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  1.  21
    Elucidating and embedding: two functions of how-possibly explanations.Franziska Reinhard - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (19):1-20.
    Philosophers of science have variously tried to characterize how-possibly explanations (HPEs) and distinguish them from how-actually explanations (HAEs). I argue that existing contributions to this debate have failed to pay attention to the different, but complementary, functions possibilities play in scientific explanations. To bring these functions to the fore, I introduce a distinction between what I call elucidating and embedding HPEs. While elucidating HPEs specify and demonstrate possible processes for a given research target, embedding HPEs demonstrate how the research target (...)
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  2.  11
    Intervention and Experiment.Irina Mikhalevich - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (18):1-25.
    The received view of scientific experimentation holds that science is characterized by experiment and experiment is characterized by active intervention on the system of interest. Although versions of this view are widely held, they have seldom been explicitly defended. The present essay reconstructs and defuses two arguments in defense of the received view: first, that intervention is necessary for uncovering causal structures, and second, that intervention conduces to better evidence. By examining a range of non-interventionist studies from across the sciences, (...)
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  3. The Replication Crisis is Less of a “Crisis” in Lakatos’ Philosophy of Science than it is in Popper's.Mark Rubin - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (5):1-20.
    Popper’s (1983, 2002) philosophy of science has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the wake of the replication crisis, offering a philosophical basis for the ensuing science reform movement. However, adherence to Popper’s approach may also be at least partly responsible for the sense of “crisis” that has developed following multiple unexpected replication failures. In this article, I contrast Popper’s approach with that of Lakatos (1978) as well as with a related but problematic approach called naïve methodological falsificationism (NMF; Lakatos, (...)
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  4.  3
    Scientific constitutive abduction.Ken Aizawa & Drew B. Headley - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (2):1-20.
    Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley used abductive reasoning to draw conclusions about the ionic basis of the action potential. Here we build on that initial proposal. First, we propose that Hodgkin and Huxley’s constitutive abductive reasoning has four features. Second, we argue that Hodgkin and Huxley are not alone in giving such arguments. Tolman, 1948, and Baumgartner, 1960, also gave such arguments. The implication is that such arguments are common enough in science that philosophers of science should pay more attention (...)
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  5.  8
    Epistemic niche construction and non-epistemic values: the case of 19th century craniology.Matteo De Benedetto & Michele Luchetti - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (2):1-27.
    In this paper, we will focus on a specific way in which non-epistemic values can influence scientific inquiry, i.e., how they affect the way in which members of a scientific community apply epistemic values. We will first introduce the concept of epistemic niche construction in science, that is, the idea that the epistemic commitments underlying the practice of a scientific community result from a feedback-loop process between the scientific practice itself and the related disciplinary matrix. We will then describe how (...)
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  6.  4
    Correction to: Epistemic niche construction and non-epistemic values: the case of 19th century craniology.Matteo De Benedetto & Michele Luchetti - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (2):1-2.
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  7.  1
    Parallel convergences: Cassirer and Vienna indeterminism.Marco Giovanelli - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (2):1-30.
    Stöltzner coined the expression ‘Vienna indeterminism’ to describe a philosophical tradition centered on the Viennese physicist Exner, serving as the ‘historical link’ between Mach and Boltzmann, on the one hand, and von Mises and Frank, on the other. During the early 1930s debate on quantum mechanics, there was a ‘rapprochement’ between Vienna indeterminism and Schlick’s work on causality. However, it was Cassirer’s 1936 monograph _Determinismus und Indeterminismus_ that showed a full ‘convergence’ with major tenets of Vienna indeterminism: the fundamentality of (...)
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  8.  2
    Operational equivalence and causal structure.Gábor Hofer-Szabó - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (2):1-30.
