Bengt Autzen
The paper examines the relationship between the effects a trait has on survival and reproduction, and notion of functional efficiency underlying the biostatistical theory of health. The paper argues two points. First, the paper criticises the notion of functional efficiency used in the biostatistical theory of health and argues that a formal measure is needed to assess a trait's net effect on survival and reproduction. Second, the paper argues that there is no non-arbitrary way of weighing the effects on survival and reproduction in such a measure.

David Teira (UNED), Mattia Andreoletti (European Institute of Oncology)
Over the last decade, philosophers of science have extensively criticized the epistemic superiority of Randomized Clinical Trials (RCTs) for testing safety and effectiveness of new drugs, defending instead various forms of evidential pluralism. We argue that scientific methods in regulatory decision making cannot be assessed in epistemic terms only: there are costs involved. Drawing on the legal distinction between rules and standards, we show that drug regulation based on evidential pluralism has much higher costs than our current RCT-based system. We analyze these costs and advocate for evaluating any scheme for drug regulatory tests in terms concrete empirical benchmarks, like the error rates of regulatory decisions.

Russell Powell (Boston University), Eric Scarffe (Boston University)
The debate over the concept of disease is cast as one between naturalism and normativism, with a hybrid view staked out in between. In light of widely discussed problems with each account, some theorists recommend eliminating the disease concept in medical contexts. In this paper, we reframe the disease debate by way of examining Ereshefsky's widely cited criticisms. We argue that while prevailing accounts do not suffer from the particular defects that he and others have identified, they do suffer from other deficits — and this leads us to propose an amended hybrid account that satisfies the institutional-ethical desiderata for a concept of disease in human medicine.

Bert Baumgaertner (University of Idaho)
One picture of the roles of models in the sciences is that they are downstream of theory, i.e., that in some relevant sense theories comes first and models later. For example, we start with a theory of Newtonian mechanics and then create models to ultimately make predictions about how, e.g., a pendulum swings. This picture is skewed by an emphasis on examples from physics, engineering, and similar disciplines. The relationship between theory and modeling is often reversed in biology: models tend to guide theory development. Epidemiological models are a particularly salient case in point.