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  1. Proving the Reality of Global Warming.P. Olcott - manuscript
    When we look at 800,000 year ice core data CO2 levels since 1950 have risen at a rate of 123-fold faster than the fastest rate in 800,000 years. When we see that this rise is precisely correlated with global carbon emissions the human link to climate change seems certain and any rebuttal becomes ridiculously implausible. The 800,000 year correlation between CO2 and global temperatures seems to be predicting at least 9 degrees C of more warming based on current CO2 levels.
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  2. Are We in a Sixth Mass Extinction? The Challenges of Answering and Value of Asking.Federica Bocchi, Alisa Bokulich, Leticia Castillo Brache, Gloria Grand-Pierre & Aja Watkins - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    In both scientific and popular circles it is often said that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. Although the urgency of our present environmental crises is not in doubt, such claims of a present mass extinction are highly controversial scientifically. Our aims are, first, to get to the bottom of this scientific debate by shedding philosophical light on the many conceptual and methodological challenges involved in answering this scientific question, and, second, to offer new philosophical perspectives (...)
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  3. (1 other version)Towards a Taxonomy of the Model-Ladenness of Data.Alisa Bokulich - forthcoming - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association.
    Model-data symbiosis is the view that there is an interdependent and mutually beneficial relationship between data and models, whereby models are not only data-laden, but data are also model-laden or model filtered. In this paper I elaborate and defend the second, more controversial, component of the symbiosis view. In particular, I construct a preliminary taxonomy of the different ways in which theoretical and simulation models are used in the production of data sets. These include data conversion, data correction, data interpolation, (...)
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  4. How Uncertainty Interacts with Ethical Values in Climate Change Research.Casey Helgeson, Wendy Parker & Nancy Tuana - forthcoming - In Linda Mearns, Chris Forest, Hayley Fowler, Robert Lempert & Robert Wilby (eds.), Uncertainty in Climate Change Research: An Integrated Approach. Springer.
    Like all human activities, scientific research is infused with values. Scientific discovery can, for example, be valued as an end in itself. The phrase ethical values is an umbrella term for much of what people care about aside from knowledge for its own sake. Ethical values encompass reasons for caring about the harms caused by climate impacts or the injustice of how those harms are distributed. The closer that research gets to informing real-world actions, the more the design of that (...)
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  5. Structural Modeling Error and the System Individuation Problem.Jon Lawhead - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Recent work by Frigg et. al. and Mayo-Wilson have called attention to a particular sort of error associated with attempts to model certain complex systems: structural modeling error. The assessment of the degree of SME in a model presupposes agreement between modelers about the best way to individuate natural systems, an agreement which can be more problematic than it appears. This problem, which we dub “the system individuation problem” arises in many of the same contexts as SME, and the two (...)
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  6. (1 other version)Aesthetic Considerations in the Development of Plate Tectonics.Mariona Miyata-Sturm - forthcoming - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 108:1-9.
    Aesthetic considerations played a substantial and positive role in the development and acceptance of plate tectonics, the modern theory of the earth’s major geological features and the unifying framework of the earth sciences. Here I give an overview of how aesthetics influenced plate tectonics and take a detailed look at a handful of examples from this history where elegance and simplicity tipped the balance in favour of a given hypothesis. I discuss some implications of this case study for extant accounts (...)
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  7. Roles for scientists in policymaking.Joe Roussos - forthcoming - In W. J. Gonzalez (ed.), Climate change and studies of the future.
    What is the proper role for scientists in policymaking? This paper explores various roles that scientists can play, with an eye to questions that these roles raise about value-neutrality and technocracy. Where much philosophical literature is concerned with the conduct of research or the transmission of research results to policymakers, I am interested in various non-research roles that scientists take on in policymaking. These include raising the alarm on issues, framing and conceptualising problems, formulating potential policies, assessing policy options for (...)
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  8. Earth and the ontology of planets.Vincent Blok - 2024 - In Mirko Daniel Garasic & Marcello Di Paola (eds.), The philosophy of outer space: explorations, controversies, speculations. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. pp. 41-55.
    what is the ontology of planets?Our access point to this question is the ontology of planet Earth. Although the presence of life marks planet Earth as special among other planets, Earth shares a basic commonality with them – namely, its material existence. We take this commonality as a point of departure for our reflections on the ontology of both planet Earth and other planets. In this chapter, we ask for the ontology of this materiality of planets. We consult the ontology (...)
