I argue that information about the distal causes of moral beliefs, such as evolution, is only relevant for assessing the epistemic status of moral beliefs in cases where we cannot determine whether the proximal processes producing these beliefs are reliable just by examining the properties of these proximal processes. Any investigation into the epistemic status of moral beliefs given their causes should start with a look at proximal causes—not at evolution. I discuss two proximal psychological influences on moral beliefs—disgust and sympathy—to demonstrate the feasibility of drawing epistemic conclusions from an examination of proximal causes alone.

Fitness is a central theoretical concept in evolutionary theory. Despite its importance, much debate has occurred over how to conceptualize and formalize fitness. One point of debate concerns the roles of organismic and trait fitness. In a recent addition to this debate, Elliott Sober argues that trait fitness is the central fitness concept, and that organismic fitness is of little value. In this paper, by contrast, we argue that it is organismic fitness that lies at the bases of both the conceptual role of fitness and its role as a measure of evolutionary dynamics.

I consider the relationship between scientific practice and the philosophical debate surrounding biological individuality. I argue for the sensitivity account, on which biologists do not require a resolution to the individuality debate. This view puts me in disagreement with much of the literature on biological individuality, where it has become common to claim that there is a relationship of dependence between biologists’ conceptions of individuality and the quality of their empirical work.

Lawton’s contingency thesis (CT) states that there are no useful generalizations (“laws”) at the level of ecological communities because these systems are especially prone to contingent historical events. I argue that this influential thesis has been grounded on the wrong kind of evidence. CT is best understood in Woodward’s terms as a claim about the instability of certain causal dependencies across different background conditions. A recent distinction between evolution and ecology reveals what an adequate test of Lawton’s thesis would look like. To date, CT remains untested. But developments in genome-level ecology and molecular ecology point in promising directions.

A strong case has been made for the role and value of mechanistic explanation in neuroscience and molecular biology. A similar demonstration in other domains of scientific investigation, however, remains an important challenge of scope for the new mechanists. This article helps answer that challenge by demonstrating one valuable role mechanisms play in phylogenetics. Using the transition/transversion (ti/tv) rate parameter as a case example, this article argues that models embedded with mechanisms produce stronger phylogenetic tree hypotheses, as measured by maximum likelihood logL values. Two important implications for the new mechanistic account of explanation are considered.

I first briefly argue that some issues in the individualism-holism debate have been fairly clearly settled and others are still plagued by unclarity. The main argument of the article is that there is a set of clear empirical issues around the holism-individualism debate that are central problems in current social science research. Those include questions about when we can be holist and how individualist we can be in social explanation.

Biological processes are often explained by identifying the underlying mechanisms that generate a phenomenon of interest. I characterize a basic account of mechanistic explanation and then present three challenges to this account, illustrated with examples from molecular biology. The basic mechanistic account (1) is insufficient for explaining nonsequential and nonlinear dynamic processes, (2) is insufficient for explaining the inherently stochastic nature of many biological mechanisms, and (3) fails to give a proper framework for analyzing organization. I suggest that biological processes are best approached as a multidimensional gradient—with some processes being paradigmatic cases of mechanisms and some being marginal cases.

This article introduces Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley’s ‘dynamical approach’ to special relativity, and argues that it may be construed as a relationalist form of Einstein’s ‘practical geometry’. This construal of the dynamical approach is shown to be compatible with related chapters of Brown’s text and also with recent descriptions of the dynamical approach by Pooley and others.

Weyl symmetry of the classical bosonic string Lagrangian is broken by quantization, with profound consequences described here (along with a review of string theory for philosophers of physics). Reimposing symmetry requires that the background space-time satisfy the equations of general relativity: general relativity, hence classical space-time as we know it, arises from string theory. We investigate the logical role of Weyl symmetry in this explanation of general relativity: it is not an independent physical postulate but required in quantum string theory, so from a certain point of view it plays only a formal role in the explanation.

Supporters of the de Broglie-Bohm (dBB) interpretation of quantum theory argue that because the theory, like classical mechanics, concerns the motions of point particles in 3D space, it is specially suited to recover classical behavior. I offer a novel account of classicality in dBB theory, if only to show that such an account falls out almost trivially from results developed in the largely interpretation-neutral context of decoherence theory. I then argue that this undermines any special claim that dBB theory is purported to have on the unification of the quantum and classical realms.