    In operational quantum mechanics two measurements are called operationally equivalent if they yield the same distribution of outcomes in every quantum state and hence are represented by the same operator. In this paper, I will show that the ontological models for quantum mechanics and, more generally, for any operational theory sensitively depend on which measurement we choose from the class of operationally equivalent measurements, or more precisely, which of the chosen measurements can be performed simultaneously. To this goal, I will (...)
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  9.  9
    (1 other version)Performative paternalism.Jakob Ortmann - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (2):1-29.
    Performativity of science refers to the phenomenon that the dissemination of scientific conceptualisations can sometimes affect their target systems or referents. A widely held view in the literature is that scientists ought not to deliberately deploy performative models or theories with the aim of eliciting desirable changes in their target systems. This paper has three aims. First, I cast and defend this received view as a worry about autonomy-infringing paternalism and, to that end, develop a taxonomy of the harms it (...)
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  10.  94
    Probabilistic empiricism.Quentin Ruyant & Mauricio Suárez - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (2):1-19.
    Modal Empiricism in philosophy of science proposes to understand the possibility of modal knowledge from experience by replacing talk of possible worlds with talk of possible situations, which are coarse-grained, bounded and relative to background conditions. This allows for an induction towards objective necessity, assuming that actual situations are representative of possible ones. The main limitation of this epistemology is that it does not account for probabilistic knowledge. In this paper, we propose to extend Modal Empiricism to the probabilistic case, (...)
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  11.  94
    Kant’s Essentialism and Mechanism and Their Relevance for Present-Day Philosophy of Psychiatry.Hein van den Berg - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (2):1-30.
    This paper aims to evaluate the relevance of Kant’s much discussed essentialism and mechanism for present-day philosophy of psychiatry. Kendler et al (2011) have argued that essentialism is inadequate for conceptualizing psychiatric disorders. In this paper, I develop this argument in detail by highlighting a variety of essentialism that differs from the one rejected by Kendler et al. I show that Kant’s essentialism is not directly affected by the argument of Kendler et al (2011), and that Kendler et al’s (2011) (...)
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  12.  10
    Grounded empiricism.Ioannis Votsis - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (2):1-27.
    Empiricism has a long and venerable history. Aristotle, the Epicureans, Sextus Empiricus, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Mill, Mach and the Logical Empiricists, among others, represent a long line of historically influential empiricists who, one way or another, placed an emphasis on knowledge gained through the senses. In recent times the most highly articulated and influential edition of empiricism is undoubtedly Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism. Science, according to this view, aims at empirically adequate theories, i.e. theories that save all and only (...)
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  13.  8
    The place of explanation in scientific inquiry: Inference to the best explanation vs inference to the only explanation.James Woodward - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (2):1-28.
    This paper investigates the status of inference to the best explanation (IBE), in contrast to inference to the only explanation (IOE) against the background of Woodward's what-if-things- had-been-different (w) account of explanation. It argues that IBE is not a defensible form of inference. By contrast IOE is defensible and objections to its use (e.g., on the basis of claims about underdetermination) are exaggerated. Although some accounts of explanation in conjunction support IBE, the w-account does not. It is also argued that (...)
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  14.  4
    Mechanisms and principles: two approaches to scientific generalization.Yoshinari Yoshida & Alan C. Love - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (2):1-19.
    Many philosophers have explored the extensive use of non-universal generalizations in different sciences for inductive and explanatory purposes, analyzing properties such as how widely a generalization holds in space and time. In the present paper, we concentrate on developmental biology to distinguish and characterize two common approaches to scientific generalization—mechanism generalization and principle generalization. The former approach seeks detailed descriptions of causal relationships among specific types of biological entities that produce a characteristic phenomenon across some range of different biological entities; (...)
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  15.  10
    Nagelian reduction and approximation.Bohang Chen - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-25.
