Recent work in epistemology and philosophy of science has argued that understanding is an important cognitive state that philosophers should seek to analyse. This paper offers a new perspective on understanding by looking to work in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Understanding is normally taken to be inside the head. I argue that this view is mistaken. Often, understanding is a state that criss-crosses brain, body and world. To support this claim, I draw on extended cognition, a burgeoning framework (...) in cognitive science that stresses the crucial role played by tools, material representations and the wider environment in our cognitive processes. I defend an extended view of understanding against likely objections and argue that it has important consequences for questions concerning the nature of understanding and its relationship to explanation. (shrink)

Distributed cognition (d-cog) claims that many cognitive processes are distributed across groups and the surrounding material and cultural environment. Recently, Nancy Nersessian, Ronald Giere, and others have suggested that a d-cog approach might allow us to bring together cognitive and social theories of science. I explore this idea by focusing on the specific interpretation of d-cog found in Edwin Hutchins' canonical text Cognition in the wild. First, I examine the scope of a d-cog approach to science, showing that there are (...) important disputes between cognitive and social theorists on which d-cog remains silent. Second, I suggest that, where social explanations can be recast in d-cog terms, this reformulation will not be acceptable to all social theorists. Finally, I ask how we should make sense of the claim that, on a d-cog analysis, social factors are cognitive factors. (shrink)

Ronald Giere has argued that at its best science gives us knowledge only from different “perspectives,” but that this knowledge still counts as scientific realism. Others have noted that his “perspectival realism” is in tension with scientific realism as traditionally understood: How can different, even conflicting, perspectives give us what there is really? This essay outlines a program that makes good on Giere’s idea with a fresh understanding of “realism” that eases this tension.

The traditional way of thinking about science goes back to the corpuscular philosophy with its micro-reductive mechanism and metaphor of reading God's Book of Nature. This "story-1" with its rhetoric of exact truths contrasts with "story-2" which describes science as a continuation of the always imperfect powers of representation given to us by evolution. On story-2 reduction is one among other knowledge fashioning strategies and shares the imperfections of all human knowledge. When we appreciate that human knowledge always admits of (...) refinement, what appear as "emergent properties" no long seems mysterious. (shrink)

Many in philosophy understand truth in terms of precise semantic values, true propositions. Following Braun and Sider, I say that in this sense almost nothing we say is, literally, true. I take the stand that this account of truth nonetheless constitutes a vitally useful idealization in understanding many features of the structure of language. The Fregean problem discussed by Braun and Sider concerns issues about application of language to the world. In understanding these issues I propose an alternative modeling tool (...) summarized in the idea that inaccuracy of statements can be accommodated by their imprecision. This yields a pragmatist account of truth, but one not subject to the usual counterexamples. The account can also be viewed as an elaborated error theory. The paper addresses some prima facie objections and concludes with implications for how we address certain problems in philosophy. (shrink)

Knowledge requires truth, and truth, we suppose, involves unflawed representation. Science does not provide knowledge in this sense but rather provides models, representations that are limited in their accuracy, precision, or, most often, both. Truth as we usually think of it is an idealization, one that serves wonderfully in most ordinary applications, but one that can terribly mislead for certain issues in philosophy. This article sketches how this happens for five important issues, thereby showing how philosophical method must take into (...) account the idealized nature of our familiar conception of truth. (shrink)

I modify and generalize Carnap’s notion of frameworks as a way of unpacking Goodman’s metaphor of “making worlds with symbols”. My frameworks provide, metaphorically, a way of making worlds out of symbols in as much as all our framework-bound access to the world is through frameworks that always stand to be improved in accuracy, precision, and usually both. Such improvement is characterized in pragmatist terms.