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  9. Contrast Classes and Agreement in Climate Modeling.Corey Dethier - 2024 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (14):1-19.
    In an influential paper, Wendy Parker argues that agreement across climate models isn’t a reliable marker of confirmation in the context of cutting-edge climate science. In this paper, I argue that while Parker’s conclusion is generally correct, there is an important class of exceptions. Broadly speaking, agreement is not a reliable marker of confirmation when the hypotheses under consideration are mutually consistent—when, e.g., we’re concerned with overlapping ranges. Since many cutting-edge questions in climate modeling require making distinctions between mutually consistent (...)
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  10. Integrating values to improve the relevance of climate-risk research.Casey Helgeson, Klaus Keller, Robert Nicholas, Vivek Srikrishnan, Courtney Cooper, Erica Smithwick & Nancy Tuana - 2024 - Earth's Future 12 (10):e2022EF003025.
    Climate risks are growing. Research is increasingly important to inform the design of risk-management strategies. Assessing such strategies necessarily brings values into research. But the values assumed within research (often only implicitly) may not align with those of stakeholders and decision makers. These misalignments are often invisible to researchers and can severely limit research relevance or lead to inappropriate policy advice. Aligning strategy assessments with stakeholders' values requires a holistic approach to research design that is oriented around those values from (...)
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  11. Managing values in climate science.Joe Roussos - 2024 - PLoS Climate 3 (6):e0000432.
    Climate science has been deeply affected by social and political values in the last fifty years [1]. If we focus on climate denial and obfuscation, we might see the influence of values as wholly negative and aim instead for objective, value-free climate science. But, perhaps surprisingly, this is at odds with the view of many philosophers who study the influence of values on science. Science cannot and should not be free from values, they argue. Rather, we should be transparent about (...)
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  12. Who's Anthropocene?: a data driven look at the prospects for collaboration between natural science, social science, and the humanities.Carlos Santana, K. Petrozzo & Timothy Perkins - 2024 - Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 39 (2):723-735.
    Although the idea of the Anthropocene originated in the earth sciences, there have been increasing calls for questions about the Anthropocene to be addressed by pan-disciplinary groups of researchers from across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We use data analysis techniques from corpus linguistics to examine academic texts about the Anthropocene from these disciplinary families. We read the data to suggest that barriers to a broadly interdisciplinary study of the Anthropocene are high, but we are also able to (...)
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  13. Astrobiology in philosophy or philosophy in astrobiology?Kristina Šekrst - 2024 - Cosmos and History 20 (1):405-415.
    The central aim of astrobiology is to study origins, evolution and distribution of life in the universe, combining data from various disciplines. However, I will argue that from a philosophical standpoint, astrobiology requires the affirmation of astrophilosophy. Fry (2015) claims that philosophical presuppositions guiding science are general, for example, we hold the notion that natural laws necessarily hold at the whole universe at large, and on the basis of the universal applicability of natural laws, the astrobiological research is conducted. Jakosky (...)
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  14. الرؤى الكونية والواقع فلسفة كل واحد.Roberto Thomas Arruda - 2024 - São Paulo: Terra à Vista.
    ليس بالتفكير نخلق العوالم، بل بفهم العالم نتعلم التفكير. "الرؤية الكونية" هو مصطلح يجب أن يعني مجموعة من الأسس التي تنبثق منها فهم منهجي للكون، ومكوناته كالحياة، والعالم الذي نعيش فيه، والطبيعة، والظواهر البشرية، وعلاقاتها. إنه، بالتالي، مجال من الفلسفة التحليلية يغذيه العلوم، وهدفه هو هذا المعرفة المجمعة والمستدامة معرفيًا عن كل ما نحن عليه ونحتويه، وما يحيط بنا، وما يرتبط بنا بأي شكل من الأشكال. إنه شيء قديم قدم الفكر البشري، وبالإضافة إلى استخدام عناصر من علم الكونيات العلمي، فإنه (...)
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  15. Using Paleoclimate Analogues to Inform Climate Projections.Aja Watkins - 2024 - Perspectives on Science 32 (4):415-459.
    Philosophers of science have paid close attention to climate simulations as means of projecting the severity and effects of climate change, but have neglected the full diversity of methods in climate science. This paper shows the philosophical richness of another method in climate science: the practice of using paleoclimate analogues to inform our climate projections. First, I argue that the use of paleoclimate analogues can offer important insights to philosophers of the historical sciences. Rather than using the present as a (...)
