Articles and blog posts found on 20 November 2024

Charles H. Pence: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24243/1/Preprint-Progress.pdf
 (pdf, 10538 words) The concept of “progress” in evolutionary theory and its relationship to a putative notion of “Progress” in a global, normatively loaded sense of “change for the better” have been the subject of debate since Darwin admonished himself in a marginal note to avoid using the terms ‘higher’ and ‘lower.’ While an increase in some kind of complexity in the natural world might seem self-evident, efforts to explicate this trend meet notorious philosophical difficulties. Numerous historians pin the Modern Synthesis as a pivotal moment in this history; Michael Ruse even provocatively hypothesizes that Ernst Mayr and other “architects” of the Synthesis worked actively to eliminate Progress from evolutionary biology’s scientific purview. I evaluate these claims here with a textual analysis of the journals Evolution and Proceedings of the Royal Society B (a corpus of 27,762 documents), using a dynamic topic modeling approach to track the fate of the term ‘progress’ across the Modern Synthesis. The claim that this term declines in importance for evolutionary theorizing over this period can, indeed, be supported; more tentative evidence is also provided that the discussion of ‘progress’ is largely absent from the British context, emphasizing the role of American paleontology in the rise and fall of ‘progress’ in 20th-century evolutionary biology.
Marissa Bennett, Michael E. Miller: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/F5CA9978460723CE836BB80CFBE6CF7F/S0031824823001381a.pdf/the-conventionality-of-real-valued-quantities.pdf
 (pdf, 5382 words) The original architects of the representational theory of measurement interpreted their formalism operationally and explicitly acknowledged that some aspects of their representations are conventional. We argue that the conventional elements of the representations afforded by the theory require careful scrutiny as one moves toward a more metaphysically robust interpretation by showing that there is a sense in which the very number system one uses to represent a physical quantity such as mass or length is conventional. This result undermines inferences which impute structure from the numerical representational structure to the quantity it is used to represent.
Matt Farr: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24237/2/Farr2024TSTNT.pdf
 (pdf, 7750 words) The shift from classical to relativistic physics significantly altered our conception of time. From a picture of space and time as autonomous concepts, and of reality as divided into moments of time, relativity theory introduced a picture of four-dimensional spacetime, and a ‘static’ or ‘block universe’ conception of time. This paper considers how exactly relativity theory clashes with our ordinary folk conception of time and what this ultimately means for how we should think about the nature of time.
Michael Nielsen, Rush T. Stewart: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57be816a579fb351c73571ad/t/673cfb50edf2a23c8faed2ee/1732049745073/Reply+to+Eva.pdf
 (pdf, 1309 words) In our “New Possibilities for Fair Algorithms,” the key to avoiding the famous impossibility result for Calibration and Equalized Odds (Kleinberg et al., 2017) is to replace Calibration with a weaker condition we call Spanning. Spanning requires that, for each relevant group, an assessor’s predictions capture the group base rate in the sense that the base rate lies within the interval spanned by the assessor’s forecasts. We are grateful for Benjamin Eva’s critical and constructive engagement with our proposal. Eva is responsible for what has so far been the most interesting fairness criterion proposed in the philosophy literature: Base Rate Tracking (Eva, 2022). In his comment on our paper, he emphasizes the “intra-group” nature of Spanning—it imposes a constraint on the assessments within each group rather than requiring some parity in assessment to hold across groups—and suggests an alternative to Spanning that he dubs Spacing. Spacing is essentially a form of intra-group Base Rate Tracking.
Miles Tucker: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5aa0a614620b858853a75ad0/t/673cfc9a54ac1542670679a8/1732050075021/Tucker+AMC.pdf
 (pdf, 7401 words) Journal of the American Philosophical Association () – © The Author(s), . Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/.), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that no alterations are made and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use and/or adaptation of the article.

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