This paper has a twofold purpose. First, it aims at highlighting one difference in how counterfactuals work in general history, on the one hand, and in history of the natural sciences, on the other hand. As we show, both in general history and in history of science good counterfactual narratives need to be plausible, where plausibility is construed as appropriate continuity of both the antecedent and the consequent of the counterfactual with what we know about the world. However, in general (...) history it is often possible to imagine a consequent dramatically different from the actual historical development, and yet plausible; in history of science, due to plausibility concerns, imagining a consequent far removed from the results of actual science seems more complicated. The second aim of the paper is to assess whether and to what degree counterfactual histories of science can advance the cause of the so-called “contingency thesis,” namely, the claim that history of science might have followed a path leading to alternative, non-equivalent theories, as successful as the ones that we currently embrace. We distinguish various versions of the contingency thesis and argue that counterfactual histories of science support weak versions of the thesis. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on two claims, put forward by Feyerabend in his later writings , which constitute the metaphysical core of his view of scientific inquiry. The first, that we call the pliability thesis, is the claim that the world can be described by indefinitely many conceptual systems, none of them enjoying a privileged status. The second, that we call the resistance thesis, is the claim that the pliability of the world is limited, i.e., not all the different (...) conceptual systems that can be used to describe the world will be equally successful: the world offers resistance to some attempts to describe it. We show that, in spite of the later Feyerabend’s notorious antirealist leanings, the pliability thesis is fully compatible with a robustly realist view of science, and we suggest that, surprisingly, Feyerabend’s insights concerning the limited pliability of the world turn out to be those of a potential ally of sophisticated versions of scientific realism. (shrink)

Optogenetic techniques are described as “revolutionary” for the unprecedented causal control they allow neuroscientists to exert over neural activity in awake behaving animals. In this paper, I demonstrate by means of a case study that optogenetic techniques will only illuminate causal links between the brain and behavior to the extent that their error characteristics are known and, further, that determining these error characteristics requires comparison of optogenetic techniques with techniques having well known error characteristics and consideration of the broader neural (...) and behavioral context in which the targets of optogenetic interventions are situated. (shrink)

In this opinion piece, the authors offer their personal and idiosyncratic views of the future of the philosophy of science, focusing on its relationship with the history of science and metaphysics, respectively. With regard to the former, they suggest that the Kantian tradition might be drawn upon both to render the history and philosophy of science more relevant to philosophy as a whole and to overcome the challenges posed by naturalism. When it comes to the latter, they suggest both that (...) metaphysics has much to learn from the philosophy of science and that it offers an array of tools that philosophers of science can themselves appropriate. (shrink)

In November 2015, after weeks of bitter political rhetoric and much discussion about the consequences of the proposed changes, the UK Tory government reversed their decision to eliminate tax credits for the poorest. While much was made of this reversal, particularly who deserved responsibility for the change, a more subtle politics was going on behind the scenes. The primary justification for the reversal, given by the Chancellor George Osborne, was that tax revenues in forthcoming years were now expected to be (...) much higher than before. Yet, a deeper look into this justification revealed that 55% of those extra revenues came from “modelling changes”. Suddenly, the discursive sparring over tax revenues found its material embodiment in the computers of the Office for Budget Responsibility. Similarly, central bank policies have become essential to the global economy since the 2008 crisis, and their policies concerning interest rates and quantitative easing are the joint product of hybrid human–computer systems. Yet, while scholars have examined the influence of modelling technology on derivatives valuation models, the field of central bank macroeconomic modelling has been largely ignored. This paper will examine these government economic models, outlining a broad history of their changing political ramifications. What are these models? How can they change the possibilities of government action so much? In addition, what effect do they have on politicians? Do they function merely as post-hoc justification for policies, or do they give shape to the space of the politically possible? The aim of this project is to begin answering these questions and generate a framework for understanding how economic modelling is shaping and interacting with economic policy. (shrink)

