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The Philosophy of Science Association Conference is a biennial philosophy meeting promoting research, teaching, and free discussion of issues in the philosophy of science from diverse standpoints. It represents a unique encounter between scholars across the globe and permits different communities, approaches and line of research to mix and blend together. This year PSA24 was in New Orleans between the 14th and the 17th of November 2024, giving us a unique combination of philosophy of science, historical American scenery and some party atmosphere (together with some natural vitamin D, warmth and sun which Norway based scholars especially appreciate).
The AssemblingLife project has been thrilled to take part in this meeting and to be able to connect with different philosophers and scientists learning about new research and trends. Our PhD researcher Sebastian Sander Oest presented a joint paper “Possible origin of division of labor in multicellular organisms” at the poster session together with Tianqin Ren, Claudia Gadaleta, Jokubas Kanusauskas and Claudio Davini. Our postdoc researcher Francesca Bellazzi presented her paper “Vitamins as investigative kinds” at the poster session and our future postdoc researcher Bendik Hallem-Aaby presented “Behaviour beyond animals” at the session “Non-human minds”.
We all enjoyed the conference, and we appreciated different aspects of it. For Sebastian, it was his very first experience at a big philosophy conference and while it felt a bit overwhelming (as such events can really be!), it gave him the chance to explore the field. He particularly enjoyed the session on Biological Levels and the one on Boundaries. Of the first, he thought that the work of Margarida Hermida “Physical Explanation and the Autonomy of Biology” on the philosophy of biophysics the autonomy on biology, unpacking five different theses in which this can be unpacked. Of the second, he enjoyed the talks of Jeffrey Sykora, “The Lawlike Nature of Boundary Conditions in Fluid Dynamics” and the one of Vincent Ardourel “Singular Limit and Intertheory Relations in Fluid Mechanics” noticing how philosophically fascinating fluids are and how much they can allow us to reflect on boundary conditions. Lastly, the scientific objectivity debate represented a final chance to reflect on how and whether science is objective.
For Francesca, the conference represented a fantastic chance to see how diverse philosophy of science is becoming every year and how much it extends beyond the “classic” general philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and philosophy of biology. The sessions were extraordinarily diverse and included philosophy of medicine, cross-disciplinary philosophy of science, philosophy of science communication and many others. In particular, she had the chance to chair the session “Sowing Philosophies of Agricultural Science” organised by the Assembling Life advisory board member Julia Bursten. It was fascinating to learn how many different theoretical aspects are involved in agricultural sciences and questions which regard modelling, measurement, policy and history.
Both she and Sebastian particularly enjoyed the symposium “Physics beyond physics - On the empirical success and explanatory role of biophysical models” put together by the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice. This session provided interesting insights into extending and transferring physical models to the life sciences and in particular to evolution. Sebastian appreciated the talks by Bill Cannon and Daniel Nicholson. Francesca and Sebastian noticed in particular how the paper on model adaptation of Patricia Palacios “From Spins to Flocks: The Vicsek Model as a Case of Model Adaptation” could be used to think of self-assembly theory and models as something that is adapted and transferred through different case studies entities at different scales. Together with learning and discovering new insights on topics related to self-assembly and the philosophy of biochemistry, Francesca enjoyed exploring sessions beyond her everyday research. The symposium “Capturing Mental Illness: Function, Dysfunction, and Neurodiversity Framings” provided interesting insights into functions and how to frame functional explanations. The arguments presented by Sera Schwarz “Problems and Prescriptions in Psychiatric Explanation - A normative analysis of explanatory framing effects” regarding explanations in psychiatry can be extended to other disciplines presenting contrasting or different explanations of the same phenomena (as for instance biochemical functionality).
Bendik found too the conference a good ground to get useful contact points and literature suggestions to start his new project within Assembling Life. While being there with his previous team, PSA represented a chance to bring together his various projects. In particular, the symposium “Cognition and Phylogeny: Integrating Tree-Thinking Into Psychology” provided interesting and novel insights into how phylogeny can enrich our understanding of cognition and behaviour. This was particularly insightful into Bendik’s investigation into group self-organisation in light of group-behaviour and how this interacts with capacities of the individuals.
Everyone got good feedback on their work, and we especially appreciated the poster session. The quality of the works presented was high and the interplay of more senior and established scholars together with early career researchers and graduate students created a fruitful environment and an overall well attended event. Also, the activities of outreach and public engagement were a success and the public session on misinformation was done in an old theatre and was pretty cool. If the team presented a criticism, it would be on the program, the parallel sessions were many and the events often run from 8 in the morning until late in the evening, making attending the whole thing very exhausting or impossible. However, we can take this as a sign to include as many scholars as possible – and this created overall a fruitful conference!