What is the relation between things and theories, the material world and its scientific representations? This is a staple philosophical problem that rarely counts as historically legitimate or fruitful. In the following dialogue, the interlocutors do not argue for or against realism. Instead, they explore changing relations between theories and things, between contested objects of knowledge and less contested, more everyday things. Widely seen as the life sciences' first general theory, the cell theory underwent dramatic changes during the nineteenth century. (...) The dialogue establishes that each successive version of the cell theory was formulated -- each identity of the object cell was formed -- around a different material : cork, cartilage, eggs in cleavage, muscle. Such things thus serve as exemplary materials, in ways not described by standard concepts like induction, theory -testing, theory -laden observation, and construction. Still, how can theories and perspective possibly be honed on things if these are apprehended differently by different observers according to their interests, training, culture, or indeed theories? The second part of the dialogue addresses this problem, partly through the verbal and visual schemata that were used by nineteenth-century microscopists and that are comparable to schemata in the visual arts. The third part of the dialogue considers the exemplary materials as a historical sequence, itself needing explanation. Theoretical change devolved partly from wider histories and geographies of the prevalence, availability, or scientific and cultural status of materials such as plants, animals, and muscle. (shrink)

Experience, it is widely agreed, constrains our thinking and is also thoroughly theory-laden. But how can it constrain our thinking while depending on what it purports to constrain? To address this issue, I revisit and carefully analyze the account of observation provided by Norwood Russell Hanson, who introduced the term ‘theory-ladenness of observation’ in the first place. I show that Hanson’s account provides an original and coherent response to the initial question and argue that, if suitably developed, his account provides (...) a distinctive, powerful, and attractive alternative to relationalist and standard representationalist conceptions of experience. (shrink)

Expertise is a cognitive achievement that clearly involves experience and learning, and often requires explicit, time-consuming training specific to the relevant domain. It is also intuitive that this kind of achievement is, in a rich sense, genuinely perceptual. Many experts—be they radiologists, bird watchers, or fingerprint examiners—are better perceivers in the domain(s) of their expertise. The goal of this paper is to motivate three related claims, by substantial appeal to recent empirical research on perceptual expertise: Perceptual expertise is genuinely perceptual (...) and genuinely cognitive, and this phenomenon reveals how we can become epistemically better perceivers. These claims are defended against sceptical opponents that deny significant top-down or cognitive effects on perception, and opponents who maintain that any such effects on perception are epistemically pernicious. (shrink)

A number of researchers today make an appeal to quantum physics when trying to develop a satisfactory account of the mind, an appeal still felt to be controversial by many. Often these "quantum approaches" try to explain some well-known features of conscious experience (or mental processes more generally), thus using quantum physics to enrich the explanatory framework or explanans used in consciousness studies and cognitive science. This paper considers the less studied question of whether quantum physical intuitions could help us (...) to draw attention to new or neglected aspects of the mind in introspection, and in this way change our view about what needs explanation in the rst place. Although prima facie implausible, it is suggested that this could happen, for example, if there were analogies between quantum processes and mental processes (e.g., the process of thinking). The naive idea is that such analogies would help us to see mental processes and conscious experience in a new way. It has indeed been proposed long ago that such analogies exist, and this paper rst focuses at some length on David Bohm's formulation of them from 1951. It then briefly considers these analogies in relation to Smolensky's more recent analogies between cognitive science and physics, and Pylkko's aconceptual view of the mind. Finally, Bohm's early analogies will be briefly considered in relation to the analogies between quantum processes and the mind he proposed in his later work. (shrink)

A number of researchers today make an appeal to quantum physics when trying to develop a satisfactory account of the mind, an appeal still felt to be controversial by many. Often these "quantum approaches" try to explain some well-known features of conscious experience (or mental processes more generally), thus using quantum physics to enrich the explanatory framework or explanans used in consciousness studies and cognitive science. This paper considers the less studied question of whether quantum physical intuitions could help us (...) to draw attention to new or neglected aspects of the mind in introspection, and in this way change our view about what needs explanation in the first place. Although prima facie implausible, it is suggested that this could happen, for example, if there were analogies between quantum processes and mental processes (e.g., the process of thinking). The naive idea is that such analogies would help us to see mental processes and conscious experience in a new way. It has indeed been proposed long ago that such analogies exist, and this paper first focuses at some length on David Bohm's formulation of them from 1951. It then briefly considers these analogies in relation to Smolensky's more recent analogies between cognitive science and physics, and Pylkko's aconceptual view of the mind. Finally, Bohm's early analogies will be briefly considered in relation to the analogies between quantum processes and the mind he proposed in his later work. -/- [This article is a modified version of an article that was first published in the anthology Being and Brain: At the Boundary between Science, Philosophy, Language and Arts, ed. by G. Globus, K. Pribram and G. Vitiello, Advances in Consciousness Research 58, John Benjamins, Amsterdam 2004, pp. 165-195.]. (shrink)

This paper offers an intellectual history of the scientific realism debate during the twentieth century. The telling of the tale will explain the philosophical significance and the prospects of the scientific realism debate, through the major turns it went through. The emphasis will be on the relations between empiricism and scientific realism and on the swing from metaphysics-hostile to metaphysics-friendly versions of realism.

