Showing papers in "Studies in History and Philosophy of Science in 2021"

TL;DR: A taxonomy of conceptions of the genetic, phenotypic, and endophenotypic dimensionality within and beyond these diagnostic categories is offered, and it is suggested that the spectrum of neurodiversity is characteristically endophenotypesic.

TL;DR: Several ways in which a choice can be value-laden are disambiguated and it is shown that thisdisambiguation has the potential to solve and dissolve philosophical problems about values in science.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors study the implications of dynamical density functional theory (DDFT) for the philosophical discussion of irreversibility in thermodynamics and show that DDFT provides novel insights that are of importance for both physicists and philosophers of physics.

TL;DR: It is argued that resolving the obstacles posed by value pluralism to collaborative environmental science requires detecting and coordinating the underlying problematic value differences, and defends the claim that philosophical dialogue among collaborators can go a long way towards helping teams of environmental scientists and fellow travelers detect their problematic value Differences.

TL;DR: It is suggested that the emphasis on the use of species to pick out natural units is itself problematic, because that is not the term's sole function, and a semantic picture of the species concept as a collection of interacting patchwork structures is defended.

TL;DR: It is argued that divergent theory choice is thus often driven by considerations of scientific process, even where direct epistemic or explanatory evaluation of its final products appears more relevant.

TL;DR: A philosophical analysis of the 2017 Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) black hole experiment and it is suggested that the main method used by the EHT Collaboration to assure trust in the results of the E HT experiment is what philosophers call the Argument from Coincidence.

TL;DR: Rather than lumping different sorts of genomic complexity together by defining 'function' as fitness contribution, it is argued that it is best to separate the heterogeneous contributions of preaptation, exaptation and adaptation to the historical processes of origin and maintenance for complex features.

TL;DR: It is suggested that "cortical column" has reached conceptual retirement: although it cannot be used to identify a neocortical building block, column research is still useful as a guide and cautionary tale for ongoing research.

TL;DR: A historical shift away from historical questions about life or descriptive questions about specific organisms towards questions that explore biological possibilities: what are possible forms of minimal genomes, regardless of whether they exist in nature is shown.

TL;DR: It is argued that the Mendelian-Biometrician distinction fails to reflect the theoretical and methodological diversity in the controversy and is not helpful to make a full understanding of the development of genetics in the first decade of the twentieth century.

TL;DR: The case for conventionalism about spacetime geometry in f(R) gravity (as well as General Relativity) turns out to be considerably stronger than that of as discussed by the authors, however.

TL;DR: This analysis shows how the evaluation and deployment of uncertainty evaluation constitutes an in practice solution to a particular form of Duhemian underdetermination that improves upon Duhem's vague notion of "good sense," avoids holism, and reconciles theory dependence of measurement with piecemeal hypothesis testing.

TL;DR: How conceiving of animal culture in this fashion has played a role in the "culture wars", and what lessons the authors can draw from this are shown.

TL;DR: It is shown how Rovelli's understanding of loop quantum gravity supports the view that there is change without time, so that the physical world can be timeless yet ever-changing.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors build on a new historiography on the policing of bodies and environments in medieval times and at the urban scale to problematize Foucault's claim about biopolitics as a modern phenomenon.

TL;DR: The roles that can be played by nonepistemic political and ethical values in the design, tuning, and interpretation of climate models are analyzed and called for more robust reflection on the ethics and governance of early-stage climate engineering research.

TL;DR: This analysis highlights the positive characteristics defining epimutation: the regularity, oxymoronic temporality, and materiality of stable processes, and the distinctive epistemic goals the epimutations concept fulfils in medicine, plant biology and toxicology.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that there exists a certain degree of conservatism in scientific practice regarding the development and use of non-animal approaches to replace animal experimentation, which is facilitated by socio-epistemic characteristics of animal-based research.

TL;DR: This article pointed out that the field, judgment and decision making (JDM) has on the whole had little impact during that span and attributed that failure to the use of methodologies that emphasize testing models rather than looking for differences in behavior.

TL;DR: It is argued that three detailed case studies - monetizing nature, nature-society dualism, and ecosystem health - are argued to motivate lessons about the importance of value-flexibility, transparency about value-based decisions that inform practice, and environmental pragmatism.

TL;DR: In this paper, it is argued that the universal acceptance of atomism in physics and chemistry in the early 20th century went along with an altered view on the epistemic status of microphysical conjectures.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors trace some of the foundational ideas in galaxy formation, with emphasis on the need for non-baryonic cold dark matter, and show that the failure points often trace to the surprising predictive successes of an alternative to dark matter.

TL;DR: The authors argue that despite the fact that these four thinkers disagree on certain assumptions, their frameworks have the same explanatory goal -to understand how objectivity is possible, and present this goal as a necessary element of a common project -that of historicising Kant's a priori.

TL;DR: There are three kinds of sources available to reconstruct the reflections that led Einstein to special relativity: a few contemporary letters and documents, his impersonal accounts of the genesis of this theory, and recollections of his own path.

TL;DR: A worry that citizen science can promote a kind of transparency that is harmful is outlined, and the value of secrecy in citizen science is argued for.

TL;DR: It is argued that adopting the notion of colligation in current debates in philosophy of science can contribute to the understanding of scientific models by studying colligation to have a better grasp of how integrating diverse model components in a creative way may produce novel generalizations about the phenomenon investigated.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose that despite many common aims, the practices through which political and epistemic authority are allocated in the regulations around animal research varies internationally, coming together in what can be identified as different national constitutions.

TL;DR: The authors argue that the kinds of probabilistic 'causes' of complex traits that GWAS-style studies can point towards do not provide the kind of causal information that is useful for generating explanations; they do not, in other words, point towards useful explanations of why particular individuals have the traits that they do.