En este artículo se plantean las siguientes preguntas: primero, ¿es Peirce un realista científico? Segundo, ¿han sido relevantes las ideas de Peirce para la defensa contemporánea del realismo científico? Y tercero, ¿está el realismo científico peirceano comprometido con una metafísica de la ciencia? La respuesta a tales preguntas es positiva. En el argumento se apela tanto a consideraciones de los manuscritos de Peirce como al debate contemporáneo sobre realismo científico. Luego de algunas observaciones introductorias en la primera sección, se expone (...) brevemente en la segunda sección el realismo científico en la versión de Psillos. En la siguiente sección se argumenta que la noción de abducción peirceana ha resultado crucial en la defensa contemporánea del realismo científico. En la cuarta se exponen algunos lineamientos de la metafísica de la ciencia del realismo científico peirceano, a saber, de creencia natural y ley de la naturaleza. En la quinta sección son resumidas las razones principales expuestas en este artículo para sostener que Peirce es un realista científico cuyas ideas han resultado de vital importancia en el debate actual. (shrink)

Eternalism is the view that all times are equally real. The relativity of simultaneity in special relativity backs this up. There is no cosmically extended, self-existing ‘now.’ This leads to a tricky problem. What makes statements about the present true? I shall approach the problem along the lines of perspectival realism and argue that the choice of the perspective does. To corroborate this point, the Lorentz transformations of special relativity are compared to the structurally similar equations of the Doppler effect. (...) The ‘now’ is perspectivally real in the same way as a particular electromagnetic spectrum frequency. I also argue that the ontology of time licensed by perspectival realism is more credible in this context than its current alternative, the fragmentalist interpretation of special relativity. (shrink)

Martin Paleček and Mark Risjord have recently put forward a critical evaluation of the ontological turn in anthropological theory. According to this philosophically informed theory of ethnographic practice, certain insights of twentieth-century analytic philosophy should play a part in the methodological debates concerning anthropological fieldwork: most importantly, the denial of representationalism and the acceptance of the extended mind thesis. In this paper, I will attempt to evaluate the advantages and potential drawbacks of ontological anthropology—arguing that to become a true alternative (...) to current social scientific thinking about methodology, it has to meet certain philosophical objections. (shrink)

We examine arguments for distinguishing between ontological and epistemological concepts of fundamentality, focusing in particular on the role that scale plays in these concepts. Using the fractional quantum Hall effect as a case study, we show that we can draw a distinction between ontologically fundamental and non-fundamental theories without insisting that it is only the fundamental theories that get the ontology right: there are cases where non-fundamental theories involve distinct ontologies that better characterize real systems than fundamental ones do. In (...) order to reconcile these distinct ontologies between fundamental and non-fundamental theories, we suggest that ontology must be understood as scale-dependent. (shrink)

Humans come prepared to recognize two fundamental features of our surroundings: animate objects and agents. This recognition begins early in ontogeny and pervades our ecological and social space. This cognitive capacity reveals an important adaptation and sets the conditions for pervasive shared experiences. One feature of our species and our evolved cephalic substrates is that we are prepared to recognize self-propelled action in others. Our cultural evolution is knotted to an expanding sense of shared experiences.

Classical pragmatism construed mind as an adaptive organ rooted in biology; biology was not one side and culture on the other. The cognitive systems underlie adaptation in response to the precarious and in the search for the stable and more secure that result in diverse forms of inquiry. Cognitive systems are rooted in action, and classical pragmatism knotted our sense of ourselves in response to nature and our cultural evolution. Cognitive systems should be demythologized away from Cartesian detachment, and towards (...) transactions with others and with nature. (shrink)