    Critics frequently target Ernest Nagel’s model of reduction for its purported inadequacy in addressing the issue of approximation. In response, proponents of Nagel’s model have integrated approximations into the more comprehensive Generalized Nagel-Schaffner model, or the GNS model. However, this article contends that the pertinent criticisms and responses are both misplaced: There are no barriers to Nagel’s model incorporating approximations, and it assimilates them in a manner distinctly dissimilar to the approach of the GNS model. Indeed, Nagel’s model is fundamentally (...)
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  16.  23
    Not quite killing it: black hole evaporation, global energy, and de-idealization.Eugene Y. S. Chua - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-45.
    A family of arguments for black hole evaporation relies on conservation laws, defined through symmetries represented by Killing vector fields which exist globally or asymptotically. However, these symmetries often rely on the idealizations of stationarity and asymptotic flatness, respectively. In non-stationary or non-asymptotically-flat spacetimes where realistic black holes evaporate, the requisite Killing fields typically do not exist. Can we ‘de-idealize’ these idealizations, and subsequently the associated arguments for black hole evaporation? Here, I critically examine the strategy of using ‘approximately Killing’ (...)
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  17.  6
    Questioning origins: the role of ethical and metaethical claims in the debate about the evolution of morality.Rebekka Hufendiek - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-23.
    Research about the evolution of morality suffers from the lack of a clear, agreed-upon concept of morality. In response to this, recent accounts have become increasingly pluralist and pragmatic. In this paper, I argue that 1) both the concept of morality and the broader understanding of what makes us moral include ethical and metaethical assumptions; 2) there is no uncontroversial descriptive notion available, and therefore settling on a particular concept inevitably entails such assumptions; and 3) what is lacking is a (...)
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  18.  15
    Absolute representations and modern physics.Caspar Jacobs & James Read - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-26.
    Famously, Adrian Moore has argued that an absolute representation of reality is possible: that it is possible to represent reality from no particular point of view. Moreover, Moore believes that such absolute representations are a desideratum of physics. Recently, however, debates in the philosophy of physics have arisen regarding the apparent impossibility of an absolute representation of certain aspects of nature in light of our current best theories of physics. Throughout this article, we take gravitational energy as a particular case (...)
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  19.  8
    Correction: Between theory and experiment: model use in dark matter detection.Rami Jreige - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-1.
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  20. The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis: An Epistemological Case for Removing the Taboo.William C. Lane - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-34.
    Discussion of the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), the hypothesis that an extraterrestrial civilization (ETC) is active on Earth today, is taboo in academia, but the assumptions behind this taboo are faulty. Advances in biology have rendered the notion that complex life is rare in our Galaxy improbable. The objection that no ETC would come to Earth to hide from us does not consider all possible alien motives or means. For an advanced ETC, the convergent instrumental goals of all rational agents – (...)
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  21. Explanatory essentialism and cryptic species.Milenko Lasnibat - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-22.
    Explanatory Essentialism (EE) is the view that a property is the essence of a kind because it causally explains the many properties that instances of the kind exhibit. This paper examines an application of EE to biological species, which I call Biological Explanatory Essentialism (BEE). BEE states that a particular biological origin is the essence of a species on the grounds that it causes certain organisms to display the group of properties the species is associated with. Evaluating BEE is important, (...)
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  22.  8
    Relational quantum mechanics is still incompatible with quantum mechanics.Jay Lawrence, Marcin Markiewicz & Marek Żukowski - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-5.
    We showed in a recent article (Lawrence et al. 2023. Quantum, 7, 1015), that relative facts (outcomes), a central concept in Relational Quantum Mechanics, are inconsistent with Quantum Mechanics. We proved this by constructing a Wigner-Friend type sequential measurement scenario on a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state of three qubits, and making the following assumption: “if an interpretation of quantum theory introduces some conceptualization of outcomes of a measurement, then probabilities of these outcomes must follow the quantum predictions as given by the (...)
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  23.  3
    Correction to: Stopping rule and Bayesian confirmation theory.Yunbing Li & Yongfeng Yuan - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-1.
