iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Niall Roe @niallroe.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Here is my review of "Evolution 'On Purpose':Teleonomy in Living Systems," a nice collection of papers from various disciplines discussing the roles of purpose, agency, etc., in biology. It is available open access, so worth checking out. Thanks to Penelope and H-net for having me review!

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Niall Roe @niallroe.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Why am I having to hit this "Stay Signed In" button like twice a day?

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Niall Roe @niallroe.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

C. S. Peirce, echoing recent comments by Terrence Tao and other mathematicians on the use of AI to solve Navier-Stokes (except Peirce is writing in 1903):

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PhilSci-Archive @philsci-archive.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

New on the Archive: Cairns, Monte (2026) Reasons to Doubt Microstructural Essentialism About Chemical Elements. [Preprint] philsci-archive.pitt.edu/30847

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Alisa Bokulich @alisabokulich.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

A new paper with @mattbrewer.bsky.social where we offer a new interpretation of @charlespeirce.bsky.social "economy of research" as being firstmost about pursuitworthiness of *data* & connect it with data collection programs in geosciences known as "targeted observation" #philsci #pragmatism #data

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Niall Roe @niallroe.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

@boeschb.bsky.social I thought you might like this page on tornado data: roadtolarissa.com/twisters/

roadtolarissa.com

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Niall Roe @niallroe.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

A "No Trespassing" sign makes as much sense as one that says "No Crimes Allowed Here".

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Oscar @oscarw.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Now out in Studies in HPS! 'Artefactualism and the twofold experience of modelling': authors.elsevier.com/a/1mH3%7E8yu... Short article building on the phenomenology of modelling experience as discussed in @msuarez.bsky.social's excellent book, Inference and Representation.

authors.elsevier.com

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Niall Roe @niallroe.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

"Of First Premisses. (Since somebody may think that I write premiss instead of premise from negligence, may I be permitted to say that desperately negligent as I am of non-logical matters, I endeavor to attend to all the minutiae of logic.

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Niall Roe @niallroe.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

“My book is meant for people who want to find out; and people who want philosophy ladled out to them can go elsewhere. There are philosophical soup shops at every corner, thank God! . . .The first step toward finding out is to acknowledge you do not satisfactorily know already“

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Cheryl Misak @cherylmisak.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Hot off the press: Michael Kremer’s and my resurrection of Margaret Macdonald.

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Niall Roe @niallroe.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

Tonight’s clouds looked kiiiinda like this

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Dr Danny Bate @dannybate.com · 29/07/2025

'Poll' in its earliest appearances refers to the top of a head – the modern political meanings of a number of votes or a survey of voters emerge from the 17th century through the act of counting people's heads. The older 'head' sense is behind terms like 'poll tax', but also 'tadpole' (toad-head).

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Nicolae Morar @nmorar.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

What a great talk with Mike Travisano about evolutionary innovation and the origin of life, alongside amazing panelists Ken Waters and ‪@mrebolleda.bsky.social ! So happy to be at #ISHPSSB2025 !

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Dr Danny Bate @dannybate.com · 22/07/2025

It's because of medieval lists that set out their entries with the format 'also... also... also...' (in Latin: item... item... item... ) that English today has the common noun 'item'.

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Alisa Bokulich @alisabokulich.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

⏰ Free access to read & download thru August 20 the final published version of Wendy Parker & my paper "Understanding Data Uncertainty" at this link ⬇️ authors.elsevier.com/c/1lMUI8yuR6... #philsci #metasci 🧪 ⚒️

