Conference Report: The Fifth International Conference of the German Society for Philosophy of Science (GWP.2025), 24–26 March, 2025

Between March 24–26, philosophers of science from across the globe, representing numerous subfields of the discipline, gathered at Friedrich-Alexander University for the fifth international conference of the German Society for Philosophy of Science (Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsphilosophie, GWP). The Kollegienhaus, a neo-baroque building located in downtown Erlangen with an adjacent palatial garden, provided a splendid venue for the conference during an early spring week. Since the GWP’s foundation in 2012, previous conferences have been held at various locations across Germany: Leibniz University Hannover in 2013, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in 2016, University of Cologne in 2019, and most recently, at the Technical University of Berlin in 2022.

The conference featured 126 contributed talks, organized into six parallel sessions across three days. Each day began and ended with keynote lectures in the Anatomie lecture hall. There were six symposia covering a broad spectrum of philosophical topics: the role of science in philosophy education, interdisciplinary collaboration between neuroscientists and philosophers, the status of medical knowledge from a philosophy of science perspective, reflections on AI-driven recommendations and AI-assisted decision-making, the representational role of model organisms, and a German language symposium on science denial. The session talks were equally diverse, addressing a wide range of themes from the General Philosophy of Science to the Philosophy of the Special Sciences (e.g., biology, AI, and cognition), as well as metaphysics, logic and mathematics, and epistemology.

A total of 195 submissions were received, including 7 symposium submissions. The acceptance rate for regular paper submissions was 67 % (126 out of 188), while symposium submissions had an acceptance rate of 57 % (4 out of 7). Of all submissions, 31 % were from women first authors, with an acceptance rate of 64 % (39 out of 61).^[1] Ultimately, only 30 % of all accepted contributions were authored by women. While this gender balance is far from ideal, it represents an improvement compared to the 2022 conference, where only 23 % of accepted submissions were from female authors.

Sabina Leonelli (TU Munich) opened the conference with her keynote lecture titled Contrasting Visions of Inquiry for an Open Society. In her talk, Prof. Leonelli presented and argued for a specific interpretation of openness – humane openness. She began by reconstructing the history of philosophical debates on the notion of openness in scientific inquiry and its role in an open society. Her analysis focused on the contrast between Henri Bergson’s conception of openness and its rational counterpart, Karl Popper’s. While it is Popper’s notion of open inquiry which more dominantly shaped research policy, Prof. Leonelli argued that contemporary debates would benefit from considering a humane version of openness, inspired by Bergson’s philosophy. This perspective emphasizes the importance of interpersonal connections among researchers, which are the cornerstone of effective communication, constructive critique, and collective creativity. The talk concluded with a proposal for incorporating humane openness into scientific research to foster both societal progress and environmental well-being.

After a first day of symposia and parallel sessions, the group reconvened in the lecture hall to attend Prof. Naomi Oreskes’ (Harvard University) DeGruyter Lecture: The Trouble with Supply-Side Science. Although Prof. Oreskes joined us virtually via Zoom, the hall was packed, and her talk was followed by a lively Q&A session. Building on her seminal books, Merchants of Doubt (2010), co-authored with Erik M. Conway, and their recent The Big Myth (2023), Prof. Oreskes painted a troubling picture of politically motivated resistance to science, using climate change denial as an example. As most solutions to the climate crisis require increased governance, neoconservative and neoliberal advocates of “free markets” and “limited government” have resisted acknowledging the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This resistance, Prof. Oreskes argued, serves as a strategy to protect the market from government regulation, particularly in the U.S. The talk presented stark examples of climate change denial and the suppression of scientific findings, culminating in outright attacks on climate scientists and the IPCC. Prof. Oreskes emphasized that more or better scientific evidence is not the solution to this issue, as the attacks are not motivated scientifically, but politically. She concluded by offering suggestions for addressing these political concerns while maintaining one’s epistemic virtues and integrity.

