Abstracts (Day 3)
Seminar Room 4: General Philosophy of Science: Statistics, Evidence and Inductive Logic
The Philosophical Foundations of Statistical Testing: Fisherian and Neyman–Pearson Approaches Reconsidered
Ryota Morimoto
Statistical inference is often treated as a mathematically grounded methodology whose philosophical interpretation is secondary. This paper argues that statistical testing, particularly in the form of Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST), cannot be properly understood without reference to underlying philosophies of science. Persistent controversies surrounding NHST arise not only from technical issues, but from a conflict between Fisherian significance testing and the Neyman–Pearson theory of hypothesis testing. Fisher conceived significance testing as an inductive method aimed at eliminating error and rejected the acceptance of hypotheses whose truth is not established as incompatible with the aims of natural science. By contrast, Neyman and Pearson framed hypothesis testing as a rule-governed procedure for scientific decision-making under uncertainty, justified by long-run error control rather than claims about truth. The paper concludes by exploring the possibility of a philosophically coherent hybrid of these approaches.
Towards the Epistemology of Evidence-Gathering
Yiwen Zhan
I develop a framework for the epistemology of evidence-gathering. While epistemic decision theory typically evaluates which attitudes one should adopt given a fixed body of evidence, it has little to say about which acts of evidence-gathering one ought to perform. This reflects a deeper tendency to treat updating as a passive state transition rather than an epistemic act. Drawing on recent work in externalist Bayesianism, I argue that agents’ updating plans can be extended to include plans for gathering evidence. This yields a two-level decision structure: at the object level, agents maximize expected accuracy given their evidence and methods; at the meta-level, they determine which evidence-gathering method to undertake. The resulting framework offers a purely epistemic account of the value of evidence-gathering acts, grounded in the way they shape both the accuracy and the reliability of one’s doxastic changes.
Peircean Pragmatism about Probability
Miguel Ohnesorge
C.S. Peirce’s philosophy of probability has been broadly misunderstood as defending frequentism on a priori grounds. Rather, he sought to determine which definitions of probability enable successful applications of statistics in progressive, scientific inquiry. Peirce settled on two criteria, which he developed when applying least-squares regression to problems in gravitational geophysics. First, probability needs to be understood factually, i.e., probability distributions aim to represent objective facts about processes (usually measurements). Second, probabilistic reasoning needs to aid us in learning new facts about these processes, usually by indicating the presence of systematic perturbations. For Peirce, his mature frequentism was the contemporary contender, but not the only theory of probability fitting these desiderata. Peirce contribution is not a specific metaphysics of probability, but a pragmatist theory of what any concept of probability ought to do for scientists. That theory remains relevant for philosophy and statistics; however one feels about his frequentism.
Seminar Room 6: Philosophy of the Life Sciences: Mechanisms and Development
Making sense of modal reasoning in developmental biology
Marco Casali
In this paper, I outline an epistemology of developmental trajectories in order to make sense of the use of possibility and modal reasoning in biological developmental practice. I argue that the notion of possibility has an important epistemic utility in understanding developmental processes. By analyzing how the notion of possibility is employed in the description and explanation of developmental processes, I argue that biological practice frequently relies on modal reasoning—particularly in the comparison of potential developmental trajectories. Building on Waddington’s visual metaphor of the epigenetic landscape, I show how this mode of reasoning enables biologists to carry out specific epistemic tasks, such as investigating the role of stochasticity in development. My conclusion is that the use of possibility and modal reasoning is not merely an incomplete epistemic element waiting to be refined; rather, it is a methodology that plays an essential role in understanding of developmental processes.
Mechanism vs. Cascade: Explanatory Pluralism without Ontological Pluralism
Vito Balorda
This paper examines whether cascade explanations in the life sciences are ontologically distinct from mechanistic explanations. Cascades are typically characterized as causal structures in which an initial trigger produces a large outcome (e.g., blood coagulation), whereas mechanisms are usually characterized as causal structures consisting of entities and activities organized so as to produce a phenomenon (e.g., protein synthesis). Recent debates on biological explanation challenge the dominant mechanistic view by appealing to explanatory pluralism, according to which there are other causal structures besides mechanisms with distinct explanatory features, such as cascades. I argue that, while cascades and mechanisms differ in their methodological and explanatory strategies, these differences do not correspond to an ontological distinction. Cascades, like mechanisms, consist of organized entities and activities responsible for the phenomenon in question. Consequently, cascades do not undermine the mechanistic framework; rather they instantiate it under different discovery practices and representational strategies.
