Typically, the imagination in thought experiments has been taken to consist in mental images; we visualize the state of affairs described. A recent alternative from Fiora Salis and Roman Frigg maintains that it is only the propositional imagination that is necessary for the conduct of a thought experiment. I set out problems with these monistic accounts and develop a pluralist stance. Thought experiments appeal to a variety of our imaginative capacities, and we ought to focus on the function of particular thought experiments when considering what type of imaginative engagement they invite.

Imagination is important for many things in science: solving problems, interpreting data, designing studies, and much else. Philosophers of imagination typically account for the productive role played by imagination in science by focusing on how imagination is constrained, for example, by self-imposed rules to infer logically or model events accurately. But the constraints offered by these philosophers constrain either too much or not enough, and they can never account for uses of imagination that are needed to break today’s constraints in order to make progress tomorrow. Thus, epistemology of imagination needs to make room for an element of epistemological anarchy.

Using climate policy debates as a case study, I argue that a certain response to the argument from inductive risk, the hedging defense, runs afoul of a reasonable ethical principle: the no-passing-the-buck principle according to which scientists ought to offer their scientific judgment when such judgment is both possible and needed in public policy debates.

Wendy S. Parker and I have advanced an inductive-risk approach to the provision of climate information that relies on the contextual values of information users. This approach aims to improve the effectiveness of climate information in social decision making. The approach’s emphasis on user values, however, conflicts with the so-called democratic view: if scientists employ contextual values, they ought to employ democratically endorsed values to preserve political legitimacy. This article draws on deliberative democratic theory to resolve the conflict, demonstrating that whether user values are legitimate to employ depends on the way labor is divided across deliberative moments.

The article examines the idea that commercialized science is a central factor in the erosion of trust in science. I claim that commercial interests have a negative impact on the trustworthiness of science by leading the public to mistakenly trust or distrust scientific results. I identify two mechanisms. First, commercial interests can directly encourage the production of consensus or dissent that is industry friendly but not epistemically reliable. Second, commercial interests support a narrow understanding of trustworthiness that allows the industry to claim that their research is reliable when it is not. A more fine-grained analysis is needed.

Scientists are becoming increasingly aware of a “replicability crisis” in the behavioral, social, and biomedical sciences. Researchers have made progress identifying statistical and methodological causes of the crisis. However, the social structure of science is also to blame. In the fields affected by the crisis, nobody is explicitly responsible and rewarded for doing confirmation and replication work. This article makes the case for a social structural reform to address the problem. I argue that we need to establish a reward system that supports a dedicated group of confirmation researchers and formulate a proposal that would achieve this.

Scholars belong to multiple communities of credit simultaneously. When these communities disagree about a scholarly achievement’s credit assignment, this raises a puzzle for decision and game theoretic models of credit seeking in science. The reference class problem for credit valuation in science is the problem of determining to which of an agent’s communities—which reference class—credit determinations should be indexed for an act under some state of nature. Solving this problem requires developing rich, mutually informed theories of community and credit that are sensitive to the structure and status systems of complex, heterogeneous scholarly networks.

Mammals are usually considered unproblematic as biological individuals. This article contends the opposite. Once we consider pregnancy, criteria for biological individuality are not easily applicable in mammals and give conflicting results: mammalian pregnancy poses a problem for biological individuality. This may open fruitful new approaches to biological individuality and is of relevance to metaphysicians interested in (human) organisms.

Mammalian placental pregnancy is a neglected problem case for theories of organismality. This example is closer to home than those typically discussed within philosophy of biology. I apply evolutionary and immunological accounts of organismality to the “counting question”: How many organisms are present during a placental pregnancy? I conclude that an evolutionary approach yields the answer two, because of bottlenecking, germ-soma sequestration, and sexual recombination. By contrast, an immunological approach answers one, because of pervasive interactions across the placenta. This analysis expands and refines recent work on a biologically informed metaphysics of pregnancy, an undertheorized area of philosophy of science.

Philosophical discussions of information and specificity in biology are now commonplace, but no consensus exists about whether the privileging of genetic causation in investigation and explanation is justified. However, little effort has been expended on understanding practices when scientists experimentally measure information or causal specificity. An example of this type of practice—measuring positional information in gene expression during pattern formation in embryogenesis—shows that biologists are unconcerned with comparing the amount of information in genes with that of other factors. Instead, they focus on whether the measured causal specificity explains the phenomenon under scrutiny.

