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Knowledge brokers are among the main channels of communication between scientists and the public and a key element to establishing a relation of trust between the two. But translating knowledge from the scientific community to a wider audience presents several difficulties, which can be accentuated in times of crisis. In this paper we study some of the problems that knowledge brokers face when communicating in times of crisis. During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we collected interviews with Italian experts that played a major role as knowledge brokers in the local media. We asked them questions about five main topics: the features and role of science communicators; the use of language in communicating science; the importance of the relation of trust with the public; the peculiarity of communicating in a context of emergency; the problem of disagreement among experts, and its public perception and communication. The goal of this paper is to understand, through the words of knowledge brokers themselves, what they consider as best practices (and obstacles) to create trust between scientists and the public. Our empirical work can inform normative accounts of what knowledge brokering should be about.

Artikkelissa argumentoidaan, että epistemologisen skientismin kannattajilla on oltava jonkinlainen näkemys tieteen metodologiasta. Skientismin kannattajat eivät voi vain vedota siihen, miten tiede sosiaalisesti organisoitu, koska tieteen sosiaalisten prosessien on itsessään täytettävä joitakin metodologisia kriteereitä. Yksi tällaisista kriteereistä on episteeminen arvioitavuus, joka edellyttää, että esitettyihin perusteisiin on oltava intersubjektiivinen pääsy. Muotoilemme artikkelissa kaksitoista teesiä, ja hahmoittelemme joitakin episteemisen arvioitavuuden seurauksia. Episteeminen arvioitavuus voi tukea epistemologisen skientismin heikkoja ja laajoja muunnelmia, joiden mukaan tiede on laajasti ymmärrettynä paras tuottamaan tietoa tai joitakin muita episteemisiä hyödykkeitä. Koska myös humanistiset ja yhteiskuntatieteet tuottavat episteemisesti arvioitavissa olevia tuloksia, skientismin kapeat versiot, joiden mukaan vain luonnontieteet tuottavat tietoa, vaativat tuekseen lisäargumentointia. Myös vahvan skientismin, joka pitää tiedettä ainoana tiedon lähteenä, on vedottava joihinkin lisäperiaatteisiin. This paper argues that the proponents of epistemological scientism must take some stand on scientific methodology. The supporters of scientism cannot simply defer to the social organisation of science because the social processes themselves must meet some methodological criteria. Among such criteria is epistemic evaluability, which demands intersubjective access to reasons. We derive twelve theses outlining some implications of epistemic evaluability. Evaluability can support weak and broad variants of epistemological scientism, which state that sciences, broadly construed, are the best sources of knowledge or some other epistemic goods. Since humanities and social sciences produce epistemically evaluable results, narrow types of scientism that take only natural sciences as sources of knowledge require additional argumentation in their support. Strong scientism, which takes sciences as the only source of knowledge, also needs to appeal to some further principles since evaluability is not an all-or-nothing affair.

This article comprises an up-to-date critical review of the field known as Economic Methodology or Philosophy of Economics (EM/PE). Two edited volumes (Kincaid and Ross 2021; Heilmann and Reiss 2021), a special issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology (2021), and a recent bibliometric analysis of the field (Claveau et al. 2021) constitute the basis of the review. Drawing on these sources, we identify a number of problematic trends in current EM/PE research. We claim that these trends could be interpreted as two kinds of biases, namely a micro-level bias and a mainstream bias. We discuss the respective details of these biases and their normative implications for the discipline.

This book was written with the assistance of Maija Harju, Ruta Jumite, Juuso Kortelainen, Marianna Laine, Shreya Sood and Sonja Sorri The theoretical structure for this textbook and course were developed over the 2 years of the ATARCA project. We worked to develop a means to mitigate the environmental tragedy of the commons associated with climate change. We diagnosed that two problems to be solved are (1) the negligible impact each individual makes on the global atmospheric commons, and (2) the worry that others will not do their part in making sustainable choices. As well, individuals may not have perfect information about the impact of their consumptive choices. The introductory video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgBEQq0laKE&t=2s

