There are myriad techniques industry actors use to shape the public understanding of science. While a naive view might assume these techniques typically involve fraud or outright deception, the truth is more nuanced. This paper analyzes industrial distraction, a common technique where industry actors fund and share research that is accurate, often high quality, but nonetheless misleading on important matters of fact. This involves reshaping causal understanding of phenomena with distracting information. Using case studies and causal models, we illustrate how this impacts belief and decision making even for rational learners, informing science policy and debates about misleading content.

I discuss the right to participate in science, which is part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (1966). Building on my previous work on this right as an ‘epistemic-cultural’ right, in this paper my goal is to clarify how fulfilling this right requires engaging with varieties of local knowledges that are too often severed in scientific narratives. I tease out three main varieties of local knowledges and highlight their distinctive features and their intersectionalities. In the second part of the paper, I argue that a more careful appreciation of varieties of local knowledges is not only key for the fulfilment of the right to participate in science but also for other human rights. I focus my attention here selectively on the right to food, and right to clean water. I conclude by highlighting the implications of this discussion for ongoing legal debates on rights of nature.

This paper advances a theory of disease as domino dysfunction. It is often argued that diseases are biological dysfunctions. However, a theory of disease as biological dysfunction is complicated by some plausible cases of dysfunction, which seem clearly non-pathological. I argue that pathological conditions are not just dysfunctions but domino dysfunctions, and that domino dysfunctions can be distinguished on principled biological grounds from non-pathological dysfunctions. I then show how this theory can make sense of the problem cases; they are not diseases because they are not domino dysfunctions.

Since Cannon, inspired by Bernard’s discussion of the conditions required for free and independent life, introduced the term homeostasis, many have embraced it as the main theoretical principle guiding physiology and medicine. Nonetheless, critics have argued that homeostasis is too limiting and have advanced a variety of alternative concepts such as heterostasis, rheostasis, and allostasis. We argue that the critics target a much narrower understanding of homeostasis put forward by the cyberneticists and that Bernard and Cannon embraced a far broader understanding that can accommodate the alternatives advanced by the critics and provide an integrated theoretical framework for physiology.

Recent developments in foundations of physics have given rise to a class of views suggesting that physically meaningful descriptions must always be relativized to a physical perspective. In this article I distinguish between strong physical perspectivalism, which maintains that all facts must be relativized to a perspective, and moderate physical perspectivalism, which maintains that all empirically meaningful descriptions must be relativized to a perspective. I argue that scientific evidence and philosophical considerations support moderate physical perspectivalism over strong physical perspectivalism. In particular, motivations connected to epistemic humility and the social nature of science are more compatible with the moderate approach.

In response to the DSM’s crisis in validity, psychiatry has seen a proliferation of alternative research frameworks (HiTOP, the Network Approach, RDoC) for studying and classifying psychiatric disorders. In this paper, I argue the existence of multiple frameworks in which each employs their own standards of validity is problematic methodologically speaking for trying to do any kind of unified validation work. Fundamental disagreements concerning the underlying phenomenon, sources of validating evidence, and the very nature of validity move each framework into an unrecognized plurality. The consequence for psychiatry is a new validity crisis.

The making of mistakes by organisms and other living systems is a theoretically and empirically unifying feature of biological investigation. Mistake theory is a rigorous and experimentally productive way of understanding this widespread phenomenon. It does, however, run up against the long-standing ‘functions’ debate in philosophy of biology. Against the objection that mistakes are just a kind of malfunction, and that without a position on functions there can be no theory of mistakes, we reply that this is to misunderstand the theory. In this paper we set out the basic concepts of mistake theory and then argue that mistakes are a distinctive phenomenon in their own right, not just a kind of malfunction.