What happens when science searches for life with only one example to guide it? Astrobiology faces an unprecedented epistemic puzzle: how do you recognize alien life when Earth’s biosphere is your sole reference point? This chapter reveals how astrobiology operates as a transient science, relying on indirect evidence and abductive reasoning while confronting hypotheses that may remain untestable for generations. From the controversial Martian meteorite ALH84001 to Venus phosphine detection, astrobiology’s history exposes how theory-laden observations create interpretive vulnerabilities. The same data can support incompatible conclusions, as a manifestation of Duhem–Quine underdetermination that reveals how traditional Popperian falsifiability breaks down when confronting phenomena beyond empirical reach. Moreover, astrobiology’s epistemic struggles mirror those in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, suggesting a broader transformation in how we construct knowledge about nonhuman intelligence and transcending human-centric categories to recognize radically alien forms of life and mind.

This chapter examines how astrophysics generates reliable knowledge despite severe epistemic constraints by applying sophisticated strategies of data processing. Focusing on the Event Horizon Telescope’s first black hole image, it highlights the indispensable interplay between modelling, instrumentation, and data reduction. Using Patrick Suppes’ concept of data models, the analysis shows how theory-laden but systematically constrained procedures bridge the gap between raw observations and theoretical claims. Rather than simple confirmation of predictions, astrophysical reasoning depends on robustness across multiple modelling strategies. The case illustrates not only the methodological richness of astrophysics but also the value of the concept of data models for the understanding of data-intensive scientific disciplines.

Philosophical problems infuse the theory and practice of astronomy, including metaphysical foundations and influences, the limits of reasoning as in black holes and the multiverse, the problematic nature of observation and inference ranging from the canals of Mars to dark matter and dark energy, the role of technology and science policy in our present understanding of the universe, and the epistemological status of astronomy and its central concepts, including space and time, life and intelligence. The conceptual and methodological foundations and challenges of astronomy have not received systematic attention as they have in other fields such as philosophy of physics and biology. Here we argue for a unified history and philosophy of astronomy to include not only classical astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology but also space science and astrobiology. Examining such influences is an important step toward scientific advance. In this volume, fifteen historians of science, ten philosophers of science, and five scientists combine to analyze these influences. In addition to being useful for astronomers, historians, and philosophers of science, for the first time a book on the philosophy of astronomy is written for a broad audience.

The Outlook argues that whatever the participant or mediatory statuses of machines may be in future research with large and complex datasets, understanding their uses and impacts at the granularity of human interaction and social accountability will be essential for attempts to integrate human and machine learning from data. It highlights the uses of the two notions of accountability addressed in this book, identifies a spectrum of natural scientists’ social inquiries that hints at their normative orientations, and argues for the use of ethnography as a reminder of human agency and responsibility.

Hume clearly distinguishes between better and worse causal inferences, notably in his “Rules by which to judge of causes and effects” in Treatise 1.3.15. Although Hume describes these rules as “all the logic I think proper to employ” in his philosophy (Treatise 1.3.15.11), the literature has paid relatively little attention to it. This chapter will investigate these eight rules, as well as their basis in Hume’s discussion of general rules. The paper then examines two controversial causal inferences in light of these rules by which to judge of causes and effects: first, the postulation of the calm passions; second, the missing shade of blue. As Hume himself recognizes, the correct application of these rules can be an enigmatic affair. Nevertheless, I find that there is reason to think that while Hume abides by these rules in his postulation of the calm passions, the missing shade of blue constitutes a gross violation of these same rules.

Research on life stories has a short history but has emerged as a thriving field. While several key papers have spurred research (e.g., McAdams, 1985; Pasupathi, 2001) from a philosophy of science perspective, it is interesting how an individual paper helps a field to flourish. We traced the impact of one early theoretical paper, Habermas and Bluck (2000), using structural topic modeling. Grounded in classic lifespan theory (Baltes et al., 1998), this article bridged the gap between telling individual memories in childhood and narrating life stories in adulthood. The authors made the first formal argument for the emergence of the life story in adolescence. Since publication, the article has provided a reference for the study of life stories (> 2,000 citations; APA PsycNet, 2022) for authors in over forty countries. Structural topic modeling uses an unsupervised learning algorithm sensitive to temporal context. It was applied to the abstracts text of all articles ever citing Habermas and Bluck (2000). Modeling identified nine topic areas, showing their citation fluctuation. We report these historic trends, providing a lens for examining the evolution of the field of life stories over time.

This concluding chapter revisits naturalized aesthetics, in which our understanding of art and aesthetic experience is clarified through a bidirectional exchange between philosophy and the empirical sciences, arguing for further collaboration with history and literature—disciplines whose existing cognitivist subfields are known as the cognitive humanities. The first part takes a closer look at the troublesome concept of the ‘natural,’ noting a tendency for neuroaesthetic approaches to search for human universals rather than attending to the particulars of culture and era. By contrast, naturalized aesthetics is—and ought to be—centrally concerned with other ‘natural’ connotations such as coherence with empirical evidence. The second part argues for the historical contingency of mental taxonomies and offers the history of emotions as a model for historicizing cognition and the arts. Awareness of past conceptions helps us ‘denaturalize’ present-day understandings to better appreciate how cognition is emergent and biocultural. The third part discusses scholarship applying the framework of distributed or situated (4E) cognition to aspects of the Early Modern theatre and the Enlightenment novel. Overall, a robust engagement between naturalized aesthetics and the cognitive humanities transforms the topic of cognition and the arts as well as the interdisciplinary exchange known as cognitive science.

Multiverse analysis is not simply a computational method but also a philosophy of science. In this chapter we explore its core tenets and historical foundations. We discuss the foundational principle of transparency in the history of science and argue that multiverse analysis brings social science back into alignment with this core founding ideal. We make connections between this framework and multiverse concepts developed in cosmology and quantum physics.

This chapter examines first the gradual infiltration of logical empiricism into British philosophy during the 1930s, mainly through lectures by Schlick and Carnap, and not necessarily in accordance with Neurath’s ideas. L. Susan Stebbing played an important role as mediator, although she reflected on differences between the Viennese and the British analytical approaches. A. J. Ayer’s bestselling book Language, Truth, and Logic prepared the ground to some extent, but, by the time Neurath arrived to give a series of lectures at Oxford University, philosophers were mostly absent serving in the war. Neurath’s lectures are reconstructed from his notes, and the changes and developments in his philosophy of science are examined, also with reference to his monograph Foundations of the Social Sciences. We show that Neurath’s late work adapted to British sociological and anthropological thinking, often at the cost of bitter debates with old friends, such as Rudolf Carnap.

While there are affinities between Collingwood’s views and pragmatism, their shared considerations of the socio-historical dimensions of scientific knowledge have not been explored thus far. This chapter aims to fill this gap by comparing Collingwood’s views from An Essay on Metaphysics with pragmatist stances in contemporary philosophy of science by Philip Kitcher and Hasok Chang. In addition to similarities regarding the importance of the purposes of inquiry and framing knowledge in relation to a system of practice, there are disagreements between Collingwood and this strand of pragmatism regarding truth, propositional knowledge, and drawing out political implications. I argue that Collingwood’s approach can supply tools that can assist the pragmatist goals of improving scientific practice, mainly through analyzing cases from the history of science. This warrants mapping Collingwood’s place in twentieth-century philosophy as a precursor to recent attempts to overcome the clash between logical and historical approaches to scientific knowledge.