What is error, and what is scientific error? Douglas Allchin explores the various types of scientific errors, how to identify them, and how to do science in light of them.
Douglas Allchin is an AAAS Fellow and Resident Fellow at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, and his work has primarily focused on the history and philosophy of science.
Check out his book, "Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science"!
Douglas Allchin’s Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science argues that scientific error shouldn’t be treated as an embarrassing sideshow to “real” science, but as something integral to how science actually learns and progresses. Instead of assuming that good methods straightforwardly yield reliable knowledge, Allchin urges a systematic “philosophy of error” that tracks how a claim can be justified at one time and later become unjustified—i.e., how changes in evidence, framing, and reasoning can overturn what once looked reasonable.
The book develops an “inventory” of error types across three layers of scientific justification. At the observational layer, errors can stem from material contamination, instrument problems, sampling and measurement misframing (like small samples, proxies, or confounders), and observer effects and biases. At the conceptual layer, mistakes arise in inference and interpretation—overgeneralization, faulty assumptions, confirmation bias, and culturally inflected biases, alongside a meta-risk Allchin calls “epistemic hubris” (the idea that these pitfalls only happen to other scientists). At the social layer, scientific discourse and institutions can also entrench errors (through weak vetting, communal biases, or distorted incentives), even though—ideally—organized skepticism and reciprocal criticism are supposed to help filter mistakes.
Finally, Allchin focuses on how errors are actually found and remedied: they don’t “announce themselves,” and there’s no single ‘error-correction method’—correction can be slow, uneven, and sometimes driven by contingencies rather than a tidy mechanism. Against the comforting slogan that science is simply ‘self-correcting,’ he argues we should be more explicit about when and how peer review and replication succeed or fail, and then manage error more deliberately. A key payoff is rethinking what counts as epistemic progress: “negative knowledge” (learning what’s not the case, and why) is still genuine knowledge, and improving reliability often means actively probing for hidden sources of error rather than only accumulating confirming evidence.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:56 - Overview of book
02:12 - Error09:08 - Uncertainty
11:42 - Epistemology
13:33 - Vagueness
17:38 - First layer of error: raw data
29:30 - Second layer of error: conceptual
50:25 - Third layer of error: social
1:10:46 - Recognizing error
1:22:34 - Resolving error
1:26:10 - Humans and history
1:29:18 - Useful biases
1:36:03 - Negative knowledge
1:41:49 - Pessimistic meta-induction
1:47:42 - Value of philosophy
1:50:23 - Conclusion
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Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen is professor in political theory at University of Aarhus, Denmark. His work has focused primarily on applied and normative ethical issues.Check out his Cambridge Element, “Wrongful Discrimination”!
Lippert-Rasmussen’s Wrongful Discrimination asks what “discrimination” is and, more importantly, what makes it wrongful when it is. He starts by distinguishing mere (generic) discrimination—just differentiating—from “group discrimination,” where people are treated differently because they’re seen as members of socially salient groups (race, gender, religion, etc.). He then maps key varieties of group discrimination (especially direct vs. indirect, plus structural patterns), and stresses that “wrongful” and “morally impermissible” can come apart: discrimination can wrong someone even in cases where (all things considered) an act might still be permissible, and vice versa.
The core of the book is a critical survey of three leading families of explanations for wrongfulness: harm-based views, disrespect-based views, and views that tie wrongfulness to sustaining or expressing relations of social inequality (a “social equality”/relational-egalitarian approach). Lippert-Rasmussen argues that each can explain many paradigm cases of wrongful direct discrimination, but each runs into serious trouble once you press on hard cases—e.g., cases that look wrongful without straightforward harm, or cases where harms are present but don’t seem to generate a complaint in the right way.
He then uses three especially important “non-paradigmatic” domains—indirect discrimination, implicit-bias discrimination, and algorithmic discrimination—to test these theories. The upshot is pessimistic about any single master explanation: these phenomena often don’t fit neatly under standard categories (prompting proposals like a third category beyond direct/indirect discrimination), and they expose systematic gaps in harm-, disrespect-, and social-equality accounts as usually formulated. Overall, he concludes that the prospects for a monistic theory of what makes discrimination wrongful are dim, and that we may need a more pluralistic (or significantly revised) framework.
