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29 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 1 of 2

Science Denial

Science Denial
  • Post-Truth or Post-Trust?
  • Gabriele Contessa
  • Published online:
    14 November 2025
    Print publication:
    20 November 2025
  • Over the last couple of decades, there has been increasing concern about the alleged rise of various forms of science denial. But what exactly is science denial? Is it really on the rise? If so, what explains its rise? And what is so concerning about it? This Element argues that the notion of science denial is highly ambiguous and that, once we carefully distinguish among all the different phenomena that are often conflated under this label, it is doubtful that any of them warrants all of the concerns that animate the critics of science denial. This has important consequences for how we understand the complex and delicate relationship between science and the public and, more generally, the collective epistemic malaise afflicting liberal democracies.
The Philosophy of Linguistics

The Philosophy of Linguistics
  • Ryan M. Nefdt
  • Published online:
    23 July 2025
    Print publication:
    21 August 2025
  • The philosophy of linguistics reflects on multiple scientific disciplines aimed at the understanding of one of the most fundamental aspects of human existence, our ability to produce and understand natural language. Linguistics, viewed as a science, has a long history but it was the advent of the formal (and computational) revolution in cognitive science that established the field as both scientifically and philosophically appealing. In this Element, the topic will be approached as a means for understanding larger issues in the philosophy of science more generally.
Underdetermination and Theoretical Virtues

Underdetermination and Theoretical Virtues
  • Dana Tulodziecki
  • Published online:
    09 June 2025
    Print publication:
    03 July 2025
    • Element
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  • This Element advances a novel view – the Epistemic Labour View – about the role, limits, and potential of the theoretical virtues as the arbiters of various versions of underdetermination. A central focus is to go beyond the often abstract discussions in this area and to show how the theoretical virtues can illuminate and resolve issues surrounding actual cases of underdetermination found in scientific practice. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Science, Pseudoscience, and the Demarcation Problem

Science, Pseudoscience, and the Demarcation Problem
  • Dániel Bárdos, Adam Tamas Tuboly
  • Published online:
    06 March 2025
    Print publication:
    06 March 2025
  • This Element examines various aspects of the demarcation problem: finding a distinction between science and pseudoscience. Section 1 introduces issues surrounding pseudoscience in the recent literature. Popper's falsificationism is presented in Section 2, alongside some of its early critics, such as Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos. It is followed in Section 3 by the notable criticism of the Popperian program by Larry Laudan that put the issue out of fashion for decades. Section 4 explores recent multi-criteria approaches that seek to define pseudoscience not only along a single criterion, but by considering the diversity and historical dimension of science. Section 5 introduces the problem of values (the 'new demarcation problem') and addresses how we can use values in the problem of pseudoscience. Finally, Section 6 concludes by emphasizing the need for an attitude-oriented approach over a rigid, method-based demarcation, recognizing scientific practice's evolving and multifaceted nature.
Scientific Realism

Scientific Realism
  • Timothy D. Lyons
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 February 2025
  • The scientific realism debate directly addresses the relation between human thought and the reality in which it finds itself. A core question: Can we justifiably believe that science accurately describes the reality that lies beneath the limits of human experience? Exploring this question, this Element begins at the most foundational level of scientific realism, the endeavor to justify belief in the existence of unobservables by way of abduction. Raising anti-realist challenges, some much discussed in the literature but also some generally overlooked, it works its way toward more refined variants of scientific realism. Because scientific realism is the default position of many scientific realists themselves often assuming it is the default position of scientists– the emphasis will be on the challenges. Those challenges will also motivate the variants of scientific realism traced. The Element concludes with a brief articulation of the author's own position, Socratic scientific realism.
The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge

The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge
  • Consensus, Controversy, and Coproduction
  • Boaz Miller
  • Published online:
    30 December 2024
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • This Element is about the social dimensions of scientific knowledge. The first section asks in what ways scientific knowledge is social. The second section develops a conception of scientific knowledge that accommodates the insights of the first section, and is consonant with mainstream thinking about knowledge in analytic epistemology. The third section asks under what conditions we can tell, in the real world, that a consensus in a scientific community amounts to shared scientific knowledge, as characterized in the second section, and how to deal with scientific dissent. The fourth section reviews the ways epistemic and social elements mutually interact to coproduce scientific knowledge. This Element engages with literature from philosophy of science and social epistemology, especially social epistemology of science, as well as Science, Technology, and Society (STS), and analytic epistemology. The Element focuses on themes and debates that date from the start of the second millennium.
Climate Science

Climate Science
  • Wendy S. Parker
  • Published online:
    27 November 2024
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • This Element examines how climate scientists have arrived at answers to three key questions about climate change: How much is earth's climate warming? What is causing this warming? What will climate be like in the future? Resources from philosophy of science are employed to analyse the methods that climate scientists use to address these questions and the inferences that they make from the evidence collected. Along the way, the analysis contributes to broader philosophical discussions of data modelling and measurement, robustness analysis, explanation, and model evaluation.
Abductive Reasoning in Science