University rankings have led to the following paradox. On one hand, global and national university rankings have an increasing impact on scientific research and higher education. On the other hand, a growing number of researchers have argued that university rankings are biased and methodologically flawed as well as documented their unintended consequences that are counterproductive to education and research activities in universities. In this article, I combine sociological and cognitive perspectives to develop a theoretical framework for explaining this paradox. The theoretical framework has four interrelated parts. The first is a distinction between three temporal stages through which university rankings commensurate universities. The second consists of an account of the social mechanisms through which university rankings generate reactive outcomes that tend to transform universities instead of just measuring their quality. The third is a league table metaphor that links the conceptual domain of team sports and the conceptual domain of universities and, I argue, provides a cognitive mechanism that shapes how many extra-academic actors, such as prospective students and policymakers, understand the results of university rankings. The fourth focuses on the affordances of the published league tables of university rankings that many extra-academic actors use for outsourcing part of their decision-making to the league tables. As a whole, this framework allows us to understand how the interrelated and materially mediated actions of different groups of actors give rise to and sustain the paradox of university rankings.

The article offers an account of emotional mechanisms (EMs). EMs are claimed to be personal, often unconscious, distinctively patterned, mental processes whereby an emotion of a given kind is transmuted into an emotion of a different kind. After preliminary considerations about emotions as felt evaluations, the article identifies three families of emotional mechanisms. These processes are set in motion when a given emotion (for example, envy, shame or anger) generates feelings of inferiority and/or impotence in the subject resulting in a negative sense of self. These feelings prompt an evaluative reappraisal of the emotion’s intentional target. Based on the reappraisal, the subject comes to feel a different kind of emotion, which does not generate feelings of inferiority and/or impotence. Importantly, the second emotion entails a psychological disposition to be collectivised: the subject seeks confirmation of the revised evaluation by sharing the emotion with others. It is argued that these features set EMs apart from other emotion regulatory processes.

This paper reviews how research on the demarcation problem has developed, starting from Popper's criterion of falsifiability and ending with recent naturalistically oriented approaches. The main differences between traditional and contemporary approaches to the problem are explicated in terms of six postulates called the traditional assumptions. It is argued that all of the assumptions can be dismissed without giving up on the demarcation problem and that doing so might benefit further discussions on pseudoscience. Four present-day research movements on evaluating the boundaries of science are introduced: (1) philosophy of pseudoscience, (2) social epistemology of dissent, (3) agnotology, and (4) evaluation of expertise. Researchers working within these areas have abandoned some or all traditional assumptions.

In this Chapter, we address the challenge of explaining institutional change, asking whether the much-criticized rational choice perspective can contribute to the understanding of institutional change in political science. We discuss the methodological reasons why rational choice institutionalism (RCI) often assumes that institutional change is exogenous and discontinuous. We then identify and explore the possible pathways along which RCI can be extended to be more useful in understanding institutional change in political science. Finally, we reflect on what RCI theorizing would look like if it started to take endogenous change seriously: by giving up some of its simplifying assumptions, RCI can be a useful tool for analyzing institutional change, but choosing this path has consequences for the generality of the models in RCI as well as for the style of its theorizing.

The phenomenon of interactive human kinds, namely kinds of people that undergo change in reaction to being studied or theorised about, matters not only for the reliability of scientific claims, but also for its wider, sometimes harmful effects at the group or societal level, such as contributing to negative stigmas or reinforcing existing inequalities. This paper focuses on the latter aspect of interactivity and argues that scientists studying interactive human kinds are responsible for foreseeing harmful effects of their research and for devising ways of mitigating them.

Ressentiment is central for understanding the psychological foundations of reactionary politics, right-wing populism, Islamic fundamentalism, and radicalism. In this article we theorise ressentiment as an emotional mechanism which, reinforcing a morally superior sense of victimhood, expedites two parallel transvaluation processes: What was once desired or valued, yet unattainable, is reassessed as something undesirable and rotten, and one’s own self from being inferior, a loser, is reassessed as being noble and superior. We establish negative emotions of envy, shame, and inefficacious anger as the main triggers of ressentiment, with their associated feelings of inferiority and impotence, which target the vulnerable self. We identify the outcomes of ressentiment as other-directed negative emotions of resentment, indignation, and hatred, reinforced and validated by social sharing. We map the psychological structure of ressentiment in four stages, each employing idiosyncratic defences that depend on the ego-strength of the individual to deliver the transvaluation of the self and its values, and finally detail how social sharing consolidates the outcome emotions, values, and identities in ressentiment through shallow twinship bonds with like-minded peers. Our interdisciplinary theoretical account integrates classic philosophical scholarship of ressentiment and its contemporary proponents in philosophy and sociology, which highlight envy as the prime driver of ressentiment; it also considers the sociological approaches that focus on the repression and transmutation of shame and its social consequences, as well as the psychoanalytic scholarship on psychic defences and political psychology models on the emotionality of decision-making. We conclude the article by elaborating the political implications of ressentiment as the emotional mechanism of grievance politics.

