Cognitive neuroscientists typically posit representations that relate to various aspects of the world, which philosophers call representational content. Anti-realists about representational content argue that contents play no role in neuroscientific explanations of cognitive capacities. In this paper, I defend realism against an anti-realist argument due to Frances Egan, who argues that for content to be explanatory it must be both essential and naturalistic. I introduce a case study from cognitive neuroscience in which content is both essential and naturalistic, meeting Egan’s challenge. I then spell out some general principles for identifying studies in which content plays an explanatory role.

This paper focuses on a type of underdetermination that has barely received any philosophical attention: underdetermination of data. I show how one particular type of data—RNA sequencing data, arguably one of the most important data types in contemporary biology and medicine—is underdetermined, because RNA sequencing experiments often do not determine a unique data set. Instead, different ways of generating usable data can result in vastly different, and even incompatible, data sets. But, since it is often impossible to adjudicate among these different ways of generating data, ‘the data’ coming out of such experiments is underdetermined.

Comparativists (about mass) eliminate absolute masses from the fundamental ontological picture by virtue of a principle of economy, the “Comparative Razor,” which requires that only mass-relations, which are invariant under (metrical) symmetries, be considered fundamental. I show how this weapon backfires. If mass-relations are endowed with a standard (multiplicative) concatenation structure, power-transformations become (metrical) symmetries, leaving comparativists prima facie unable to distinguish a possible world and its duplicate where mass-relations are uniformly squared. Then, I considered possible exit strategies, which unfortunately either rely on hidden absolutist assumptions, or leave comparativists and absolutists on equal footing.

Current models of scientific inquiry assume that scientists all share the same evaluative standards. However, scientists often rely on different yet legitimate ones, a feature we call evaluative diversity. We investigate how scientific success is affected by diversity in evaluative standards through computer-based simulations. Our results show that communities with diverse standards benefit substantially from scientists sharing all the approaches they explored, regardless of whether they considered them valuable. Moreover, we find that even a moderate degree of evaluative diversity can, under certain conditions, lead scientists to reach more satisfying results than those they would reach in homogeneous communities.

What is lost if we don’t have a diagnosis? This article examines the aims of clinical medicine and the role of understanding in these aims. Starting from a case prompt with a patient suffering from persistent physical symptoms, I argue that understanding is at the clinical core and that the target of such understanding is the patient’s body with symptoms. Synthesizing accounts of medical understanding and phenomenology of illness, I suggest that the understanding sought in the clinic extends beyond mechanistic explanation to include a sense of bodily intelligibility and that diagnoses are useful but not necessary tools to this end.

Philosophers have been drawing their attention to the metaphysics of symmetries. Most have taken a Closed System View, that is, the metaphysical assumption that closed systems are ontologically fundamental. In this article, I explore the consequences of adopting a different perspective, the Open System View, according to which open systems are regarded as ontologically fundamental. I argue that by doing so, our metaphysical understanding of symmetries changes substantially in three respects: Epistemic approaches are favored, ontic approaches should change the set of physical symmetries regarded as fundamental, and the metaphysical connection between conservation principles and symmetries is weaker than thought.

The sex binary can be a useful idealization in scientific models; a fiction helpful for sorting people into two categories to investigate the possible mechanisms driving the differences we observe. However, attempts to say that the sex binary is anything more than that are misguided. Alisa Bokulich’s account of credentialed fictions will help substantiate this point to articulate a more nuanced view of the fictional sex binary in modeling terms. I will argue that, despite often treating it as such, the sex binary is not an approximation of biological sex nor is it explanatory.

Eric Mandelbaum has reported some troubles with Bayesianism in cognitive science. He has brought some behavioral data to show that belief updating in humans is fundamentally Bayesian perverse. I argue that the behaviors that he seeks to explain do not undermine Bayesian accounts of belief updating and can instead be explained as idiosyncratic consequences of an appropriately bounded implementation of a Bayesian-normative belief-updating system.

This paper presents a new problem for the inference rule commonly known as “inference to the best explanation” (IBE). The problem is that uncertainty about parts of one’s evidence may undermine the inferrability of a hypothesis that would provide the best explanation of that evidence, especially in cases where there is an alternative hypothesis that would provide a better explanation of only the more certain pieces of evidence. A potential solution to the problem is sketched, in which IBE is generalized to handle uncertain evidence by invoking a notion of evidential robustness.