Some authors (Muller and Saunders, Huggett and Norton) have attempted to defend Leibniz’s Identity of Indiscernibles through weak discernibility. The idea is that if there is a symmetric, nonreflexive physical relation that holds between two particles, then those particles cannot be identical. In this article I focus only on Muller and Saunders’s account and argue that the means by which they achieve weak discernibility is not through a quantum mechanical observable but an alternate mathematical construction that is both unorthodox and incomplete.

In this article, I consider some of the first appearances of a hypothesis of quantized energy between the years 1900 and 1913 and provide an analysis of the nature of the unificatory power of this hypothesis in a Bayesian framework. I argue that the best way to understand the unification here is in terms of informational relevance: on the assumption of the quantum hypothesis, phenomena that were previously thought to be unrelated turned out to yield information about one another on the basis of agreeing measurements of the numerical value of Planck’s constant.

The renormalization group (RG) has been characterized as merely a coarse-graining procedure that does not illuminate the microscopic content of quantum field theory (QFT) but merely gets us from that content, as given by axiomatic QFT, to macroscopic predictions. I argue that in the constructive field theory tradition, RG techniques do illuminate the microscopic dynamics of a QFT, which are not automatically given by axiomatic QFT. RG techniques in constructive field theory are also rigorous, so one cannot object to their foundational import on grounds of lack of rigor.

Boltzmannian statistical mechanics partitions the phase space of a system into macroregions, and the largest of these is identified with equilibrium. What justifies this identification? Common answers focus on Boltzmann’s combinatorial argument, the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, and maximum entropy considerations. We argue that they fail and present a new answer. We characterize equilibrium as the macrostate in which a system spends most of its time and prove a new theorem establishing that equilibrium thus defined corresponds to the largest macroregion. Our derivation is completely general and does not rely on assumptions about the dynamics or interparticle interactions.

A dynamical system is called chaotic if small changes to its initial conditions can create large changes in its behavior. By analogy, we call a dynamical system structurally chaotic if small changes to the equations describing the evolution of the system produce large changes in its behavior. Although there are many definitions of “chaos,” there are few mathematically precise candidate definitions of “structural chaos.” I propose a definition, and I explain two new theorems that show that a set of models is structurally chaotic if it contains a chaotic function. I conclude by discussing the relationship between structural chaos and structural stability.

Focusing on Shannon information, this article shows that, even on the basis of the same formalism, there may be different interpretations of the concept of information, and that disagreements may be deep enough to lead to very different conclusions about the informational characterization of certain physical situations. On this basis, a pluralist view is argued for, according to which the concept of information is primarily a formal concept that can adopt different interpretations that are not mutually exclusive, but each useful in a different specific context.

Election prediction by means of opinion polling is a rare empirical success story for social science. I examine the details of a prominent case, drawing two lessons of more general interest: (1) Methodology over metaphysics. Traditional metaphysical criteria were not a useful guide to whether successful prediction would be possible; instead, the crucial thing was selecting an effective methodology. (2) Which methodology? Success required sophisticated use of case-specific evidence from opinion polling. The pursuit of explanations via general theory or causal mechanisms, by contrast, turned out to be precisely the wrong path—contrary to much recent philosophy of social science.

To arrive at their final evaluation of a manuscript or grant proposal, reviewers must convert a submission’s strengths and weaknesses for heterogeneous peer review criteria into a single metric of quality or merit. I identify this process of commensuration as the locus for a new kind of peer review bias. Commensuration bias illuminates how the systematic prioritization of some peer review criteria over others permits and facilitates problematic patterns of publication and funding in science. Commensuration bias also foregrounds a range of structural strategies for realigning peer review practices and institutions with the aims of science.

On many science-related policy questions, the public is unable to make informed decisions, because of its inability to make use of knowledge obtained by scientists. Philip Kitcher and James Fishkin have both suggested therefore that on certain science-related issues, public policy should not be decided on by actual democratic vote, but should instead conform to the public’s counterfactual informed democratic decision (CIDD). Indeed, this suggestion underlies Kitcher’s specification of an ideal of a well-ordered science. This article argues that this suggestion misconstrues the normative significance of CIDDs. At most, CIDDs might have epistemic significance, but no authority or legitimizing force.

In this article I analyze process tracing, a causal mechanism-based technique for testing causal claims in the social sciences that requires one to specify a chain of intervening causes between any putative cause and effect. I argue that one should not only give evidence that the intervening causes are present in a suitable case study, as process tracing methodologists recommend, but also provide counterfactual evidence to show that each link in the chain is genuinely causal. I detail what that counterfactual evidence should consist of, using Woodward’s manipulability theory, and argue that this evidence relies on tentative comparisons to other case studies.