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  24. Stopping rule and Bayesian confirmation theory.Yunbing Li & Yongfeng Yuan - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-25.
    This article mainly investigates whether common Bayesian confirmation measures are affected by stopping rules. The results indicate that difference measure d, log-ratio measure r, and log-likelihood measure l are not affected by non-informative stopping rules, but affected by informative stopping rules. In contrast, Carnap measure $$\tau $$, normalized difference measure n, and Mortimer measure m are affected by (non-)informative stopping rules sometimes but sometimes aren’t. Besides, we use two examples to further illustrate that confirmation measures d, r, and l are (...)
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  25.  18
    Quantum indeterminacy: a matter of degree?Maria Nørgaard - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-24.
    The degreed view is an influential account in the debate on quantum value indefiniteness, linking the gradedness of quantum properties to quantum indeterminacy. This paper challenges the connection between degrees and indeterminacy by presenting an example of a graded quantum property that does not entail metaphysical indeterminacy. Through an investigation of two graded approaches to location in quantum mechanics, the paper argues that while the first account, degreed instantiation of exact location, is indeterminate, the second account, degreed quantum location, is (...)
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  26. (1 other version)Performative Paternalism.Jakob Ortmann - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-29.
    Performativity refers to the phenomenon that scientific conceptualisations can sometimes change their target systems or referents. A widely held view in the literature is that scientists ought not to deliberately deploy performative models or theories with the aim of eliciting desirable changes in their target systems. This paper has three aims. First, I cast and defend this received view as a worry about autonomy-infringing paternalism and, to that end, develop a taxonomy of the harms it can impose. Second, I consider (...)
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  27.  12
    The replication crisis is less of a “crisis” in Lakatos’ philosophy of science than it is in Popper’s.Mark Rubin - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-20.
    Popper’s (1983, 2002) philosophy of science has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the wake of the replication crisis, offering a philosophical basis for the ensuing science reform movement. However, adherence to Popper’s approach may also be at least partly responsible for the sense of “crisis” that has developed following multiple unexpected replication failures. In this article, I contrast Popper’s approach with that of Lakatos (1978) as well as with a related but problematic approach called naïve methodological falsificationism (NMF; Lakatos, (...)
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  28.  14
    Conceptualising research environments using biological niche concepts.Rose Trappes & Sabina Leonelli - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-24.
    Several philosophers of science have taken inspiration from biological research on niches to conceptualise scientific practice. We systematise and extend three niche-based theories of scientific practice: conceptual ecology, cognitive niche construction, and scientific niche construction. We argue that research niches are a promising conceptual tool for understanding complex and dynamic research environments, which helps to investigate relevant forms of agency and material and social interdependencies, while also highlighting their historical and dynamic nature. To illustrate this, we develop a six-point framework (...)
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  29.  9
    Formal consistency of the Principal Principle revisited.Leszek Wroński, Zalán Gyenis & Mariangela Zoe Cocchiaro - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-34.
    We rigorously describe the relation in which a credence function should stand to a set of chance functions in order for these to be compatible in the way mandated by the Principal Principle. This resolves an apparent contradiction in the literature, by means of providing a formal way of combining credences with modest chance functions so that the latter indeed serve as guides for the former. Along the way we note some problematic consequences of taking admissibility to imply requirements involving (...)
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  30. Perspectives and meta-perspectives: context versus hierarchy in the epistemology of complex systems.Ragnar van der Merwe - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science (1):1-20.
    For some post-structuralist complexity theorists, there are no epistemic meta-perspectives from where to judge between different epistemic perspectives toward complex systems. In this paper, I argue that these theorists face a dilemma because they argue against meta-perspectives from just such a meta-perspective. In fact, when we understand two or more different perspectives, we seem to unavoidably adopt a meta-perspective to analyse, compare, and judge between those perspectives. I further argue that meta-perspectives can be evaluated and judged from meta-meta-perspectives, and so (...)
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