This article investigates the relationship between two evaluative claims about agents’ degrees of belief: (i) that it is better to have more rather than less accurate degrees of belief and (ii) that it is better to have less rather than more probabilistically incoherent degrees of belief. We show that, for suitable combinations of inaccuracy measures and incoherence measures, both claims are compatible, although not equivalent; moreover, certain ways of becoming less incoherent always guarantee improvements in accuracy. Incompatibilities between particular incoherence and inaccuracy measures can be exploited to argue against particular ways of measuring either inaccuracy or incoherence.

The first part of this article finds Craver’s mutual manipulability theory (MM) of constitution inadequate, as it definitionally ties constitution to the feasibility of ideal experiments, which, however, are unrealizable in principle. As an alternative, the second part develops an abductive theory of constitution (NDC), which exploits the fact that phenomena and their constituents are unbreakably coupled via common causes. The best explanation for this fact is the existence of an additional dependence relation, namely, constitution. NDC has important ramifications for constitutional discovery—most notably, that there is no experimentum crucis for constitution, not even under ideal discovery circumstances.

We show that previous results from epistemic network models by Kevin J. S. Zollman and Erich Kummerfeld showing the benefits of decreased connectivity in epistemic networks are not robust across changes in parameter values. Our findings motivate discussion about whether and how such models can inform real world epistemic communities.

In many fields in the life sciences investigators refer to downward or top-down causal effects. Craver and I defended the view that such cases should be understood in terms of a constitution relation between levels in a mechanism and intralevel causal relations (occurring at any level). We did not, however, specify when entities constitute a higher-level mechanism. In this article I appeal to graph-theoretic representations of networks, now widely employed in systems biology and neuroscience, and associate mechanisms with modules that exhibit high clustering. As a result of interconnections within clusters, mechanisms often exhibit complex dynamic behaviors that constrain how individual components respond to external inputs, a central feature of top-down causation.

Clade selection is unpopular with philosophers who otherwise accept multilevel selection theory. Clades cannot reproduce, and reproduction is widely thought necessary for evolution by natural selection, especially of complex adaptations. Using microbial evolutionary processes as heuristics, I argue contrariwise that (1) clade growth (proliferation of contained species) substitutes for clade reproduction in the evolution of complex adaptation, (2) clade-level properties favoring persistence—species richness, dispersal, divergence, and possibly intraclade cooperation—are not collapsible into species-level traits, (3) such properties can be maintained by selection on clades, and (4) clade selection extends the explanatory power of the theory of evolution.

Philosophical defenses of cognitive/evolutionary psychological accounts of racialism claim that classification based on phenotypical features of humans was common historically and is evidence for a species-typical, cognitive mechanism for essentializing. They conclude that social constructionist accounts of racialism must be supplemented by cognitive/evolutionary psychology. This article argues that phenotypical classifications were uncommon historically until such classifications were socially constructed. Moreover, some philosophers equivocate between two different meanings of “racial thinking.” The article concludes that social constructionist accounts are far more robust than psychological accounts for the origins of racialism.

Many have suggested that the transformation standardly referred to as ‘time reversal’ in quantum theory is not deserving of the name. I argue on the contrary that the standard definition is perfectly appropriate and is indeed forced by basic considerations about the nature of time in the quantum formalism.

Constructive field theory aims to rigorously construct concrete, nontrivial solutions to Lagrangians used in particle physics. I examine the relationship of solutions in constructive field theory to both axiomatic and Lagrangian quantum field theory (QFT). I argue that Lagrangian QFT provides conditions for what counts as a successful constructive solution and other information that guides constructive field theorists to solutions. Solutions matter because they describe the behavior of QFT systems and thus what QFT says the world is like. Constructive field theory clarifies existing disputes about which parts of QFT are philosophically relevant and how rigor relates to these disputes.

Where E is the proposition that [If H and O were true, H would explain O], William Roche and Elliot Sober have argued that P(H | O&E) = P(H | O). In this article I argue that not only is this equality not generally true, it is false in the very kinds of cases that Roche and Sober focus on, involving frequency data. In fact, in such cases O raises the probability of H only given that there is an explanatory connection between them.