September 2023

Table of Contents:

1. From the desk of the President
2. World Congress of Philosophy

3. Short Reads by Grads

4. PSA24 Early Bird Sponsors
5. PSA @ APA
6. PhilSci Archive
7. Calendar of Events & Calls for Papers - Upcoming Dates

From the Desk of the President

Dear Friends and Colleagues

It has been another busy second quarter of the 2023 year for the Philosophy of Science Association and with many initiatives under way, I thought I should give you an update about a number of upcoming events.

However, before I do so, I wanted to express on behalf of the whole philosophy of science community my deep sadness at the news of Evelyn Fox Keller passing away. Fox Keller has been a towering figure in the field of science and technology studies and feminist philosophy of science. Her many books dedicated to the history and philosophy of biology have defined the field and left a long-lasting impact. My thoughts are with Fox Keller’s family, friends, colleagues, and students in remembering this extraordinary philosopher of science.

I expect more information and ‘in memoriam’ articles will appear in the next few weeks, and we will link to them in the next PSA newsletter.

Coming back to my PSA update, first of all, I am delighted to announce that the registration and program of the inaugural PSA Around the World 2023 is now available online. The conference will run on ZOOM for 3h on each of the following three days:

Sunday 5th November 9am Beijing time / Tokyo 10am / Saturday 4th Nov. New York EST 8pm / Sunday 5th November London 1am GMT

Saturday 11th November 5pm Beijing time / Tokyo 6pm / New York EST 4am / London 9am GMT

Friday 17th November 9am Beijing time / Tokyo 10am / Thursday 16th Nov. New York EST 8pm / Friday 17th November London 1am GMT

We are experimenting a new format with the first hour of each day dedicated to a plenary panel in-conversation session and the following 2h with over 100 contributed papers over three days that will run in parallel sessions via ZOOM breakout rooms.

The three plenary panel in-conversation sessions will have each a thematic focus on East Asia and South East Asia as follows:

Day 1, Sunday 5th November 2023. Philosophy of science in the institutional context of East Asia and South East Asia (Chair: Teru Miyake, Singapore).

Panellists:

Duoyi Fei (China)

Sang Wook Yi (South Korea)

Hsiang-Ke Chao (Taiwan)  

Sayaka Oki (Japan)

Day 2, Saturday 11th November 2023. Researching and Teaching Philosophy of Science in East Asia and South East Asia (Chair: Natalja Deng, Seul)

Panellists:

Tetsuji Iseda (Japan)

Ilho Park (South Korea)

Wang Wei (China)

Yin Chung Au (Taiwan)

Day 3, Friday 17th November 2023. Traditions and cultures in the practice of philosophy of science in East Asia and South East Asia (Chair: Karen Yan, Taiwan)

Panellists:

RueyLin Chen (Taiwan)  

Soraj Hongladarom (Thailand)

Li Jianhui (China)

Jing Zhu (China)

As already announced in the May 2023 newsletter, we received a high number of contributed papers for this CfP with a fantastic representation from East Asia and South East Asia but also more globally across the PSA community in the US, Europe, and everywhere else. The PSA Around the World 2023 Program Committee has worked very hard to finalise a program that is geographically diverse, wide-ranging in its topics, and genuinely exciting!

Thus, we very much invite all PSA members—wherever you are—to join us online for those dates in November, to celebrate the vibrant philosophy of science scene of East Asia and South East Asia and to get together one more time (even if online) before our next in person Biennial Meeting in November 2024.

Registration for this event is now open!

There is a small registration fee to cover admin costs incl. EasyChair (which is sadly no longer free to use) and ZOOM license but it can easily be waived by ticking the relevant box on the online form if you do not have institutional funding to cover for it.

Once again this new initiative is due to the tireless commitment and dedication of the PSA International Relations Committee with Hasok Chang (Chair), Chuang Liu, Teru Miyake and all the colleagues in the PSA AW2023 Program Committee that I had the pleasure and honour of chairing over the past year.

