Configuration space representations have utility in physics but are not generally taken to have ontological significance. We examine one salient reason to think configuration space representations fail to be relevant in determining the fundamental ontology of a physical theory. This is based on a claim due to several authors (Allori, Dürr, Goldstein, Tumulka, and Zanghì) that fundamental theories must have primitive ontologies. This claim would,if correct, have broad ramifications for how to read metaphysics from physical theory. We survey ways of understanding the argument for a primitive ontology in order to assess the case against configuration space realism.

It is commonly claimed that the universality of critical phenomena is explained through particular applications of the renormalization group (RG). This article has three aims: to clarify the structure of the explanation of universality, to discuss the physics of such RG explanations, and to examine the extent to which universality is thus explained. The derivation of critical exponents proceeds via a real-space or a field-theoretic approach to the RG. Building on work by Mainwood, this article argues that these approaches ought to be distinguished: while the field-theoretic approach explains universality, the real-space approach fails to provide an adequate explanation.

Scientists and decision makers rely on climate models for predictions concerning future climate change. Traditionally, physical processes that are key to predicting extreme events are either directly represented (resolved) or indirectly represented (parameterized). Scientists are now replacing physically based parameterizations with neural networks that do not represent physical processes directly or indirectly. I analyze the epistemic implications of this method and argue that it undermines the reliability of model predictions. I attribute the widespread failure in neural network generalizability to the lack of process representation. The representation of climate processes adds significant and irreducible value to the reliability of climate model predictions.

In this paper, I discuss the prospects of nominalistic scientific realism (NSR) and show that it fails on many counts. In section 2, I discuss what is required for NSR to get off the ground. In section 3, I question the idea that theories have well-defined nominalistic content and the idea that causal activity is a necessary condition for commitment to the reality of an entity. In section 4, I challenge the notion of nominalistic adequacy of theories.

James Woodward offers a conception of explanation and mechanism in terms of interventionist counterfactuals. Based on a case from ecology, I show that ecologists’ approach to that case satisfies Woodward's conditions for explanation and mechanism, but his conception does not fully capture what ecologists view as explanatory. The new mechanistic philosophy likewise aims to describe central aspects of mechanisms, but I show that it is not sufficient to account for ecological mechanisms. I argue that in ecology explanation involves identification of invariant and insensitive causal relationships and descriptions of the mechanistic characteristics that make these relations possible.

Philosophical defenses of cognitive/evolutionary psychological accounts of racialism claim that classification based on phenotypical features of humans was common historically and is evidence for a species-typical, cognitive mechanism for essentializing. They conclude that social constructionist accounts of racialism must be supplemented by cognitive/evolutionary psychology. This article argues that phenotypical classifications were uncommon historically until such classifications were socially constructed. Moreover, some philosophers equivocate between two different meanings of “racial thinking.” The article concludes that social constructionist accounts are far more robust than psychological accounts for the origins of racialism.

Much of Stephen Jay Gould’s legacy is dominated by his views on the contingency of evolutionary history expressed in his classic Wonderful Life. However, Gould also campaigned relentlessly for a “nomothetic” paleontology. How do these commitments hang together? I argue that Gould’s conception of science and natural law combined with his commitment to contingency to produce an evolutionary science centered around the formulation of higher-level evolutionary laws.

Modularity is a key concept in building and evaluating complex simulation models. My main claim is that in simulation modeling modularity tends to degenerate for reasons inherent to simulation methodology. The argument will proceed by analyzing the techniques of parameterization, tuning, and kludging. They are—to a certain extent—inevitable when building complex simulation models but erode modularity. As a result, the common account of validating simulations faces a major problem, namely, a problem of holism. In the conclusion, I will ask to what extent holism sets limits to validation.

This paper is concerned with two closely related problems: the first is the general question of border-line cases; the second is a suggested identification of the notions of ambiguity and vagueness. In the first part of the paper I propose to discuss border-line cases in the following way: I shall say what is meant by “border-line cases,” discuss their genesis, enumerate and evaluate the different methods of resolving such cases, and make a brief comment or two the bearing, if any, that such cases have on logical theory. In the second part it will be suggested that the notion of vagueness can be reduced to the status of a special but important case of ambiguity; I hold that such a reduction would effect both an economy and a clarification.

Brian Ellis has argued that the assigning of forces is, in the final analysis, a matter of convention. This conclusion is backed by the premises (1) that forces and force-effects are necessary and sufficient for each other, and (2) that the classification of some state of affairs as a force-effect is at least partly conventional. We argue that the first premise is false, that the second premise is ambiguous as between several senses of “conventional,” and finally that he has not established that force-effects are conventional in the sense required for the conclusion he wishes to draw.