Beyond Decomposition in Mechanistic Explanation: Organization through Structural Dimensions, Methodological Strategies, and Categorical Foundations
Jinyeong Gim
Mechanistic explanation aims to account for how biological phenomena are produced by underlying mechanisms. While much attention has been given to identifying constitutively relevant components through decomposition based on mutual manipulability, this paper argues that organization of these components is equally indispensable. In particular, I distinguish between two dimensions of organization—constitutive and sequential —and then examine their interdependence and explanatory significance. Drawing on Darden’s reasoning strategies of productive continuity and modular assembly, I propose that these strategies serve as methodological tools for constructing sequential organization. However, they require normative support comparable to that which mutual manipulability provides for decomposition. I introduce a framework grounded in category-theoretic compositionality, offering three formal conditions that clarify how organized components collectively produce the phenomenon. Using the case of protein synthesis, the paper demonstrates how categorical compositionality provides a theoretical foundation for representing, assessing, and normatively guiding the organization of mechanisms in biological explanation.
Seminar Room 7: History and Philosophy of Science: Geosciences, Physics, and Chemistry
The Problem of Gaining Access and the Inversion Schema
Teru Miyake
The Earth’s interior is inaccessible, yet we know a great deal about it. Almost everything we know is an inference from observations of seismic waves made at its surface. This is a particular case of a more general problem that I call the problem of gaining access: the problem of obtaining knowledge about an inaccessible target phenomenon, such as the Earth’s interior, from observations of accessible phenomena, such as seismic waves at the Earth’s surface. This talk presents a framework for understanding the problem of gaining access. The framework involves a representation that I call the inversion schema. Using the inversion schema, I will show what the challenges are for solving the problem of gaining access. I will then discuss how scientists have historically dealt with these challenges by taking advantage of a number of features of the use of inversion for gaining access: convergent access, modularity, and interdependence.
The Reconstruction of Scientific Knowledge through Instruments: A Case Study of the Instrumental Revolution in Modern Chemistry
Wonho Jung
This paper proposes a framework to account for the “instrumental revolution” in mid-20th-century chemistry. While traditional philosophy of science remains theory-centric, I argue that the rapid adoption of spectroscopic instruments (UV, IR, NMR)—which by the 1960s became standard in virtually every chemical study—fundamentally reconfigured the epistemic structure of the discipline. Building on C. Kenneth Waters’ “Investigative Matrix” and Joachim Schummer’s “Knowing through Making” (KTM), I extend Waters’ framework by positioning instruments as dynamic variables that reconfigure procedural know-how and strategic approaches. I demonstrate that the instrumental revolution shifted chemical practice from direct sensory engagement to instrument-mediated interaction, thereby transforming the very mode of scientific “making.” This study provides a generalized epistemic model for understanding how material mediation reshapes the investigative matrix and extends the epistemic horizon of instrument-intensive sciences.
Seminar Room 8: Philosophy of the Cognitive Sciences: Mechanisms and Representation in Neuroscience
Representational Talk in Neuroscientific Explanation: A Corpus-Based, Deflationary Perspective
Wanqi Chen, Chen Zhibin
While the concept of representation is pervasive in neuroscience, its ontological and epistemic status remains characterized by persistent ambiguities. Moving beyond survey-based studies of neural states, this paper employs a corpus-based analysis to examine how representational vocabulary functions as a structured resource within concrete neuroscientific explanatory frameworks. We identify three recurrent model types where representational talk performs distinct, stable functions: symbolic models using discrete variables; functional models mapping neural activity to experimental variables; and structural models capturing population-level geometrical organization. Our analysis reveals that these roles are model-relative and non-hierarchical. These findings support a deflationary account of mental representation, suggesting that semantic content serves to stabilize explananda and guide cross-task generalization without requiring representations to be treated as ontic constituents of mechanisms. Situating these results within an eikonic conception of scientific explanation, we demonstrate that representational descriptions are explanatorily legitimate through their roles in licensed inference and model integration.
Seminar Room 9: General Philosophy of Science: Empirical Adequacy, Theory-Ladenness, and Vagueness
Empirical adequacy as a kind of truth-as-correspondence
Jonathon Hricko
I defend an understanding of empirical adequacy as a kind of truth-as-correspondence. My starting point is van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism. Although van Fraassen presents the idea of empirical adequacy as ‘truth about observables,’ he hasn’t shown which view of truth is most suitable for constructive empiricism. I suggest that a kind of truth-as-correspondence can be read off of van Fraassen’s view that theories ‘save’ phenomena when data models that we use to represent phenomena are isomorphic to parts of theoretical models: Those parts of theoretical models are true when they correspond to data models. I defend this kind of truth-as-correspondence from objections to the correspondence theory of truth. However, I argue that the way to avoid these objections conflicts with van Fraassen’s understanding of empirical adequacy, which requires ‘saving’ observable-but-forever-unobserved phenomena. I conclude that we should understand empirical adequacy in a way that requires ‘saving’ only the actually observed phenomena.
