December 2024

Table of Contents:

1. From the Desk of the PSA President
2. PSA24 Prize Winners
3. PSA Post Conference Survey
4. PSA Office Hours
5. PSA @ APA
6. PSA Around the World 2025
7. Upcoming Events

From the Desk of the PSA President

Dear Friends and Colleagues

As the year draws to a close, and with it my 2-year PSA Presidency, I wanted to send you a brief note to express my sincere thank you for all your ongoing support for the PSA.

Serving as PSA President in 2023-24 has been the honour of my life. It has been a truly humbling experience to work with so many inspirational colleagues, and to see how much our thriving community has grown over the years.

The PSA Biennial Meeting in New Orleans (14-17 November 2024) attracted over 700 participants, and a strong sense of community pervaded all the plenary events, poster session, and parallel sessions. I saw many excellent talks including a large number by brilliant graduate students and early career scholars. And I came back home energised and still thinking about some of the conversations and discussions.

Once again, I want to express my deep gratitude to Program Chair David Danks, Poster Session Chair Charbel El-Hani and Cognate Societies Session Chair Mary Morgan for having made the PSA 2024 such a vibrant and successful event.

Looking back, I am very pleased with the novel initiatives that we have been able to achieve in the PSA Governing Board in the past two years: e.g. from the collegial designing of the Strategic Vision document, to the creation of the Ron Giere Society for Legacy and Planned Gifts, to the launch of the PSA Around the World, among many more ongoing initiatives by UPSS, DEI Caucus, International Relations committee, and all the other PSA committees.

In my role as Past President in 2025-26, I will continue to work with the Governing Board for the next iteration of PSA Around the World 2025 which will be led by the East European Network for Philosophy of Science (EENPS). This conference is open to all PSA members wherever you are. The event will be fully online and will

take place over three dates in November 2025 - see the Call for Abstracts for more information. I look forward to working with Co-Chairs Tomas Marvan and Magda Malecka and I very much hope to see many of you participating online to PSA Around the World 2025 next year.

As always, I am grateful to the PSA Governing Board for their excellent work and dedication; and to our Executive Director Max Cormendy for making everything possible. To incoming President Craig Callender I wish the same intellectually rewarding experience that the past two years have been for me.

I have no doubt that the PSA future is bright and that our community will continue to grow and cultivate a myriad of directions of research all important and valuable in their own ways. I also have no doubt that PSA will remain a beacon of timely research and illuminating ideas for our societies and their democratic institutions.

I wish you all and your loved ones a restful and joyful festive season, and Happy New Year, or Happy Hogmanay as they say here in Scotland, when it comes.

With gratitude,

Michela Massimi

(PSA President 2023-24)

Edinburgh, 16 December 2024

PSA24 Awards & Prizes

The Hempel Award - The 2024 Hempel award recognizing lifetime scholarly achievement in the Philosophy of Science was awarded to James Woodward. The PSA Governing Board is proud to recognize Dr. Woodward for his significant and influential contributions to the field.

The PSA Prize in Philosophy of Science & Race - There were 2 awardees this year:

Carole Lee - "NIH Peer Review: Criterion Scores Completely Account for Racial Disparities in Overall Impact Scores" co-authored with Elena Erosheva, Sheridan Grant, Mei-Ching Chen, Mark D. Lindner, and Richard K. Nakamura.

Michael Diamond-Hunter -  (2024) on Populations, Individuals, and Biological Race

The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Caucus Prize in Feminist Philosophy of Science

Professor Gillian Russell is the winner of the PSA DEI Caucus Prize in Feminist Philosophy of Science for her recent article, From Anti-Exceptionalism to Feminist Logic. This prize is awarded biennially for the best book, article, or chapter published in English in the area of feminist philosophy of science within the five years prior to each PSA meeting.  From Anti-Exceptionalism to Feminist Logic grapples with the question of whether logic can be feminist.  Along the way Russell provides an exceptional analysis of the various ways any science might be feminist, and considers whether logic, in particular, might count.  This creative, insightful paper asks an altogether unexpected question, and answers it with a surprising "yes, sometimes".  Our congratulations to Professor Russell!

The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Caucus Prize Symposium

The winner of the DEIC symposium prize is "Race, Ethnicity, and Ancestry: The Uses and Misuses of Population Descriptors in Genomics", by Catherine Bliss (Rutgers University), Lisa Gannett (Saint Mary University), Yasmin Haddad (University of Quebec), Celso Neto (University of Exeter), Abigail Nieves Delgado (Utretch University).

