We model the impact of different incentives on journal behavior in undertaking peer review. Under one scheme, the journal aims to publish the highest-quality papers; under the second, the journal aims to maintain a high rejection rate. Under both schemes, journals prefer to set very high standards for acceptance despite allowing significant error in peer review. Under the second scheme, however, in order to encourage more submissions of mediocre papers, the journal is incentivized to make its editorial process less accurate. This leads to both worse peer review and lower-quality articles being published.

Historians have shown that philosophical discussions about the implications of relativity significantly shaped the development of European philosophy of science in the 1920s. Yet little is known about American debates from this period. This article maps the first responses to Einstein’s theory in three U.S. philosophy journals and situates these papers within the local intellectual landscape. I argue that these discussions (1) stimulated the development of a distinctly American branch of philosophy of science and (2) paved the way for the logical empiricists who emigrated to the United States in the years before World War II.

We provide five rearticulations of the thesis that the structure of spacetime is conventional, rather than empirically determined, based upon variation of the structures that are empirically underdetermined and modal contexts in which this underdetermination occurs. Three of the five formulations of conventionalism will be found to fail. Two are found to open up new interesting problems for researchers in the foundations of general relativity. In all five cases, our analysis explores the interplay between geometric identities, symmetry, conformal structure, and the dynamical content of physical theories with the conventionalism dialectic deployed as a tool of explication, clarification, and exploration.

Behavioral welfare economics usually aims at mere means paternalism, helping agents better pursue their own goals. This paper discusses one initially promising way to inform policies addressed at agents who violate expected utility theory (EUT), namely what I call “CPT debiasing.” I argue that this approach is problematic even if we grant the normative authority of EUT, the descriptive adequacy of CPT (cumulative prospect theory), and the general acceptability of means paternalism. First, it is doubtful whether the CPT utility function measures what its proponents intend. Second, by imposing risk neutrality on agents, the approach involves a more problematic paternalism.

Grant Ramsey and Michael Deem argue that appreciating the role that empathy plays in posttransgression guilt leads to a more promising account of the emotion’s evolutionary origins. But because their proposal fails to adequately distinguish guilt from shame, we cannot say which of the two emotions we are actually getting an evolutionary account of. Moreover, a closer look at the details suggests both that empathy may be more relevant for our understanding of shame’s evolutionary origins than guilt’s and that guilt is unlikely to be an adaptation.

Recent work on the status of astrophysical modeling in the wake of quantum gravity indicates that a “fauxrizon” (a portmanteau of faux horizon), such as is relevant to understanding astrophysical black holes according to the fuzzball proposal within string theory, might ultimately solve the familiar black hole evaporation paradox. I clarify, with general upshots for the foundations of quantum gravity research, some of what this suggestion would amount to: identification of intertheoretic constraints on global spacetime structure in (observer-relative) semiclassical models of fuzzballs.

I discuss a contemporary solution to the dynamic problem of old evidence (POE), as proposed by Sprenger. Sprenger’s solution combines the Garber–Jeffrey–Niiniluoto (GJN) approach with Howson’s suggestion of counterfactually removing the old evidence from scientists’ belief systems. I argue that in the dynamic POE, the challenge is to explain how an insight under beliefs in which the old evidence E is known increased the credence of a scientific hypothesis. Therefore, Sprenger’s counterfactual solution, in which E has been artificially removed, does not resolve the problem. I consider several potential responses.