This thematic issue brings together ten articles from political psychology, political sociology, philosophy, history, public policy, media studies, and electoral studies, which examine reactionary politics and resentful affect in populist times.

This paper proposes that the emotion of shame is key to understanding the appeal of Poland's ruling populist right-wing party, Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, or PiS). PiS employs shame in its strategy of emotion regulation in mediated party communication in pro-government media outlets. We suggest that there are two pillars of shame that underpin support for PiS: (1) the collective shame that originates from the perceived cultural inferiority of Poland in relation to the West/Europe, and (2) the individual shame of failing to achieve material prosperity in the context of the post-communist economic transformation. We examine how shame and pride have been instrumentalised in the coverage of the 2019 European Parliament elections by the right-wing media outlet wPolityce.pl. The paper demonstrates how wPolityce.pl consistently invoked both economic and cultural shame and highlighted the antagonism between PiS and the opposition by identifying the latter with a 'pedagogy of shame.'

Interdisciplinarity is widely considered necessary to solving many contemporary problems, and new funding structures and instruments have been created to encourage interdisciplinary research at universities. In this article, we study a small technical university specializing in green technology which implemented a strategy aimed at promoting and developing interdisciplinary collaboration. It did so by reallocating its internal research funds for at least five years to “research platforms” that required researchers from at least two of the three schools within the university to participate. Using data from semi-structured interviews from researchers in three of these platforms, we identify specific tensions that the strategy has generated in this case: (1) in the allocation of platform resources, (2) in the division of labor and disciplinary relations, (3) in choices over scientific output and academic careers. We further show how the particular platform format exacerbates the identified tensions in our case. We suggest that certain features of the current platform policy incentivize shallow interdisciplinary interactions, highlighting potential limits on the value of attempting to push for interdisciplinarity through internal funding.

This article reviews the relatively recent trend in economic methodology that consists in bringing insights from the debate in philosophy of science on values in science in order to analyse value-ladenness of economic research. The text claims that these insights from philosophy of science offer a slightly new approach to the topic of value judgments in economics that has been discussed in philosophy of economics for decades. It suggests that the perspective of philosophy of science reviewed in the article invites to rethinking analyses of feminist economists as important contributions to economic methodology. Non

The notion of grand challenges has become popular in research governance to support the allocation of research funding to societally beneficial topics. This article illustrates the flexibility and usefulness of grand challenges for university rectorates and project leaders when communicating with policy makers, research hinders, and local industries and companies. The Flexibility is beneficial to researchers and rectorate during the design stage of research projects. However, their utility diminishes in the later stages as other targets take precedence, particularly the need to demonstrate academic excellence. First, I explore the definitions of grand challenges in United States and European Union. Second, I provide a case study demonstrating the use of grand challenges in one technical research university. Last, I propose that if the aim in research policy is to orient research more towards societal benefit, more specific processual or outcome-oriented targets should be introduced to supplement grand challenges.

Discussions of the relations between the social sciences and the cognitive sciences have proliferated in recent years. Our article contributes to the philosophical and methodological foundations of the cognitive social sciences by proposing a framework based on contemporary mechanistic approaches to the philosophy of science to analyze the epistemological, ontological and methodological aspects of research programs at the intersection of the social sciences and the cognitive sciences. We apply this framework to three case studies which address the phenomena of social coordination, transactive memory, and ethnicity. We also assess how successful these research programs have been in providing mechanistic explanations for these phenomena, and where more work remains to be done.

The suggestions outlined here include the following. Money is a bundle of institutionally sustained causal powers. Money is an institutional universal instantiated in generic currencies and particular money tokens. John Searle’s account of institutional facts is not helpful for understanding the nature of money as an institution (while it may help to illuminate aspects of the nature of currencies and money particulars). The money universal is not a social convention in David Lewis’s sense (while currencies and money particulars are characterized by high degrees of conventionality). The existence of the money universal is dependent on a larger institutional structure and cannot be understood in terms of collective belief or acceptance or agreement separately focusing on money. These claims have important implications for realism about money.