Hasok Chang, Natalja Deng, Zhu Jing, Chuang Liu, Qiaoyin Lu, Teru Miyake, Yuko Murakami, Jun Otsuka, Karen Yan, Sang Wook Yi, Wang Wei, Billy Wheeler, Jiji Zhang have all been working long hours over the past 12 months to organise PSA AW 2023. Needless to say, the PSA Executive Director, Max Cormendy, assisted by Ramy Amin in the Cincinnati office, have made everything possible for the organisation and planning of this event in all its details.  My deep gratitude goes to them all. They have been a wonderfully collegial, enthusiastic, and dedicated group of colleagues to work with. 

In other news, the Call for Symposia for the next Biennial Meeting of the PSA in New Orleans (14-17 November 2024) will soon be out, followed by Call for Contributed Papers and Call for Cognate Societies sessions. I am delighted to announce that the following colleagues have kindly agreed to serve in the following roles:

• David Danks (UC San Diego) PSA 2024 Program Chair
• Charbel El-Hani (Federal University of Bahia) PSA 2024 Poster Session Chair
• Mary Morgan (LSE) PSA 2024 Cognate Societies Session Chair
  
  

Many thanks to David, Charbel and Mary for their generous availability to help organise the next Biennial Meeting, with more announcements coming out soon via the PSA newsletter and PSA website.

Next, a quick follow-up on my earlier announcement about the PSA current work on a Strategic Plan which aims to lay out values and priorities for the PSA over the next few years. Following upon the creation of a dedicated task force group consisting of PSA Past Presidents, President-Elect, and current Chairs of various PSA Committees, the task force group started the work on the Strategic Plan document in late May. We have made progress in collectively drafting a document and we hope to be able to report back once this is finalised over the next year or so, including consultation mechanisms with the PSA community at large.

Finally, the PSA Office Hour initiative continues with a series of upcoming events in the fall 2023, which you can find here: https://philsci.org/psa_office_hour.php We invite all PSA members especially graduate students but also postdocs to join these online events by registering through the link above. We are grateful to the colleagues that have kindly given their availability to run these office hours. We welcome your suggestions for additional new office hours as we go into the new year.   

I look forward to seeing many of you via ZOOM at the PSA Around the World 2023 conference in November. And in the meantime, I wish you all a productive new academic year.

Very best wishes,

Michela Massimi

(PSA President 2023-24)

World Congress of Philosophy

The 25th World Congress of Philosophy will be in Rome in August 2024. It is a self-pay conference, and some researchers who have acceptable papers will not be able to afford to travel to Rome. The organisers aren't allowing zoom talks, so these people won't be able to present their research at all because of a lack of funds.

If you're willing to contribute to fund travel grants for philosophers of science who get papers accepted and can't afford the travel, go to the GoFundMe website here.

Short Reads by Grads

The PSA is pleased to share its second installment of Short Reads by Grads. 

Dustin Gray is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He earned a master’s degree in philosophy at San Diego State University and a bachelor’s in the same at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His areas of specialization are in philosophy of technology, philosophy of science, and metaphysics. Dustin’s current research focuses on surveillance technologies and the ways in which they affect the landscape of higher education. More broadly,

he is thinking about the complex relationships that humans have forged with digital technologies and how they stand to redefine our commonly held notions of autonomy, control, and submission.

Review of Andreas Hüttemann’s A Minimal Metaphysics for Scientific Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

By Dustin Gray

Hüttemann’s stance that science should be taken seriously as a source for our metaphysics is

what drives the primary aim of his book, namely, to offer a minimal approach thereto for

scientific practice. To accomplish this, he maintains a thorough, yet constrained focus on

methods such as prediction, explanation, and manipulation to account for their ability to

accurately explain the structure of reality. Hüttemann’s undertaking resists analysis of the

content of physical theories to advance a metaphysics that avoids postulating anything

explanatorily irrelevant to its structure. The book focuses on three major components of

scientific practice: generalization (laws of nature), causal reasoning, and reductive explanatory practices. 

