A piece of folklore enjoys some currency among philosophical Bayesians, according to which Bayesian agents who, intuitively speaking, spread their credence over the entire space of available hypotheses are certain to converge to the truth. The goals of the current discussion are to show that that kernel of truth in this folklore is in some ways fairly small and to argue that Bayesian convergence-to-the-truth results are a liability for Bayesianism as an account of rationality since they render a certain sort of arrogance rationally mandatory.

Statistical decision theory, whether based on Bayesian principles or other concepts such as minimax or admissibility, relies on minimizing expected loss or maximizing expected utility. Loss and utility functions are generally treated as unit-less numerical measures of value for consequences. Here, we address the issue of the units in which loss and utility are settled and the implications that those units have on the rankings of potential decisions. When multiple currencies are available for paying the loss, one must take explicit account of which currency is used as well as the exchange rates between the various available currencies.

In this article, we provide a case study examining how integrative systems biologists build simulation models in the absence of a theoretical base. Lacking theoretical starting points, integrative systems biology researchers rely cognitively on the model-building process to disentangle and understand complex biochemical systems. They build simulations from the ground up in a nest-like fashion, by pulling together information and techniques from a variety of possible sources and experimenting with different structures in order to discover a stable, robust result. Finally, we analyze the alternative role and meaning theory has in systems biology expressed as canonical template theories like Biochemical Systems Theory.

How does Newton approach the challenge of mechanizing gravity and, more broadly, natural philosophy? By adopting the simple machine tradition’s mathematical approach to a system’s covarying parameters of change, he retains natural philosophy’s traditional goal while specifying it in a novel way as the search for impressed forces. He accordingly understands the physical world as a divinely created machine possessing intrinsically mathematical features and mathematical methods as capable of identifying its real features. The gravitational force’s physical cause remains an outstanding problem, however, as evidenced by Newton’s onetime reference to active principles as the “genuine principles of the mechanical philosophy.”

I point out a simple sense in which the standard formulation of Curie’s principle is false when the symmetry transformation it describes is time reversal.

Kevin Davey claims that the justification of the second law of thermodynamics as it is conveyed by the “standard story” of statistical mechanics, roughly speaking, that low-entropy microstates tend to evolve to high-entropy microstates, is “unhelpful at best and wrong at worst.” In reply, I demonstrate that Davey’s argument for rejecting the standard story commits him to a form of skepticism that is more radical than the position he claims to be stating and that Davey places unreasonable demands on the notion of justification in the physical sciences.