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131. Dan Linford | The Causal Principle
Episode 131
Tuesday, December 9, 2025 • Duration 01:24:47
If causation is not fundamental, what keeps reality from turning into chaos with things randomly popping into existence, and does the kalām’s claim that whatever begins to exist has a cause really explain the order we see?
Dan Linford is lecturer at Old Dominion University, Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies. His work focuses on physics and the philosophy of physics, philosophy of religion.
2. Interview Summary
In this interview, Dan Linford discusses his paper “Without microphysical causation, just anything cannot begin to exist just anywhere,” motivated in part by debates around the causal principle often associated with the kalām cosmological argument. He frames the core question as whether the order we observe in the universe really requires causation—specifically, whether “whatever begins to exist must have a cause”—or whether there are non-causal ways to explain why we don’t see arbitrary “raging tigers” popping into existence out of nowhere.
A major focus is a traditional line of support for the causal principle that Linford labels the Hobbes–Hume–Edwards–Pryor principle (HPP): roughly, if the causal principle were false, we’d lack a good explanation for why things don’t begin to exist at arbitrary times, places, in arbitrary numbers, and of arbitrary kinds. Linford and the host also pause on how strong the causal principle is supposed to be (mere accident vs physical/metaphysical necessity), and note that once you add extra metaphysical commitments (the interview uses the A-theory of time as an example), the principle can become either harder to justify or even vacuously true in a way that won’t do the work causal-principle defenders want.
Linford then develops an alternative picture—drawing on “neo-Russellian” themes—on which causation isn’t fundamental to microphysics (for Russell-style reasons like time-symmetry), but causal talk remains useful in the special sciences for identifying “effective strategies” (a Cartwright-inspired point about intervention vs mere correlation). The upshot is that even if microphysical causation fails, it doesn’t follow that “anything goes”: what can begin to exist is still constrained by nomic (law-based), metaphysical, and logical principles, and those constraints can underwrite explanations of why tigers (etc.) don’t pop into existence. He also addresses a familiar objection to Humean-style views—why expect an “ordered continuation” of the mosaic rather than chaos—by appealing to Lewis-style similarity/“closeness” considerations (and related constraints on probability talk), arguing that the standard HPP-based worry doesn’t straightforwardly land.
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130. Phil Halper and Niayesh Afshordi | Battle of the Big Bang
Episode 130
Tuesday, December 2, 2025 • Duration 01:09:56
What, if anything, happened before the Big Bang, which origin story is right, and what future observations could finally decide between them?
Phil is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Socieity, science popularizer, and runs the excellent YouTube channel "Phil Halper", aka Skydivephil. Niayesh Afshordi is professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo. He is also a founding faculty member at the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics and an Associate Faculty in the Cosmology and Gravitation group at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
2. Book Summary
Battle of the Big Bang argues that what most people call “the Big Bang” is really two things: a well-tested story about a very hot early universe, and a much less secure story about an initial “bang” or singular beginning. The authors frame the hot early universe as “science’s earliest memory,” while emphasizing that cosmologists are now trying to recover an even earlier “lost memory,” using new physics rather than just extrapolating familiar laws backwards forever. They set the stage with a brisk history of cosmological thinking and with the central puzzle: the standard picture explains a lot about how the universe evolves, but it does not straightforwardly tell us what (if anything) happened before the Big Bang, or what replaces the would-be singularity.
The middle of the book is a guided tour through today’s rival “origin stories,” presented as a genuine competition with strengths, weaknesses, and lots of unfinished business. Using inflation and its offshoots as one major contender, the authors then explore a sequence of alternatives: multiverse ideas, Hawking-style “no boundary” beginnings, string-theoretic scenarios like colliding branes and string-gas phases, loop-quantum-gravity-inspired “big bounce” pictures, cyclic models, “born from a black hole” proposals, varying-speed-of-light approaches, holographic cosmology, and even self-creation/time-loop possibilities. A recurring theme is that the singularity is widely treated as a sign that our two great frameworks, quantum mechanics and general relativity, cannot both be straightforwardly applied at the earliest times, so any serious account has to confront quantum gravity head-on, even though there is no consensus (and sometimes “too many answers”) about what that looks like in detail.
