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  1.  9
    Mere Recurrence and Cumulative Culture at the Margins.Andrew Buskell & Claudio Tennie - 2025 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 76 (1):123-145.
    The consensus formulation of cumulative culture characterizes cumulative traditions as information transmitted by high-fidelity learning that generates incremental improvement over time. While this formulation is effective for studying paradigmatic cases (for example, Holocene-era hominin toolkits), it is less so at capturing and explaining putative cases at the margins—for instance, some recurrent behaviours observed in social animal species. This article argues against the consensus formulation in favour of a minimal one, which links cumulative culture to what we call ‘copying know-how’ and (...)
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  2.  15
    The Conceptual Format Debate and the Challenge from (Global) Supramodality.Fabrizio Calzavarini - 2025 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 76 (1):45-74.
    The primary aim of the article is to take a fresh look at the debate between amodal and grounded (modality-specific) theories of conceptual representations by formulating what I call the challenge from (global) supramodality. The challenge proceeds from the observation that, in recent years, many neuroscience data suggest that extensive portions of what are traditionally considered modality-specific cortices are in fact supramodal in nature; that is, they can process external information independently from the perceptual modality. According to a strong or (...)
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  3.  5
    (1 other version)Does the No Alternatives Argument Need Gerrymandering to Be Significant?Richard Dawid - 2025 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 76 (1):209-222.
    In a recent article, Menon has argued that the no alternatives argument can only be significant if the priors for numbers of alternatives are tuned in an implausible way (gerrymandered, as he calls it). In this article, I demonstrate that priors needed for making a no alternatives argument significant are in line with what can be plausibly assumed in a successful research field.
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  4.  3
    Putting Theory in Its Place: The Relationship between Universality Arguments and Empirical Constraints.Grace E. Field - 2025 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 76 (1):95-122.
    In light of Hawking radiation’s empirical undetectability, physicists have attempted to establish it as universal—as a phenomenon that should appear regardless of the possible details of quantum gravity, whatever those details might be. But, as pointed out in a recent article by Gryb, Palacios, and Thébault, these universality arguments for Hawking radiation seem broadly unconvincing compared to the Wilsonian renormalization-group universality arguments for condensed matter physics. Motivated by their apparent failure, compared with the overwhelming success of universality arguments in so (...)
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  5.  18
    Invention and Evolution of Correlated Conventions.Daniel A. Herrmann & Brian Skyrms - 2025 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 76 (1):223-241.
    An important feature of many conventions is that the agents use an asymmetry to coordinate their behaviour. We call these ‘correlated conventions’. However, a puzzle arises: since any asymmetry works as well as any other, what are the relevant asymmetries on which a given population founds its correlated conventions? In order to gain traction on this question we need an account of both the invention and evolution of correlated conventions. Invention has remained largely unexplored in the literature. In this article (...)
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  6.  22
    (1 other version)On the Mathematics and Metaphysics of the Hole Argument.Oliver Pooley & James Read - 2025 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 76 (1):21-43.
    We make some remarks on the mathematics and metaphysics of the hole argument, in response to a recent article in this journal by Weatherall. Broadly speaking, we defend the mainstream philosophical literature from the claim that correct usage of the mathematics of general relativity ‘blocks’ the argument.
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  7.  47
    Hidden Costs of Epistemic Conformity: Lessons from Information Cascade Simulations.Patricia Rich - 2025 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 76 (1):147-172.
    Information cascades are troubling and well studied because apparently individually rational responses to evidence can lead entire communities to conform (participate in cascades), and hence to converge on the wrong answer. Yet existing theory cannot explain why a robust, substantial minority of people in experimental studies do not conform. Groups achieve improved reliability thanks to these non-conformists. I use simulations to study cascade problems in an evolutionary setting. The results show that although conforming maximizes expected fitness, non-conformists can persist and (...)
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  8. On Explaining the Success of Induction.Tom F. Sterkenburg - 2025 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 76 (1):75-93.
    Douven observes that Schurz’s meta-inductive justification of induction cannot explain the great empirical success of induction, and offers an explanation based on computer simulations of the social and evolutionary development of our inductive practices. In this article, I argue that Douven’s account does not address the explanatory question that Schurz’s argument leaves open, and that the assumption of the environment’s induction-friendliness that is inherent to Douven’s simulations is not justified by Schurz’s argument.
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  9. Representation without Informative Signalling.Gerardo Viera - 2025 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 76 (1):243-267.
    Various writers have attempted to use the sender–receiver formalism to account for the representational capacities of biological systems. This article has two goals. First, I argue that the sender–receiver approach to representation cannot be complete. The mammalian circadian system represents the time of day, yet it does not control circadian behaviours by producing signals with time of day content. Informative signalling need not be the basis of our most basic representational capacities. Second, I argue that representational capacities are primarily about (...)
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  10. Restricted Auditory Aspatialism.Douglas C. Wadle - 2025 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 76 (1):173-207.
    Some philosophers have argued that we do not hear sounds as located in the environment. Others have objected that this straightforwardly contradicts the phenomenology of auditory experience. And from this they draw metaphysical conclusions about the nature of sounds—that they are events or properties of vibrating surfaces rather than waves or sensations. I argue that there is a minimal, but recognizable, notion of audition to which this phenomenal objection does not apply. While this notion doesn’t correspond to our ordinary notion (...)
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  11.  11
    (1 other version)Why Confirm Laws?Barry Ward - 2025 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 76 (1):1-20.
    I argue that a particular approach to satisfying the broad predictive ambitions of the sciences demands law confirmation. On this approach I confirm non-nomic generalizations by confirming there are no actually realized ways of causing disconfirming cases. This gives causal generalizations a crucial role in prediction. I then show how rational judgements of relevant causal similarity can be used to confirm that causal generalizations themselves have no actual disconfirmers, providing a distinctive and clearly viable methodology for inductively confirming them. Finally, (...)
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  12. The criminalist's paradox as a counterexample to the principle of total evidence.Michał Sikorski & Alexander Gebharter - 2025 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    The principle of total evidence says that all relevant information should be considered when making an inference about a hypothesis. In this article, we argue that the criminalist’s paradox from the literature on the methodology of forensic science constitutes a counterexample against the principle of total evidence. The paradox arises, for example, when a forensic scientist uses the results from other forensic procedures to inform their own analysis. In such cases, their results can become more reliable, but at the same (...)
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