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  16. Teleology and function in non-living nature.Gunnar Babcock - 2023 - Synthese 201 (4):1-20.
    There’s a general assumption that teleology and function do not exist in inanimate nature. Throughout biology, it is generally taken as granted that teleology (or teleonomy) and functions are not only unique to life, but perhaps even a defining quality of life. For many, it’s obvious that rocks, water, and the like, are not teleological, nor could they possibly have stand-alone functions. This idea - that teleology and function are unique to life - is the target of this paper. I (...)
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  17. Institutional Values Influence the Design and Evaluation of Transition Knowledge in Funding Proposals at NOAA.Steve Elliott, Gina Eosco, Laura Newcomb & Joseph Conran - 2023 - Philosophy of Science 90:1286 - 1296.
    This paper shows how institutional values influence the design and evaluation of arguments in funding proposals for research. We characterize a general argument made within proposals and several kinds of subarguments that contribute to it. We indicate that funders’ values inform the kinds of proposal documents funders require and their relative weighting of them. We illustrate these points by showing how a program office in the U.S. federal agency NOAA uses its public service mission to require and heavily weigh arguments (...)
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  18. Machine learning and the quest for objectivity in climate model parameterization.Julie Jebeile, Vincent Lam, Mason Majszak & Tim Räz - 2023 - Climatic Change 176 (101).
    Parameterization and parameter tuning are central aspects of climate modeling, and there is widespread consensus that these procedures involve certain subjective elements. Even if the use of these subjective elements is not necessarily epistemically problematic, there is an intuitive appeal for replacing them with more objective (automated) methods, such as machine learning. Relying on several case studies, we argue that, while machine learning techniques may help to improve climate model parameterization in several ways, they still require expert judgment that involves (...)
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  19. Usability of climate information: Toward a new scientific framework.Julie Jebeile & Joe Roussos - 2023 - WIREs Climate Change.
    Climate science is expected to provide usable information to policy-makers, to support the resolution of climate change. The complex, multiply connected nature of climate change as a social problem is reviewed and contrasted with current modular and discipline-bounded approaches in climate science. We argue that climate science retains much of its initial “physics-first” orientation, and that it adheres to a problematic notion of objectivity as freedom from value judgments. Together, these undermine its ability to provide usable information. We develop the (...)
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  20. Epistemic possibilities in climate science: lessons from some recent research in the context of discovery.Joel Katzav - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (4):1-21.
    A number of authors, including me, have argued that the output of our most complex climate models, that is, of global climate models and Earth system models, should be assessed possibilistically. Worries about the viability of doing so have also been expressed. I examine the assessment of the output of relatively simple climate models in the context of discovery and point out that this assessment is of epistemic possibilities. At the same time, I show that the concept of epistemic possibility (...)
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  21. Earthquakes.Gah-Kai Leung - 2023 - In Nathanaël Wallenhorst & Christoph Wulf (eds.), Handbook of the Anthropocene. Springer. pp. 127-132.
    Earthquakes are among the world’s deadliest natural phenomena. On an increasingly crowded Earth, earthquake risk management therefore should be taken seriously as a global policy problem. Thus, this chapter discusses some of the ethical dimensions of earthquakes as a phenomenon of planetary significance in the Anthropocene. I do not attempt an exhaustive survey, but consider one background ethical issue: the kinds of harms that occur when an earthquake impacts human habitation. We may distinguish three categories of human-related harms: personal harms, (...)
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  22. Expert judgment in climate science: How it is used and how it can be justified.Mason Majszak & Julie Jebeile - 2023 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 100 (C):32-38.
    Like any science marked by high uncertainty, climate science is characterized by a widespread use of expert judgment. In this paper, we first show that, in climate science, expert judgment is used to overcome uncertainty, thus playing a crucial role in the domain and even at times supplanting models. One is left to wonder to what extent it is legitimate to assign expert judgment such a status as an epistemic superiority in the climate context, especially as the production of expert (...)
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  23. The Epistemic Privilege of Measurement: Motivating a Functionalist Account.Miguel Ohnesorge - 2023 - Philosophy of Science 90 (1):1396-1406.
    Philosophers and metrologists have refuted the view that measurement’s epistemic privilege in scientific practice is explained by its theory-neutrality. Rather, they now explicitly appeal to the role that theories play in measurement. I formulate a challenge for this view: scientists sometimes ascribe epistemic privilege to measurements even if they lack a shared theory about their target quantity, which I illustrate through a case study from early geodesy. Drawing on that case, I argue that the epistemic privilege of measurement precedes shared (...)
