{"title":"Tables turned on table talk","authors":"Majid D. Beni","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102081","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102081","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Eliminative structural realism is in line with mereological nihilism. This contrasts with reconciliatory, non-eliminativist versions of structural realism, such as rainforest realism, which aim to accommodate quotidian ontology. Recently, the ordinary object ontology of rainforest realism has been defended by drawing on cognitive sciences. This paper critically examines philosophical arguments and scientific evidence, particularly from predictive processing, to argue that these sources do not support the ontology of ordinary objects but instead favour an organism-oriented form of eliminativist structural realism.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 102081"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145349593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"French on London and Bauer, and QBism","authors":"Jacques L. Pienaar","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102084","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102084","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this article I compare two interpretations of quantum mechanics (QM) that draw inspiration from phenomenology: the London–Bauer–French interpretation (hereafter LBF) as articulated by Steven French (French, 2024), and QBism (Fuchs, 2010; Fuchs and Stacey, 2019; Fuchs et al., 2014) . I give special attention to certain disagreements between QBism and LBF identified in French (2023, 2024), as well as French’s related claims that QBism may be at odds with key ideas in phenomenology. My main finding is that QBism does not fare so badly with phenomenology as French makes out; in particular it <em>can be</em> made compatible with Zahavi’s <em>correlationism</em> and Husserl’s notion of intersubjectivity, both of which strongly inform LBF. Nevertheless, I concur with French’s argument that QBism is incompatible with the conception of quantum measurement in LBF, hence also with that of Merleau–Ponty, as the latter based his own analysis on that of London & Bauer. I explain why I find QBism’s account preferable in this case.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 102084"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145356662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A pink lie in French medicine","authors":"Juliette Ferry-Danini","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102075","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102075","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper sets to explain how one of the most prescribed and sold pharmaceutical drugs in France – Spasfon (phloroglucinol), introduced on the French market in the 1960s, became and remained so successful in the absence of solid scientific evidence. Integrating the epistemology of ignorance and a feminist approach to the history of medicine, my goal is to understand how this case of ignorance was initially constructed and how it has maintained itself to this day. I argue that sexism is one key factor explaining how ignorance was constructed around this very popular – and incidentally pink – pharmaceutical drug.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 102075"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145419171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intertheoretical relationships based on three-model framework","authors":"Kohei Morita","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102077","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102077","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Intertheoretical relationships have been traditionally investigated through the notions of reduction and emergence. Recently, the focus has shifted towards the relationship between models for elaborating intertheoretical relationships in physics. This article demonstrates that three, rather than two, types of models are essential for elucidating some intertheoretical relationships. Beyond the conventional higher- and lower-level models, an intermediate-level model is crucial for establishing connections between the theories. This framework is not only applicable to some practical cases but also effectively captures the characteristics of two significant intertheoretical relationships: between classical and quantum mechanics, and between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. By applying this framework to these cases, this study highlights both the similarity and the difference in these intertheoretical relationships.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 102077"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145419172","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Buffon's new concept of history","authors":"Raphaël Authier","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102078","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102078","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article raises the question of the meaning given by Buffon to the notion of history, through a reexamination of three aspects of a problem which has become traditional in a series of critical discussions: to what extent can Buffon's Histoire naturelle be considered as historical? This article aims to clarify Buffon's position by specifying the reasons for which his study of living beings cannot be considered as transformist or evolutionist, by showing that his work nevertheless constitutes a decisive milestone in a movement towards a historical understanding of the objects of natural sciences, and by highlighting the transformation of the very meaning of the concept of history in Buffon's texts. The gap between the Buffonian conception of the living world and that of inorganic nature, as well as the evolution of his thought from 1749 to 1778, cannot be underestimated<em>.</em></div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 102078"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145349568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kevin C. Elliott , David B. Resnik , Wendy Lipworth