Underdetermination and the Case for Methodological Localism
Seyyadali Najeeb
This paper reassesses the epistemic force of underdetermination (UD) within the framework of methodological localism, the meta-philosophical view that debates about scientific realism should be conducted on a discipline-by-discipline basis rather than on a wholesale global basis. While UD does not disappear under localism, its implications are significantly reshaped: it no longer justifies wholesale anti-realism but instead constrains epistemic commitment relative to local evidential and methodological conditions. The paper argues that global underdetermination arguments rely on illegitimate generalisations from historically and disciplinarily specific failures of theorisations. Focusing on Stanford’s problem of unconceived alternatives as a paradigmatic UD argument, it is shown why such arguments cannot support global scepticism under a local realism. A case study from galactic dynamics, contrasting MOND and ΛCDM, illustrates how genuine local underdetermination can warrant suspended realist commitment in a specific domain without threatening realism elsewhere in science.
Antifragility in Scientific Modeling
Ryan O’Loughlin
While robustness has been extensively debated in philosophy of science, its conceptual neighbor, antifragility, has received comparatively little attention. Introduced by Nassim Taleb, antifragility characterizes systems that benefit from volatility, error, or stress. This paper extends antifragility to scientific modeling, arguing that model failure, sensitivity, and disagreement can play positive roles rather than merely indicating deficiency. Building on work on the value of error in experimental science and evolutionary epistemology, I analyze how modeling practices can succeed because of their vulnerabilities. I distinguish three varieties of antifragility in modeling: mechanistic, where error-driven feedback is integral to model construction; epistemic, where discrepancies between models and data spur discovery; and social, where navigating failure contributes to scientific credibility and trust. I also examine a potential confirmatory role for antifragility in climate modeling, where structured disagreement can strengthen confidence in shared causal cores. The paper concludes by outlining normative implications for scientific modeling.
Seminar Room 4: Philosophy of the Life Sciences: Populations, Sex, and Biological Norms
Effective Population Size: Misconceptions, Modelling Strategies, and Non-Causal Explanations
Zhixiang Cheng
This article tentatively explores some philosophical issues concerning ‘effective population size’ (EPS), an important but widely misinterpreted concept (or a family of concepts). I summarize four relatively common misconceptions about EPS among non-population-geneticists. Then, I argue that there are two competing general views among population geneticists regarding the nature of EPS: the monist-dynamic view and the pluralist-kinematic view. According to the monist-dynamic view, EPS represents or captures (the effects of) genetic drift, but I contend that this simplistic understanding is untenable. I also argue that assigning an EPS to a natural population exemplifies an unusual modelling strategy, which may substantially distort or misrepresent the causal structure or causal features of the target natural population. This anti-realistic modelling strategy makes it possible for EPS—together with an ideal Wright-Fisher model—to provide non-causal explanations in evolutionary biology.
A Proximate-Ultimate Framework for Understanding Biological Sex
Min OuYang
Broadly speaking, two main approaches to biological sex can be distinguished: a physiological approach and an evolutionary approach. These correspond to Mayr’s well-known distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations in biology. The former, grounded in functional biology, has tended to dominate discussions of sex and gender, particularly in contemporary debates. By contrast, the latter—despite its deeper philosophical significance—has received comparatively little attention outside evolutionary biology and remains underexplored in philosophical analysis. The central aim of this paper is to provide a systematic meta-analysis of the concept of biological sex by explicitly drawing on and developing this proximate–ultimate distinction.
The Bell-Curve Continuum: Bridging Typological and Population Thinking through Idealization
Shichao Wen
This paper, building on Sober (1980), reframes typological and population thinking as two statistical readings of normality under idealization. On the typological (wheel-of-fortune/error-law) view, average represents the causal center and deviations are disturbances; on the population (Galton’s quincunx/variation-law) view, the bell shape emerges from aggregation of many small, near-independent elements, making variance explanatory. I develop a bell-curve continuum that treats these as two endpoints rather than rivals. Two buffer zones—structured type cases and grouped/mixture subtypes cases—show how stable “types” can decompose into structured types, and into multiple subtypes, and then into near-independent components. This yields a clear picture of explanatory role reassignment across the continuum: what counts as “constant” vs “random” can switch under explicit assumptions. The framework clarifies when evo-devo’s focus on conserved structure and population genetics’ focus on sources of variation can be bridged without conflation.