Abductive Reasoning in Science
  • Finnur Dellsén
  • Published online:
    03 June 2024
    Print publication:
    17 October 2024
    • Element
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  • In abductive reasoning, scientific theories are evaluated on the basis of how well they would explain the available evidence. There are a number of subtly different accounts of this type of reasoning, most of which are inspired by the popular slogan 'Inference to the Best Explanation.' However, these accounts disagree about exactly how to spell out the slogan so as to avoid various problems for abductive reasoning. This Element aims, firstly, to give an opinionated overview both of the many accounts of abductive reasoning that have been proposed and the problems that have motivated them; and, secondly, to critically evaluate these accounts in a way that points toward a systematic view of the nature and purpose of abductive reasoning in science. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Feminist Philosophy of Science

Feminist Philosophy of Science
  • Anke Bueter
  • Published online:
    28 May 2024
    Print publication:
    20 June 2024
  • Feminist scholars have identified pervasive gender discrimination in science as an institution, as well as gender bias in the very content of many scientific theories. An ameliorative project at heart, feminist philosophy of science has inquired into the social and epistemological roots and consequences of these problems and into their potential solutions. Most feminist philosophers agree on a need for diversity in scientific communities to counter the detrimental effects of gender bias. Diversity could thus serve as a unifying concept for a potential consensus of the field. Yet there are substantial differences in the kinds and roles of diversity envisaged. This element argues that we need diversity, both in terms of social locations and of values, to overcome former biases and blind spots. Diversity as such, however, is insufficient. To reap its epistemic benefits, diversity also needs to be institutionalised in a way that counters various forms of epistemic injustice.
Science and the Public

Science and the Public
  • Angela Potochnik
  • Published online:
    23 March 2024
    Print publication:
    25 April 2024
  • Science is a product of society: in its funding, its participation, and its application. This Element explores the relationship between science and the public with resources from philosophy of science. Chapter 1 defines the questions about science's relationship to the public and outlines science's obligation to the public. Chapter 2 considers the Vienna Circle as a case study in how science, philosophy, and the public can relate very differently than they do at present. Chapter 3 examines how public understanding of science can have a variety of different goals and introduces philosophical discussions of scientific understanding as a resource. Chapter 4 addresses public trust in science, including responding to science denial. Chapter 5 considers how expanded participation in science can contribute to public trust of science. Finally, Chapter 6 casts light on how science might discharge its obligations to the public.
Scientific Models and Decision Making

Scientific Models and Decision Making
  • Eric Winsberg, Stephanie Harvard
  • Published online:
    16 January 2024
    Print publication:
    08 February 2024
  • This Element introduces the philosophical literature on models, with an emphasis on normative considerations relevant to models for decision-making. Chapter 1 gives an overview of core questions in the philosophy of modeling. Chapter 2 examines the concept of model adequacy for purpose, using three examples of models from the atmospheric sciences to describe how this sort of adequacy is determined in practice. Chapter 3 explores the significance of using models that are not adequate for purpose, including the purpose of informing public decisions. Chapter 4 provides a basic framework for values in modelling, using a case study to highlight the ethical challenges in building models for decision making. It concludes by establishing the need for strategies to manage value judgments in modelling, including the potential for public participation in the process.
Logical Empiricism as Scientific Philosophy

Logical Empiricism as Scientific Philosophy
  • Alan W. Richardson
  • Published online:
    11 December 2023
    Print publication:
    18 January 2024
  • This Element offers a new account of the philosophical significance of logical empiricism that relies on the past forty years of literature reassessing the project. It argues that while logical empiricism was committed to empiricism and did become tied to the trajectory of analytic philosophy, neither empiricism nor logical analysis per se was the deepest philosophical commitment of logical empiricism. That commitment was, rather, securing the scientific status of philosophy, bringing philosophy into a scientific conception of the world.
Modelling Scientific Communities

Modelling Scientific Communities
  • Cailin O'Connor
  • Published online:
    30 November 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023
  • This Element will overview research using models to understand scientific practice. Models are useful for reasoning about groups and processes that are complicated and distributed across time and space, i.e., those that are difficult to study using empirical methods alone. Science fits this picture. For this reason, it is no surprise that researchers have turned to models over the last few decades to study various features of science. The different sections of the element are mostly organized around different modeling approaches. The models described in this element sometimes yield take-aways that are straightforward, and at other times more nuanced. The Element ultimately argues that while these models are epistemically useful, the best way to employ most of them to understand and improve science is in combination with empirical methods and other sorts of theorizing.
Scientific Progress

Scientific Progress
  • Darrell P. Rowbottom
  • Published online:
    18 September 2023
    Print publication:
    12 October 2023
  • What constitutes cognitive scientific progress? This Element begins with an extensive survey of the contemporary debate on how to answer this question. It provides a blow-by-blow critical summary of the key literature on the issue over the past fifteen years, covering the central positions and arguments therein. It also draws upon older literature, where appropriate, to inform the treatment. The Element then enters novel territory by considering meta-normative issues concerning scientific progress. It focuses on how the standards involved in assessing progress arise. Does science have aims, which determine what counts as progress, as many authors assume? If so, what is it to be an aim of science? And how does one identify such things? If not, how do normative standards arise? After arguing that science does not have overarching aims, the Element proposes that the standards are ultimately subjective.
Natural Kinds

