference – because the empirical findings of their ...

Kenneth Kendler (Virginia Commonwealth University) I will examine results from recent studies on the etiology of major psychiatric disorders relating them to strategies for dealing with causal complexity and levels of explanation. I will begin by examining simple statistical models on a "cartoon" le...

Calvin Burgess (LMU Munich) Williamson (2007) argued that if probabilities are regular then certain qualitatively identical events must be assigned different probabilities, which is implausible. His remarks suggest an assumption that chances supervene on qualitative local circumstances and space-tim...

Sarah Wieten (Stanford University) - The popularity of direct-to-consumer genetic testing is on the rise. The largest and most visible of these companies, 23andMe, had been providing not only “ancestry” targeted testing, but “health” related testing with FDA approval since March 2018. In thi...