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129. Chloe Romanis | Biotechnology, Gestation, and the Law
Episode 129
Tuesday, November 25, 2025 • Duration 01:14:17
What happens to our laws about pregnancy, parenthood, and abortion when “gestation” can be shared, transferred, or even moved outside the human body by new biotechnology?
Elizabeth Chloe Romanis is Associate Professor in Biolaw in the Durham Law School as well as in the Durham Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences, and her work focuses on healthcare law and bioethics.
In Biotechnology, Gestation, and the Law, Elizabeth Chloe Romanis argues that debates about reproduction are often built on shaky concepts, and that this matters once new technologies make “ordinary” assumptions about pregnancy and birth start to wobble. A central move is to separate pregnancy (a state of being) from gestation (a generative process), and to show how legal thinking slides between incompatible pictures, sometimes implicitly treating the fetus as part of the pregnant person, but more often treating the pregnant person as a “container.” This conceptual work is not just metaphysical housekeeping: it exposes the background assumptions that structure current legal schemas and shape how people’s lives are regulated.
Building on that foundation, Romanis proposes treating “technologies enabling gestation” as a genus that includes surrogacy, uterus transplantation (UTx), and ectogestation, and she argues that the law’s focus on “assisted conception” is a poor fit for regulating this very different procreative enterprise. She then tracks how existing frameworks can blunt the technology’s transformative potential by trying to force new modalities of gestation to mimic “natural” procreation, a pattern tied to deeper forms of biological essentialism and a tendency to privilege the binary, two-parent nuclear family. On sex and gender, she argues that these technologies can be equality-enhancing for marginalized groups, but that it is a mistake to treat them as a simple “solution” for women’s equality; the more radical potential lies in “unsexing” generative labour and disrupting the assumption that gestation is inherently female.
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128. Dan Zahavi | Being We
Episode 128
Tuesday, November 18, 2025 • Duration 01:35:48
What if the most important thing about acting together is not that our individual intentions line up, but that it can genuinely change how the world shows up to us through a first-person plural perspective?
Dan Zahavi is professor of philosophy and the director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen and is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, with Shaun Gallagher. His work focuses on phenomenology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
Check out his book, "Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Social Ontology"!
Zahavi’s Being We argues that debates about ‘collective intentionality’ miss something central if they focus only on how individual intentions line up. The phenomenological tradition, he claims, forces us to take seriously the *qualitative* character of doing things together: feeling, thinking, and acting “as part of a we” can transform one’s sense of self, one’s relation to others, and one’s experience of the world. On this view, *we*-perspectives and *we*-experiences are not optional add-ons to an already complete theory of mind; they are genuine explananda that constrain what we can plausibly say about selfhood and social cognition.
In Part I (“We and I”), Zahavi tackles the “primacy” question: does the first-person plural precede the first-person singular, or vice versa? He argues that talk of a we requires plurality and differentiation, and that we-experiences presuppose (rather than erase) the self–other distinction; attempts to derive phenomenal consciousness or basic subjectivity from communal life don’t succeed. That doesn’t mean sociality is irrelevant to selfhood, but it does mean we need careful distinctions between cultural/conceptual accounts of the self and the minimal first-personal “for-me-ness” of experience—because an irreducible plurality of perspectives is exactly what makes distinctive forms of being-with possible in the first place.
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127. Barry Loewer | Laws of Nature
Episode 127
Tuesday, November 4, 2025 • Duration 01:36:10
What are laws of nature, do they govern the universe or merely summarize it, and what do those answers imply about induction, chance, and time’s arrow?
Barry Loewer is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and the director of the Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences. In this interview, we explore philosophical issues related to laws of nature and related topics.
