History of Philosophy of Science

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-essential, phenomenal pleasures and pains have three features that suggest that they were shaped by selection, according to James: they are natively-patterned, those patterns are systematically linked with antecedent brain states, and the patterns are "universal" among humans. If epiphenomenalism were true, phenomenal patterns could not have been selected (because epiphenomenalism precludes phenomenal consciousness affecting reproductive success). So epiphenomenalism must be false.

Jamie Shaw
The emerging consensus in the secondary literature on Duhem is that his notion of 'good sense' is a virtue of individual scientists that guides them while choosing between rival theories (Stump 2007; Ivanova 2010; Kidd 2011; Fairweather 2012; Bhakthavatsalam 2017). More specifically, it is argued that good sense can, ceteris paribus, provide grounds for choosing one theory over empirically equivalent alternatives. In this paper, I argue that good sense is irrelevant to theory choice. Theory choice, for Duhem, is either a pseudo-problem or addressed purely by methodological desiderata depending on how theory choice is understood. I go on to provide a positive interpretation of good sense as a feature of scientific communities that undergo particular forms of education that allow scientists to abandon theory pursuit. I conclude by suggesting that this interpretations lends itself to reading Duhem as a proto-social epistemology rather than a virtue epistemology.

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 full-text corpus of the journal from its start in 1934 until today. Our results document the rise and fall of logical positivism, the permanence of metaphysical questions, the significance of epistemological issues as well as the recent rise of philosophy of biology and other trends. These analyses show how text-mining methods can be used to conduct a reflexive analysis upon our very own discipline.

Mousa Mohammadian
For a long time, it was assumed that Peircean abduction and Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) were virtually the same. Recently, however, it has been claimed that they are radically different. I argue that these positions rely on a misinterpretation of abduction and lack a historical perspective vis-à-vis the relationship between abduction and IBE. To address these problems, I resolve a false exegetical dichotomy that has been dominating the interpretations of abduction. Then I show that abduction and IBE have important similarities and differences and the differences can be understood in terms of two historic developments in the philosophy of science, i.e., Reichenbach's context distinction and the problem of underdetermination.