Biological sciences have strived to adopt the conceptual framework of physics and have become increasingly quantitatively oriented, aiming to refute the assertion that biology appears unquantifiable, unpredictable, and messy. But despite all effort, biology is characterized by a paucity of quantitative statements with universal applications. Nonetheless, many biological disciplines—most notably molecular biology—have experienced an ascendancy over the last 50 years. The underlying core concepts and ideas permeate and inform many neighboring disciplines. This surprising success is probably not so much attributable (...) to mathematical and statistical approaches in molecular biology, but rather to the preponderance of qualitative approaches, especially visualization. Visualizations can be afforded by quantitative research, but usually they rely on both, quantitative and qualitative research. I claim the following three features to be responsible for the unceasing zeal for using visualizations: visual representations facilitate reasoning, images can be cognitively processed in a “fast” manner, and abstractions of visual representations prompt conceptual advances. In summary, visualizations have largely contributed to the success of molecular biology by conveying its concepts to other disciplines, and at the same time, eclipsing mere quantitative approaches. However, visualizations also bear the risk of misinterpretation when traversing neighboring disciplines and even more so when pervading nonscientific domains. (shrink)

Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings is about new approaches to many of the big topics in philosophy of science today, but with a very different take. To begin with, we are urged to reject the received Cartesian-Laplacean myths: Descartes’ certainty and Laplace’s computational omniscience. Instead, Wimsatt re-engineers a philosophy for human beings with all their cognitive limitations. His approaches find their starting point in the actual practices of scientists themselves, which he strongly identifies with engineering practices as the source of (...) researchers’ solutions for dealing with a complex world. He aims to construct an understanding of scientific methodology around the central role of reduction. But he dismisses eliminative reductionism in favor of a heuristic-based realist view. Wimsatt’s world is a complex one, and this means that science needs to do away with all the absolute and simple answers, because they do not reflect the world we are living in. A complex world requires the mindset and tinkering of an engineer to uncover its reality. The appropriate response must be heuristics all the way down as we constantly seek out reliable inferences on often shifting ground. To this end, we aim for models and theories that are robust, just as engineers aim to build robust machines. And although errors occur and approaches are fallible, they allow us to continually adapt the heuristics applied and sharpen our perceptions so as to develop more refined tools for investigating and understanding the world. (shrink)

Current Perspectives in Philosophy of Biology.

Semantic realism can be characterised as the idea that scientific theories are truth-bearers, and that they are true or false in virtue of the world. This notion is often assumed, but rarely discussed in the literature. I examine how it fares in the context of the semantic view of theories and in connection with the literature on scientific representation. Making sense of semantic realism requires specifying the conditions of application of theoretical models, even for models that are not actually used, (...) which leads to several difficulties. My conclusion is that semantic realism is far more demanding than one would expect. Finally, I briefly examine some pragmatist alternatives. (shrink)

Perspectival realism combines two apparently contradictory aspects: the epistemic relativity of perspectives and the mind-independence of realism. This paper examines the prospects for a coherent perspectival realism, taking the literature on scientific representation as a starting point. It is argued that representation involves two types of norms, referred to as norms of relevance and norms of accuracy. Norms of relevance fix the domain of application of a theory and the way it categorises the world, and norms of accuracy give the (...) conditions for the theory to be true. Perspectival realism could be made coherent by taking a realist stance towards one type of norm, and a perspectival stance towards the other, by assuming they are relative to a community. This provides two versions of perspectival realism, called relevance perspectivism and accuracy perspectivism. How each option fares with respect to the challenge of incompatible models is examined. Finally, the prospects of full perspectivism are evaluated. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have come forth with approaches to chemistry based on its actual practice, imparting to it a proper aim and character of its own. These approaches add to the currently growing movement of pluralist philosophies of science. We draw on recent pluralist accounts from chemistry and analyse three notions from modern chemical practice and theory in terms of these accounts, in order to complement the so far more general pluralist approaches with specific evidence. Our survey reveals that the concept (...) of element indicates conceptual pluralisms in chemistry. that electronegativity illustrates methodological pluralism in determining one and the same concept, and that acidity is an instance of plurality hidden behind ‘one notion’. (shrink)