Seminar Room 6: History, Chemistry, and Philosophy of Science
Transforming Philosophy into Logical Analysis of Science: A Historico-Critical Study
Bohang Chen
This talk starts by telling a new story about the history of philosophy and science in the 19th and 20th centuries, by focusing on a proposal to transform philosophy. The central thesis is that some members from several philosophical schools/movements (logical empiricism, neo-Kantianism, pragmatism, British analysis, French historical epistemology, and even phenomenology) in philosophy in the early 20th century advocated the transformation of philosophy into logical analysis of science, driven by their uniform awareness of the Great Differentiation of the sciences from philosophy in the 19th century. Relevant evidence will be provided to support the historical thesis, and further clarifications will be offered to deepen the story. The rest of this talk assesses critically the transformation proposal and argues that it remains methodologically viable after taking a historical turn in the contemporary era of science, although it remains a minority and is not wholeheartedly practiced in current academic philosophy.
How can an integrated history and philosophy of science help in the context of the debate between new mechanism and processual ontology? The relevance of the other biological synthesis of Julian S. Huxley (1887-1975)
Yihan Jiang and Stefan Bernhardt-Radu
This paper employs an integrated history and philosophy of science (iHPS) to intervene in the debate between processual and new-mechanist ontologies in biology. We challenge the claim that revised mechanism can fully subsume processual insights, arguing that mechanisms are themselves products of temporal dynamics. Focusing on evolutionary biologist Julian S. Huxley, we demonstrate that he seriously considered contextualized mechanisms akin to those defended by contemporary new mechanists. However, drawing on unpublished materials and process-philosophical influences, Huxley ultimately viewed the active, historical engagement of organisms with their environments as the foundational process from which mechanisms emerge. Thus, a historical re-examination of Huxley’s synthesis reveals a perspective where mechanisms are not merely embedded in contexts but are genuinely constituted by evolutionary and developmental processes.
Principlism and Compositionism as the Explanation for the Chemical Revolution
Qiyue Zhang
I argue that Hasok Chang’s use of the distinction between principlism and compositionism to explain the Chemical Revolution is problematic. First, I introduce Chang’s account of the Chemical Revolution in Is Water H2O? and his argument that the progress of chemistry was a transition from principlism to compositionism, with Lavoisier’s victory attributed to his compositionist approach. Then, I challenge this interpretation from two perspectives: first, the two traditions were often intertwined in the works of chemists at the time, thus cannot serve as the primary explanation for the Revolution; second, Chang underestimates the role of atomism, which further blurs the distinction between principlism and compositionism. Finally, I propose that the key progress lay in chemists such as Lavoisier undermining the fixed status of a predetermined set of elements or principles, thereby enabling the integration of newly discovered substances into chemical theory.
Seminar Room 7: Philosophy of Technology and AI: Governance, Responsibility, and Agency
The Philippines as a Petri Dish: Examining the Fragmentation of AI in Digital Governance under Surveillance Capitalism -- Implications for Democracy and Public Administration
Carlos Bryan Nolido
Christopher Wylie described the Philippines as a “testing ground” for surveillance capitalism, showing how the country’s hyperconnected yet weakly regulated digital environment enabled the refinement of data extraction, algorithmic manipulation, and political influence by global platforms. This paper discusses how fragmented AI and digital governance-informed by outdated and incoherent policies such as the Data Privacy Act of 2012, the E-Commerce Act, and the E-Governance Act of 2023-fail to provide a coherent national AI framework. The paper draws on Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism, Milan’s data justice, and Brillantes and Fernandez’s ethical public administration to argue that incoherent policy reflects deeper institutional vulnerabilities, limited regulatory capacity, and bureaucratic silos that enable private platforms to overpower democratic controls. As surveillance capitalism grows, it depletes public trust, weakens administrative sovereignty, and threatens democratic accountability. The paper calls for an integrated, ethical, and democratically anchored AI governance framework to reclaim public control over digital infrastructures.
Reinventing AI Responsibility
Hyungrae Noh, Ijin Kim, Jiyoung Park, Garam Kim, Dongwoo Kim
The growing autonomy of contemporary AI systems challenges traditional conceptions of responsibility. The key concerns are with: (i) whether AI systems themselves are considered as bearers of responsibility, alongside human actors such as developers and users; and (ii) what factors structure the attribution of responsibility among them. We present two experimental vignette studies examining lay responsibility judgments in professional contexts where AI use leads to harm. Our finding is that participants do indeed treat AI systems as loci of responsibility, but in a different sense from human actors.