Prof. Roman Frigg (London School of Economics) kicked off the second day of the conference with his keynote lecture, Stabilizing Understanding. His talk tackled the question How do models provide understanding of their target systems? – a question well connected to much of his work on models and representation (c.f., Friday’s symposium on model organisms as representations, which centred around Prof. Frigg’s and Dr. James Nguyen’s influential DEKI account of scientific representation). The lecture began by outlining the disagreement between factivists – who insist that all understanding is factive – and non-factivists, who contend that (radical) departures from the truth need not hinder understanding. Prof. Frigg criticized aspects of both positions: for one, a model should be veridical about those aspects of the target system it seeks to understand (an argument against non-factivism), yet factivist approaches struggle to accommodate the idealized aspects inherent in scientific models (an argument against factivism). The talk concluded with a novel factivist account of understanding that highlights the importance of stability. If a model provides understanding, it does so due to a set of modelling assumptions that remain stable across working variations of the model.

Prof. Lina Jansson (University of Nottingham) concluded the second day of parallel sessions and symposia with her keynote lecture, Explanation and Confirmation: When Loveliness Enables Likeness. While explanatory power is widely regarded as a theoretical virtue, it is also sometimes taken to provide a reason to believe a more explanatory theory over a less explanatory alternative. However, it remains challenging to account for confirmation via explanatory power within popular models of confirmation (e.g., Bayesian frameworks) without reducing explanatory considerations to mere contributors to confirmatory success, such as predictive accuracy. In her talk, Prof. Jansson argued that explanatory considerations can, in and of themselves, enable confirmation. She suggested that this perspective may offer a way to improve our epistemic access to empirical evidence in cases involving otherwise inaccessible systems – such as black holes or the early universe.

Shifting the focus from understanding and explanation, Prof. Kevin Elliott (Michigan State University) rang in the last day of the conference with his lecture Values in Science: Where Have We Come from, and Where Are We Going? The talk began with an overview of the literature on values in science – a productive field full of disagreements on key concepts such as the nature of values, value-ladenness, and the value-free ideal. The second half of Prof. Elliott’s keynote argued that more focus should be placed on the institutional features influencing the scientific community’s value-laden choices, rather than the individualist perspective that much of the literature has taken. Although the value-free ideal may not be entirely “dead,” debates about it are no fruitful way to frame the issues of values in the sciences for practicing scientists. Prof. Elliott concluded by highlighting a recent trend toward pluralism, opening up important lines of inquiry that are closed off when the focus is reduced solely on identifying a small set of the very “best” values for science to operate under.

The conference concluded with Prof. Andreas Hüttemann’s (University of Cologne) keynote lecture, Leaving the Humeanism Non-Humeanism Debate Behind. He opened by presenting two major perspectives on laws of nature, focusing on the question: what best explains the apparent modal features of laws? Humean views aim to reduce natural necessities to elements without modal character, motivated by a reluctance to postulate entities beyond our experiential reach. In contrast, Non-Humean views are driven by the idea that something in nature must account for these modal features, and thus introduce irreducible modal primitives. Prof. Hüttemann considered both motivations and argued that the modal character of laws is best understood in terms of empirically accessible invariance relations. These, he suggested, can account for what we ordinarily regard as nomological or dispositional necessity.

GWP.2025 was locally organized by members of the Philosophy Department at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, under the leadership of Michael Jungert (chair) and supported by Sabine Dika, Gerhard Ernst, Katrin Götz-Votteler, Simone Hespers, Jon Leefmann, Erasmus Mayr, Josephine Musil-Gutsch, Vanina Rodriguez-Bauer, Anna Schneider, and Sebastian Schuol. The Program Committee, chaired by GWP President Axel Gelfert, played its usual integral role, with contributions from Gerhard Ernst, Vera Hoffmann-Kolss, Michael Jungert, Jon Leefmann, Erasmus Mayr, Josephine Musil-Gutsch, and Sebastian Schuol. On behalf of all participants, sincere thanks are due to the organizing and program committees for their dedicated work.

Lastly, the generous support of the event’s funders is gratefully acknowledged: De Gruyter for sponsoring a plenary lecture, the Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie e.V. (GAP) for sponsoring a symposium, and the Manfred Roth Stiftung and the Universitätsbund Erlangen-Nürnberg for their generous contributions and support. Special thanks are extended to the FAU Kompetenzzentrum für interdisziplinäre Wissenschaftsreflexion (ZIWIS) at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and its Institut für Philosophie for hosting the event.

More information about the conference, including all the abstracts and the schedule, can be found at https://www.ziwis.fau.de/forschung/gwp-2025/.