Regarding the first, Hüttemann argues that since science deals principally with systems and

their intrinsic properties, the laws we postulate must apply to them. His analysis stipulates that

mathematical equations used to explain laws become “law statements” only insofar as they

represent the empirical behavior of physical systems. This linkage is established to make a

further claim about the invariance of physical phenomena such as electrons existing in an

entangled state for instance. In adopting such a theory, Hüttemann argues, we presuppose the

existence of these things or systems nomologically, i.e., in terms of general laws that need not

necessarily depend on logical necessity.  He concludes that seeing laws in this light constitutes

progress in our endeavors to develop a metaphysics that best explains why we have the

scientific practices we do.

Regarding causal reasoning, Hüttemann’s main focus is on what he refers to as “quasi-internal

processes,” i.e., processes that systems are disposed to insofar as they are free of interfering

factors. An example of this might be that of a free-falling object in a vacuum. This phenomenon

is seen as emblematic of “closed-system” causation in that the same effect necessarily follows

from the same cause. Disruptive causes (those that introduce interfering factors into quasi

internal processes), on the other hand, are seen by Hüttemann as demonstrating an important

consideration. Namely, that interference with quasi-internal processes such as that which might

come as a result of disruptive causes calls into question the very nature of what closed-system

causation is meant to be. 

The final chapters discuss cases of reduction and how they might affect the ontological commitments that inform scientific practice. He brings to light the importance science seems to place on part-whole explanations of physical phenomena. Though ontologically speaking, we may want to be able to refer to the behavior of parts to explain the behavior of that which they constitute, this need not commit us to foundationalism or physical eliminativism. Hüttemann argues that such a commitment would require us to introduce the exact relations into our metaphysics that were disregarded as irrelevant in the preceding chapters.

Though seeking only to commit to that which is adequate for a working metaphysics, Hüttemann’s approach does involve a great deal of complexity and requires a large base of prior knowledge. As such, his book will be particularly valuable to advanced scholars working in philosophy of science.  

PSA24 Early Bird Sponsors

The PSA is pleased to announce its first round of PSA24 sponsors for the upcoming biennial meeting in New Orleans:

Emerald Sponsors:

University of California Irvine, Logic & Philosophy of Science -

Platinum Sponsors:

Ann Johnson Institute 

Gold Sponsors:

Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Philosophy 

Arizona State University, Centre for Biology and Society 

Our sponsors help make the PSA biennial meeting possible. Thanks to them, not only are we able to have a high quality meeting but we are also able to keep conference registration more accessible for students. If you are interested in becoming a PSA24 sponsor, please reach out to director@philsci.org.

PSA @ APA 

The PSA will be hosting two Author Meets Critics sessions at the Eastern Division and Central Division meetings of the APA. The Eastern Division meeting will feature Dr. Matthew Brown and his book, Science and the Moral Imagination. The Central Division meeting will feature Dr. Ryan Nefdt and his book, Language, Science, and Structure: A Journey Into the Philosophy of Linguistics. 

More information on timing as details are settled. Many thanks to the Awards Committee for their hard work!

PhilSci Archive 

PhilSci-Archive is the official preprint repository for the PSA and the best place to host your philosophy of science preprints. It offers a free, stable, and openly accessible archive for scholarly articles and monographs. With PhilSci-Archive, researchers can search the open-access repository and get curated alerts about new work delivered to their inboxes. Many journals encourage authors to post preprints on archives like the PhilSci-Archive in order to increase readership, and historical data suggests that posting to the archive increases a published paper’s citation rates (see https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/20778/). Visit philsci-archive.pitt.edu today to create a free account and post your preprints.

Calendar of Events & Calls for Papers - Upcoming Dates

9/30/2023 - Prediction and Punishment: Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Carceral AI

10/1/2023 - HOPOS - Call for Papers

10/6/2023 - History of the Philosophy of Pregnancy

10/6/2023 - History of the Philosophy of Pregnancy Conference

11/1/2023 - CFP: World Congress of Philosophy 2024

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