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa
Understanding data uncertainty
Alisa Bokulich", Wendy S. Parker b,"
" Department of Philosophy, Boston University, United States
› Department of Philosophy, Virginia Tech, United States
ABSTRACT
Scientific data without uncertainty estimates are increasingly seen as incomplete. Recent discussions in the philosophy of data, however, have given little attention to the nature of uncertainty estimation. We begin to redress this gap by, first, discussing the concepts and practices of uncertainty estimation in metrology and showing how they can be adapted for scientific data more broadly; and second, advancing five philosophical theses about uncertainty estimates for data: they are substantive
adequacy-for-purpose view of uncertainty estimation, addresses a weakness in a recent philosophical account of data, and provides a new perspective on the "safety" versus "precision" debate in metrology.
1. Introduction
Uncertainty is an inescapable part of science. Yet while much has been written in recent years on uncertainty in computational modeling contexts (especially related to climate modeling; see, e.g., Parker, 2010;
Frigg, Thompson, & Werndl, 2015; Knutti et al., 2019), comparatively little philosophical attention has been given to uncertainty associated with scientific data collected via observation, measurement, and experiment. Important preliminary work on this topic examines the evaluation of systematic uncertainty in measurement (Staley, 2020), changing conceptions of uncertainty in metrology (de Courtenay & Grégis, 2017; Grégis, 2019b), and the representation of uncertainty when measurements are discordant (Grégis, 2019a). Overall, however, when it comes to uncertainty associated with scientific data obtained via observation, measurement, and experiment—what we will call "data uncertainty"-the territory remains largely unexplored from a philosophical point of view.
Conception…

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British Journal for the Philosophy of Science @thebjps.bsky.social · 07/07/2025

Just accepted: ‘Severe Testing: Error Statistics versus Bayes Factor Tests’ – Deborah Mayo Abstract in alt text or read the full paper here (open access): www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... #philsci #philsky

ABSTRACT In the face of today’s statistical crisis of science, it is often recommended that statistical significance tests be replaced with Bayes factor tests. In this article, I examine this recommendation. Bayes factor tests, unlike statistical significance tests, only depend on the probability of the data under H0 and a competitor H1. They are insensitive to a method’s error probabilities such as significance levels, type 1 and type 2 errors, and confidence levels. It might be thought that if a method is insensitive to error probabilities that it escapes the inferential consequences of inflated error rates at the heart of obstacles to replication. I will argue that this is not the case, and that Bayes factor tests can accord strong evidence to a claim H, even though little has been done to rule out H’s flaws. There are two reasons: their insensitivity to biasing selection effects, and the fact that H and its competitor need not exhaust the space of relevant possibilities. I will show how this results in a disconnect between Bayes factor tests and error control protocols that are being called for by replication reforms. To solve the problem, I propose that commonly used Bayes factor tests be supplemented with a post-data severity concept in the frequentist error statistical sense. The question is not whether ‘severity’ can be redefined Bayesianly—of course it can—the question is whether the resulting concept can address today’s concerns behind obstacles to replication. I will also respond to criticisms of the severity reformulation of statistical significance tests, and show how it enables avoiding fallacies of statistical tests.

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Niall Roe @niallroe.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

If I could introduce a new type of punctuation, it would be a question mark with a comma at the bottom instead of a period. This would be useful for sort of run-on questions.

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Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

My research question is simple: How does everything connect to everything else in a way is new and yet totally obvious?

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Anna Alexandrova @annaalexandrova.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

I am on a bit of a PhD examining spree lately, so will post links to the great work of the newly minted doctors as they are uploaded. This one is by Ahmad Elabbar (who by the way will be starting as my new colleague next year, yey!). It is a tour de force, co-examined with the amazing Simon Caney

repository.cam.ac.uk

Justice as an ideal for climate assessment

Confronting a series of planetary crises, the international community has established a complex regime of global environmental assessments. The most prominent of these remains the Intergovernmental Pa...

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Niall Roe @niallroe.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

Away for a few days. Didn’t bring a book with me because I knew I would use it to procrastinate. But now my work is done and my laptop won’t charge and

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 29/05/2025

We thank Reviewer 2 for their helpful feedback which has greatly improved the paper

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Niall Roe @niallroe.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

It’s kinda fun that “substance”, “hypostasis” and “understand” all kinda have the same base meaning, looking at their etymology. Stand under. When we hypothesize we place something under, try it as a foundation. When we gain the right kind of confidence, we stand there with it.

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Niall Roe @niallroe.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Symbols grow... A symbol, once in being, spreads among the peoples. In use and in experience, its meaning grows. Such words as force, law, wealth, marriage, bear for us very different meanings from those they bore to our barbarous ancestors. C.S. Peirce, “What is a Sign?”1894, EP2, 10.

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Niall Roe @niallroe.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

It is evident, then, even from what we have said before, that all men seem to seek the causes named in the Physics, and that we cannot name any beyond these; but they seek these vaguely;

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