Isaac Wilhelm

Typicality is routinely invoked in everyday contexts: bobcats are typically short-tailed; people are typically less than seven feet tall. Typicality is invoked in scientific contexts as well: typical gases expand; typical quantum systems exhibit probabilistic behaviour. And typicality facts like these support many explanations, both quotidian and scientific. But what is it for something to be typical? And how do typicality facts explain? In this paper, I propose a general theory of typicality. I analyse the notion of a typical property. I provide a formalism for typicality explanations, and I give an account of why typicality explanations are explanatory. Along the way, I show how typicality facts explain a variety of phenomena, from everyday phenomena to the statistical mechanical behaviour of gases. Finally, I argue that typicality is not the same thing as probability.

I explore how the nature, scope, and limits of the knowledge obtained in orbital dynamics has changed in recent years. Innovations in the design of spacecraft trajectories, as well as in astronomy, have led to new logics of theory-testing—that is, new research methodologies—in orbital dynamics. These methodologies—which combine resonance overlap theories, numerical experiments, and the implementation of space missions—were developed in response to the discovery of chaotic dynamical systems in our solar system. In the past few decades, they have replaced the methodology that dominated orbital research in the centuries following Newton's Principia. As a result, the kind of knowledge achieved by orbital research has changed: we can know how orbiting bodies in chaotic systems behave, but only over sufficiently short time scales; and we can reliably measure those temporal limitations, using Lyapunov time.

This paper presents new data on the representation of women who publish in 25 top philosophy journals as ranked by the Philosophical Gourmet Report for the years 2004, 2014, and 2015. It also provides a new analysis of Schwitzgebel’s 1955–2015 journal data. The paper makes four points while providing an overview of the current state of women authors in philosophy. In all years and for all journals, the percentage of female authors was extremely low, in the range of 14–16%. The percentage of women authors is less than the percentage of women faculty in different ranks and at different kinds of institutions. In addition, there is great variation across individual journals, and the discrepancy between women authors and women faculty appears to be different in different subfields. Interestingly, journals which do not practice anonymous review seem to have a higher percentage of women authors than journals which practice double anonymous or triple anonymous review. This paper also argues that we need more data on academic publishing to better understand whether this can explain why there are so few full-time female faculty in philosophy, since full-time hiring and tenuring practices presumably depend on a candidate’s academic publishing.