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  24. Scaling procedures in climate science: Using temporal scaling to identify a paleoclimate analogue.Aja Watkins - 2023 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 102 (C):31-44.
    Using past episodes of climate change as a source of evidence to inform our projections about contemporary climate change requires establishing the extent to which episodes in the deep past are analogous to the current crisis. However, many scientists claim that contemporary rates of climate change (e.g., rates of carbon emissions or temperature change) are unprecedented, including compared to episodes in the deep past. If so, this would limit the utility of paleoclimate analogues. In this paper, I show how a (...)
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  25. Calibrating statistical tools: Improving the measure of Humanity's influence on the climate.Corey Dethier - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 94 (C):158-166.
    Over the last twenty-five years, climate scientists working on the attribution of climate change to humans have developed increasingly sophisticated statistical models in a process that can be understood as a kind of calibration: the gradual changes to the statistical models employed in attribution studies served as iterative revisions to a measurement(-like) procedure motivated primarily by the aim of neutralizing particularly troublesome sources of error or uncertainty. This practice is in keeping with recent work on the evaluation of models more (...)
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  26. When is an Ensemble like a Sample?Corey Dethier - 2022 - Synthese 200 (52):1-22.
    Climate scientists often apply statistical tools to a set of different estimates generated by an “ensemble” of models. In this paper, I argue that the resulting inferences are justified in the same way as any other statistical inference: what must be demonstrated is that the statistical model that licenses the inferences accurately represents the probabilistic relationship between data and target. This view of statistical practice is appropriately termed “model-based,” and I examine the use of statistics in climate fingerprinting to show (...)
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  27. Methodological and conceptual challenges in rare and severe event forecast verification.Philip A. Ebert & Peter Milne - 2022 - Natural Hazards and Earth System Science 22 (2):539-557.
    There are distinctive methodological and conceptual challenges in rare and severe event (RSE) forecast verification, that is, in the assessment of the quality of forecasts of rare but severe natural hazards such as avalanches, landslides or tornadoes. While some of these challenges have been discussed since the inception of the discipline in the 1880s, there is no consensus about how to assess RSE forecasts. This article offers a comprehensive and critical overview of the many different measures used to capture the (...)
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  28. Rienk Vermij. Thinking on Earthquakes in Early Modern Europe: Firm Beliefs on Shaky Ground. 266 pp. London: Routledge, 2020. $44.95 (paper); ISBN 9780367492182. Cloth and E-book available. [REVIEW]Fa-ti Fan - 2022 - Isis 113 (1):180-181.
  29. Chance, evolution, and the metaphysical implications of paleontological practice.Alan Love - 2022 - In K. J. Clark and J. Koperski (ed.), Abrahamic Reflections on Randomness and Providence. pp. 119-143.
    For several decades, a debate has been waged over how to interpret the significance of fossils from the Burgess Shale and Cambrian Explosion. Stephen Jay Gould argued that if the “tape of life” was rerun, then the resulting lineages would differ radically from what we find today, implying that humans are a happy accident of evolution. Simon Conway Morris argued that if the “tape of life” was rerun, the resulting lineages would be similar to what we now observe, implying that (...)
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  30. Pluralizing measurement: Physical geodesy's measurement problem and its resolution.Miguel Ohnesorge - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 96 (C):51-67.
    Derived measurements involve problems of coordination. Conducting them often requires detailed theoretical assumptions about their target, while such assumptions can lack sources of evidence that are independent from these very measurements. In this paper, I defend two claims about problems of coordination. I motivate both by a novel case study on a central measurement problem in the history of physical geodesy: the determination of the earth's ellipticity. First, I argue that the severity of problems of coordination varies according to scientists' (...)
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  31. MASS SURVEILLANCE, BEHAVIOURAL CONTROL, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL COERCION THE MORAL ETHICAL RISKS IN COMMERCIAL DEVICES.Yang Immanuel Pachankis - 2022 - In David C. Wyld & Dhinaharan Nagamalai (eds.), Computer Science and Information Technology. pp. 151-168.
    The research observed, in parallel and comparatively, a surveillance state’s use of communication & cyber networks with satellite applications for power political & realpolitik purposes, in contrast to the outer space security & legit scientific purpose driven cybernetics. The research adopted a psychoanalytic & psychosocial method of observation in the organizational behaviors of the surveillance state, and a theoretical physics, astrochemical, & cosmological feedback method in the contrast group of cybernetics. Military sociology and multilateral movements were adopted in the diagnostic (...)
