We propose a new account of calibration according to which calibrating a technique shows that the technique does what it is supposed to do. To motivate our account, we examine an early twentieth-century debate about chlorophyll chemistry and Mikhail Tswett’s use of chromatographic adsorption analysis to study it. We argue that Tswett’s experiments established that his technique was reliable in the

According to a radical account of quantum metaphysics that I label ‘high-dimensionalism’, ordinary objects are the ‘shadows’ of high-dimensional fundamental ontology (for example, Albert [2013], [unpublished-a]; Ney [2015]). Critics—especially Maudlin ([2007], [2010], [2019])—allege that high-dimensionalism cannot provide a satisfactory explanation of the manifest image. In this article, I examine

We discuss the proposal by Sebens and Carroll to derive the Born rule in Everettian quantum mechanics from a principle they call ‘ESP-QM’. We argue that the proposal fails: ESP-QM is not, as Sebens and Carroll argue, a ‘less general version’ of an independently plausible principle, ESP, and can only be motivated by the empirical success of quantum mechanics, including use of the Born rule. Therefore

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Volume 73, Issue 2, June 2022.

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Volume 73, Issue 1, March 2022.

One of Glennan’s ([1996]) most prominent contributions to the new mechanist debate consists in his reductive analysis of higher-level causation in terms of mechanisms. In this article I employ causal Bayes nets (CBNs) to reconstruct his analysis. This allows for identifying general assumptions that have to be satisfied to get the analysis working. I show that once these assumptions are in place, they

Peer review is often taken to be the main form of quality control on academic writings. Usually this is carried out by journals. Parts of math and physics appear to have now set up a parallel, crowd-sourced model of peer review, where papers are posted on the arXiv to be publicly discussed. In this paper we argue that crowd-sourced peer review is likely to do better than journal-solicited peer review

Recent arguments, involving entangled systems shared by sets of Wigner’s friend arrangements, allegedly show that the assumption that the experiments performed by the friends yield definite outcomes, is incompatible with quantum predictions. From this, it is concluded that the results of measurements cannot be thought of as being actual or objective. Here, I show that these arguments depend upon a

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Volume 72, Issue 4, December 2021.

This article sits at a point of intersection between the philosophy of physics and the metaphysics of modality. There are clear similarities between Everettian quantum mechanics and various modal metaphysical theories, but there have hitherto been few attempts at exploring how the two topics relate. In this article, I build on a series of recent papers by Wilson ([2011], [2012], [2013]), who argues

A long and intense debate in philosophy is concerned with the question whether there can be haecceistic differences between possible worlds, that is, nonqualitative differences that only arise from different de re representations. According to haecceitism, it can give rise to a different situation if the positions of two qualitatively identical particles are exchanged, while according to anti-haecceitism

The recent debate about whether gauge symmetries can be empirically significant has focused on the possibility of 'Galileo's ship' types of scenarios, where the symmetries effect relational differences between a subsystem and the environment. However, it has gone largely unremarked that apart from such Galileo's ship scenarios, Greaves and Wallace (2014) proposed that gauge transformations can also

Around 97% of climate scientists endorse anthropogenic global warming (AGW), the theory that human activities are partly responsible for recent increases in global average temperatures. Clearly, this widespread endorsement of AGW is a reason for non-experts to believe in AGW. But what is the epistemic significance of the fact that some climate scientists do not endorse AGW? This paper contrasts expert

In light of the fact that Hawking radiation is practically empirically undetectable, physicists have attempted to establish the effect as universal — as a phenomenon that should appear regardless of the possible details of quantum gravity, whatever those details might be. But, as pointed out in a recent article by Gryb, Palacios, and Thébault [1], these universality arguments for Hawking radiation

We make some remarks on the mathematics and metaphysics of the hole argument, in response to a recent article by Weatherall. Broadly speaking, we defend the mainstream philosophical literature from the claim that correct usage of the mathematics of general relativity ‘blocks’

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Volume 72, Issue 3, September 2021.

In a recent paper, Tushar Menon has argued that the no-alternatives argument can only be significant if the priors for numbers of alternatives are tuned in an implausible way (gerrymandered, as he calls it). In this paper, I demonstrate that priors needed for making a no-alternatives argument significant are in line with what can be plausibly assumed in a successful research field.