Paleontology is facing an ethical crisis related to its long history of extractive practices, including a practice now referred to as parachute science. In this article, I provide diagnostic criteria for identifying parachute science and illustrate them using the high-profile example of a Brazilian dinosaur fossil, Irritator challengeri, acquired by a German museum under dubious conditions. I use this case study to identify three types of harm resulting from parachute science, showing how they can be understood as a case of distributive epistemic injustice. I conclude by using this framework to point toward more ethical paleontological practices.

Although fundamental arguments have been presented to support the value-laden nature of all scientific research, they appear to be difficult to apply to basic research in physics. To explain this, I argue that basic research in physics is, in a very specific respect, often value-laden to a lesser degree. To spell this out, I refer to the different signal-to-noise ratios that can be achieved in different fields of research. I also argue that having a very low degree of value-ladenness in the very specific respect that I identify does not mean that the research is not value-laden at all.

Practice-based approaches to the philosophy of mathematics have gone mainstream over the past several decades. As the paradigm has grown in popularity, however, there’s been little sustained meditation—and still less any explicit consensus—on what precisely it means for philosophy to take practice seriously. The field’s lack of a clear common methodology has begun to make itself felt in slowed and uncertain progress on core problems. Here, I review the methodological situation and propose five canons to guide future research. I focus throughout on the study of explanation in mathematics as a guiding example.

It is often claimed that biology is autonomous from the physical sciences, but this is seldom made precise. This article makes explicit, for the first time, five distinct “autonomy of biology” theses. Three moderate theses concerning scientific status, methodological distinctness, and nonreducibility of biology to physics are correct and are nearly universally accepted. Two stronger theses, concerning the exclusivity of biological explanation and irrelevance of physical laws, are shown to be false on the basis of two case studies of physical explanations of biological phenomena. Which scales and laws are explanatorily relevant for a particular phenomenon must be decided empirically.

I present a heretofore untheorized form of lay science, called extitutional science, whereby lay scientists, by virtue of their collective experience, are able to detect errors committed by institutional scientists and attempt to have them corrected. I argue that the epistemic success of institutional science is enhanced to the extent that it takes up this extitutional criticism. Because this uptake does not occur spontaneously, extitutional interference in the conduct of institutional science is required. I make a proposal for how to secure this epistemically beneficial form of lay interference.

Vitamins are important scientific categories in different contexts. This article argues that vitamins are investigative kinds in middle-range ontologies: Categories subject to open-ended investigation and that track features of the world. Section 2 presents the history of vitamin discovery to illustrate how the introduction of the “vitamin” category and subsequent research led to the identification of many different vitamins. Section 3 explores whether vitamins can be considered natural or conventional kinds. Section 4 argues that vitamins are investigative kinds. Section 5 considers the ontology of vitamins as investigative kinds in a middle-range ontology.

The meta-inductive approach to induction justifies induction by proving its optimality. The argument for the optimality of induction proceeds in two steps. The first “a priori” step intends to show that meta-induction is optimal and the second “a posteriori” step intends to show that meta-induction selects object-induction in our world. I critically evaluate the second step and raise two problems: the identification problem and the indetermination problem. In light of these problems, I assess the prospects of any meta-inductive approach to induction.

Eugenic arguments are not a thing of the past. In 2016, geneticist Michael Lynch published an article in Genetics arguing that human mental and physical performance are declining at a rate of 1% per generation. This estimate is not based on measurements of performance but on an argument from mutational load: Medical interventions are relaxing selection on the human population, which will lead to a buildup of deleterious mutations. This simple argument from mutational load is invalid. When the argument is made valid, it is not obvious that there are any significant consequences for human population health.

Existing characterizations of “trace” in the philosophy of the historical sciences agree that traces need to be downstream of the long-past event under investigation. I argue that this misses an important type of trace used in historical reconstructions. Existing characterizations of traces focus on what I propose to call direct traces. What I call circumstantial traces (1) share a common cause with a past event, and (2) allow an inference to said event via an intermediate step. I illustrate the significance of checking the alignment between direct and circumstantial traces in historical reconstructions through a case study from (micro-)paleontology.

Del Santo and Gisin have recently argued that classical mechanics exhibits indeterminacy and that by treating the observables of classical mechanics with real number precision we introduce hidden variables that restore determinacy. In this article we introduce the conceptual machinery required to critically evaluate these claims. We present a characterization of indeterminacy which can capture both quantum indeterminacy and the classical indeterminacy Del Santo and Gisin propose. This allows us to show that there is an important difference between the two: their classical indeterminacy can be resolved with hidden variables in a manner which is not possible for quantum indeterminacy.