Philosophy of Science

Theories of bounded rationality join process reliabilists in holding that rationality is ecological, or environment-relative. Most theories of ecological rationality, like most versions of reliabilism, have been externalist. In this paper, I develop a de-externalized account of ecological rationality. I show how the account retains many advantages of externalist accounts while avoiding key challe…

The literature on theoretical equivalence in the philosophy of physics is replete with physical theories that look quite different but are purportedly equivalent. Plausibly, there might exist a pair of equivalent theories that look different insofar as they existentially quantify over different entities. However, given the preeminence of the quantificational theory of ontological commitment, whic…

Numerous phenomena prompt inquiries into their origins, spanning from the cosmos and life, to species, civilizations, and pandemics. Answering these questions entails offering origin explanations. Here, I explore the distinctive characteristics of origin explanations that distinguish them from other types of explanations. I explicate the concept of an origin phenomenon and suggest conceptualizing…

This paper explores the inductive logic associated with exponential smoothing, the most widely used predictive rule that manifests the idea that more recent observations have a stronger influence on predictive probabilities than more remote ones. The main result shows that exponential smoothing can be derived from a set of plausible qualitative invariance assumptions about conditional probabiliti…

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 understa…

Strategic science skeptics criticize scientific claims solely to promote non-epistemic goals. I will analyze and debunk a philosophically neglected argument exploited by strategic science skeptics: the argument from disagreement. The core of this argument is that one should lower one’s confidence in a scientific claim when having learned that there is a scientific disagreement about this claim. I…

Gauge theories are often characterized as possessing ‘redundancy’ or ‘excess structure’. This, in turn, motivates reducing the gauge symmetries, commonly through ‘symplectic reduction’ in the Hamiltonian framework. However, there are multiple ways to formulate a Hamiltonian gauge theory. This paper examines the relationship between the formulation of a Hamiltonian gauge theory and the attribution…

Evidence synthesis has recently seen an enormous increase across many different scientific disciplines. Despite its popularity, it has also been the subject of significant criticism. One of the main critiques of evidence synthesis is the existence and treatment of heterogeneity between primary studies. The aim of this article is to reexamine heterogeneity in evidence synthesis, including perspect…

Democratic theorists and social epistemologists often celebrate the epistemic benefits of diversity. One of the cornerstones is the “diversity trumps ability” result by Hong and Page ( 2004 ). Ironically, the interplay between diversity and ability is rarely studied in radically different frameworks. In particular, the diversity–expertise trade-off has not been studied systematically for small, d…

Newton famously rejected the use of hypotheses in natural philosophy, in stark contrast to many of his contemporaries, such as Descartes, Huygens, and Leibniz, who employed hypothetical methods. This disagreement is often framed as one concerning the Hypothetico-Deductive (HD) method, but I argue that this is mistaken. The relevant hypothesis-based methods at issue were what I call inference to t…

I argue that the epistemic aim of scientific theorizing (EAST) is producing theories with the highest possible number and degree of theoretical virtues (call this “TV-EAST”). I trace TV-EAST’s logical empiricist origins and discuss its close connections to Kuhn’s and Laudan’s problem-solving accounts of the aim of science. Despite TV-EAST’s antirealist roots, I argue that if one adopts the realis…

Human computers and micro-observers were scientific workers who performed calculations or reduced and analysed data before the advent of electronic computers. They were a staple of big science during the nineteenth and early to mid twentieth century. Despite their prevalence within big science, their epistemic roles remain unexamined by philosophy of science. This paper investigates the epistemic…

I use Swampman to illuminate the role of thought experiments in philosophy of science. Against Millikan and others, I argue that even outlandish thought experiments can shed light on science and scientific kinds, so long as we understand them as illustrations of scientific reasoning , not as examples of scientific kinds . The logic of thought experiments, understood as illustrations, is analogous…

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 up…

In this discussion note, we contrast two models of pluralistic policy advice that have recently been proposed: Stephen John’s ( 2025 ) representative model and our integrative model (Bschir and Lohse 2022 , 2024 ). We believe that the contrast between representative and integrative pluralism is of high relevance for the broader philosophical discussion on scientific policy advice.