Beyond Rules: Social Norms, Agency, and the Ethics of AI
Xiao Tan, Chunxi Liu
This paper critiques the dominant rule-based approach in AI ethics, arguing that it rests on an impoverished understanding of ethical life and mistakenly treats AI as an industrial product whose behavior can be fully predetermined by moral rules. Drawing on Bicchieri’s theory of norms and insights from new materialism, it argues that AI ethics is primarily a matter of social norm coordination rather than moral rule enforcement. AI, as a technology with distributed agency, reshapes ethical life through its embedding in infrastructures and networks.
Seminar Room 8: Philosophy of the Cognitive Sciences: The Extended Mind, Intelligence, and Memory
Resonance as a Challenge to the Extended Mind Theory: An Unresolved Dilemma
Young E. Rhee
The Extended Mind Theory (EMT), pioneered by Clark and Chalmers, has evolved from simple functionalism into a complex framework integrating Predictive Processing (PP) and consciousness. While a pillar of the 4E cognition paradigm (Embodied, Embedded, Extended, Enactive), EMT faces a significant theoretical hurdle: explaining resonance. Resonance describes the deep, bidirectional synchronization and mutual sense-making between an agent and its environment. While enactivism excels here through “normative co-regulation,” EMT’s functionalist roots often view the world as a resource to be “recruited,” struggling to account for such reciprocal autonomy. This creates a dilemma for Clark: align with non-representational enactivism or stick to representational models. For physical AI, achieving resonance serves as a vital benchmark for true sentience, moving beyond mere data processing toward shared meaning.
Explaining Swarm Intelligence: A Hybrid Model of Ant Colony Path Optimization
Yian Chen
As a frontier of complexity science, swarm intelligence calls for a new mode of explanation. Through a case study of ant colony path optimization, I show that successful explanations rely on a hybrid model integrating five elements: system-level constraints, positive feedback loops, functional noise, information-based interactions, and mathematical dependency relations. On this basis, I argue that: (1) those elements by themselves challenge a narrow notion of mechanistic explanation, which emphasizes reductionism, fine-grained detail, decomposition & localization, mechanical interactions, and causal dependency relations; (2) in the explanatory practice of swarm intelligence, those elements are intertwined rather than linearly separated as independent modules. Consequently, this case supports a pluralistic and practice-oriented approach of explanation that better captures the heterogeneity of complexity science.
Memory and Morality: Examining the Knobe Effect in Attributions of Episodic Memory
Kiichi Inarimori, Tamaki Kodama, Kengo Miyazono
This study explores whether moral considerations influence attributions of episodic memory, testing whether the Knobe effect extends to memory ascription. Using online vignette experiments, the authors examine whether people ascribe episodic memory when a mental representation is not causally linked to the agent’s past experience, and whether moral blameworthiness affects such judgments. The study contributes to debates between the causal theory of memory, which requires a causal connection, and simulationism, which denies this necessity. The authors predict that episodic memory is generally denied in causally deficient cases, but more readily attributed when the agent is morally blameworthy. To explain this, they propose the Causal Attribution Hypothesis, according to which moral judgments bias causal judgments, leading people to relax causal requirements in blameworthy cases. The results suggest that while moral effects undermine the evidential value of folk intuitions, they ultimately support the causal theory of memory.
Seminar Room 9: General Philosophy of Science: Thought Experiments, Worldmaking, and Theory-Ladenness
This Is Water: A Naturalistic Principle for Metaphysical Thought Experiments
Michael Veldman
Many assume metaphysics must be naturalistic, underwriting its procedures by reference to science and scientific rationality. However, many metaphysicians’ conceptions of scientific method appear to be deeply mistaken, which risks providing false assurances of the rational security of their methods, which are explicitly modeled off those conceptions. I focus on the thought experiment, and argue for a naturalistic methodological principle: metaphysical theorizing ought to be required to derive models of the facts constituting its thought experiments from our best science. I show it has teeth by application, in conjunction with chemical theory and paleoclimatology, to Putnam’s famous argument for ‘semantic externalism’ from his Twin Earth thought experiment.
Rereading Nelson Goodman’s “Worldmaking”: A Defense from the Philosophy of Scientific Practice
Yutong Zhou
Nelson Goodman’s doctrine of worldmaking has often been dismissed as a form of radical relativism or as inapplicable beyond the domain of art. Against this view, this paper argues that Goodman’s worldmaking constitutes a defensible stance within the general philosophy of science. Drawing on Ian Hacking’s insight that Goodman’s position uniquely addresses the epistemological challenges raised by laboratory studies, the paper situates worldmaking within the contemporary philosophy of science in practice. It first shows that Goodman’s theories of exemplification and the new riddle of induction reveal a pre-Humean problem of predicate underdetermination, highlighting the role of historically situated practices in stabilizing predicates. It then argues that standard realist and anti-realist critiques by Putnam and Boghossian mislocate Goodman’s position. Finally, through discussion of scientific controversies and the experimenter’s regress, the paper defends a practice-based version of worldmaking, denying the existence of a neutral, external standpoint for adjudicating competing scientific worlds.
