Ashton Green (University of Notre Dame)  In the early years of her research, Du Châtelet used the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) to develop a epistemological method, so that she could extrapolate from empirical data (such as the results of experiments in heating metals) in a rigorous way...

Kalewold Kalewold (University of Maryland, College Park) Race is commonly considered a risk factor in many complex diseases including asthma, cardiovascular disease, renal disease, among others. While viewing races as genetically meaningful categories is scientifically controversial, empirical evide...

Petri Turunen (University of Helsinki)  The poster outlines a four-year empirical investigation into a synthetic biology (BIO, EBRC, Elowitz 2010, Morange 2009) consortium. The focus of the investigation was on how scientists in a highly interdisciplinary research consortium deal with interdisc...

Mark Povich (Washington University, St. Louis)  An account of distinctively mathematical explanation (DME) should satisfy three desiderata: it should account for the modal import of DMEs; it should distinguish uses of mathematics in explanation that are distinctively mathematical from those tha...

Josiah Skogen (Indiana University), Michael Goldsby (Washington State University), Samantha Noll (Washington State University) Wicked problems are defined as complex challenges that require multifaceted solutions, involving diverse scientific fields. The technical expertise scientists provide is par...

Magdalena Malecka (University of Helsinki) The objective of this research project is to propose the novel perspective in the philosophy of science to analyse reliance on the behavioural findings in policy contexts. The recent applications of the behavioural sciences to policymaking are based on rese...

Cordelia Erickson-Davis (Stanford University) In the computational theory of vision, the world consists of patterns of light that reflect onto the retina and provoke neural activity that the individual must then reconstruct into an image-based percept (Marr 1979). “Seeing” turns into an optimiza...

The PhilSci-Archive (philsci-archive.pitt.edu) is an open access, electronic archive of preprints and postprints in the philosophy of science. The archive’s goal is to preserve work in philosophy of science and to foster its rapid exchange. It is a service to philosophers of science by philosopher...

Nicholas Zautra In September of 2016, a doctoral student in History and Philosophy of Science started a social engagement project in the form of an interview-based podcast featuring prominent and up-and-coming philosophers of science. The initial goals of the project were to develop an outreach plat...

Casey Helgeson (Penn State), Nancy Tuana (Penn State) Other things being equal, simpler theories (or hypotheses, or models) are better. Theses of this form have long been discussed both in science and philosophy (see, e.g., Baker, 2016; Sober 2015). There are many variations on the idea, depending o...

Raphael Scholl (University of Cambridge)  The goal of personalized medicine is to stratify patient populations into subgroups according to biologically relevant individual variations. In principle, these variations could be in lifestyle or environment; in practice, they are usually genetic. The...

Lindley Darden (University of Maryland, College Park), Kunal Kundu (University of Maryland, College Park), Lipika Ray (University of Maryland, College Park), John Moult (University of Maryland, College Park) The "big data" revolution is leading to new insights into human genetic disease mechanisms. ...

Brian Woodcock (University of Minnesota), Arthur Cunningham (St. Olaf College) Both popular culture and introductory science pedagogy abound with statements about the nature of science and the so-called “scientific method.” This means that college students stepping into a philosophy of science c...

Mary S. Morgan (London School of Economics), Mat Paskins (London School of Economics), Kim Hajek (London School of Economics), Andrew Hopkins (London School of Economics), Dominic Berry (London School of Economics)  Narrative is at work in many sciences, operating at various levels of reasoning...

Kathryn Plaisance (University of Waterloo), John McLevey (University of Waterloo), Alexander Graham (University of Waterloo), Janet Michaud (University of Waterloo)  Discussions among philosophers of science as to the importance of doing scientifically- and socially-engaged work seem to be incr...

Robert Meunier (University of Kassel)  When philosophers of science turned their attention to practices, many aspects of science came in focus that had been neglected in earlier accounts, which were mainly interested in theories and their justification. The role of instruments and experiments, ...

Janet Stemwedel (San Jose State University)  In the 12 years since its launch in 2006, the social media service Twitter has risen to prominence not least because of its use by elected officials and political candidates, by celebrities, and by journalists and media outlets. Among Twitter’s hun...

James Ladyman (University of Bristol) Resources for school science teachers, created in a collaborative project between the University of Bristol, and teachers and educators in Bristol. The Thinking Science resources come in the form of questions designed to provoke thinking and discussion, to conso...

Renaud Fine (Université Grenoble-Alpes) My aim with this poster will be to explore ways to have a concrete influence on the shaping of the politicization of science and push it towards a more democratic direction, with a focus on the institutionalized modes of public participation to the definition...

Lane DesAutels (Missouri Western State University), Caleb Hazelwood (Georgia State University) Individuals are things you can refer to, point to, and single out. In much of life science, individuality is indispensable for comparing, counting, and characterizing objects of study. But in the philosoph...

Hsiao-Fan Yeh (National Chung Cheng University), Ruey-Lin Chen (National Chung Cheng University) This paper explores modes of experimental interventions in molecular biology. We argue for the following three points: (i) We distinguish between different modes of experimental interventions according t...

Thomas Reydon (Leibniz Universität Hannover)  Both in academic and in public contexts the notion of evolution is often used in an overly loose sense. Besides biological evolution, there is talk of the evolution of societies, cities, languages, firms, industries, economies, technical artifacts,...

Michael Silberstein (Elizabethtown College), Mark Stuckey (Elizabethtown College)  To answer John Wheeler's "Really Big Question,'' "Why the quantum?'' via quantum information theory according to Bub, one must explain both why the world is quantum rather than classical and why the world is quan...

David Murphy (Truman State University) Proponents of the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) regularly invoke its explanatory contributions, while critics assign negative explanatory value. Mark Sprevak’s critique, inspired by Peter Lipton, casts doubt on the efficacy of the shared strategy of ...

Stoeltzner Michael (University of South Carolina) The aim of this poster is to present the works of the research unit “The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider” that was granted in 2016 by the German Research Foundation (DFG) together with the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) for a six-year peri...

Phillip Honenberger (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Evelyn Brister (Rochester Institute of Technology)  Bibliometrics is now an established method for investigating scientific knowledge production and its social dynamics. This project analyzes contributor sections in order to better understa...

Simon Lohse (Leibniz Universität Hannover), Dirk Alexander Frick (Leibniz Universität Hannover), Rebecca Knab (Leibniz Universität Hannover)  Background: A polarized debate on animal experimentation has persisted for decades in both academia and the general public. Correspondingly, anim...

Gregory Macklem (University of Notre Dame) I don’t need to argue the value of philosophy of science to the attendees of a PSA conference, and it is perhaps an obvious claim (for those same attendees, at least) that it is impossible to teach a science class without at least an implicit communicatio...

Michelle Pham (University of Washington, Seattle) Science skeptics often undermine expert scientific testimony by appealing to lack of consensus. Climate change deniers, for example, highlight lack of agreement among climate scientists regarding anthropogenic climate change (Oreskes and Conway 2010)...

Catherine Kendig (Michigan State University) The naming, coding, and tracking of parts and modules is pervasive in all fields of biology. However, these activities seem to play a particular role in synthetic biology where discovering something is the same part is crucial to ideas of identity as well...