Yksi lukion filosofian tavoitteista on kehittää opiskelijoiden itsenäistä ajattelua ja luoda pohja keskustelun järkiperäiselle arvioinnille ja kyvylle ilmaista näkemyksiä perustellen millä tahansa alalla, ei vain filosofiassa. Logiikkaan ja argumentaatioon liittyviä kysymyksiä käsitellään omana aihealueenaan erityisesti lukion filosofian ensimmäisessä pakollisessa moduulissa. Tästä huolimatta argumentaatio on koko lukion filosofian opetuksen läpäisevä aihe. Logiikan ja argumentaation Lops-tukimateriaali pyrkii tukemaan argumentaatiotaitoja sekä edistämään niiden harjoittelemista. Materiaali sisältää runsaasti opetusvinkkejä ja tehtäviä.

Filosofian olympialaisissa mitataan lukiolaisten kykyä laatia filosofinen essee annetun filosofisen lainauksen pohjalta. Suomi on voittanut kultaa neljästi ja muutenkin menestynyt kisoissa hyvin. Maamme edustajat käyvät läpi kolmen viikonlopun mittaisen valmennuksen, jossa opiskellaan tekstien tulkintaa, argumentointia sekä esseen rakennetta ja tyyliä. Koulutuksen sisältö antaa kuvan siitä, miten hyvä filosofinen essee rakentuu.

Cognitive sociology has been split into cultural and interdisciplinary traditions that position themselves differently in relation to the cognitive sciences and make incompatible assumptions about cognition. This article provides an analysis and assessment of the cognitive and methodological assumptions of these two traditions from the perspective of the mechanistic theory of explanation. We argue that while the cultural tradition of cognitive sociology has provided important descriptions about how human cognition varies across cultural groups and historical periods, it has not opened up the black box of cognitive mechanisms that produce and sustain this variation. This means that its explanations for the described phenomena have remained weak. By contrast, the interdisciplinary tradition of cognitive sociology has sought to integrate cognitive scientific concepts and methods into explanatory research on how culture influences action and how culture is stored in memory. Although we grant that interdisciplinary cognitive sociologists have brought many fresh ideas, concepts and methods to cultural sociology from the cognitive sciences, they have not always clarified their assumptions about cognition and their models have sketched only a few specific cognitive mechanisms through which culture influences action, meaning that they have not yet provided a comprehensive explanatory understanding of the interactions between culture, cognition and action.

Generalization from a case study is a perennial issue in the methodology of the social sciences. The case study is one of the most important research designs in many social scientific fields, but no shared understanding exists of the epistemic import of case studies. This article suggests that the idea of mechanism-based theorizing provides a fruitful basis for understanding how case studies contribute to a general understanding of social phenomena. This approach is illustrated with a reconstruction of Espeland and Sauder's case study of the effects of rankings on US legal education. On the basis of the reconstruction, it is argued that, at least with respect to sociology, the idea of mechanism-based theorizing captures many of the generalizable elements of case studies.

I examine ramifications of the widespread view that scientific objectivity gives us a permission to trust scientific knowledge claims. According to a widely accepted account of trust and trustworthiness, trust in scientific knowledge claims involves both reliance on the claims and trust in scientists who present the claims, and trustworthiness depends on expertise, honesty, and social responsibility. Given this account, scientific objectivity turns out to be a hybrid concept with both an epistemic and a moral-political dimension. The epistemic dimension tells us when scientific knowledge claims are reliable, and the moral-political dimension tells us when we can trust scientists to be socially responsible. While the former dimension has received a fair amount of attention, the latter is in need of analysis. I examine what it means for scientists to be socially responsible, that is, to follow “sound” moral and social values in different stages of scientific inquiry (Kourany in Philosophy of science after feminism, Oxford University Press, New York, 2010). Social responsibility is especially important when scientists function as experts in society. Members of the public and policymakers do not want to rely on scientific research shaped by moral and social values they have good reasons to reject. Moreover, social responsibility is important in social research in which moral and social values can legitimately play many roles. I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different answers to the question of how social scientists can identify appropriate moral and social values to inform their research. I argue that procedural accounts of social responsibility, such as well-ordered science and deliberative polling, have limitations.

Sustainability science is fundamentally an interdisciplinary venture, but what does this interdisciplinarity imply in practice? And how can, and should, we think about interdisciplinarity more generally? These are important philosophical and methodological questions for sustainability science, the answers to which remain at least partially out of sight for a variety of reasons. This chapter has three main aims. First, it provides a discussion of various dimensions of interdisciplinarity and how it can be understood from a philosophical perspective. Second, a historical perspective is assumed as well, as it introduces the history of interdisciplinarity and problem-driven science governance and some previous attempts at establishing interdisciplinary fields (ecological economics and cognitive science). And third, it provides an outline of an important strategy within sustainability science, suggesting that the focus has been on institutional reform.