We come prepared to track events and objects, building our knowledge base while foraging for coherence. Classical pragmatism recognizes that the acquisition of knowledge is in part a contact sport (e.g. Peirce, Dewey). One of the aims of neuroscience is to capture human experience. One route to perhaps achieve this may be through the study of the visual system and its expansion in our evolutionary history. Embodied cephalic systems, as Dewey knew well, are tied to self-corrective inquiry. A philosophy of (...) neuroscience needs to capture how such events are tracked, tested through experience, and subsequently modified in the brain to comprise a knowledge base. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how realist moral naturalists can provide an intra-theoretic explanation of the epistemic possibility of wholesale moral error. This is a requirement on metaethical theories that has been recently defended by Akhlaghi (2021). After clarifying Akhlaghi’s argument and responding to Evers’s (2021) recent rebuttal, I argue that even under the assumption that moral facts are grounded in an appropriate subset of natural facts (N-facts), there is still a non-zero probability of wholesale moral error. This is demonstrated (...) by considering three types of epistemically possible scenarios: specifically, it could either be that N-facts do not actually exist, or that N-facts exist in a way that entails wholesale moral error, or that N-facts exist in a non-error theoretic way, but their existence is temporally restricted. (shrink)

Given that many imaging technologies in biology and medicine are non-optical and generate data that is essentially numerical, it is a striking feature of these technologies that the data generated using them are most frequently displayed in the form of semi-naturalistic, photograph-like images. In this paper, I claim that three factors underlie this: (1) historical preferences, (2) the rhetorical power of images, and (3) the cognitive accessibility of data presented in the form of images. The third of these can be (...) argued to provide an epistemic advantage to images, but I will further argue that this is often misleading and that images can in many cases be less informative than the corresponding mathematical data. (shrink)

Two questions are central to the “rationality debate” in the philosophy of social science. First, should we acknowledge differences in basic norms of epistemic and agential rationality, or in the content of perceptual experience, as the “best explanation” of radical differences in belief and practice? Second, can genuine understanding be achieved between cultures and research traditions that so differ in their beliefs and practices? I survey a number of responses to these questions, and suggest that one of these, “dialogical optimism”, (...) while attractive, is in need of further clarification. Such clarification may be forthcoming if we attend to recent work by John McDowell. McDowell claims that perceptual experience, as our primary mode of epistemic access to the world, must be located within what Sellars termed the “space of reasons” if we are to make sense of our conception of ourselves as thinking creatures. I develop a reading of this claim in terms of a fundamental duality in human perceptual experience, and use this conception of experience to illuminate the dialogical optimist strategy in the rationality debate. (shrink)

The ArgumentTwo dominant models of criticism are identified and analyzed. One is selfconsciously normative. It conceives of criticism as subject to strict logical rules. The other views itself as essentially descriptive and accounts for the critical activity in terms of social factors. In spite of their different origins and purposes, it is argued that both models share a reductionistic thrust, which minimizes the role of the critic qua agent. It is further agreed that neither provides an adequate account of critical (...) activity and its role in science. (shrink)

In the last two sections of Structure, Thomas Kuhn first develops his famous threefold conception of the incommensurability of scientific paradigms and, subsequently, a conception of scientific progress as growth of empirical strength. The latter conception seems to be at odds with the former in that semantic incommensurability appears to imply the existence of situations where scientific progress in Kuhns sense can no longer exist. In contrast to this seeming inconsistency of Kuhns conception, we will try to show in this (...) study that the semantic incommensurability of scientific terms appears to be fully compatible with scientific progress. Our argumentation is based on an improved version of the formalization of Kuhns conception as developed in the 1970s by Joseph Sneed and Wolfgang Stegmüller: In order to be comparable, incommensurable theories need the specification of relations that refer to the concrete ontologies of these theories and involve certain truth claims. The original structuralist account of reduction fails to provide such relations, because (1) it is too structural and (2) it is too wide. Moreover, the original structuralist account also fails to cover important cases of incommensurable theories in being too restrictive for them. In this paper, we develop an improved notion of “reduction” that allows us to avoid these shortcomings by means of a more flexible device for the formalization of (partially reductive) relations between theories. For that purpose, we use a framework of rigid logic, i.e., logic that is based on a fixed collection of objects. (shrink)

