Gregor P. Greslehner (University of Salzburg) 'Structure' and 'function' are both ambiguous terms. Discriminating different meanings of these terms sheds light on research and explanatory practice in molecular biology, as well as clarifying central theoretical concepts in the life sciences like the ...

Jeremy Heis (University of California, Irvine) - Ernst Cassirer, like all of the “classical” Neo-Kantians, characterized his philosophy of science as a kind of “idealism.” Although many contemporary philosophers have identified affinities between their own philosophies of science and Cassire...

James Ladyman (University of Bristol) Not all of physics is fundamental physics. Optics, condensed matter physics and geophysics are all special sciences. Fundamental physics is often associated with the physics of smallest parts of matter and hence with high energies since they are required to brea...

Christophe Malaterre (UQAM), Jean-Francois Chartier (UQAM), Davide Pulizzotto (UQAM) What is philosophy of science? For the 50th anniversary of the first biennial meeting of the PSA, we look back at eighty years of Philosophy of Science by running dynamic topic-modeling analyses over the complete fu...

Mark Newman (Rhodes College) According to some philosophers of science, our understanding of a scientific theory is reflected by our ability to solve problems using that theory (see for instance de Regt and Dieks (2005), de Regt (2009), de Regt and Gijsbers (2017) and Newman (2017a, 2017b)). If this...

Mike D. Schneider (University of California, Irvine) The "Cosmological Constant Problem" (CCP) is widely considered a crisis in contemporary theoretical physics. Unfortunately, the search for its resolution is hampered by open disagreement about what is, strictly, the problem. This disagreement stem...

Janella Baxter (University of Pittsburgh) The causal selection debate in the philosophy of biology literature has to do with the underlying justification for why biologists single out some causal variables rather than others in explanation. Loss of function studies are a central experimental approac...

Daniel Hicks (University of California, Davis) Feminist philosophers of science continue to draw on ideas about trust and trustworthiness developed by feminist ethicist Annette Baier more than thirty years ago (Baier 1986). Why does Baier remain popular among feminist philosophers? In this paper, I ...

Uljana Feest (Leibniz Universität Hannover) Current debates about the replication crisis in psychology take it for granted that direct replication is valuable and focus their attention on questionable research practices in regard to statistical analyses. This paper takes a broader look at the notio...

Margaret Morrison (University of Toronto) In asking the question "What is fundamental about physics?" it is important to recognise that within physics itself the notion of fundamentality is less that clear cut. Although it has typically been associated with the study of high energy phenomena and m...

Celso Neto (University of Calgary) This paper defends lineage pluralism; the view that biological lineages are not a single, unified type of entity. I analyze aspects of evolutionary theory, phylogenetics, and developmental biology to show that these areas appeal to distinct notions of lineage. Base...

Laurenz Hudetz (London School of Economics) This talk addresses the question what it is to interpret a formalism. First, I explicate the notion of an uninterpreted formalism and explain how uninterpreted formalisms can be extended to pre-interpreted formalisms. Second, I show how pre-interpreted for...

Sean Carroll (California Institute of Technology) We often think of fundamental theories in terms of spatial scales: the smaller the elements of a theory's ontology, the more fundamental it must be. I will argue that it's better to think in terms of comprehensiveness: the more fundamental a theory i...

Corey Maley (University of Kansas) Analog computation has been neglected in the philosophical literature. The received view is that analog computation essentially involves the manipulation of continuous variables. Careful attention to the theory and practice of analog computation reveals that there ...

Zinhle Mncube (University of Johannesburg) - Racial categories are widely used in biomedicine. Epidemiologists stratify health outcomes according to racial categories. Pharmaceutical companies develop so-called ‘race-based medicines’ targeted at people of specific racial categories. In clinical ...

Cristina Moya (University Of California, Davis) As Dennett asserts, culturally-evolved tools were necessary for understanding the reasons for designs. However, there are many reasons to be skeptical of a monotonic increase in comprehension over time. Humans often faithfully imitate (without comprehe...

Jonathan Bain (New York University) Naturalness, as a guiding principle for effective field theories (EFTs), requires that there be no sensitive correlations between phenomena at low- and high-energy scales. This essay considers three reasons to adopt this principle. The first two are that it has be...

Alexander Klein (California State University, Long Beach) James developed an evolutionary objection to epiphenomenalism that is still discussed today. Epiphenomenalists have offered responses that do not grasp its full depth. I thus offer a new reading and assessment of James's objection. Our life-e...

Margaret Morrison (University of Toronto) Significant emphasis has been placed on the role of universality in economics where scaling results are found to hold for widely different economies and very different time periods. This has led to applications of methods from statistical physics to econom...

Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh) There is very little discussion of what a replication is and of its function. In this talk, I develop such a general account ("the re-sampling account of replication"): A replication is an experiment that resamples experimental components. On this basis , I...

Marco J. Nathan (University of Denver) What is the role of causation in causal explanation? Is the answer not obvious? Causation provides the raw material, the foundation for explanation. This response unveils a common presupposition, namely, that causes play a uniform role across theories of causat...

Michael Hicks (University of Cologne) The laws of nature have an interesting internal explanatory structure. This leads to interesting questions for metaphysicians of laws: what is the nature of this explanation? Marc Lange has recently argued in favor of metalaws: higher-order laws governing other ...

Darcy McCusker (University of Washington) In this paper, I will show that gendered citation practices constitute a participatory epistemic injustice because they prevent female scientists from fully engaging in the epistemic practices of science. I also wish to draw attention to the cumulative natur...

Jacob P. Neal (University of Pittsburgh) Philosophers of biology generally agree that causal specificity tracks biological importance: more specific causes are more important. Largely focused on explanatory contexts, this discussion of causal specificity neglects an important aspect of biological pr...

Maureen O'Malley (University of Sydney) I focus on elucidating the special features bacterial model systems have over other organismal model systems. These features go beyond merely practical advantages, such as small size and fast generation time, to something Parke and I call 'epistemic' tractabil...

Frank Cabrera (Kansas State University) In this paper, I consider whether a recent argument by Roche and Sober (2013) shows that Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) and Bayesianism are incompatible. According to Roche and Sober, in many cases "explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant" from the...

Nora Boyd (Siena College) - Empirical results can sometimes be fruitfully repurposed across epistemic contexts. Sometimes this happens in a single historical context, as when the same research outputs are shared between different contemporaneous groups investigating different phenomena, or when the ...