Kirsten Walsh has criticized my interpretation of Newton’s view on the certainty of his new science of color, namely, that it shifted through his long career from one of certainty to probabilism. I defend my view by further considering his statements on certainty in his Optical Lectures, “New Theory about Light and Colors,” Query 31 of the Opticks, and Rule 4 added to the Principia in 1726.

Marc Lange has recently raised three objections to the account of minimal model explanations offered by Robert Batterman and Collin Rice. In this article, I suggest that these objections are misguided. I suggest that the objections raised by Lange stem from a misunderstanding of the what it is that minimal model explanations seek to explain. This misunderstanding, I argue, consists in Lange’s seeing minimal model explanations as relating special types of models to particular target systems rather than seeing minimal model explanations as looking to explain robust patterns of behavior that are exhibited by a variety of physically diverse systems.

Olav Benjamin Vassend proposes two solutions to the “interpretive problem” of assigning nonzero probabilities to hypotheses that are known to be false. He argues that the verisimilitude interpretation (probability expresses the degree of belief that the hypothesis is closest to the truth) and the counterfactual interpretation (probability is conditional on a false supposition) are equivalent. While Vassend’s intuition about these two solutions is basically correct, the technical details of his treatment need elaboration and correction. Appropriate tools for combining verisimilitude and Bayesian probabilities can be found in my Truthlikeness.

This essay examines the provenance of a single, curious term that William James often used in connection with his own pragmatism. The term is Denkmittel, an uncommon German contraction of Denk (thought) and Mittel (instrument). James’s Central European sources for this now forgotten bit of philosophical jargon provide a small illustration of a bigger historical point that too often gets obscured. Pragmatism—James’s pragmatism, at least—was both allied with and inspired by a broader sweep of scientific instrumentalism that was already flourishing in fin de siècle European philosophy.

In this article I discuss various humility theses about individuals and intrinsic properties as discussed by authors such as David Lewis. I argue that we should accept a similar humility thesis about the world’s space-time structure regardless of which metaphysics of space-time we accept. I argue this undercuts some important motivations opting in for an ontic structural realist metaphysic.

Transcendental arguments are not popular in contemporary philosophy of science. They are typically seen as antinaturalistic and incapable of providing explanatory force in accounting for natural phenomena. However, when viewed as providing (certain types of) intelligibility to complicated concepts used in scientific reasoning, a concrete and productive role is recoverable for transcendental reasoning in philosophy of science. In this article I argue that the resources, and possibly the need, for such a role are available within a thoroughly naturalistic framework garnered from the work of Hasok Chang and William Wimsatt.

Adrian Currie has introduced a novel account of creativity within the social epistemology of science. The account is intended to capture how conservatism can be detrimental to the health of inquiry within certain scientific communities, given the aims of research there. I argue that recent remarks by Carlo Rovelli put pressure on the applicability of the account. Altogether, it seems we do not yet well understand the relationship between creativity, conservatism, and the health of inquiry in science.