2. Interview Summary
Barry Loewer begins by situating the very idea of “laws of nature” historically: people have long noticed regularities, and often tied them to theology, but the modern notion of simple mathematical laws that describe motion and form the aim of physics really crystallizes in the 17th–18th centuries (especially in Descartes, influenced by Galileo). On that early picture, laws were not just descriptions but part of how God “governed” inert matter, since matter itself was taken to be passive. This historical backdrop sets up the interview’s central contrast between “governing” (non-Humean) and “systematizing” (Humean) conceptions of laws.
Loewer then develops the Humean line through David Lewis’s “best system” idea: take the total distribution of fundamental properties across spacetime, and the laws are whatever axioms best systematize it by balancing simplicity and informativeness. He contrasts this with Maudlin-style governance using a vivid joke: on the governing view, God sets initial conditions + laws and can “go on vacation,” whereas on the Humean view God would have to create the whole history “all at once,” and we later extract the best system from it. The conversation then turns to why many philosophers resist Humeanism: they want something to “hold the universe together,” and they worry that if laws are mere regularities then induction becomes unjustifiable; Loewer replies that Hume shows there’s no guarantee of induction anyway—science is inherently risky—and he brings in Goodman’s “grue” problem to show that even stating the induction problem correctly requires constraints on which predicates/generalizations count as projectible.
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126. Emma Borg | Acting for Reasons
Episode 126
Tuesday, October 28, 2025 • Duration 01:20:20
If humans are as irrational and “automatic” as some psychologists suggest, why does explaining what people believe and want still feel like the best way to understand what they do?
1. Guest
Emma Borg is Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, although before that was for a long time Professor at the University of Reading. Her work focuses on the philosophy of language, mind, and cognitive science. In this interview, we focus on her recent book, "Acting for Reasons: In Defence of Common-sense Psychology".
Emma Borg’s Acting for Reasons: In Defence of Common-sense Psychology argues that the familiar ‘common-sense psychology’ (CP) framework—explaining action via contentful mental states like beliefs and desires—remains broadly vindicated despite recent experimental and theoretical backlash. Borg characterizes CP as combining (i) a claim about action generation (typically, behaviour is caused “in the right way” by an agent’s reasons) and (ii) a claim about action understanding (typically, we explain and predict others by attributing mental states and inferring what those states should lead them to do). The book’s central aim is to resist the increasingly popular conclusion that “common-sense psychology is wrong” and to show that CP’s reach is much broader than “high days and holidays” cases of explicit deliberation.
The first half of the book takes on the Heuristics-and-Biases-inspired attacks on CP’s picture of decision-making. Borg distinguishes two strands: the No Reasons challenge, where heuristics are treated as automatic, “gut-feel” processes that bypass reasons altogether, and the Insufficient Reasons challenge, where people do consult reasons but in a biased, evidentially thin, or otherwise irrational way. She argues that defining heuristics as reasons-insensitive (or inferring that from their “fast, automatic” feel) is a mistake, and that much of the empirical case for endemic irrationality relies on contentious interpretations and methodological pitfalls (including concerns tied to replication, stability, and ecological validity). Overall, Borg’s conclusion on this side is that widespread heuristic reasoning does by itself undermine CP’s general assumption of individual rationality and reasons-responsiveness.
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125. Malcolm Keating | Reason in an Uncertain World
Episode 125
Tuesday, October 21, 2025 • Duration 01:29:30
How can Nyāya philosophy teach us to argue better, spot bad reasoning, and still live well amid uncertainty?
Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Smith College. His work focuses primarily on Indian philosophy. In this interview, we focus on his book, "Reason in an Uncertain World: Nyāya Philosophers on Argumentation and Living Well".
Reason in an Uncertain World argues that Nyāya philosophers offer something modern “critical thinking” usually doesn’t: a unified picture of how reasoning and argumentation connect to living well. Keating starts from the fact that we now face an overwhelming stream of claims and controversies, and while people often look to “ancient wisdom” for emotional stability, they look elsewhere for tools to sort truth from fiction. Nyāya, he argues, can do both: it treats reasoning skills and debate practices as socially embedded ways of getting to truth and as crucial for leading happy, virtuous, meaningful lives.