This chapter provides an overview of different economics experiments, with a particular focus on different epistemic and non-epistemic interests underlying them. The chapter also discusses two types of philosophical interests in experimentation in economics, a general interest in the logic of inductive inferences and a more fine-grained interest in the divergence and convergence between economic and psychological perspectives in experimental practices in economics. Several experimental paradigms are used for illustrations, including public goods games, bargaining games, double auctions with the induced value method and random assignment method, and market entry games.

Disinformation about science can impose enormous economic and public health burdens. A recently proposed strategy to help online users recognise false content is to follow the techniques of professional fact checkers, such as looking for information on other websites (lateral reading) and looking beyond the first results suggested by search engines (click restraint). In two preregistered online experiments (N = 5387), we simulated a social media environment and tested two interventions, one in the form of a pop-up meant to advise participants to follow such techniques, the other based on monetary incentives. We measured participants’ ability to identify whether information was scientifically valid or invalid. Analysis of participants’ search style reveals that both monetary incentives and pop-up increased the use of fact-checking strategies. Monetary incentives were overall effective in increasing accuracy, whereas the pop-up worked when the source of information was unknown. Pop-up and incentives, when used together, produced a cumulative effect on accuracy. We suggest that monetary incentives enhance content relevance, and could be combined with fact-checking techniques to counteract disinformation.

Recent epistemology of modality has seen a growing trend towards metaphysics-first approaches. Contrastingly, this paper offers a more philosophically modest account of justifying modal claims, focusing on the practices of scientific modal inferences. Two ways of making such inferences are identified and analyzed: actualist-manipulationist modality (AM) and relative modality (RM). In AM, what is observed to be or not to be the case in actuality or under manipulations, allows us to make modal inferences. AM-based inferences are fallible, but the same holds for practically all empirical inquiry. In RM, modal inferences are evaluated relative to what is kept fixed in a system, like a theory or a model. RM-based inferences are more certain but framework-dependent. While elements from both AM and RM can be found in some existing accounts of modality, it is worth highlighting them in their own right and isolating their features for closer scrutiny. This helps to establish their relevant epistemologies that are free from some strong philosophical assumptions often attached to them in the literature. We close by showing how combining these two routes amounts to a view that accounts for a rich variety of modal inferences in science.

Economics has been criticized by other disciplines, and by some prominent economists themselves, for many of its methodological choices, in particular the specific assumptions in models. Some of these critiques have been appropriated by economists, giving rise to new sub-fields of economics. Critics from the field of history and sociology have long pointed out that the economic models of markets are not historically and institutionally embodied, as the real markets are. Various strands of institutional economics arose from such criticism. Claims by ecologists that natural capital is not completely substitutable with other forms of capital fostered the development of ecological economics. Likewise, criticism from psychologists that decision makers are irrational or boundedly rational foster the development of behavioral economics. This chapter concerns another example of persistent criticism, namely the assumption in economics that \emph{homo economicus} is an asocial animal, which does not hold on evolutionary, psychological or sociological grounds. How have economists responded to this criticism, and how successful have they been? To focus the discussion, I will review four strategies of model modification that aim to address the sociality of human behavior and interactions in the framework of rational choice. In particular, I will focus on modifications of game theory, which is the main analytical tool economists use to model interdependent choices. The perspective I adopt here reflects mainstream approaches to economic modeling, and I do not discuss more radical proposals to use entirely new frameworks such as complexity theory or network theory \citep[see e.g.][]{mason2007a}. This focus on the mainstream approaches is motivated as a useful way to highlight core characteristics of economic explanations of sociality. The review of four major approaches to modeling social influence in economics will indicate different interpretations of sociality, followed by a suggestion that the non-reductive and constructive interpretation brings economics closer to sociology and away from psychology and biology.

