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Early philosophical accounts of explanation mistook the function of boundary conditions for that of contingent facts. I diagnose where this misunderstanding arose and establish that it persists. I disambiguate between uses of the term "boundary conditions" and argue that boundary conditions are explanatory via their roles as components of models. Using case studies from fluid mechanics and the physics of waves, I articulate four explanatory functions for boundary conditions in physics: specifying the scope of a model, enabling stable descriptions of phenomena in the model, generating descriptions of novel phenomena, and connecting models from differing theoretical backgrounds.

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Vocal fry is a phonation, or voicing, in which an individual drops their voice below its natural register and consequently emits a low, growly, creaky tone of voice. Media outlets have widely acknowledged it as a generational vocal style characteristic of millennial women. Critics of vocal fry often claim that it is an exclusively female vocal pattern, and some say that the voicing is so distracting that they cannot understand what is being said under the phonation. Claiming that a phonation is so distracting as to prevent uptake of the semantic content of an utterance associated with it is an extreme reaction, especially when accompanied by demands for women to change their phonation. We argue that this reaction limits women's communicative autonomy. We analyze the extreme reaction to female vocal fry, which we characterize as a non-content-based response, from the perspectives of philosophy of language, feminist epistemology, and linguistics. We argue that when fry is heard as annoying and distracting, it is because the hearer interprets the speaker as echoing an utterance from a position of authority to which she is not entitled. We show that this reaction encodes conscious or unconscious sexist attitudes toward women's voices.

This article examines the distinction between active matter and active materials, and it offers foundational remarks toward a system of classification for active materials. Active matter is typically identified as matter that exhibits two characteristic features: self-propelling parts, and coherent dynamical activity among the parts. These features are exhibited across a wide range of organic and inorganic materials, and they are jointly sufficient for classifying matter as active. Recently, the term "active materials" has entered scientific use as a complement, supplement, and extension of "active matter." At the same time, new work in the philosophy of science has considered the problem of how to classify the products of synthetic and laboratory processes, and the extent to which the aims of classifying natural kinds compare and contrasts with the aims of classifying these synthetic kinds. In this article, I apply those considerations to the problems of classifying and characterizing active materials. In doing so, I also argue for a conception of active materials' coherent dynamical activity as multiscale, rather than emergent, and I discuss how the special non-equilibrium status of active materials factors in to classificatory concerns.

T he synthesis, characterization, and interpretation of nanoscale materials necessarily draw from both bulk and molecular descriptions of matter. Researchers choose which descriptions to use in order to understand and explain a given phenomenon. These choices are often intuitive and subconscious, dictated by the dominant behaviors of the system, as well as by the research questions being answered, the availability of instrumentation, and the researcher's training. But the choice of certain descriptions over others can dramatically influence how a researcher conceives of their system, as well as how they make, study, and use the resulting research products.The philosophy of science is the study of these choices and of scientific reasoning itself. As a branch of epistemology (i.e., the theory of knowledge), philosophy of science investigates the nature of scientific reasoning and the implications of scientific theories for both understanding the natural world and acting in it. Philosophers of science examine scientific methodology as a whole, investigating the conditions for successful scientific explanation, the relationships between causation and the laws of nature, and whether and in what sense the various branches of science can be unified with one another. Philosophers of science also examine individual sciences, answering questions such as, "Can we reduce the human experience of consciousness to patterns of electrical signals in the brain?", "Should we trace the origins of life to metabolism or replication?", or "If the physical world is really governed by quantum mechanics and relativity, why does classical mechanics work so well for so much of science?" Answering these questions is not a matter of collecting data nor of interpreting the results of individual experiments. Rather, it is a matter of conceptual analysis: evaluating the implications of understanding a scientific concept in one way rather than another. In nanoscience, for example, one can conceive of colloidal nanoparticle synthesis as either building a molecule or growing a crystal. Conceiving of a synthesis as molecular will suggest certain models, synthetic protocols, and characterization strategies. Conceiving of a synthesis as crystallization will suggest others.Collaboration between scientists and philosophers of science reveals new domains for conceptual analysis and new research opportunities for both philosophers and scientists. Philosophers trained in conceptual analysis can provide expertise in evaluating what is gained, and what is lost, by using one conception over another. Which conception(s) we use can influence every aspect of scientific work, including the ways we think about material systems and what experiments we design. These concepts also influence the ways we communicate, who we communicate with, and perhaps most importantly, the very research questions we ask. In this Viewpoint, we give examples of collaborative conceptual analysis by introducing the benefits and limitations of importing bulk-scale concepts of matter into ...