Scientific explanations must bear the proper relationship to the world: they must depict what, out in the world, is responsible for the explanandum. But explanations must also bear the proper relationship to their audience: they must be able to create human understanding. With few exceptions, philosophical accounts of explanation either ignore entirely the relationship between explanations and their audience or else demote this consideration to an ancillary role. In contrast, I argue that considering an explanation’s communicative role is crucial to any satisfactory account of explanation.

Kevin Elliott and Dan McKaughan argue that, in some cases, nonepistemic values provide legitimate reasons for scientists to accept an epistemically inferior option, a claim that they support with two case studies. This essay argues that Elliott and McKaughan have not shown that their case studies are indeed ones in which an epistemically inferior option was accepted. Specifically, their interpretation of these cases depends on problematic premises that it is epistemically better to wait for a slower-but-more-reliable method than to accept the result of a quicker-but-less-reliable one and that a more detailed model is epistemically preferable to a simpler one.

The goal of this paper is to develop a counterfactual theory of explanation (CTE). The CTE provides a monist framework for causal and noncausal explanations, according to which both causal and noncausal explanations are explanatory by virtue of revealing counterfactual dependencies between the explanandum and the explanans. I argue that the CTE is applicable to two paradigmatic examples of noncausal explanations: Euler’s explanation and renormalization group explanations of universality.

In this article I examine the perceptual metaphor at the heart of perspectivism, discussing three elements: partiality, interestedness, and interaction. I argue that perspectivists should drop the visual metaphor in favor of a haptic one. Because the sense of touch requires contact and purposeful exploration on the part of the perceiver, it is obvious that with touch one apprehends an extradermal reality in virtue of and not in spite of its interactive and interested nature. By analogy, perspectivists should investigate the thesis that scientific representations inform us about the natural world in virtue of their interactive and interested qualities.

Success-to-truth inferences have been the realist stronghold for a long time. Scientific success is the parameter by which realists claim to discern approximately true theories from false ones. But scientific success needs to be probed a bit deeper. In this article, I tell three tales of scientific success, by considering in turn success from nowhere, success from here now, and success from within. I argue for a suitable version of success from within that can do justice to the historically situated nature of our scientific knowledge. The outcome is a new way of thinking about success-to-truth inferences along perspectivalist lines.

There is danger in stressing commonalities among methods because the differences matter in fixing the meaning of our claims. Different methods can, and often do, test the same claim. But it takes a strong network of theory and empirical results to ensure that. Failing that, we are likely to fall into inference by pun. We use one set of methods to establish a claim and then draw inferences licensed by a similar-sounding claim that calls for different methods of testing. Our inferences fail, and bridges we build (or policies we set) depending on them fall down.

For centuries scientists have claimed that women are intellectually inferior to men and blacks are inferior to whites. Although these claims have been contested and corrected for centuries, they still continue to be made. Meanwhile, scientists have documented the harm done to women and blacks by the publication of such claims. Can anything be done to improve this situation? Freedom of research is universally recognized to be of first-rate importance. Yet, constraints on that freedom are also universally recognized. I consider three of these constraints and argue for tighter restrictions on race- and gender-related cognitive differences research on their basis.

In this article I show that population geneticists are acknowledging a kind of biological population that has hitherto been unappreciated by philosophers. The new population talk occurs when population geneticists call continent-level human genetic clusters ‘populations’ in population structure research. My theory is that the kind of population being referred to is the K population, which is, roughly, a biological population whose members are united by common genomic ancestry and in which population membership is graded. After presenting and defending the theory, I show that the K population is indeed a kind of biological population. Finally, I address likely objections.