I discuss the prospects of perspectival realism for resolving the problem of incompatible models or theories in scientific practice. My diagnosis is that the perspectivist can secure the ‘realism’ in her position only by employing suitable relations between the models. It is such relations that do the work, not the general philosophical claim about the perspectival nature of knowledge claims. But appeal to such relations has also been the preferred strategy of scientific realist approaches to the problem. With respect to (...) the problem of incompatible models, then, it is not clear that perspectivism has a clear advantage—even though the issue was among the motivating problems for proposing this view. I suggest, however, that the required inter-model relations embody a narrower notion of perspective, a notion that is explicitly part of the models themselves and that is essential in maintaining a realist view. (shrink)

Naturalism in the philosophy of science has proceeded differently than the familiar forms of meta-philosophical naturalism in other sub-fields, taking its cues from “science as we know it” (Cartwright in The Dappled World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, p. 1) rather than from a philosophical conception of “the Scientific Image.” Its primary focus is scientific practice, and its philosophical analyses are complementary and accountable to empirical studies of scientific work. I argue that naturalistic philosophy of science is nevertheless criterial for (...) other versions of meta-philosophical naturalism; relying on a conflicting conception of scientific understanding would constitute a “first philosophy” imposed on the sciences. Moreover, naturalistic philosophy of science provides the basis for a “radically” naturalistic alternative to the familiar forms of orthodox or liberal naturalism. Goodman, Sellars and Hempel had previously challenged empiricist scruples against causal connections or nomological necessity by arguing that scientific concepts already had modal import. The radical naturalism I defend similarly challenges meta-philosophical naturalists’ conception of the Scientific Image as anormative, and instead shows how the normativity of scientific understanding in practice is a scientifically intelligible natural phenomenon. This account then provides a basis for naturalistic reflection on how other practices and normative concerns fit together with the best scientific understanding of human ways of life. (shrink)

There is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of action and the philosophy of science over folk psychological explanations of human action: do the (perhaps implicit) generalizations that underwrite such explanations purport to state contingent, empirically established connections between beliefs, desires, and actions, or do such generalizations serve rather to define, at least in part, what it is to have a belief or desire, or perform an action? This question has proven important because of certain traditional assumptions made about the (...) role of law-statements in scientific explanations. According to this tradition, law-statements take the form of generalizations, and the laws we find in well-established sciences are contingent and empirical; as such, if the kinds of generalizations at work in folk psychological explanations of human action act like definitions, or state conceptual connections, then such generalizations could not play the kind of explanatory role we find in mature sciences. This paper argues that the aforementioned way of framing the debate reflects a still powerful but impoverished conception of the role laws play in scientific explanations, a conception that, moreover, cannot be reconciled with a good deal of actual scientific practice. When we update the philosophy of science, we find the concerns that are raised for folk psychological explanations largely evaporate or are found not to be specific to such explanations. (shrink)

I begin by arguing that a consistent general naturalism must be understood in terms of methodological maxims rather than metaphysical doctrines. Some specific maxims are proposed. I then defend a generalized naturalism from the common objection that it is incapable of accounting for the normative aspects of human life, including those of scientific practice itself. Evolutionary naturalism, however, is criticized as being incapable of providing a sufficient explanation of categorical moral norms. Turning to the epistemological norms of science itself, particularly (...) those governing the empirical testing of specific models, I argue that these should be regarded as conditional rather than categorical and that, as such, can be given a naturalistic justification. The justification, however, is more cognitive than evolutionary. The historical development of science is found to be a better place for applying evolutionary ideas. After briefly considering the possibility of a naturalistic understanding of mathematics and logic, I turn to the problem of reconciling scientific realism with an evolutionary picture of scientific development. The solution, I suggest, is to understand scientific knowledge as being “perspectival” rather than absolutely objective. I first argue that scientific observation, whether by humans or instruments, is perspectival. This argument is extended to scientific theorizing which is regarded not as the formulation of universal laws of nature but as the construction of principles to be used in the construction of models to be applied to specific natural systems. The application of models, however, is argued to be not merely opportunistic but constrained by the methodological presumption that we live in a world with a definite causal structure even though we can understand it only from various perspectives. (shrink)