The first half of the book develops Nyāya’s epistemology as a response to uncertainty and suffering. Chapter 1 sets the historical stage and introduces the Nyāya thought that understanding (especially epistemology) can relieve pain and suffering, orienting inquiry toward an “excellent” human goal; Keating illustrates this with Nyāya reflections on and the attraction of a final state without pain and suffering. Chapters 2–6 then build a toolkit of “ways of knowing” (including perception, inference, and testimony), highlighting the idea of “certification” (reflectively checking that one really knows), the structure and varieties of inference (and how counterfeit inferences arise through pseudo-reasons), how to evaluate testimony and handle conflicting reports, and how doubt—especially doubt arising from controversy—can be a rational trigger for further inquiry rather than a skeptical dead-end.
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124. Amir Horowitz | Intentionality Deconstructed
Episode 124
Tuesday, October 14, 2025 • Duration 01:34:01
Can anything be genuinely about the world, or is intentionality just a useful way of organizing our thoughts and talk?
Amir Horowitz is head of the PPE program and professor at the Open University of Israel. His work covers a range of topics, but especially the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and language.
Check out his recent book, "Intentionality Deconstructed: An Anti-Realist Theory"!
Horowitz’s Intentionality Deconstructed argues for intentional anti-realism: the view that intentionality (aboutness, reference, “think-about,” etc.) is not merely absent from the world, but cannot be instantiated because the very concept is “inherently flawed,” making the thesis a necessary, conceptual, a priori one rather than an empirical eliminativist proposal. He begins by focusing on how we could ever settle questions of reference/content in the first place, using disputes surrounding the Gödel–Schmidt case in experimental philosophical semantics to motivate the claim that neither armchair intuitions nor theoretical “constraints” can genuinely determine reference. The core idea is that you can’t extract an intentional “function” from a representation itself (anything “encoded” would still require interpretation), and the concept of reference is too neutral to privilege one candidate relation over others.
The middle of the book is largely negative: it targets prominent ways of securing intentionality. Against the (roughly, that phenomenology alone constitutes intentional directedness), Horowitz argues that no intrinsic mental property—including phenomenal character—can do the grounding work required, and that “intrinsic intentionality” makes explicit a tension (intrinsicness vs transcendence) that cannot be resolved. He then attacks strategies: even if minds/languages stand in many causal/informational relations to the world, the reductive naturalist must explain what makes of them semantic/intentional relation, and Horowitz argues that the needed justification is unavailable—mere stipulation (“identify R with aboutness”) won’t get realism off the ground.
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In the final stretch, the book turns from “what might have happened” to “how could we ever know,” stressing the limits of what current headline instruments can actually tell us about the beginning. The authors note that even spectacular observatories like JWST are not designed to see back to the origin itself, and that the cosmic microwave background is the oldest light we can directly observe, so ordinary telescopes hit a hard wall; to probe earlier than that, we likely need new “messengers,” especially primordial gravitational waves, and better ways of squeezing evidence out of subtle imprints on the sky. They also reflect on the sociology of foundational disputes, warning that scientific consensus is not the same thing as popularity, and that the “battle” can sometimes resemble factional conflict more than dispassionate evaluation. The upshot is deliberately modest: nobody yet knows what happened at the Big Bang, but the path forward is clearer than it used to be, because future observations could rule whole classes of models in or out.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:54 - Impetus for the book
07:12 - Historical background
09:01 - The Big Bang
15:22 - The meaning of “nothing”
15:43 - Quantifier vs. noun sense of nothing
18:22 - Almost nothing scenarios
23:37 - How theories bear on cosmic origins
28:47 - Concerns about multiverse theories
29:10 - Testability of multiverse models
34:05 - String theory and brane theory
39:25 - Could there be time before time?
39:59 - Limits of temporal concepts
43:43 - Two-direction time models
50:05 - Other models
54:01 - Are we on the cusp of a new cosmic revolution?