Arguments for the Diachronic Theory-Ladenness of Observation
Khyutae Kang
I present arguments for “diachronic theory-ladenness of observation”, focusing on perceptual changes resulting from neural plasticity. Raftopoulos (2009, 2015) argues that long-term perceptual changes due to neural plasticity must not be counted as a genuine case of theory-ladenness. It is because the changes resulting from neural plasticity arise not from the influence of higher-level cognitive states per se, but from the influence of the sensorimotor tasks. I provide two counterarguments against him. First, scientific theory acceptance is not mere change in beliefs but involves the acquisition of embodied skills, practices, and tacit knowledge, often accompanied by lasting neural changes. The second is a consequentialist argument: perceptual changes due to neural plasticity generate the same implications—such as theory-relative observation and disagreement—that originally motivated the theory-ladenness thesis. Therefore, such changes should be recognized as a legitimate form of theory-ladenness.
Seminar Room 4: Philosophy of the Physical Sciences: Metaphysics of Physics
Seeing from Somewhere: The Metaphysics of Frame Dependence
Sebastian Murgueitio Ramirez, Eugene Chua
Many quantities central to physics are frame-dependent: one and the same object can be correctly assigned different values of the same general quantity (speed, length, momentum) in different inertial frames. Yet this feature has been largely neglected in the metaphysics of quantities, and it sits uneasily with the familiar single value principle according to which an object cannot have different values of a general quantity at a given time. We begin by isolating the physicist’s account of frame-variance and frame-invariance. We then argue that a natural metaphysical reconstruction of frame-variance fails. Finally, we develop an alternative metaphysical account that we call “Relative Truth.” According to this view, propositions about physical quantities are not just true or false simpliciter, but true or false relative to both times and frames. We close by drawing connections to perspectivism in philosophy of physics and to the debate around the alleged metaphysical priority of invariants.
Being and becoming in quantum gravity
Natalja Deng
One philosophical issue that interacts in interesting ways with research at the current frontiers of physics is that of whether our world includes becoming (as opposed to merely being). This talk examines that issue in the light of (i) classical sequential growth models in causal set theory, and (ii) loop quantum gravity. In particular, it responds to philosophical responses to physicists’ glosses on the metaphysical upshots of these approaches, which on the surface similarly defend being (B/eternalism) over becoming (A/presentism or growing block) for both (i) and (ii). The contention will be that there is an unresolved tension in these responses that renders especially the response to (ii) problematic and threatens to mask interesting metaphysical differences between physicists’ glosses on (i) and (ii). The talk will also draw out implications of this issue for putative empirical incoherence and spatiotemporal gap problems in quantum gravity.
Newton–Cartan Lessons for the Metaphysics of Time
Lorenzo Lorenzetti, Enrico Cinti, Marco Sanchioni
We challenge the prevailing view that A-theoretic views of time are well-secured within pre-relativistic physics and are threatened only by relativity. We show that a particularly significant class of models of Newtonian gravitation fails to sustain an absolute simultaneity relation, which is a condition for A-theories. To establish this, we propose a general criterion that any spacetime theory must satisfy in order to admit absolute simultaneity, and we demonstrate that torsional Newton-Cartan spacetimes typically fail to meet it. Given the centrality of the Newton-Cartan formulation of Newtonian gravitation, this result strongly undermines the received contrast between the metaphysical implications of Newtonian and relativistic physics. Moreover, the result extends beyond Newtonian physics: it challenges potential strategies that seek to defend A-theoretic views by turning to quantum gravity, in particular to approaches based on Newton-Cartan spacetimes. Hence even frameworks more fundamental than relativity prove less hospitable to the A-theory than it seems.
Seminar Room 6: Philosophy of the Life Sciences: Swarm Intelligence, Inference, and Selection
Towards an Active Philosophy of Animal
Xiaotao Liu
The past few decades have witnessed rapid growth in the literature on animal minds, animal cognition, animal ethics, and animal welfare. We contend that it is necessary to establish a field of study, called animal philosophy or philosophy of animal (动物哲学). We shall clarify three senses of philosophy of animal, and argue how an active philosophy of animal might shed new light on many important philosophical issues.