In this chapter, we argue that in order to understand the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary dialectics in sustainability science, it is useful to see sustainability science as a kind of management science, and then to highlight the hard-soft distinction in systems thinking. First, we argue that the commonly made natural-social science dichotomy is relatively unimportant and unhelpful. We then outline the differences between soft and hard systems thinking as a more relevant and helpful distinction, mainly as a difference between perspectives in systemic modeling toward models. We also illustrate that the distinction is methodologically useful to advance sustainability science by enabling us (i) to suggest novel ways of using existing theoretical, experimental, and computational resources of the sciences for renewable resource management, and (ii) to disentangle disciplinary disagreements in climate science.

An intuitively appealing argument for pluralism in economics can be made on the grounds that schools of economic thought complement one another. Let us call this the complementarity-based argument for pluralism (CAP). The concepts of complementarity, pluralism, and school of thought are scrutinized in this paper to evaluate this argument. I argue that the complementarity of schools is relative to scientific goals, which implies that discussing complementarity of schools of economic thought requires discussing the goals of economic research. I also distinguish weak from strong complementarity and show that some alleged complementarity relations between schools are weak and thus provide little support for CAP. However, if strong complementarity relations, relative to a valuable goal, can be demonstrated to exist between specific schools, this is a strong reason for pluralism about those schools. Finally, I provide suggestions on how to distinguish strong from weak complementarity. An intuitively appealing argument for pluralism in economics can be made on the grounds that schools of economic thought complement one another. Let us call this the complementarity-based argument for pluralism (CAP). The concepts of complementarity, pluralism, and school of thought are scrutinized in this paper to evaluate this argument. I argue that the complementarity of schools is relative to scientific goals, which implies that discussing complementarity of schools of economic thought requires discussing the goals of economic research. I also distinguish weak from strong complementarity and show that some alleged complementarity relations between schools are weak and thus provide little support for CAP. However, if strong complementarity relations, relative to a valuable goal, can be demonstrated to exist between specific schools, this is a strong reason for pluralism about those schools. Finally, I provide suggestions on how to distinguish strong from weak complementarity.

The study of short-term projects to implement policy has lately gained ground among scholars of environmental governance and public administration. The increasing reliance on and prevalence of projects, or ‘projectification’, has spurred critical debates on the ability of projects to contribute to long-term goals, including sustainability, as well as institutional change. Yet, the literature on projectification lacks specificity in terms of how projects are understood, how the relationship between projects and permanent organizations looks like, and how projects can influence institutional orders. The aim of this paper is to systematize the literature in order to uncover the process of transforming project outputs into institutional change. Three models of projectified governance – mechanistic, organic, and adaptive – is presented, providing a conceptual apparatus that advances the study of projects in environmental policy and governance. The paper argues that the adaptive model, with its reliance on multi-scalar networks for the coordination of project activities and knowledge, shows most promise in achieving institutional change to address complex environmental problems.

Economists and philosophers disagree about the concept of choice used in economics. Some behavioural economists argue that economic models of choice will improve as they become more and more psychologically realistic. Don Ross argues that this argument fails because its hidden assumption – that the economic concept of choice is the same as the psychological counterpart – is false. Ross conjectures that the economic concept of choice concerns a population-scale pattern of behavioural changes in response to incentives. We conduct a survey experiment to test two predictions that Ross’s conjecture generates. The statistical analysis of our data confirms our predictions, although with some qualifications. In interpreting our results, we distinguish two versions of commonsensible realism, strong and weak, and propose the weak one as a plausible explanation of our results. Weak commonsensible realism also produces further testable hypotheses. Some methodological implications of our study are discussed.

Non

If ontic dependence is the basis of explanation, there cannot be mathematical explanations. Accounting for the explanatory dependency between mathematical properties and empirical phenomena poses insurmountable metaphysical and epistemic difficulties, and the proposed amendments to the counterfactual theory of explanation invariably violate core commitments of the theory. Instead, mathematical explanations are either abstract mechanistic constitutive explanations or reconceptualizations of the explanandum phenomenon in which mathematics as such does not have an explanatory role. Explanation-like reasoning within mathematics, distinction between explanatory and nonexplanatory proofs, and comparative judgments of mathematical depth can be fully accounted for by a concept of formal understanding.

The concept of evidence has gone unanalysed in much of the current debate between proponents and critics of evidence-based medicine. In this paper I will suggest that part of the controversy rests on an understanding of the word “evidence” that is too broad, and therefore contains the contradictions that allow both camps to defend their position and charge their adversaries. I will argue that reconciling the different meanings of the word ‘evidence’ in “evidence-based medicine” should help put EBM in its rightful place.