This paper aims to address the relevance of the natural sciences for transcendental phenomenology, that is, the issue of naturalism. The first section distinguishes three varieties of naturalism and corresponding forms of naturalization: an ontological one, a methodological one, and an epistemological one. In light of these distinctions, in the second section, I examine the main projects aiming to “naturalize phenomenology”: neurophenomenology, front-loaded phenomenology, and formalized approaches to phenomenology. The third section then considers the commitments of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology with (...) respect to the three varieties of naturalism previously discussed. I argue that Husserl rejected strong and weak forms of epistemological naturalism, strong methodological naturalism, and ontological naturalism. The fourth section presents the argument that Husserl endorsed a weak, conditional form of methodological naturalism. This point is illustrated with Husserl’s proposal of “somatology,” a natural science apt to study the corporeality of the lived body. The final section addresses the complementarity and respective limits of the transcendental phenomenological and the natural scientific frameworks. I argue that, on Husserl’s account, the function of transcendental phenomenology with respect to the natural sciences is to provide them with an epistemological foundation and an ontological clarification. I suggest that certain natural sciences can be understood, within the transcendental phenomenological framework, as “sciences of constitution,” that is, as sciences investigating the contribution of real structures acting as conditions of possibility for the occurrence of certain kinds of comprehensive unities in lived experience. (shrink)

Assistive technology is widely used in contemporary special needs education. Our interest is in the extent to which we can conceive of certain uses of AT in this educational context as a form of extended cognition. It is argued that what is critical to answering this question is that the relationship between the student and the AT is more than just that of subject-and-instrument, but instead incorporates a fluidity and spontaneity that puts it on a functional par with their use (...) of the student’s biological cognitive traits. It is claimed that AT use in special needs education offers an especially plausible case of extended cognition for just this reason. It is further maintained that understanding AT in this fashion has some important philosophical and practical ramifications, including how we should conceive of mainstream education, given that this is increasingly conducted within highly technologically-embedded environments. (shrink)

On the basis of a case study in bioengineering, this paper proposes a novel perspective on models in science and engineering. This is done with the help of two notions: representation and design. These two notions are interpreted as referring to modeling relations between vehicles and targets that differ in their respective directions of fit. The representation relation has a vehicle-to-target direction of fit and the design relation has a target-to-vehicle direction of fit. The case study of an organ on (...) chip model illustrates that the technical device can participate in both design and representation relations. The two relations share the same relatum of the organ on chip, but they have different directions of fit. In the design relation, the chip is adjusted to a design plan, in which case we are dealing with a target-to-vehicle direction of fit. In the representation relation, the chip is adjusted to a human organ, in which case we are dealing with a vehicle-to-target direction of fit. The example shows that a conception of modeling as involving only relations with a vehicle-to-target direction of fit is too narrow to account for models in science and engineering. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to articulate an account of scientific modeling that reconciles pluralism about modeling with a modest form of scientific realism. The central claim of this approach is that the models of a given physical phenomenon can present different aspects of the phenomenon. This allows us, in certain special circumstances, to be confident that we are capturing genuine features of the world, even when our modeling occurs independently of a wholly theoretical motivation. This framework is illustrated (...) using a recent debate from meteorology. (shrink)

This is a critical notice of Mark Wilson's Wandering Significance.

