A common objection to adaptationist accounts of human emotions is that they ignore the influence of culture. If complex emotions like guilt, shame and romantic jealousy are largely culturally determined, how could they be biological adaptations? Dual inheritance models of gene/culture coevolution provide a potential answer to this question. If complex emotions are developmentally ‘scaffolded’ by norms that are transmitted from parent to offspring with reasonably high fidelity, then these emotions can evolve to promote individual reproductive interests. This paper draws on case studies of emotional development to illustrate how complex emotions satisfy these conditions. Many of the norms and parenting strategies influencing emotional development are absorbed during the early stages of life when a child is in primary contact with its parents and before the onset of complex cognition. These conditions make it likely that emotion-governing norms are transmitted vertically and with relatively little cognitive ‘contamination’.

We are often justified in acting on the basis of evidential confirmation. I argue that this is because inductive inference supports belief in non-quantificational—or generic—generalizations, rather than universally quantified generalizations. I show how this account supports, rather than undermines, a Bayesian account of inductive inference. Induction from confirming instances of a generalization to belief in the corresponding generic is part of a reasoning instinct that is typically (but not always) correct, and allows us to approximate the predictions that formal epistemology would make.

The paradox of Wigner’s friend challenges the objectivity of quantum theory. A pragmatist interpretation can meet this challenge by judicious appeal to decoherence. Quantum theory provides situated agents with resources for predicting and explaining what happens in the physical world—not conscious observations of it. Even in bizarre Wigner’s friend scenarios, differently situated agents agree on the objective content of physical magnitude statements while, normally, quantum Darwinism permits agents equal observational access to their truth. Quantum theory has nothing to say about conscious experiences. But it does prompt us to reexamine the significance of everyday claims about the physical world.

The problem of theory choice and model selection is hard but still important when useful truths are underdetermined, perhaps not by all kinds of data but by the kinds of data we can have access to ethically or practicably—even if we have an infinity of such data. This article addresses a crucial instance of that problem: the problem of inferring causal structures from nonexperimental, nontemporal data without assuming the so-called causal Faithfulness condition or the like. A new account of epistemic evaluation is developed to solve that problem and justify a standard practice of causal inference in data science.

Most accounts of mechanism discovery have focused on mechanisms that perform the work required to produce a phenomenon. These mechanisms are often subject to regulation by control mechanisms. Using the example of the molecular motor dynein, this paper examines one process by which such control mechanisms are discovered—the process by which researchers, after identifying additional components required to produce the phenomenon but not directly involved in the work of producing that phenomenon, investigate both how these components act on the original mechanism and how they do so in response to measurements of conditions relevant to the operation of the controlled mechanism.

Confirmation is a graded notion: evidence can confirm a hypothesis to a greater or lesser degree. There has been debate about how to measure degree of confirmation. Starting from the observation that we would like evidence to be a discriminating indicator of truth, we conduct computer simulations to determine how well the various known measures of confirmation predict the extent to which a given piece of evidence fulfills that role, given a hypothesis of interest. The outcomes show that some measures are markedly better indicators of truth than others.

This article advances the development of a phylogeny-based psychology in which cognitive ability types are individuated as characters in the evolutionary biological sense. I explain the character concept and its utility in addressing (or dissolving) conceptual problems arising from discoveries of cognitive abilities across a wide range of species. I use the examples of stereopsis in the praying mantis, internal cell-to-cell signaling in plants, and episodic memory in scrub jays to show how anthropocentric cognitive ability types can be reformulated into cognitive characters, thereby promoting the integration of psychology with other sciences of evolved traits.

Measuring the climates of the deep past requires the use of paleoclimate proxies. I describe two proxy data and measurement practices, regarding proxy calibration and proxy data infrastructure. I document how at least some data and measurement practices in paleoclimatology are disunified: these practices do not involve intercalibration or otherwise statistical combination of multiple proxy records, and metadata necessary for proxy data to be reused or intercompared is often not provided. I argue that, perhaps counterintuitively, this lack of standardization and unification of proxy data and measurements has several benefits, especially related to the management of error and uncertainty.