The Outsourcing of Inference vs. Individual Model Construction: The Distinct Social Structures of Clinical and Basic Medical Research
Tatsuyuki Sato
Values and causality have each been extensively studied in the philosophy of science; however, mainly in isolation from one another. In this paper, I argue that evidential pluralism in causality gives rise to distinct social epistemological structures for managing the value-laden nature of knowledge production. Drawing on examples from clinical and basic medical research, I propose that the locus of inductive inference varies with the type of evidence. Causal inference from statistical evidence is outsourced to the community to manage inductive risks. In contrast, causal inference from mechanistic evidence remains at the level of individual researchers, thereby facilitating the construction of a mechanistic model. I further propose that this divergence in social epistemological structures arises from the fundamental difference in the direction of inference required to draw causal claims from each type of evidence. I characterize this difference by drawing on Psillos’s accounts of “horizontal” and “vertical” modes of inference.
Revamping the Additivity Criterion for Units of Selection: How Three Layers of Additivity Have Been Smooshed Together
Pierrick Bourrat, Elisabeth Lloyd
Additivity is a core concept in the evolutionary biologists’ toolkit. In the 1980s, Wimsatt and Lloyd proposed additivity-based criteria for adjudicating units of selection. However, critics later claimed additivity is not relevant in this context. We argue that, properly understood, additivity is directly relevant to identifying units of selection, and that confusion stems from conflating distinct notions of additivity.
We start by presenting two forms of what we call additivity by substitution, which are classically used in evolutionary theory (e.g., population genetics), and argue that they are not the most relevant for units of selection. We then distinguish a third form—additivity by aggregation of components—which is relevant in this context since it permits us to assess the effect of combining lower-level entities to produce a higher-level one, compared with their independent effects. Building on this insight, we propose a new additivity criterion for units of selection.
Seminar Room 7: Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Evidence and Epistemic Communities
What is the Optimal Configuration for an Epistemic Community to Solve Complex Epistemic Problems
Shaokai Du
This research investigates the optimal structure of epistemic groups for solving complex epistemic problems. Using agent-based-modeling (ABM) and epistemic landscape model, I explore how individual collaboration scope influences group structure and performance across shareable epistemic outputs (e.g., new methods) and prioritized epistemic outputs (e.g., publications). Results reveal an optimal collaboration scope that maximizes performance by fostering a semi-clustered group structure—balancing dense intra-subgroup connections with sparse inter-subgroup links. This structure optimizes exploration-exploitation trade-offs for shareable outputs and balances focused-dispersed research pattern for prioritized outputs. Additionally, an inverse relationship between exploration density (researchers per unit research area) and optimal collaboration scope stabilizes subgroup sizes across varying community scales. These findings offer practical insights for organizing scientific research, suggesting that spontaneous subgroup formation with limited inter-subgroup communication enhances group epistemic performance.
What is the role of experiments in providing mechanistic evidence?
Mariusz Maziarz
Evidential Pluralism, a philosophical position that supports the use of both difference-making and mechanistic evidence, has been criticized by supporters of Evidence-Based Medicine on the ground that effective pharmaceutical treatments and non-pharmaceutical interventions were successfully used in clinical practice despite their mechanisms of action remaining unknown at the time of their introduction. To defend EP as descriptively adequate for establishing causality in medicine, Williamson rebutted that RCTs provide evidence for an unknown mechanism that accounts for the systematically observed positive results. This point of view contradicts Illari’s analysis, which holds that mechanistic evidence provides evidence for a specific mechanism by indicating which entities, actions, and interactions constitute it. This poses the question of whether experiments can provide mechanistic evidence. I argue, using examples of clinical trials and randomized field experiments, that experiments can provide evidence for specific mechanisms in certain contexts when background knowledge suggests a few possible mechanisms.
Supporting the Variety of Evidence Thesis: Evidential pluralism in evidence-based management
Paride Del Grosso
The purpose of this paper is to support the (practical) validity of the (still contested) Variety of Evidence Thesis (VET), i.e. that, ceteris paribus, a more varied body of evidence (compared to a less varied one) confirms a hypothesis better, because evidential variety increases the robustness of the hypothesis. To do that, I focus on the interplay between source and type variety in evidence-based management (EBMgt), an evidence-based practice in which evidence plays a crucial role to support highly context-specific causal hypotheses. By considering a real example, I show that, although the orthodox approach to evidence for causation in EBMgt promotes source-variety, it does not promote type-variety, because it mainly prescribes the use of difference-making evidence. This limits hypothesis robustness. I argue that increasing type-variety by integrating difference-making evidence with mechanistic evidence – as prescribed by evidential pluralism – increases hypothesis robustness. This supports the validity of the VET.
