Articles and blog posts found on 29 October 2024

Anish Seal: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24117/1/0EDB507C-9365-11EF-B383-858C99831876.pdf
 (pdf, 9698 words) The practice of science appears to involve “model-talk”. Scientists, one thinks, are in the business of giving accounts of reality. Scientists, in the process of furnishing such accounts, talk about what they call “models”. Philosophers of science have inspected what this talk of models suggests about how scientific theories manage to represent reality. There are, it seems, at least three distinct philosophical views on the role of scientific models in science’s portrayal of reality: the abstractionist view, the indirect fictionalist view, and the direct fictionalist view. In this essay, I try to articulate a question about what makes a scientific model more or less appropriate for a specific domain of reality. More precisely, I ask, “What accounts for the fact that given a determinate target domain, some scientific models, but not others, are thought to be “appropriate” for that domain?” I then consider whether and the degree to which each of the mentioned views on scientific models institutes a satisfactory response to this question. I conclude that, amongst those views, the direct fictionalist view seems to have the most promising response. I then utilize this argument to develop a more precise account of the problem of differential importability, and ultimately offer a more general and less presumptive argument that the problem seems to be optimally solved by justifying comparative evaluation of model-importabilities solely in terms of comparative evaluations of what I characterize as models’ “holistic” predictive success.
Justin Holder: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24128/1/Holder%20-%20The%20Structure%20of%20an%20Unknowable%20System.pdf
 (pdf, 11730 words) One may demarcate at least three major forms of philosophical antirealism: scientific, sceptical, and transcendental. Each regards certain systems as unknowable. And for each, it has been argued that even if the nature of a system is unknowable, its structure may still be known. Structuralism in this sense is as yet ununified: even though structure is supposed to solve a similar problem in each case, proposals tend to be formulated in ways that make them specific to their respective contexts. Here I present a unified framework for making claims about only the structure of a target system which are not undermined by any of the three forms of antirealism. The framework may therefore provide a baseline for our knowledge of the world which is safe from most philosophical antirealism. The defining characteristic of my approach is how it leverages the role that an unknowable system plays in underlying experiences. I develop a formula for sentences making claims about the structures of target systems and I account for the representation of systems by mathematical structures as well.
Lorenzo Sartori: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24127/1/LSartori-psa_paper_submission.pdf
 (pdf, 5052 words) Paper accepted to the 2024 edition of the Philosophy of Science Association (New Orleans) and for publication in the related special issue in Philosophy of science. This version of the article has been accepted for publication after peer review but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections.
Mario Villalobos: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24118/2/Exoautopoietic%20bodies%20the%20quest%20for%20the%20theoretical%20identity%20of%20living%20beings.pdf
 (pdf, 8653 words) Despite all the encyclopedic knowledge that biological sciences have accumulated regarding living beings, their physiology and behaviour, their molecular bases, their development and evolution, it is still frustratingly elusive to find a neat and uncontroversial answer to the (apparently) simple question “What are living beings?” The traditional approach to answering this question has been by means of definitions. Many have been proposed in the literature over the years (each one emphasising different aspects of living beings, such as biochemical composition, metabolism, thermodynamics, evolution, or self-organisation), but none have achieved transversal acceptance in the community (Sagan 1970; Pályi, Zucchi and Caglioti 2002; Tsokolov 2009; Bedau and Cleland 2010; Trifonov 2011; Kolb 2018). So much is the case that some have declared, with resignation, that it is impossible to find such a definition and that we should better forget the whole question (Machery 2012).
Stephanie Collins: https://stephaniecollins.xyz/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/care-ethics-and-structural-injustice.pdf
 (pdf, 9791 words) Philosophical interest in structural injustice has risen sharply since the publication of Iris Marion Young’s Responsibility for Justice (Young 2011). In short, a structural injustice occurs when social, economic, or political processes operate to produce an unjust outcome, where those processes cannot be reduced to identifiable wrongs perpetrated by isolatable agents (regardless of whether those agents are individuals or collectives, such as governments or corporations).  Paradigm examples of structural injustices include widespread homelessness and exploitative labour practices—both of which are examples analysed by Young.
Zvi Hasnes Beninson, Ehud Lamm: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24124/1/Two%20rights%20can%20make%20a%20wrong_1-1.pdf
 (pdf, 1244 words) Scientists are once again worried about ideologically driven bad science. We explain that this problem results from the conjunction of two worthy values that make science susceptible to recurrence of such situations. The solution is to acknowledge the social, political, economic, and ideological frameworks in which science is embedded.
D. G. Mayo's blog: https://errorstatistics.com/2024/10/28/excursion-1-tour-ii-4th-stop-error-probing-tools-versus-logics-of-evidence-excerpt/
 (html, 1225 words) We are starting on Tour II of Excursion 1 (4th stop). The 3rd stop is in an earlier blog post. As I promised, this cruise of SIST is leisurely. I have not yet shared new reflections in the comments–but I will! …

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