Borut Trpin

New paper with @stephanhartmann.bsky.social forthcoming in Philosophical Studies: "Coherence-Based Measures of Explanatory Power."

Recent work questions probabilistic measures of explanatory power. We propose a coherence-based alternative that avoids the worries.

philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28483/

Daniel Kostić, PhD What is your current role and how did you get here? I am currently an Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFIS PAN). This is a purely...

Big thanks to @annaalexandrova.bsky.social, @gabrieltarziu.bsky.social and Michal Hladky for the invitation and organisation! See also @danielkostic.bsky.social‘s entry: eenps.weebly.com/blog/daniel-...

Borut Trpin What is your current role and how did you get here? I am currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, with affiliation also at the University of Maribor. My path...

I recently added an entry on the @eenphilsci.bsky.social blog: a bit of my story from early international experiences to my current work on coherence and reasoning, and what it’s like building philosophy of science here in Central & Eastern Europe.
eenps.weebly.com/blog/borut-t...

#philsci

We conceived this series to put into words the experience of #philsci researchers from Eastern n Central Europe. There are 2 entries from @boruttrpin.bsky.social and @danielkostic.bsky.social Thanks to both! These are stories of success and resilience, but read about the darker sides too and learn.

This paper (with @martinjustin.bsky.social) grew out of the Miščević memorial conferences in Rijeka and Maribor and connects Nenad's idea of reflective luck to our coherence modeling work. It was recently published in Analiza. Link here if of interest: journals.um.si/index.php/an...

Photo of palm trees in San Diego & text: PSA PHILOSOPHY Of SCIENCE ASSOCIATION PSA 2026 PSA 2026 - San Diego Conference Website The PSA's 30th biennial meeting is scheduled to take place in San Diego, CA from Nov 19-22, 2026.

Submissions open for PSA Biennial Meeting Contributed Papers, deadline March 15, & Posters, due by June 1, 2026.
PSA 2026 is in San Diego November 19 - 22, 2026 #HPS

psa26.oa-event.com

www.philsci.org/psa_2026.php

Dear EPSA members, In our first newsletter of 2026, we want to announce some good news and update you on some recent developments pertaining to EPSA. The good news is that we have now secured locations not only for EPSA27 but also for EPSA29! We were very lucky this year to receive nothing less than four bids to host EPSA27; all bids were very strong and carefully prepared, and the Steering Committee found it very difficult to decide. Eventually, we settled on Warsaw, Poland, for 2027 (with Marcin Milkowski and Hajo Greif as co-chairs) and Ljubljana, Slovenia, for 2029 (with Borut Trpin as chair). More details will follow in due course, but for now, we can all be happy that the next two EPSAs are in good hands and will take place in splendid locations! This is also a good moment to thank the Steering Committee members who have concluded their term (Lilia Gurova, Federica Russo, Marcel Weber, Catherine Herfeld, Edouard Machery and Caterina Marchionni) and in particular my predecessor Stéphanie Ruphy as EPSA President. Thanks to their good work, the current Steering Committee has found EPSA to be in excellent shape, which will allow us to continue to serve the philosophy of science community in Europe in constructive ways. We also want to thank Dunja Šešelja and Mathias Frisch, who have completed their terms as Editors-in-Chief of the European Journal for Philosophy of Science, and to welcome Samuel Fletcher and Catherine Herfeld as the new Editors-in-Chief of EJPS. Speaking of EJPS, we will soon be announcing the Call for Papers for the Proceedings of EPSA25, with Julie Jebeile as guest editor for the Proceedings (plus a team of co-editors to be announced shortly). Finally, the EPSA BlueSky account is now managed by Simon Lohse; if you are on BlueSky, please follow us there at https://bsky.app/profile/epsaphilsci.bsky.social Warm Regards, Catarina Dutilh Novaes and the EPSA Steering Committee

📣 Letter with the latest updates on EPSA2027 *and* EPSA2029, changes in the steering committee, the proceedings for EPSA25, and more... #philsci

Excited to share that EPSA 2029 will take place in Ljubljana! 🎉
Big congrats to the Warsaw team for hosting EPSA 2027 too!
@epsaphilsci.bsky.social @mmilkowski.bsky.social @hgreif.bsky.social

Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow YouTube video by Antonio Jose Osuna Mascaró

She uses the bristled end of a deck brush on her back and hindquarters, using repeated place-and-pull motions. For more sensitive areas such as the belly flap, udder, and anal region, she switches to the stick end, using careful, repeated poke-and-lift movements. See video link: youtu.be/bAk4PFEuWKQ

2 year Postdoctoral Research Fellow opportunity at the University of St Andrews on my project "Aesthetic Values and the Social Dimensions of Science"

www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

#philosophy #philsci

Testing abductions from uncertain evidence Abstract. Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) is traditionally conceived of as a rule of inference, in which one infers to the hypothesis that provides

@boruttrpin.bsky.social and I have a new paper out in Philosophical Quarterly. We had both written on how inference to the best explanation could work with uncertain evidence. So we teamed up to test some suggestions for how to do that using computer simulations: academic.oup.com/pq/article/d...

Good news: The deadline for submissions to the EJPS TC “Understanding Climate Change: A Multifaceted Inquiry”, which I’m co-editing with Borut Trpin, has been extended to March 1, 2026.

Please share with anyone who might be interested!

More info here: link.springer.com/collections/...

The deadline for the EJPS TC "Understanding Climate Change: A Multifaceted Inquiry" which Gabriel Târziu and I are guest editing has been extended to
*March 1, 2026.*

Consider submitting a paper if your research fits our call and please share the info!