{"title":"Subconscious value influences on science","authors":"Kevin C. Elliott , David B. Resnik , Wendy Lipworth","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102079","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102079","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Philosophical scholarship on science and values has gradually shifted away from asking whether values have any legitimate role to play in scientific judgment and decision-making and toward considering how to responsibly manage value influences to protect the integrity, rigor, reliability, and trustworthiness of science. This scholarship has focused primarily on helping individual scientists deal with cases in which they are aware of the values at stake and are able to make conscious choices about whether to incorporate them into their judgment and decision-making. This means that accounts of the relationship between science and values tend to focus on <em>consciously perceived</em> values and value influences and tend to overlook the effects of <em>subconscious</em> values on scientific judgment and decision-making. In this paper, we aim to show how greater attention to subconscious value influence on judgment and decision-making can deepen our understanding of the relationship between science and values and provide useful guidance for managing value influences. To achieve our goal, we first examine the literature on values, interests, and conflicts of interest (COI) to demonstrate the potential for values to be subconscious and/or to exert subconscious influences on scientific judgment and decision-making. Next, we discuss some of the specific ways those subconscious influences could affect scientific reasoning. Finally, we show that most contemporary proposals for managing values in science are not well-suited to handling subconscious values or value influences, and we briefly point to some management strategies that merit further development.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 102079"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145349559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Between myth and history: von Neumann on consciousness in quantum mechanics","authors":"Federico Laudisa","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102083","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102083","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The von Neumann attitude on such a deep interpretational question as the role of a human observer in order for the quantum description of measurement to be consistent has been long misrepresented. The large majority of the subsequent literature ascribed to von Neumann a radical view, according to which not only the collapse was in itself a truly physical process, but also the only way to accommodate it within a quantum description of a typical measurement was the introduction of human consciousness as a kind of ‘causal’ factor. Inspired by the work of reconstruction pursued by the phenomenological reading of the London-Bauer approach, started by Steven French more than twenty years ago, the account I propose substantiates a significantly more cautious attitude by von Neumann: the time seems then ripe to tell a more balanced story on the relation between the notion of consciousness and the foundations of quantum mechanics in the work of the first scientist – János von Neumann – who explicitly and rigorously addressed the implication of a really <em>universal</em> formulation of quantum physics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 102083"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145365197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On representation and similarity: The case of mouse models of cancer","authors":"Martin Zach","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102069","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102069","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>According to the similarity account, scientists use models to represent their targets by utilizing similarities in certain respects and to certain degrees between a model and its target. According to the critics, however, representation is conceptually distinct from the notion of accurate representation, and rather than being the relation that grounds representation, similarity should be considered as setting a standard of accuracy. Based on the case study of research practices involved in using mouse models to study cancer, this paper argues that while the overarching skepticism regarding the similarity account may be justified, the role of similarity in specific contexts deserves attention. Indeed, it will be shown that similarity plays a significant role in determining whether a mouse model represents a particular aspect of cancer. Thus, authors dismissive of similarity grounding representation, while correct in the general picture, should take into consideration the role that similarity plays in deciding whether a model is or not a representation in concrete scientific practices.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 102069"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145365196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Understanding the ‘spaceflight treatment’ in plant space biology: Experimental practices, metadata workflows, and data re-analysis","authors":"Paola Castaño , Sabina Leonelli","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102073","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102073","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The boundaries between targeted interventions, background factors, and confounders are concerns in all biological experimentation. Plant space biology takes these concerns to new territories not just geographically but also epistemically because of the operational constraints of collecting data in the multi-stressor spaceflight environment. In consequence, a central challenge in this field is the disentanglement of the various factors involved in the experiments and their tracing to biological effects on the plants.</div><div>This paper characterizes the unique challenges of fundamental plant biology experiments and examines how secondary data analysis relying on metadata curation is providing novel ways to interpret, compare, and potentially integrate results obtained in these experiments. We propose an understanding of metadata workflows in comparative analyses of complex datasets as a form of <em>post hoc</em> experimental control that makes data tractable for interpretation in three ways: by providing a picture of the relevant intervening factors in experiments, refining the realm of comparison by keeping some conditions constant as background and others targets of analysis, and distinguishing between dependent and independent variables. More broadly, we maintain that this work can be regarded as an extension of experimental practice as it restructures the empirical resources on which researchers build analyses of past experiments and can contribute to the design of future ones.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 102073"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145514852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reply by the Author","authors":"Jan Cornelius Schmidt","doi":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102072","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.shpsa.2025.102072","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49467,"journal":{"name":"Studies in History and Philosophy of Science","volume":"114 ","pages":"Article 102072"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145684679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}