Merton envisioned his norms of science at a time when peer-reviewed journals controlled scientific communication. Technologies for sharing and finding content have since divorced the certification and amplification of science, generating systemic vulnerabilities. Certified amplification—a new Mertonian-styled norm—enjoins their recoupling and introduces a taxonomy of strategies adopted by institutions to close the certification-amplification gap, including the proportioning of the one to the other. Examples illustrating each taxonomic type collectively paint a picture of an ethos employing a rich range of certification and amplification techniques and emerging in a decentralized fashion across heterogeneous objects, communication modalities, and institutions.

The generalized selected effects theory of function (GSE) holds that a trait’s proper function is an activity that historically caused its differential persistence or differential reproduction within a population, construed as a collection of individuals that impact each other’s persistence or reproduction chances. Several critics have taken aim at GSE on the grounds that its appeal to populations is either unfit for purpose or arbitrary. Here I revise GSE by articulating a notion of population that is fit for purpose and showing that its selection is not arbitrary but flows from the realist commitments of the selected effects theory.

The major question—what is categorial analysis and how can it be reliably performed?—lies beyond the scope of this paper. Indeed, I would presume that very little can be said significantly about it in general. One's convictions on the subject have to be shown by actual performance, which is my intention in the present instance. But it may help the process of communication if I try to indicate at the beginning the general frame in which this analysis of value occurs.

A kinetic theory of permeability is developed both for the case where the cell membrane is a distinct phase and where it is simply the interface between cell and environment. A general expression for the diffusion current of a substance across the membrane is derived, which depends on two “coefficients of permeability” rather than one. Solubility and adsorption theories of permeability are shown to be special cases of the formulas. The permeability coefficients are expressed in terms of the difference of potential energy of the diffusing substance in the two phases; for a membrane of finite thickness they also involve the thickness, and the diffusion coefficient of the solute in the membrane.

In the course of modern philosophy, there have been several attempts to demonstrate the existence of ultimately simple objects by purely logical methods. One of the most recent of such attempts forms part of the foundation of Wittgenstein's logical doctrine. As Wittgenstein has, until quite recently, been considered the authoritative source of Logical Positivism, an examination of his supposed demonstration of logical simples is propaedeutic to an evaluation of the method of the school.

“Dutch Book” arguments and references to gambling theorems are typical in the debate between Bayesians and scientists committed to “classical” statistical methods. These arguments have rarely convinced non-Bayesian scientists to abandon certain conventional practices (like fixed-level null hypothesis significance testing), partially because many scientists feel that gambling theorems have little relevance to their research activities. In other words, scientists “don’t bet.” This article examines one attempt, by Schervish, Seidenfeld, and Kadane, to progress beyond such apparent stalemates by connecting “Dutch Book”–type mathematical results with principles actually endorsed by practicing experimentalists.

In his review of my Prelude to Galileo (1981a), Ernan McMullin rejects my emendation of Pierre Duhem's “continuity thesis” wherein I develop the case for a pronounced medieval-scholastic influence on Galileo's science based on parallels between Galileo's early Latin compositions and lectures given by contemporary Jesuits at the Collegio Romano (McMullin 1983). He does so on two grounds: (1) that the evidence of derivation I provide, using textual parallels, is so strong that it refutes the claim for any intellectual influence, being a better instance of mindless copying than one of personal appropriation; and (2) that, in any event, the logical structure of the argument which I attribute to Galileo's mature work is not that of demonstration ex suppositione as understood by Aquinas, and so the example I provide of Galileo's use of suppositio “does not link him in any significant way to the specifically Thomist tradition of natural science” (1983, p. 173). An adequate reply to this critique would require the introduction of more historical evidence than would be appropriate for the pages of this journal. A few remarks, however, may be in order concerning such evidence which bears directly on McMullin's first ground, and concerning the implications of this evidence for contemporary philosophy of science, which bear on his second.