More info: link.springer.com/collections/...

Doctoral Researcher, Philosophy of science: AI in scientific problem solving Doctoral Researcher, Philosophy of science: AI in scientific problem solving

A funded PhD position in philosophy of science: AI in scientific problem solving. At @helsinki.fi @tint-philosophy.bsky.social #philsci jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki...

Original TV ad for VW Golf with The Munich Beefeaters Dixieland Band YouTube video by Thalia Gigerenzer

Learned recently that Gerd Gigerenzer appears in a 1974 Volkswagen Golf ad - and with a banjo, no less!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxss...

Master in Logic and Philosophy of Science Our Master (MA) program in Logic and Philosophy of Science was founded in October 2012. It is an international MA program of the Faculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Religious Studies at L...

The 2026 application round for the MA in Logic and Philosophy of Science at @lmumuenchen.bsky.social is now open. Please help us spread the word. www.philosophie.lmu.de/en/study/deg...

New on the Archive:

Sikimić, Vlasta (2025) Fair or Flawed? Rethinking Grant Review with Generative AI. [Preprint]

https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27232/

What a successful kick-off of the PSA around the World - Eastern Europe! So many super interesting talks. Kudos to @tmarvan.bsky.social, @magdalenamalecka.bsky.social, @philsci.bsky.social and @eenphilsci.bsky.social for such a great job at organizing it! Looking forward to the next one on 14 Nov.

Theoretical Rationality and Practical Reason The division of theoretical and practical philosophy was codified by Kant, who set aside the kingdom of natural necessity and the kingdom of moral ends. The last centuries saw gradual erosion of this ...

Excited (and a bit daunted) to be part of a remarkable keynote lineup at Theoretical Rationality and Practical Reason conference at Sofia University next May.
Abstract submissions are open until January 1, 2026.
philevents.org/event/show/1...

How to conceptualise research environments for transdisciplinary work? How do researchers negotiate such spaces, and with which implications for knowledge produced? @rosetrappes.bsky.social and I answered by proposing the idea of "multiplex research environments"! See: rdcu.be/eN8ie #philsci

Nonmonotonic Logic Cambridge Core - Logic - Nonmonotonic Logic

If logic is your thing. Free download for two weeks

Coherence as a constraint on scientific inquiry - Synthese We investigate the epistemic role of coherence in scientific reasoning, focusing on its use as a heuristic for filtering evidence. Using a novel computational model based on Bayesian networks, we simulate agents who update their beliefs under varying levels of noise and bias. Some agents treat reductions in coherence as higher-order evidence and interpret such drops as signals that something has gone epistemically awry, even when the source of error is unclear. Our results show that this strategy can improve belief accuracy in noisy environments but tends to mislead when evidence is systematically biased. We explore the implications for the rationality of coherence-based reasoning in science.

Just published: Coherence as a Constraint on Scientific Inquiry, Synthese (with @martinjustin.bsky.social).
TL,DR: coherence considerations can be good or bad in scientific inquiry. Our paper suggests how to determine when it is the former rather than the latter.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Understanding Climate Change: A Multifaceted Inquiry Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time. Addressing it requires an unprecedented level of collaboration and engagement between ...

Quick reminder: the deadline for submissions to the EJPS TC “Understanding Climate Change: A Multifaceted Inquiry”, which I’m co-editing with @boruttrpin.bsky.social, is December 1, 2025.

Please share with anyone who might be interested!

More info here: link.springer.com/collections/...

A weirdly underappreciated problem about Inference to the Best Explanation is how it can handle uncertain evidence. This new paper, now forthcoming in Philosophy of Science, proposes a strategy for doing that (and argues that Einstein may have used it). #philsky #philsci

doi.org/10.1017/psa....

Our paper "Coherence as a Constraint on Scientific Inquiry" (with @martinjustin.bsky.social), has just been accepted in Synthese.

We model when treating drops in coherence as higher-order evidence helps (noisy settings) vs. misleads (biased evidence).

Preprint: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/26685/

Philosophy of Science Association <div style="font-size: 40px;"><h1 class="fr-text">Philosophy of Science Around the World - 2025</h1></div>

Don't forget to register for PSA Around the World 2025! This year spotlights Eastern & Central Europe 🌍

📅 The conference will take place:
Thu, Nov 6 (3–6:15pm CET)
Fri, Nov 14 (3–6:15pm CET)
Sat, Nov 22 (3–6:30pm CET)
🔗 Register here:

Just registered for PSA Around the World Eastern Europe. Hope you do too! Organised by @philsci.bsky.social with @eenphilsci.bsky.social this online conference over three afternoons in November covers the past and the present of #philsci in Eastern n Central Europe (where it arguably started!)

Gabriel (@gabrieltarziu.bsky.social) and I are guest editing a topical collection for EJPS on Understanding Climate Change. Submissions on the epistemology of climate science, policy, and public reasoning are welcome.

Deadline: 1 Dec 2025 → link.springer.com/collections/...

Funny enough, I only spotted this paper through a citation alert. I worked out a different strategy to respond to my old worries this spring but haven’t had time to write it up yet. Maybe that’s next!

Jeffrey conditionalization: against caution - Philosophical Studies Borut Trpin has raised a novel objection to Jeffrey conditionalization (JC). He argues that JC can lead to increasing confidence in a false hypothesis, based on non-misleading observations. But I show...

During my PhD, I raised an objection to Jeffrey conditionalisation (Phil Studies). Andrew Doppenberg has now published an excellent reply that defends JC. It’s gratifying to see the debate continue, even when critical of my old work - and reassuring that JC remains robust.
doi.org/10.1007/s110...