Entries by Elizabeth Hannon

Associate Editor Lara Buchak Featured in this Year’s Philosopher’s Annual

15 August 2016 in , , , /by

BJPS Associate Editors don’t just act as midwives to great philosophy, they produce it too! Hot on the heels of ex-Associate Editor Marc Lange, Lara Buchak is featured in this year’s Philosopher’s Annual for her joint paper ‘Groupthink’, written with Jeffrey Sanford Russell and John Hawthorn, and published in Philosophical Studies.

IF Success, Then Celebrate!

14 June 2016 in , , , /by

Editing is more often than not a thankless job (look away now, potential Co-Editor-in-Chiefs). However, this is one of those rare happy moments when it all comes good. Yesterday, Thomson Reuters released the Journal Citation Report for 2015 and the BJPS continues its lead among philosophy of science journals, with an impact factor of 1.738.

The Burden of Proofs | Beth Hannon

2 June 2016 in , , /by

One of the always-frustrating aspects of being a copy editor is that it requires an obsessive nature as well as a willingness to accept that perfection isn’t possible; no matter how many times your check the proofs, there’ll always be something that makes it into the final version. Obviously enough, such obsessiveness and knowing when to let go aren’t traits often found to co-exist in one mere human. And in correcting others’ mistakes—and in writing posts such as this—Muphry’s law looms large. All in all, you’re asking for trouble. But despite opening the door to public ridicule, we thought we’d add to our ‘how to’ series with something on copy-editing.

Oi! Ref!

17 December 2015 in , , /by

Another year, another plethora of referees to thank! The BJPS continues to go from strength to strength, and while our authors can bask in the limelight, as editors we get to see behind the scenes, to all the hard work done by the referees in taking strong drafts and turning them into shiny, publishable gems. As the list of names below makes clear, the number of people it takes to make a journal work is not small, and that’s before we include all the editors and the team at OUP. What’s more, this list isn’t nearly complete—not everyone consented to be named—and there are more than a few (heroic!) people listed who have written a number of reports for us throughout the year. We are incredibly grateful for all of he considered, thoughtful reports we received throughout the year from these referees—they certainly make our job as editors easier!

Contemporary Scientific Realism and the 1811 Gill Slit Prediction | Peter Vickers

8 June 2015 /1 Comment/in , , , , /by

How exactly are the history and philosophy of science supposed to come together? In the case of the scientific realism debate there is a relatively straight forward answer to this. In short, scientific realists are keen to make some sort of success-to-truth inference. Typically they state that when scientific success is sufficiently impressive, we ought to infer that the hypotheses (or parts or aspects of the theory) that generated this success are at least approximately true. This allows for the possibility that, in the history of science, one might find just that sort of success, born of a theory/set of hypotheses that are definitely not approximately true (whatever your take on ‘approximate truth’). Even allowing for one or two exceptions, the possibility arises that there might be many such cases in the history of science. This makes many scientific realist positions falsifiable—loosely speaking, at least. But as things stand, nobody knows which contemporary realist positions (if any) are indeed falsified because we just don’t have at hand the relevant historical ‘facts’ (again, speaking loosely). What we need to make progress is careful and detailed history of science, dealing with relevant historical episodes…