Natural Kinds
  • Muhammad Ali Khalidi
  • Published online:
    16 August 2023
    Print publication:
    14 September 2023
    • Element
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  • Scientists cannot devise theories, construct models, propose explanations, make predictions, or even carry out observations, without first classifying their subject matter. The goal of scientific taxonomy is to come up with classification schemes that conform to nature's own. Another way of putting this is that science aims to devise categories that correspond to 'natural kinds.' The interest in ascertaining the real kinds of things in nature is as old as philosophy itself, but it takes on a different guise when one adopts a naturalist stance in philosophy, that is when one looks closely at scientific practice and takes it as a guide for identifying natural kinds and investigating their general features. This Element surveys existing philosophical accounts of natural kinds, defends a naturalist alternative, and applies it to case studies in a diverse set of sciences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Philosophy of Open Science

Philosophy of Open Science
  • Sabina Leonelli
  • Published online:
    31 July 2023
    Print publication:
    31 August 2023
    • Element
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  • The Open Science [OS] movement aims to foster the wide dissemination, scrutiny and re-use of research components for the good of science and society. This Element examines the role played by OS principles and practices within contemporary research and how this relates to the epistemology of science. After reviewing some of the concerns that have prompted calls for more openness, it highlights how the interpretation of openness as the sharing of resources, so often encountered in OS initiatives and policies, may have the unwanted effect of constraining epistemic diversity and worsening epistemic injustice, resulting in unreliable and unethical scientific knowledge. By contrast, this Element proposes to frame openness as the effort to establish judicious connections among systems of practice, predicated on a process-oriented view of research as a tool for effective and responsible agency. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Scientific Representation

Scientific Representation
  • James Nguyen, Roman Frigg
  • Published online:
    10 August 2022
    Print publication:
    01 September 2022
    • Element
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  • This Element presents a philosophical exploration of the notion of scientific representation. It does so by focussing on an important class of scientific representations, namely scientific models. Models are important in the scientific process because scientists can study a model to discover features of reality. But what does it mean for something to represent something else? This is the question discussed in this Element. The authors begin by disentangling different aspects of the problem of representation and then discuss the dominant accounts in the philosophical literature: the resemblance view and inferentialism. They find them both wanting and submit that their own preferred option, the so-called DEKI account, not only eschews the problems that beset these conceptions, but further provides a comprehensive answer to the question of how scientific representation works. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Values in Science

Values in Science
  • Kevin C. Elliott
  • Published online:
    10 June 2022
    Print publication:
    23 June 2022
  • This Element introduces the philosophical literature on values in science by examining four questions: (1) How do values influence science? (2) Should we actively incorporate values in science? (3) How can we manage values in science responsibly? (4) What are some next steps for those who want to help promote responsible roles for values in science? It explores arguments for and against the “value-free ideal” for science (i.e., the notion that values should be excluded from scientific reasoning) and concludes that it should be rejected. Nonetheless, this does not mean that value influences are always acceptable. The Element explores a range of strategies for distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate value influences. It concludes by proposing an approach for managing values in science that relies on justifying, prioritising, and implementing norms for scientific research practices and institutions.
Fundamentality and Grounding

Fundamentality and Grounding
  • Kerry McKenzie
  • Published online:
    07 February 2022
    Print publication:
    03 March 2022
  • A suite of questions concerning fundamentality lies at the heart of contemporary metaphysics. The relation of grounding, thought to connect the more to the less fundamental, sits at the heart of those debates in turn. Since most contemporary metaphysicians embrace the doctrine of physicalism and thus hold that reality is fundamentally physical, a natural question is how physics can inform the current debates over fundamentality and grounding. This Element introduces the reader to the concept of grounding and some of the key issues that animate contemporary debates around it, such as the question of whether grounding is 'unified' or 'plural' and whether there exists a fundamental level of reality. It moves on to show how resources from physics can help point the way towards their answers - thus furthering the case for a naturalistic approach to even the most fundamental of questions in metaphysics.
Bayesianism and Scientific Reasoning

Bayesianism and Scientific Reasoning
  • Jonah N. Schupbach
  • Published online:
    21 January 2022
    Print publication:
    31 March 2022
  • This Element explores the Bayesian approach to the logic and epistemology of scientific reasoning. Section 1 introduces the probability calculus as an appealing generalization of classical logic for uncertain reasoning. Section 2 explores some of the vast terrain of Bayesian epistemology. Three epistemological postulates suggested by Thomas Bayes in his seminal work guide the exploration. This section discusses modern developments and defenses of these postulates as well as some important criticisms and complications that lie in wait for the Bayesian epistemologist. Section 3 applies the formal tools and principles of the first two sections to a handful of topics in the epistemology of scientific reasoning: confirmation, explanatory reasoning, evidential diversity and robustness analysis, hypothesis competition, and Ockham's Razor.

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