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  32. Distributing epistemic and practical risks: a comparative study of communicating earthquake damages.Li-an Yu - 2022 - Synthese 360 (5):1-24.
    This paper argues that the value of openness to epistemic plurality and the value of social responsiveness are essential for epistemic agents such as scientists who are expected to carry out non-epistemic missions. My chief philosophical claim is that the two values should play a joint role in their communication about earthquake-related damages when their knowledge claims are advisory. That said, I try to defend a minimal normative account of science in the context of communication. I show that these epistemic (...)
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  33. What is a data model?: An anatomy of data analysis in high energy physics.Antonis Antoniou - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (4):1-33.
    Many decades ago Patrick Suppes argued rather convincingly that theoretical hypotheses are not confronted with the direct, raw results of an experiment, rather, they are typically compared with models of data. What exactly is a data model however? And how do the interactions of particles at the subatomic scale give rise to the huge volumes of data that are then moulded into a polished data model? The aim of this paper is to answer these questions by presenting a detailed case (...)
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  34. A River Is Not a Pendulum: Sediments of Science in the World of Tides.Debjani Bhattacharyya - 2021 - Isis 112 (1):141-149.
    This essay explores the history of the silty sediments that make up the littorals of the Bengal Delta to see how they emerged as an object of scientific inquiry and as part of a hydrosocial and political history. By using the conceptual framing of hydrosociality, the piece investigates the political and legal possibilities of amphibious landscapes to document the colonial legal engagement with and scientific puzzlement over these silty sediments and their postcolonial afterlives. As temporary landscapes, silts and sediments pose (...)
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  35. Taming the tyranny of scales: models and scale in the geosciences.Alisa Bokulich - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):14167-14199.
    While the predominant focus of the philosophical literature on scientific modeling has been on single-scale models, most systems in nature exhibit complex multiscale behavior, requiring new modeling methods. This challenge of modeling phenomena across a vast range of spatial and temporal scales has been called the tyranny of scales problem. Drawing on research in the geosciences, I synthesize and analyze a number of strategies for taming this tyranny in the context of conceptual, physical, and mathematical modeling. This includes several strategies (...)
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  36. Water and Planetary History. [REVIEW]Lino Camprubí - 2021 - Isis 112 (1):164-167.
  37. Gillen D’Arcy Wood. Land of Wondrous Cold: The Race to Discover Antarctica and Unlock the Secrets of Its Ice. 312 pp., figs., bibl., index. Princeton, N.J./Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2020. $27.95 (cloth); ISBN 9780691172200. E-book and audiobook available. [REVIEW]Vanessa Heggie - 2021 - Isis 112 (1):194-195.
  38. Why Simpler Computer Simulation Models Can Be Epistemically Better for Informing Decisions.Casey Helgeson, Vivek Srikrishnan, Klaus Keller & Nancy Tuana - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (2):213-233.
    For computer simulation models to usefully inform climate risk management, uncertainties in model projections must be explored and characterized. Because doing so requires running the model many ti...
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  39. On the appropriate and inappropriate uses of probability distributions in climate projections and some alternatives.Joel Katzav, Erica L. Thompson, James Risbey, David A. Stainforth, Seamus Bradley & Mathias Frisch - 2021 - Climatic Change 169 (15).
    When do probability distribution functions (PDFs) about future climate misrepresent uncertainty? How can we recognise when such misrepresentation occurs and thus avoid it in reasoning about or communicating our uncertainty? And when we should not use a PDF, what should we do instead? In this paper we address these three questions. We start by providing a classification of types of uncertainty and using this classification to illustrate when PDFs misrepresent our uncertainty in a way that may adversely affect decisions. We (...)
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  40. How Incoherent Measurement Succeeds: Coordination and Success in the Measurement of the Earth's Polar Flattening.Miguel Ohnesorge - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 88 (C):245-262.
    The development of nineteenth-century geodetic measurement challenges the dominant coherentist account of measurement success. Coherentists argue that measurements of a quantity are epistemically successful if their numerical outcomes converge across varying contextual constraints. Aiming at numerical convergence, in turn, offers an operational aim for scientists to solve problems of coordination. Geodesists faced such a problem of coordination between two indicators of the earth’s ellipticity, which were both based on imperfect ellipsoid models. While not achieving numerical convergence, their measurements produced novel (...)