Later chapters apply this framework to parenthood and abortion. Romanis examines why gestation has been used to anchor legal motherhood, and how that rationale becomes unstable once gestational work can be divided across people and machines (as in partial or complete ectogestation), creating new puzzles about who counts as a legal parent and when parental rights and responsibilities should begin. She emphasizes the importance of keeping clear boundaries that protect pregnant people, including carefully distinguishing entities undergoing extra-uterine gestation from fetuses, precisely to avoid expanding fetal-centred regulation of pregnancy. Finally, she argues that technologies enabling gestation do not change the morality of abortion when the harms of unwanted pregnancy are centred, but they are likely to generate politically motivated pressures on abortion provision because much ectogestation literature frames abortion as “the problem” rather than recognizing it as a response to unwanted pregnancy.
Parts II and III then explain how we-ness is built up through concrete interpersonal relations and can take multiple forms. Zahavi emphasizes empathy and second-person engagement as ways of encountering another that preserve otherness while enabling coordination and mutual “contact,” and he distinguishes this from mere imaginative perspective-taking; this sets the stage for his analysis of shared emotions and why “affective sharing” needs clearer criteria than simple emotional contagion or matching feelings. Finally, he maps “varieties of we,” moving from intimate dyads and triads to thicker communal and national identifications: larger-scale wes are highly mediated, shaped by norms and institutions, and often sustained through “us–them” demarcation—sometimes actively orchestrated by political forces—so understanding we-formation also means understanding the risks of overly exclusive group identification.
In the final stretch, the interview broadens into the metaphysical question behind Loewer’s book-title riff on Hawking: what “breathes fire into the equations,” i.e., why this universe and this lawlike structure at all—and what the world (and knowers like us) must be like for physics to succeed. Loewer suggests physics can’t itself answer “why there is a universe” or “why there are laws,” since any such explanation would already presuppose laws (a theological answer might be possible, but it wouldn’t be a scientific one). He then connects laws to chance and time via the Albert–Loewer “Mentaculus” program: add a “Past Hypothesis” that the universe began in a very low-entropy state, combine it with the dynamical laws and a Boltzmann-style probability measure, and you get a package that yields objective chances and explains time’s arrow—what he calls a “probability map of the universe.”
The remainder of the book turns to CP’s second component—how we understand other people—and targets “deflationary” alternatives that try to explain social cognition without robust belief–desire attribution (e.g., behaviour-reading, mirror-neuron stories, “submentalizing,” or more “minimal” mentalizing). Borg argues that fully behaviour-reading approaches face serious empirical and theoretical problems, and that mid-ground views still don’t justify demoting CP to a niche role. Her final position is that deflationary resources may at most supplement CP (for certain developmental or special-purpose explanations), but they don’t supplant CP as the central, everyday framework for making sense of intentional action—so, taken together, the book concludes that common-sense psychology is broadly vindicated.
The second half turns from knowing to arguing: how people should (and often do) reason together when disagreements become interpersonal. Nyāya distinguishes truth-seeking “discussion” from competitive formats like disputation (aimed at victory), and Keating uses that contrast to analyze fallacies, equivocations, misleading objections, and the “points of defeat” that explain how someone can lose a debate even without directly refuting their view. The closing chapter draws the ethical lesson: because real debates often mix truth-seeking with ego, politics, and high stakes, Nyāya thinkers sometimes allow even morally serious arguers to use less-than-ideal argumentative tactics in special circumstances—while still treating reasoned discourse as a practice that shapes (and is shaped by) character and virtue.
Having cleared the ground, Horowitz develops intentional anti-realism in detail. The negative thesis is that content ascriptions “in themselves” lack truth conditions, but he pairs this with a practice-dependence account: relative to a scheme/practice of content ascription, such ascriptions can be true/false—e.g., “Gödel” can “refer” to Gödel under a causal-historical practice or to Schmidt under a descriptivist practice, while outside any practice the right answer is “to no one.” He then explains why content talk can still be useful and often successful: content ascriptions carry logico-syntactic messages (structural commitments) that can be true/adequate even if their semantic “aboutness” message is not, and the predictive/explanatory payoff of folk psychology can be attributed to these structural patterns rather than to real intentional properties. Finally, he addresses objections like the “success” argument and the “cognitive suicide” worry by treating “claim that/believe that” talk as rhetorical/“quoted” within a radical revisionary framework, and he closes with an Ockham-style moral: since intentional properties are dispensable and unsupported, we should reject their instantiation altogether.
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