The scale, pace, and intensity of human activity on the planet demands radical departures from the status quo to remain within planetary boundaries and achieve sustainability. The steering arms of society including embedded financial, legal, political, and governance systems must be radically realigned and recognize the connectivity among social, ecological, and technological domains of urban systems to deliver more just, equitable, sustainable, and resilient futures. We present five key principles requiring fundamental cognitive, behavioral, and cultural shifts including rethinking growth, rethinking efficiency, rethinking the state, rethinking the commons, and rethinking justice needed together to radically transform neighborhoods, cities, and regions.

According to the diversity-beats-ability theorem, groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers. We argue that the model introduced by Lu Hong and Scott Page (2004; see also Grim et al. 2019) is inadequate for exploring the trade-off between diversity and ability. This is because the model employs an impoverished implementation of the problem-solving task. We present a new version of the model which captures the role of ‘ability’ in a meaningful way, and use it to explore the trade-offs between diversity and ability in scientific problem solving.

I envision new directions in the methodology of experimental games in the field of developmental, environmental and resource economics. Although there have been extensive discussions on experimental practices in recent years, following Guala's [(2005). The methodology of experimental economics. Cambridge University Press] pioneering work, the methodology has narrowly focused on issues related to the internal and external validity of experimental results, in particular the extrapolation of results for policy. I introduce co-production as a popular perspective in the recent methodological discussion on sustainability science, and then I illustrate how it works in the familiar context of game-theoretic studies of common pool resource management. I then distinguish various ways in which methodologists could engage in the normative appraisal of co-production using economics, ranging from conservative to radical approaches.

How general are our findings concerning the evolution and development of life forms? I will discuss this question of generality and the related question concerning the existence of lawlike generalizations with specific reference to evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo). On the one hand, evo-devo suggests that the evolution and development of life forms is more contingent than we have previously presumed, thus showing that we have accidental and non-generalizable results concerning evolutionary and developmental phenomena. On the other hand, evo-devo reveals the existence of generality-maintaining mechanisms, thus showing that certain evolutionary and developmental generalizations have stability and necessity. These two findings suggest a picture of evolution as being both stable and contingent, repeatable and unique, and generalizable and non-generalizable. This picture of evolution was already present during the Modern Synthesis. At the same time, evo-devo has provided us with new insights into what are generality-destroying, generality-maintaining, and generality-creating mechanisms behind the evolution and development of life forms.

Winner of the 2020 Essay Competition of the International Social Ontology Society Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained realist interpretation of interactive human kinds by arguing for an explanatory domain account of the looping effect. First, I argue that knowledge of the feedback mechanisms that mediate the looping effect can supplement, and help to identify, the applicability domain over which a kind and its property variations are stably explainable. Second, by applying this account to cross-cultural case studies of psychiatric disorders, I distinguish between congruent feedback mechanisms that explain matches between classifications and kinds, and incongruent feedback mechanisms that explain mismatches. For example, congruent mechanisms maintain Western auditory experiences in schizophrenia, whereas exporting diagnostic labels inflicts incongruence by influencing local experiences. Knowledge of the mechanisms can strengthen explanatory domains, and thereby facilitate classificatory adjustments and possible policy and treatment interventions on psychiatric disorders.

Improvised joint action feels good, sometimes even great, as the participants experience highly rewarding “group flows”. In this chapter, I analyze the emergence of the affective phenomenology of improvised jazz and theater with the sociological interaction ritual theory of Randall Collins, enriched with phenomenological and enactivist theories on human sociality. I first distinguish three main kinds of affective experiences in joint improvisation: positive feelings about the activity itself; feelings of togetherness among the performers; and feelings of transcendence. Then I argue that the notion of group flow cannot explain the eliciting conditions, internal dynamics, and long-term effects of these experiences. Instead, I suggest that a philosophically enriched interaction ritual theory offers a more plausible account of the elements and processes from which the affective experiences of joint improvisation build up.