Dimensional analysis can offer us explanations by allowing us to answer What-if–things-had-been-different? questions rather than in virtue of, say, unifying diverse phenomena, important as that is. Additionally, it is argued that dimensional analysis is a form of modelling as it involves several of the aspects crucial in modelling, such as misrepresenting aspects of a target system. By highlighting the continuities dimensional analysis has with forms of modelling we are able to describe more precisely what makes dimensional analysis explanatory and understand (...) otherwise puzzling aspects of dimensional reasoning, such as introducing fictitious dimensions and excluding dimensionally relevant information to characterise some systems. Finally, thinking of dimensional arguments as a form of modelling allows an explication of the role abstraction and multiple realisability; not as compatibility with other possible worlds but as compatibility with different fictional descriptions of our own world. (shrink)

One way visual representations might function in scientific reasoning is to convey content that is true or false, analogous to making a claim. An alternative way that visual representations might function is as an object that may make statements true or false, but is not itself true or false, analogous to a scientific model. In this paper I evaluate the most recent and extended defense of this latter position and show that the case study involved does not in fact support (...) the view that the diagrams discussed function as truth-makers rather than truth bearers. (shrink)

Este artigo pretende mostrar que os argumentos sustentados por Ryle podem ser uma postura crítica ao problema do realismo e dos processos mentais: primeiramente, porque o realismo, diferentemente de algumas teorias da mente contemporâneas, separa a vida mental das outras propriedades que compõem o mundo e, posteriormente, porque tal argumento precisaria explicar como tais propriedades podem instanciar um conteúdo que não seria parte de um sistema físico [como o cérebro]. Deste modo, argumenta-se que, a partir de Ryle, a interação dos (...) processos mentais com a possibilidade da existência de objetos externos à consciência não depende de nenhuma arquitetura biológica, mas dos elementos semânticos que utilizamos cotidianamente para falar e dizer o mundo. Esta postura, por um lado, redesenha críticas à chamada doutrina oficial e, por outro, nutre uma parcela de argumentos realistas que deveriam ser atacados e dissolvidos pelas atuais teorias da mente. Palavras-chave: Realismo, linguagem, processos mentais, cognição, Ryle. (shrink)

There is currently a gap in our understanding of how figures produced by mechanical imaging techniques play evidential roles: several studies based on close examination of scientific practice show that imaging techniques do not yield data whose significance can simply be read off the image. If image-making technology is not a simple matter of nature re-presenting itself to us in a legible way, just how do the images produced provide support for scientific claims? In this article I will first show (...) that there is a distinct question about the semiotics of mechanically produced images that has not yet been answered. I show that my account of visual representations can do so, and I argue that the role of convention involved in my account is compatible with the view that visual representations produced through mechanized imaging techniques can play genuine evidential roles in scientific reasoning. (shrink)

Recent years have seen enticing empirical approaches to solving the epistemological problem of the theory-ladenness of observation. I group these approaches in two categories according to their method of choice: testing and refereeing. I argue that none deliver what friends of theory-neutrality want them to. Testing does not work because both evidence from cognitive neuroscience and perceptual pluralism independently invalidate the existence of a common observation core. Refereeing does not work because it treats theory-ladenness as a kind of superficial, removable (...) bias. Even if such treatment is plausible, there is likely no method to ascertain that effects of this bias are not present. More importantly, evidence from cognitive neuroscience suggests that a deeper, likely irremovable kind of theory-ladenness lies within the perceptual modules. (shrink)

The “ontological turn” is a recent movement within cultural anthropology. Its proponents want to move beyond a representationalist framework, where cultures are treated as systems of belief that provide different perspectives on a single world. Authors who write in this vein move from talk of many cultures to many “worlds,” thus appearing to affirm a form of relativism. We argue that, unlike earlier forms of relativism, the ontological turn in anthropology is not only immune to the arguments of Donald Davidson’s (...) “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” but it affirms and develops the antirepresentationalist position of Davidson’s subsequent essays. (shrink)

Research on ethical, legal and social aspects of life sciences and new technologies has mainly been focused on impacts and consequences, while the emerging framework of Responsible Research and Innovation focuses rather on increased involvement and reflexivity in research processes to foster science and technology that better answers the needs of society. I argue that philosophy of science should be a central feature of RRI and demonstrate how the philosophy of science can contribute in this sense. I show how investigating (...) basic assumptions in research, here exemplified by reductive assumptions in causal modeling, can have important ethical and societal implications. (shrink)

