Philosophy of Science

One challenge to relationism in general relativity is that the metric field is underdetermined by the stress–energy tensor. This is manifested in the existence of distinct vacuum solutions to Einstein’s equations. In this paper I reformulate the problem of underdetermination as a problem from vacuum solutions. I call this the vacuum challenge and identify the gravitational degrees of freedom (ass…

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 implementatio…

According to Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction account, a mental disorder must involve an objective dysfunction couched in evolutionary terms. However, selected effects functions are indeterminate because (i) the same trait can be both selectively advantageous and disadvantageous, and (ii) the functional activity of a trait can be assessed according to conflicting norms, given the trait’s pl…

Recently, several philosophers and physicists have increasingly noticed the hegemony of unitarity in the discourse on black hole information loss and are challenging its legitimacy in the face of the measurement problem. They proclaim that embracing non-unitarity solves two paradoxes for the price of one. Although I share their distaste regarding the philosophical bias, I disagree with their stra…

There are many—not just one—periodic laws in chemistry. These laws correspond to nonaccidental regularity relations about physical and chemical properties of (sets of) chemical elements. I support this by showing how these regularity relations can be understood from the perspective of a philosophical analysis of laws. Specifically, I show that these relations instantiate standard features associa…

Spacetime singularities are expected to disappear in quantum gravity. Singularity resolution prima facie supports the view that spacetime singularities are mathematical pathologies of general relativity. However, this conclusion might be premature. Spacetime singularities are more accurately understood as global properties of spacetime rather than things. Therefore, if spacetime emerges in quantu…

Subject to techniques of perturbative renormalization, the Standard Model makes empirical predictions that are stupendously successful. But also deeply mysterious. Not every quantum field theory (qft) is renormalizable. Indeed, most aren’t. The mystery is: Why should we be so lucky, that we live in a world governed by a renormalizable qft? I explicate this Renormalizability Puzzle , and explain w…

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, conce…

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 bo…

In this article, I stress the need to broaden the scope of diversity in value-laden ideals of science to include geographic diversity. I argue that egalitarian and normic ideals have conceptual limitations when considering this dimension. While egalitarian frameworks advocate for a placeless science, normic frameworks predominantly locate scientific knowledge within the “Global North,” highlighti…

Philosophers of science have overlooked the role of theory in neuroscience, resulting in a somewhat surprising naïveté regarding the nature and function of neuroscientific theories. Here I provide a framework that identifies and begins to characterize what we need to know about neuroscientific theories so as to improve our epistemic standing. I argue that we need an account of the structural, int…

According to what I call the Probabilistic View, absence of evidence is evidence of absence when finding evidence is highly expected. However, this view fails to make sense of the practice of using absence of evidence in the paleosciences, where finding evidence is typically not highly expected. Using a case from paleogeology, I offer a novel account of when absence of evidence should be evidence…

Thick concepts have both descriptive and evaluative dimensions to their meaning. Some have argued that because the descriptive and evaluative dimensions cannot be separated (they are “blended”), the implicit values influence the confirmation of any “mixed claims’’ containing the thick concept. Using the development of the concept of hypersegregation as a case study, we argue for a distinction bet…

It is often said that successful scientific research must be built on trust. Focusing on the alleged necessity of trust for successful scientific communication and thus for scientific cooperation (which underlies much of contemporary science), I argue that science mustn’t be built on trust. Appearances to the contrary come from a failure to distinguish different attitudes toward scientists’ testi…

Darwin describes the Origin of Species as ‘one long argument’. The exact structure of this argument has been the subject of controversy among philosophers of biology. I will propose a novel analysis that sheds new light on Darwin’s argument. The central claim will be that the evidence that supports the theory of common descent can only satisfactorily support it after the theory of natural selecti…

This article challenges a false dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity in understanding the nature of human social relationships. I argue that social relationships are composed of both subjective and objective components, which are inherently interdependent. They are influenced by biological properties and subject to evolutionary processes, yet they cannot be reduced to them. I use emergi…

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…

Researchers in history and the historical sciences explore the use of generative AI (GenAI) systems for reconstructing destroyed artifacts. This paper poses a novel question: Can such GenAI systems generate evidence that provides new knowledge about the world or can they only produce hypotheses that we might seek evidence for ? Exploring responses to this question, the paper argues that (1) GenAI…

This paper challenges the notion of emergent time in quantum cosmology by examining the reconciliation of the timeless Wheeler–DeWitt equation with the Universe’s dynamical evolution. We critically evaluate the analogy between the Wheeler–DeWitt and Klein–Gordon equations, highlighting challenges for the identification of an emergent time parameter. We conclude that refining this analogy may lead…

In principle, inaccuracies in the representation of the climate’s internal variability could undermine the measurement of the human contribution to warming. Equally in principle, the success of the measurement practice could provide evidence that our assumptions about internal variability are correct. I argue that neither condition obtains: Current measurement practices do not provide evidence fo…