Erilaiset kognitiota koskevat kysymyksenasettelut ovat viime vuosikymmeninä yleistyneet yhteiskuntatieteissä. Vaikka sosiologit eivät ole olleet tässä suhteessa edelläkävijöitä, sosiologian sisältä löytyy kuitenkin kasvava joukko kulttuurin ja kognition rajapinnasta kiinnostuneita tutkijoita. Artikkelissa esittelemme tieteidenvälisen kognitiivisen sosiologian suuntausta, jonka tavoitteena on sillan rakentaminen kulttuurisosiologian ja kognitiotieteiden välille. Tässä suuntauksessa on keskusteltu erityisestisiitä, millaisten kognitiivisten prosessien välityksellä kulttuuri vaikuttaa ihmisten toimintaan ja miten näitä prosesseja on mahdollista tutkia empiirisesti. Lähestymme kognitiivista sosiologiaa näiden kysymysten kautta keskittyen Stephen Vaiseyn ehdotukseen soveltaa kognition kaksoisprosessiteorioita sen tutkimiseen, kuinka yksilötoimijoiden sisäistämät kulttuurisen skeemat motivoivat heidän toimintaansa. Vaiseyn ehdotus toi kognition kaksoisprosessiteoriat kulttuurisosiologiseen tutkimukseen ja käynnisti keskustelun erilaisista mittareista ja menetelmistä, joilla kulttuuristen skeemojen vaikutusta toimintaan voisi tutkia empiirisesti. Artikkelissa käsittelemme Vaiseyn käyttämän perinteisen survey-menetelmän ja sitä koskevan kritiikin lisäksi kognitiotieteistä ammentavia uusia kokeellisia menetelmiä. Vertaamme näitä uusia menetelmiä myös perinteisempiin kulttuurisosiologien käyttämiin menetelmiin, kuten haastatteluihin ja etnografiaan. Discussions concerning human cognition have become more prevalent in the social sciences during recent decades. While sociologists have not been at the forefront of these discussions, there is an increasing number of sociologists engaging with the interface between culture and cognition. In this article we introduce an interdisciplinary tradition of cognitive sociology that aims to build a bridge between cultural sociology and the cognitive sciences. Key questions within this research field concern the nature of the cognitive processes through which culture influences action and the methods for studying them. We approach these questions primarily through Stephen Vaisey’s proposal for applying dual-process theories of cognition in order to study how people’s internalized cultural schemas motivate their behavior. Vaisey’s proposal brought dual-process theories to the center of cultural sociology and gave rise to debates about different measures and methods for tracing the influence of cultural schemas on actions. In this article, we discuss Vaisey’s survey-based methodology and its criticisms. In addition, we consider new experimental methods from the cognitive sciences, and compare these methodological approaches with more traditional research methods used in cultural sociology, such as interviews and ethnography. peerReviewed

We review some of the major accounts in the current epistemology of modality and identify some shared issues that plague all of them. In order to provide insight into the nature of modal statements in science, philosophy, and beyond, a satisfactory epistemology of modality would need to be suitably applicable to practical and theoretical contexts by limited beings. However, many epistemologies of modality seem to work only when we have access to the kind of knowledge that is at least currently beyond our reach. Or, in the extreme case, it is argued that even if we knew all the relevant information about the respective domain – or even the entire state of the world – there would still remain a special class of modal truths that would be left unaccounted for. Neither picture bodes well for practical applicability, nor for the philosophical justification of these epistemologies. This is especially the case as we hold that one of the main motivations for modal inquiry typically arises in cases of imperfect information and limited cognitive resources. We close by providing a partial remedy to the situation by suggesting an overall framework of relative modality (RM) that can be used to both unify some existing modal epistemologies and, at the same time, make them more metaphysically modest.

The interdisciplinary exchange between economists and psychologists has so far been more active and fruitful in the modifications of Expected Utility Theory than in those of Game Theory. We argue that this asymmetry may be explained by economists' specific way of doing equilibrium analysis of aggregate-level outcomes in their practice, and by psychologists' reluctance to fully engage with such practice. We focus on the notion of belief that is embedded in economists' practice of equilibrium analysis, more specifically Nash equilibrium, and argue that its difference from the psychological counterpart is one of the factors that makes interdisciplinary exchange in behavioral game theory more difficult.

Sustainability science seeks to extend scientific investigation into domains characterized by a distinct problem-solving agenda, physical and social complexity, and complex moral and ethical landscapes. In this endeavor, it arguably pushes scientific investigation beyond its usual comfort zones, raising fundamental issues about how best to structure such investigation. Philosophers of science have long scrutinized the structure of science and scientific practices, and the conditions under which they operate effectively. We propose a critical engagement between sustainability scientists and philosophers of science with respect to how to engage in scientific activity in these complex domains. We identify specific issues philosophers of science raise concerning current sustainability science and the contributions philosophers can make to resolving them. In conclusion, we reflect on the steps philosophers of science could take to advance sustainability science.