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of human complex traits have provided us with new estimates of heritability. These estimates foreground the question of genetic causation. After having presented in simple terms the rationale underlying this way of estimating heritability, I assess the extent to which relationships between genes and phenotypes established with GWAS satisfy several dimensions of causal relationships—namely, range of influence, specificity, and stability—distinguished within the interventionist account of causation. The upshot is that if these relationships are causal in some sense, my analysis shows the extent to which they do not represent paradigmatic causal relationships.

We address Turkheimer’s argument that genome-wide association studies of behaviors and psychiatric traits will fail to produce coherent explanations. We distinguish two major sources of potential incoherence (heterogeneity and complexity), showing how they independently threaten coherence and considering how they are being and might better be addressed with protein and other databases and network tools.

Biologists have proposed a variety of explanations for extravagant sexual displays, and controversies over explanations define the history of sexual selection research. Recently, Richard Prum has defended Darwin’s idea that the evolution of sexual displays is driven by arbitrary and nonadaptive preferences of potential mates. Prum argues that this explanation should be the null model for sexual selection research. I show that if we adopted Prum’s proposal, the inferences we could be justified in making are more modest than he claims. I also discuss problems with estimating model parameters that at present prevent his proposal from being useful in practice.

I examine the use of the term function in Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, invoked as (1) the healthy functioning of the land community, which is dependent on (2) the maintenance of the characteristic functions of populations that are parts of the land community. The latter can be understood as referring to interactions between species that are the products of coevolution (such as parasite-host, predator-prey) and, thus, in terms of the “selected effect” account of function. The performance of these functions under certain conditions maintain what Leopold took to be the healthy functioning of a land community.

What meaning does epidemiological evidence have for the individual? In evidence-based medicine, epidemiological evidence measures the patient’s risk of the outcome or the change in risk due to an intervention. The patient’s risk is commonly understood as an individual probability. The problem of understanding epidemiological evidence and risk thus becomes the challenge of interpreting individual patient probabilities. I argue that the patient’s risk is interpreted ontically, as a propensity. After exploring formidable problems with this interpretation in the medical context, I propose an epistemic reinterpretation of individual patient probabilities as credences. On this view, epidemiological evidence informs medical uncertainty.

The idea that remembering involves an engram, becoming stable and permanent via consolidation, has guided the neuroscience of memory since its inception. The shift to thinking of memory as continuous and dynamic, as part of a trend toward neural dynamics, has challenged this commitment, with some, such as Lynn Nadel, calling for “the demise of the fixed trace” and others, such as Alcino J. Silva, urging rejection of the “consolidation dogma.” Does consideration of neural dynamics offer reasons to reject engram theory? No. I argue that they are compatible. At most, shifting to a dynamic view of neural processes compels revision of the implementational details.

Some realistic models of neural spiking take into account spike timing, yet the practical relevance of spike timing is often unclear. In Eugene Izhikevich’s model, timing plays a crucial role by allowing for the natural formation of polychronous circuits. In such circuits, individual elements may figure in a number of distinct assemblies, their role in each determined by their timing relative to other neurons. I show that this reflects a distinct organizational principle from notions of pluripotency, redundancy, or reuse and argue that properly understanding this phenomenon requires a shift to a time-sensitive, process-based view of computation.

In human conscious experience, many features are present in combination: objects are presented through the senses, information from different sensory modalities is integrated, events are marked with value, and we have a sense of our own location and state. Which of these might come before others in plausible evolutionary trajectories, or do they form a tight package of correlated features that cannot readily be dissociated? I take a comparative approach to these questions, focusing on a distinction between sensory and evaluative aspects of experience and looking at the distribution of subjectivity-relevant features in a range of invertebrate animals.

Memes have been proposed to explain wide swathes of human culture and language use. I argue that what is really doing the explanatory work in many of these cases is a basic mechanism of information transmission, which is distinct from memetic evolution by natural selection in significant ways. Perhaps the most significant of these is that information transmission depends primarily on the interests of the users of information, rather than the reproductive interests of the informational entities—‘memes’—themselves. Although my main target is memetic approaches, this argument also applies to some other, nonmemetic, theories of cultural evolution.