Douven (2021) observes that Schurz's meta-inductive justification of induction cannot explain the great empirical success of induction, and offers an explanation based on computer simulations of the social and evolutionary development of our inductive practices. In this paper, I argue that Douven's account does not address the explanatory question that Schurz's argument leaves open, and that the assumption

For two centuries, collaborative research has become increasingly widespread. Various explanations of this trend have been proposed. Here, we offer a novel functional explanation of it. It differs from ac- counts like that of Wray (2002) by the precise socio-epistemic mech- anism that grounds the beneficialness of collaboration. Boyer-Kassem and Imbert (2015) show how minor differences in the step-efficiency

Computer simulations are nowadays often directly involved in the generation of experimental results. Given this dependency of experiments on computer simulations, that of simulations on models, and that of the models on free parameters, how do researchers establish trust in their experimental results? Using high energy physics (HEP) as a case study, I will identify three different types of robustness

Mismatch is a prominent concept in evolutionary medicine and a number of philosophers have published analyses of this concept. The word ‘mismatch’ has been used in a diversity of ways across a range of sciences, leading these authors to regard it as a vague concept in need of philosophical clarification. Here, in contrast, we concentrate on the use of mismatch in modelling and experimentation in evolutionary

I argue that bounded agents face a systematic accuracy-coherence tradeoff in cognition. Agents must choose whether to structure their cognition in ways likely to promote coherence or accuracy. I illustrate the accuracy-coherence tradeoff by showing how it arises out of at least two component tradeoffs: a coherence-complexity tradeoff between coherence and cognitive complexity, and a coherence-variety

Cancer is often seen as a case of multilevel selection, in which selfish cancer cells pursue short-term proliferation to the detriment of the collective. Thus cancer cells are described as `cheats', and an analogy is often drawn between the mechanisms by which organisms fight cancer and the mechanisms by which social groups enforce cooperation. Recently, Gardner ([2015a]) and Shpak and Lu ([2016])

Polysemous concepts with multiple related meanings pervade natural languages, yet some philosophers argue that we should eliminate them to avoid miscommunication and pointless debates in scientific discourse. This paper defends the legitimacy of polysemous concepts in science against this eliminativist challenge. My approach analyses such concepts as patchworks with multiple scale-dependent, technique-involving

Mathematics appears to play an explanatory role in science. This, in turn, is thought to pave a way toward mathematical Platonism. A central challenge for mathematical Platonists, however, is to provide an account of how mathematical explanations work. I propose a property-based account: physical systems possess mathematical properties, which either guarantee the presence of other mathematical properties

Landauer's principle is, roughly, the principle that there is an entropic cost associated with implementation of logically irreversible operations. Though widely accepted in the literature on the thermodynamics of computation, it has been the subject of considerable dispute in the philosophical literature. Both the cogency of proofs of the principle and its relevance, should it be true, have been questioned

Measurement outcomes provide data for a physical theory. Unless they are objective they support no objective scientific knowledge. So the outcome of a quantum measurement must be an objective physical fact. But recent arguments purport to show that if quantum theory is universally applicable then there is no such fact. This calls for a reappraisal of the notions of fact and objectivity. If quantum

This paper investigates how the credit incentive to engage in questionable research practices (up to and including fraud) interacts with cumulative advantage, the process whereby high-status academics more easily increase their status than low-status academics. I use a mathematical model to highlight two dynamics that have not yet received much attention. First, due to cumulative advantage, questionable

Experimental balance is usually understood as the control for the value of the conditions, other than the one under study, which are liable to affect the result of a test. We will discuss three different approaches to balance. ‘Millean balance’ requires to identify and equalize ex ante the value of these conditions in order to conduct solid causal inferences. ‘Fisherian balance’ measures ex post the

In this paper, I want to start to untangle some of the philosophical issues associated with our practices of ascribing authorship for collaborative work, with an eye to formulating better guidelines for authorship. I will focus on the following questions: 1. What epistemic, social, and ethical functions are played by our practices of ascribing authorship for academic papers? 2. What ways of ascribing

Most philosophers of science do philosophy ‘on’ science. By contrast, others do philosophy ‘in’ science (‘PinS’), i.e., they use philosophical tools to address scientific problems and to provide scientifically useful proposals. Here, we consider the evidence in favour of a trend of this nature. We proceed in two stages. First, we identify relevant authors and articles empirically with bibliometric

This article develops an account of distributive epistemic justice in the production of scientific knowledge. We identify four requirements: (a) science should produce the knowledge citizens need in order to reason about the common good, their individual good and pursuit thereof; (b) science should produce the knowledge those serving the public need to pursue justice effectively; (c) science should

In this article, I explore the compatibility of inference to the best explanation (IBE) with several influential models and accounts of scientific explanation. First, I explore the different conceptions of IBE and limit my discussion to two: the heuristic conception and the objective Bayesian conception. Next, I discuss five models of scientific explanation with regard to each model’s compatibility