Scientific realists use the “no miracle argument” to show that the empirical and pragmatic success of science is an indicator of the ability of scientific theories to give true or truthlike representations of unobservable reality. While antirealists define scientific progress in terms of empirical success or practical problem-solving, realists characterize progress by using some truth-related criteria. This paper defends the definition of scientific progress as increasing truthlikeness or verisimilitude. Antirealists have tried to rebut realism with the “pessimistic metainduction”, but critical (...) realists turn this argument into an optimistic view about progressive science. (shrink)

I discuss changes of perspective of four kinds in science and about science. Section 2 defends a perspectival nonrealism—something akin to Giere’s perspectival realism but not a realism—against the idea of complete, “Copernican” objectivity. Section 3 contends that there is an inverse relationship between epistemological conservatism and scientific progress. Section 4 casts doubt on strong forms of scientific realism by taking a long-term historical perspective that includes future history. Section 5 defends a partial reversal in the status of so-called context (...) of discovery and context of justification. Section 6 addresses the question of how we can have scientific progress without scientific realism—how progress is possible without the accumulation of representational truth. The overall result is a pragmatic instrumentalist perspective on the sciences and how to study them philosophically, one that contains a kernel of realism—instrumental realism. (shrink)

Are we entering a major new phase of modern science, one in which our standard, human modes of reasoning and understanding, including heuristics, have decreasing value? The new methods challenge human intelligibility. The digital revolution inspires such claims, but they are not new. During several historical periods, scientific progress has challenged traditional concepts of reasoning and rationality, intelligence and intelligibility, explanation and knowledge. The increasing intelligence of machine learning and networking is a deliberately sought, somewhat alien intelligence. As such, it (...) challenges the traditional, heuristic foresight of expert researchers. Nonetheless, science remains human-centered in important ways—and yet many of our ordinary human epistemic activities are alien to ourselves. This fact has always been the source of “the discovery problem”. It generalizes to the problem of understanding expert scientific practice. Ironically, scientific progress plunges us ever deeper into complexities beyond our grasp. But how is progress possible without traditional realism and the intelligibility realism requires? Pragmatic flexibility offers an answer. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that a comprehensive account of the role of representations in science should reconsider some neglected theses of the classical philosophy of science proposed in the first decades of the 20th century. More precisely, it is argued that the accounts of Helmholtz and Hertz may be taken as prototypes of representational accounts in which structure preservation plays an essential role. Following Reichenbach, structure-preserving representations provide a useful device for formulating an up-to-date version of (...) a (relativized) Kantian a priori. An essential feature of modern scientific representations is their mathematical character. That is, representations can be conceived as (partially) structure-preserving maps or functions. This observation suggests an interesting but neglected perspective on the history and philosophy of this concept, namely, that structure-preserving representations are closely related to a priori elements of scientific knowledge. Reichenbach’s early theory of a relativized constitutive but non-apodictic a priori component of scientific knowledge provides a further elaboration of Kantian aspects of scientific representation. To cope with the dynamic aspects of the evolution of scientific knowledge, Cassirer proposed a re-interpretation of the concept of representation that conceived of a particular representation as only one phase in a continuous process determined by pragmatic considerations. Pragmatic aspects of representations are further elaborated in the classical account of C.I. Lewis and the more modern of Hasok Chang. (shrink)

If models can be true, where is their truth located? Giere (Explaining science, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998) has suggested an account of theoretical models on which models themselves are not truth-valued. The paper suggests modifying Giere’s account without going all the way to purely pragmatic conceptions of truth—while giving pragmatics a prominent role in modeling and truth-acquisition. The strategy of the paper is to ask: if I want to relocate truth inside models, how do I get it, what (...) else do I need to accept and reject? In particular, what ideas about model and truth do I need? The case used as an illustration is the world’s first economic model, that of von Thünen (1826/1842) on agricultural land use in the highly idealized Isolated State. (shrink)