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  41. The Science of Shallow Waters: Connecting and Classifying the Early Modern Atlantic.Christopher L. Pastore - 2021 - Isis 112 (1):122-129.
    Histories of ocean science have emphasized the ways that state-sponsored deep-sea expeditions ushered in a new age of oceanic understanding during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This essay, on the other hand, examines the ways that shallow waters played host to less formal but nevertheless important efforts to create oceanic natural knowledge, often centuries earlier. By documenting the legends and experiences of people who worked on and lived by the ocean—divers, sailors, and fishermen, among others—and corroborating their stories (...)
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  42. Reflections on the Knowledge of Shallow Waters.Marina Tolmacheva - 2021 - Isis 112 (1):150-153.
  43. Dinosaurs and Reasonable Disagreement.Margaret Greta Turnbull - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Research 46:329-344.
    Most philosophical discussions of disagreement have used idealized disagreements to draw conclusions about the nature of disagreement. I closely examine an actual, non-idealized disagreement in dinosaur paleobiology and show that it can not only teach us about the features of some of our real world disagreements, but can help us to argue for the possibility of reasonable real world disagreement.
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  44. Knowing the Littoral: Perception and Representation of Terraqueous Spaces in a Global Perspective.Wilko Graf von Hardenberg - 2021 - Isis 112 (1):108-110.
  45. Making a Stable Sea: The Littorals of Eighteenth-Century Europe and the Origins of a Spatial Concept.Wilko Graf von Hardenberg - 2021 - Isis 112 (1):130-140.
  46. The Skeptic and the Climate Change Skeptic.Alex Worsnip - 2021 - In Michael Hannon & Jeroen de Ridder (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology. New York: Routledge.
    Outside the philosophy classroom, global skeptics – skeptics about all (purported) knowledge of the external world – are rare. But there are people who describe themselves as “skeptics” about various more specific domains, including self-professed “skeptics” about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. There is little to no philosophical literature that juxtaposes the climate change skeptic with the external world skeptic. While many “traditional” epistemologists assume that the external world skeptic poses a serious philosophical challenge in a way that the (...)
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  47. Understanding scientific types: holotypes, stratotypes, and measurement prototypes.Alisa Bokulich - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (5):1-28.
    At the intersection of taxonomy and nomenclature lies the scientific practice of typification. This practice occurs in biology with the use of holotypes (type specimens), in geology with the use of stratotypes, and in metrology with the use of measurement prototypes. In this paper I develop the first general definition of a scientific type and outline a new philosophical theory of types inspired by Pierre Duhem. I use this general framework to resolve the necessity-contingency debate about type specimens in philosophy (...)
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  48. Calibration, Coherence, and Consilience in Radiometric Measures of Geologic Time.Alisa Bokulich - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (3):425-456.
    In 2012, the Geological Time Scale, which sets the temporal framework for studying the timing and tempo of all major geological, biological, and climatic events in Earth’s history, had one-quarter of its boundaries moved in a widespread revision of radiometric dates. The philosophy of metrology helps us understand this episode, and it, in turn, elucidates the notions of calibration, coherence, and consilience. I argue that coherence testing is a distinct activity preceding calibration and consilience, and I highlight the value of (...)
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  49. Philosophical Perspectives on Earth System Modeling: Truth, Adequacy and Understanding.G. Gramelsberger, J. Lenhard & Wendy Parker - 2020 - Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems 12 (1):e2019MS001720.
    We explore three questions about Earth system modeling that are of both scientific and philosophical interest: What kind of understanding can be gained via complex Earth system models? How can the limits of understanding be bypassed or managed? How should the task of evaluating Earth system models be conceptualized?
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  50. What is Paradoxical About ‘Fermi’s Paradox’?: Review of Milan Ćirković: The Great Silence, Oxford University Press, 2018.Cansu Hepçağlayan, Aja Watkins & Russell Powell - 2020 - Acta Biotheoretica 68 (4):469-477.
    In this review of Milan Ćirković’s The Great Silence: Science and Philosophy of Fermi’s Paradox, we attempt to reconstruct the logic of Fermi’s paradox as understood by the author, and we critically examine the reasoning that leads to the paradox. We show that there is no plausible solution to Fermi’s paradox that can satisfy all of Ćirković’s proposed desiderata, which in turn suggests that the author’s standards for hypothesis adjudication need to be revised.
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