Seminar Room 8: Metaphysics of Science: Grounding and Emergence
New Grounding Account of Governance
Wentao Ding
In this paper, I argue for a new grounding account of governance. According to this view, laws of nature govern in the sense that laws ground the explanatory fact that some event explains another event. This account is new in two senses. First, for all other accounts of governance in the literature, they are all based on the Input-Output Model of Governance. In this model, together with some input events, laws explain some output events. My account rejects this model. Instead, it is based on the Meta-explanatory Model of Governance, according to which laws meta-explain why first-order explanation happens between different events. Second, my account is new in the sense that it avoids two main objections challenging the grounding conception of governance. Besides these, my account is also compatible with constraint accounts of governance. It can accommodate key considerations that motivate constraint accounts while contributing a metaphysical analysis of constraint.
Emergence: Operational Definition
Kaamesh Singam
Denis Noble argues that, in the Hodgkin-Huxley model of the action potential, the global cell property of membrane potential has a downward causal (DC) influence on the gating behaviour of the ion channels. He argues that this DC in the form of structural constraints is present at each level in an organism and hence each level is an emergent level. This article aims to challenge Noble’s arguments in support of emergence and DC and in turn provide a new operational definition of emergence by incorporating the claims into the new mechanist framework. Other accounts of emergence and DC such as those from Carl Gillett and James Woodward, specifically using the HH model as an example, are also analysed. This article emphasises the need for a concept of emergence that results in changes in scientific practice. Other potential examples of emergence and DC from spatial ecology and sociogenomics are also discussed.
Closure of Constraints and Emergence
Prakhar Manas
In this paper, I present a coherent idea of weak ontological emergence to support the Closure of Constraints model of biological organisation. The account of weak emergence presented will be based on complex system dynamics, and reduction, restriction, and elimination of degrees of freedom (DoF). I aim to show that weak emergence, conceptualised in this way, is able to provide a coherent idea of configurations acting as constraints within the closure of constraints model; and additionally, help properly conceptualise the idea of biological function, redundancy, and robustness of biological organisations.
Seminar Room 9: AI, Social Epistemology, and Trust
The Threat of Over-Simplification: An Investigation of The Online Environment for Information Processing
Qiantong Wu
In this paper, I am going to analyze how technology changes the environment for information processing online and how the online environment of information processing can bring the threat of oversimplification, causing significant epistemic consequences. I will first emphasize the importance of environmental factors in cognitive processing, not only in the sense of environmental factors being associated with the direct content for cognitive processing, but also in the sense of how the former influence the generation of cognitive content and the flexibility of cognitive content in the face of information against individual preconceptions. I will then demonstrate the special characteristics of the environment for information processing online and explain how these characteristics create changes that significantly differentiate the online from the offline environment for information processing, leading to oversimplification in cognitive processing online. Lastly, I will demonstrate the potential threat of over-simplification by interpreting empirical studies demonstrating real-life epistemic phenomena.
What Misinformation Science Could and Could Not Be
Adrian K. Yee
It remains unclear what counts as an adequate social scientific theory of misinformation. Contemporary misinformation theories should strive to meet three adequacy criteria given what is required of successful real-life applications: that theories employ reproducible methods, that similar verdicts are arrived at within a community concerning what is misinformation, and that they be justifiable via a process of idealized public reasoning. Misinformation science is shown to be an analogue of engineering, a teleological endeavor reflecting and testing the commitments of background theories while serving stakeholder goals. Broader lessons are drawn regarding contestable hierarchies of expertise in social science research.
Non-Causal Unificationist Explanation: A Philosophical Methodology for the Epistemology of Artificial Intelligence
Enrong Pan, Ziming Wang
The pervasive integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into scientific practice has raised questions about its epistemological legitimacy, particularly given the challenge of epistemic opacity. This paper examines algorithmic external epistemology, which justifies AI outputs using indicators external to the model, and algorithmic internal epistemology, which seeks explanations for the model’s behavior. To challenge external epistemology, this paper constructs four types of knowledge about structure (what, how, where, and why) and analyzes how each contributes to the justification, understanding, and trust in model outputs. As for internal epistemology, existing explainable AI (XAI) techniques cannot fully explore these knowledge types, as they neglect the model itself as an explanans. Using AlphaFold as a case study, the paper proposes a non-causal unificationist explanation, arguing that unification provides explanatory power by integrating a fact into an existing unified Humean mosaic and successfully predicting it. This perspective serves as a supplement to algorithmic internal epistemology.