A probability space is common cause closed if it contains a Reichenbachian common cause of every correlation in it and common cause incomplete otherwise. It is shown that a probability space is common cause incomplete if and only if it contains more than one atom and that every space is common cause completable. The implications of these results for Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle are discussed, and it is argued that the principle is only falsifiable if conditions on the common cause are imposed that go beyond the requirements formulated by Reichenbach in the definition of common cause.

Say that an agent is epistemically humble if she is less than fully confident that her opinions will converge to the truth, given appropriate evidence. Is such humility rationally permissible? According to Gordon Belot’s orgulity argument: the answer is yes, but long-run convergence-to-the-truth theorems force Bayesians to answer no. That argument has no force against Bayesians who reject countable additivity as a requirement of rationality. Such Bayesians are free to count even extreme humility as rationally permissible. Furthermore, dropping countable additivity does not render Bayesianism more vulnerable to the charge that it is excessively subjective.

I claim that the Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) current equations owe a great deal of their importance to their role in bringing results from experiments on squid giant action preparations to bear on the study of the action potential in other neurons in other in vitro and in vivo environments. I consider ideas from Weber and Craver about the role of Coulomb's and other fundamental equations in explaining the action potential and in HH's development of their equations. Also, I offer an embellishment to Schaffner's emergent unifier conception of the HH model.

On the classical account of evolution by natural selection (ENS) found in Lewontin and many subsequent authors, ENS is conceived as involving three key ingredients: phenotypic variation, fitness differences, and heredity. Through the analysis of three problem cases involving heredity, I argue that the classical conception is substantially flawed, showing that heredity is not required for selection. I consider further problems with the classical account of ENS arising from conflations between three distinct senses of the central concept of ‘fitness’ and offer an alternative to the classical conception of ENS involving the interaction of distinct evolutionary mechanisms.

A holistic account of the meaning of theoretical terms leads scientific realism into serious troubles. Alternative methods of reference fixing are needed by a realist who wishes to show how reference invariance is possible in spite of meaning variance. This paper argues that the similarity theory of truthlikeness and approximate truth, developed by logicians since the mid 1970s, helps to make precise the idea of charitable theoretical reference. Comparisons to the recent proposals by Kitcher and Psillos are given. This argument helps to undermine the scepticist meta-induction about theories, and thereby to reevaluate Laudan's alleged confutation of scientific realism.

In this article I discuss the justification of scientific change and argue that it rests on different sorts of invariance. Against this background I consider notions of observation, meaning, and regulative standards. I sketch an account of the rationale of scientific change which preserves the merits and avoids the shortcomings of the approach of Feyerabend, Hanson, Kuhn, Toulmin, and others. Each of these writers would hold that transitions from one scientific tradition to another force radical changes in what is observed, in the meanings of the terms employed, and in the metastandards involved. They would claim that “incommensurable” replacement is what does, and should, occur during scientific “revolutions.” Such writers, however, have trouble in comparing different scientific theories. My account permits different theories to be compared in various ways. These comparisons, I argue, are possible through appeal to “first-level” and “second-level” invariance. In this connection I argue that observation, meaning, and regulative standards should be, and in fact usually are, nontrivially invariant with respect to scientific change.

An inference to a new explanation may be both logically non-ampliative and epistemically ampliative. Included among the premises of the latter form is the explanandum—a unique premise which is capable of embodying what we do not know about the matter in question, as well as legitimate aspects of what we do know. This double status points to a resolution of the Meno paradox. Ampliative inference of this sort, it is argued, has much in common with Nickles' idea of discoverability and, together with the mapping and correction procedures (briefly summarized) required for such inference, may suggest a broadening of the concept of justification which would incorporate much of what has been defended in theories of discovery.

Advocates of the counterfactual approach to causal inference argue that race is not a cause, and this despite the fact that it is commonly treated as such by scientists in many disciplines. I object that their argument is unsound since two of its premises are false. I also sketch an argument to the effect that racial discrimination cannot be explained unless one assumes race to be a cause.

In our previous writings we have outlined a mathematical theory of biological phenomena. In our systematic construction of “mathematical biology,” similar in its aims to mathematical physics, we have started with the fundamental unit,—the living cell. After having established a physico-mathematical theory of the fundamental properties of the cell, we have studied the interaction of several cells. This led us into two different fields. On the one hand we studied such interactions of cells, which determine the form of cellular aggregates, constituting multicellular organisms. On the other hand we studied different types of functional interactions, which determine the reactions of the aggregate as a whole to different environmental changes. While the first field leads us eventually to the theory of organic form, the second brings us to the physico-mathematical theory of behavior.