Kate Nicole Hoffman (University of Pennsylvania) Classically, the suffering of non-human animals, although in certain circumstances recognized as unacceptable (or at least unsavory), has been viewed as different in kind from human suffering. Descartes famously argued that animals are incapable of ex...

Ryan O'Loughlin (Indiana University, Bloomington) I question whether climate scientists actually adopted the ‘hiatus’ framing, as claimed by Stephan Lewandowsky et al. (2015), despite their use of the word and the large degree of attention they paid to the 1998-2012 time period. Much has been wr...

Marion Boulicault (MIT) Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are implantable devices that allow for computer-mediated interaction between a person’s brain activity and their environment. Examples of devices include those aimed at controlling prosthetic limbs and epilepsy. They work by analyzing brain ...

Megan Delehanty (University of Calgary) Integrating different types of evidence from various techniques and disciplinary perspectives is often a significant epistemic challenge. In general, the greater the overlap between the accepted ontologies, methods, and standards for evidence, the more easily ...

Tamar Schneider (University of California, Davis) In immunology, the concept of the self/non-self frames the immune system as a discriminatory mechanism of harmful (i.e., pathogenic) from non-harmful (i.e., non-pathogenic) elements in the body. Consequently, the immune-self conceptualizes the role o...

Eleanor Gilmore-Szott (University of Utah) Even in the age of precision medicine an accurate family health history (FHx) remains a crucial tool in research on heritable diseases and for clinicians in assessing risk and treatment options for patients. However, most individuals lack crucial details ab...

Laura Cupples (Washington State University) I examine the dynamics of measure development using two case studies: temperature, and quality of life. I argue, following Bas van Fraassen (2008) and Leah McClimans (2010) that in each case these dynamics have a hermeneutic structure. Just as the hermeneu...

Brian Hanley In cases where many causes together bring about an effect, it is common to select some causes as particularly important. Philosophers since Mill have been pessimistic about analyzing this reasoning due its variability and the multifarious pragmatic details of how these selections are ma...

Marta Sznajder (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy) What exactly are the subjective and the logical interpretations of probability? Given how often these labels are used to characterize different positions in the philosophical foundations of probability, we should have a very sharp understand...

Kathleen Creel (University of Pittsburgh), David Colaço (University of Pittsburgh) For four years after the Parkes radio telescope identified “perytons,” terrestrial short chirped radio pulses, their cause was unknown. Researchers believed that perytons were terrestrial in origin beca...

Soohyun Ahn (University of Calgary) It is often assumed that science aims to discover real divisions of the world, what philosophers call ‘natural kinds.’ Since natural kinds are supposed to be independent of us and useful for our epistemic endeavours, it is thought that value-laden consideratio...

Armin Schulz It is increasingly widely accepted that there are systematic differences in the ways in which humans make economic decisions. So, for example, it has been found that there are gender differences in risk aversion, as well as cultural differences in sharing norms. What is not yet clear is...

Ravit Dotan (University of California, Berkeley) I argue that non-epistemic values are essential to theory choice, using a theorem from machine learning theory called the No Free Lunch theorem (NFL).Much of the current discussion about the influence of non-epistemic values on empirical reasoning is ...

John Bickle (Mississippi State Univerity) Philosophy of science remains deeply theory-centric. Even after the sea change over the past three decades, in which “foundational” questions in specific sciences have come to dominate concerns about science in general, the idea that everything of philos...

Rebecca Ring (York University) Do any non-human animals have culture? To find out, some scientists have attempted to isolate behaviours or information that are caused and spread by means other than genetic inheritance or ecological factors. However, cultural, genetic and ecological factors are not a...

Zvi Biener (University of Cincinnati) Richard Feynman referred to universal gravitation as “the greatest generalization made by the human mind.” Not surprisingly, that generalization has been of perennial interest to philosophers of science, from William Whewell to recent authors in Philosophy o...

Mike Dacey Experiments in comparative psychology typically aim to test a default model against an alternative. Morgan’s Canon dictates that researchers prefer models that posit the simplest processes. This is often interpreted by analogy to null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST): the simpler m...

Isaac Davis (Carnegie Mellon University) In epistemic reliability theory, verification and refutation are treated as success criteria for methods, rather than entailment relations between hypothesis and data (Kelly 2000). Utilizing formal learning theory, we can achieve deductive guarantees that a m...

Kristin Kokkov (University of Tartu) Archaeology is a domain that studies material remains of past events for the purpose of understanding social structures and cultural dynamics of past people. The events and people in question do not exist anymore and cannot be observed directly. Thus, there is a ...

Michael Begun (University of Pittsburgh) One intriguing feature of recent research on some prominent questions in astrophysics and cosmology is the presence of stubborn discrepancies or tensions in empirical results. For example, the two main approaches for determining the Hubble constant—classica...

Franklin Jacoby (University of Edinburgh) Certain kinds of pluralism suggest scientific practice is organised into discrete units with autonomy. Autonomy means one scientific unit of practice cannot be criticised, rejected, or vindicated by another unit. Versions of this view are defended by Chang (...

Stephanie Harvard (Simon Fraser University) The values in science literature has resulted in much debate, as well as many examples of value judgments that scientists make in the course of their work. Several examples have emerged in climate change and other types of simulation modelling, but example...

Daniel Hicks (University of California, Davis), Evelyn Brister (Rochester Institute of Technology) A long tradition in feminist historiography of science has focused on uncovering the lost and obscured contributions of women scientists. For example, Katherine Brading's work has raised the status of ...

Vanessa Bentley (University of Alabama, Birmingham) Sex essentialism, a form of biological essentialism, is the view that the two sexes are essentially distinct; males and females have different biological essences that are a result of their sex. Sex essentialism as an assumption imposes methodologi...

Daniel Herrmann (University of California, Irvine) There are justifications for taking Occam's Razor as an epistemic principle in the computational learning theory and machine learning literature. I clarify and argue against one widely used justification of the epistemic value of Occam's Razor---tha...

Meghan Page (Loyola University, Maryland) Models of “good science” often appeal to successful predictions and observable empirical results. This poses a problem for historical sciences, such as archaeology, evolutionary biology, and geology, that investigate historical events. It is difficult to...

Stefano Canali (Leibniz Universität Hannover) Background: Philosophy and Epidemiology  Most of the philosophical scholarship on epidemiology has focused on causality, by looking at causal explanations and interpretations of epidemiological results in terms of causal claims (Broadbent, 2013). I...

Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla (DCLPS) Two peers have an epistemic disagreement regarding a proposition, if their epistemic attitudes towards the proposition differ. The question of how to deal with such a disagreement is the problem of epistemic peer disagreement. Several proposals to resolve th...

Oliver Galgut, Elselijn Kingma (University of Southampton) Introduction: Random allocation (randomisation) is widely considered the best allocation technique for double-masked, controlled, interventional medical trials. One problem for randomisation is that — contrary to what is often claimed...

Ayca Mazman (University of Cincinnati) In developmental psychology, a specific experimental design, namely the false belief task, is used to measure children's ability to attribute beliefs and intentionality to others. There are many variations of the false belief task, each of them claiming to test...