 Ernest Nagel Early-Career Scholar Essay Award

2022: 

David Kinney, "Why Average When You Can Stack? Better Methods for Generating Accurate Group Credences"

Fons DeWulf, "Beyond Hempel: Reframing the Debate about Scientific Explanation"

2023:

Jennifer S, Jhun, "Multi-Model Reasoning in Economics: The Case of COMPASS"

CasparJacobs, "The Nature of a Constant of Nature: the Case of G"

Mary B. Hesse Graduate Student Essay Award

Shelly Yiran Shi, "Nothing Matters" 

Honorable Mention: Matthew Maxwell, "Fitness, Mutational Load, and Eugenics"

PSA Outreach and Engagement Award

Ayelet Shavit & Yael Silver - "Town Square Academia"

Honorable Mentions:

Scott Scheall, Francois Allisson, Cinla Adder , and Jennifer Jhun - Smith and Marx Walk Into a Bar
Emily LaRosa - AgAid and AI
Eddy Keming Chen - Op-Eds in Popular Media

PSA International Syllabus Prize

Bixin Guo (Macalester College)

PSA24 Post Conference Survey

If you have a moment and are so inclined, we would appreciate your feedback regarding the PSA24 Biennial Meeting. The survey is not long, but your feedback is valuable and will result in even better meetings in the future. Thanks so much for your attendance and we look forward to seeing you at PSA26!

PSA24 Post Conference Survey

PSA Office Hours

The newest round of PSA Office Hours have been posted to the website - check out the details and sign up for some excellent sessions here - https://www.philsci.org/psa_office_hour.php

Please note that there will be a panel discussion in April focused on Philosophers of Science in Industry - more information coming soon!

PSA @ APA

If you are planning to attend the APA Eastern Meeting in New York this January, please consider supporting the PSA @ APA Author Meets Critics session!

The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience

Author: Mazviita Chirimuuta (University of Edinburgh)

Speakers:
Ida Momennejad (Microsoft Research NYC)
Nedah Nadia Nemati (Columbia University)
Zed Adams (The New School)
Jacob Browning (NYU)

PSA Around the World 2025 - Call for Abstracts

In 2023, the Philosophy of Science Association launched a new initiative called PSA Around the World. The aim of the initiative is to reach out to the global community of philosophers of science and spotlight the rich diversity of practices and traditions in the field of philosophy of science via fully online conferences with a dedicated regional focus, running in the years when the Biennial Meeting of the PSA does not take place.
 
The second PSA Around the World conference spotlights Eastern and Central Europe and is organized by the East European Network for Philosophy of Science (https://eenps.weebly.com/).
 
The conference is open to all PSA members worldwide. Contributed papers may be on any topic in philosophy of science. Scholars working in Eastern and Central Europe are particularly encouraged to submit papers, and papers exploring the philosophy of science in Eastern and Central European contexts are most welcome.
 
The PSA Around the World 2025 Committee is committed to assembling a program with high-quality papers on a variety of topics and diverse presenters that reflect the full range of current work in the philosophy of science. Given the time zones constraints, and with an eye to increasing diversity of topics, there is no call for symposia for this conference.
 
The conference will run fully online for three days and different time slots to accommodate a global audience in various time zones: Thursday, November 6; Friday, November 14; Saturday, November 22 (precise timing for each day TBA). The conference fee is $50 and is able to be waived.
 
Submissions should consist of a 1000-word abstract and be prepared for anonymous review with no information identifying the author in the body of the abstract. For co-authored papers, the presenting author should submit the abstract. Abstracts should be submitted using the SciencesConf link: http://psaatw25.sciencesconf.org. Users will need to register for a SciencesConf account before submitting an abstract. The deadline for submissions is March 31, 2025, 11:59 PM Pacific Standard Time. All presenters should be members of the Philosophy of Science Association, but if this represents an unreasonable burden, please reach out to director@philsci.org.

More information and submission link can be found on the PhilSci site - https://www.philsci.org/psa_around_the_world_2025.php

Upcoming Events and Calls

12/31/2024 - CFP: Large Language Models for the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science (Workshop)

1/11/2025 - Call for Abstract: 22nd ISEE Meeting

1/31/2025 - CFP: Meta-Level Reflections on the Scientific Realism Debate

2/1/2025 - International Philosophy of Medicine Roundtable

2/15/2025 -  Philosophy of High Energy Physics (PHEP-2) conference

3/15/2025 - Pragmatism and Measurement: New Directions - University of Pittsburgh

Join

Donate

Get Involved

Learn More

Click here to unsubscribe. | Click here to forward
View this email as a web page
Message sent by Philosophy of Science Association, director@philsci.org
Philosophy of Science Association