Despite its potential implications for the objectivity of scientific knowledge, the claim that “scientific instruments are perspectival” has received little critical attention. I show that this claim is best understood as highlighting the dependence of instruments on different perspectives. When closely analyzed, instead of constituting a novel epistemic challenge, this dependence can be exploited to mount novel strategies for resolving two old epistemic problems: conceptual relativism and theory-ladeness. The novel content of this article consists in articulating and developing these strategies (...) by introducing two fine-grained notions of perspectives as the key units of analysis: “broad perspectives” and “narrow perspectives.”. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom teaches that Thomas Huxley discredited Richard Owen in their debate over ape and human brains. This paper reexamines the dispute and uses it as a test case for evaluating the metaphysical realist, internal realist, and social constructivist theories of scientific knowledge. Since Owen worked in the Kantian tradition, his anatomical research illustrates the implications of internal realism for scientific practice. As an avowed Cartesian, Huxley offered a well developed attack on Owen''s position from a metaphysical realist perspective. Adrian (...) Desmond''s political retrospective on the dispute affords the additional opportunity to contrast internal realism with social constructivism. I argue that since Huxley ultimately based his attack on his valuing Europeans as superior to blacks, his argument illustrates the hazards of accepting the metaphysical realist promise of value free science. Desmond overlooks this racial dimension of the dispute, and his work shows how social constructivism can distract the historian and philosopher from even the social meaning of science. As internal realists like Putnam have argued, values enter science not from without, but from within the very process of science itself. (shrink)

While ontic structural realism (OSR) has been a central topic in contemporary philosophy of science, the relation between OSR and the concept of emergence has received little attention. We will argue that OSR is fully compatible with emergentism. The denial of ontological emergence requires additional assumptions that, strictly speaking, go beyond OSR. We call these _physicalist closure assumptions._ We will explain these assumptions and show that they are independent of the central commitments of OSR and inconsistent with its core goals. (...) Recognizing the compatibility of OSR and ontological emergence may contribute to the solution of ontological puzzles in physics while offering new ways to achieve the goals that advocates of OSR set for their view. (shrink)

Perhaps the most significant contemporary theory of lawhood is the Best System (/MRL) view on which laws are true generalizations that best systematize knowledge. Our question in this paper will be how best to formulate a theory of this kind. We’ll argue that an acceptable MRL should (i) avoid inter-system comparisons of simplicity, strength, and balance, (ii) make lawhood epistemically accessible, and (iii) allow for laws in the special sciences. Attention to these problems will bring into focus a useful menu (...) of novel MRL theories, some of which solve problems the original MRL theory could not. Hence we conceive of the paper as moving toward a better Best System theory of laws. (shrink)

Some strongly empiricist views of scientific knowledge advocate a rejection of metaphysics. On such views, scientific knowledge is described strictly in terms of knowledge of the observable world, demarcated by human sensory abilities, and no metaphysical considerations need arise. This paper argues that even these views require some recourse to metaphysics in order to derive knowledge from experience. Central here is the notion of metaphysical inference, which admits of different “magnitudes”, thus generating a spectrum of putative knowledge with more substantially (...) empirical beliefs at one end, and more metaphysically imbued beliefs at the other. Given that metaphysical inference is required even concerning knowledge of the observable, the empiricist hope of avoiding metaphysics altogether is futile: knowledge of the observable simply involves metaphysical inferences that are of smaller magnitudes than others. Metaphysical inferences are required not only to distinguish veridical from non-veridical experience and to determine the quality of empirical information, but also in order to explain how we construct experience (through categorizations and classifications of objects, events, processes, and properties), how we extrapolate from empirical evidence to generalize about observable phenomena, and how we use this evidence to test and confirm hypotheses and theories. (shrink)

: The distinction between science and philosophy plays a central role in methodological, programmatic and institutional debates. Discussions of disciplinary identities typically focus on boundaries or else on genealogies, yielding models of demarcation and models of dynamics. Considerations of a discipline's self-image, often based on history, often plays an important role in the values, projects and practices of its members. Recent focus on the dynamics of scientific change supplements Kuhnian neat model with a role for philosophy and yields a model (...) of the evolution of philosophy of science. This view illuminates important aspects of science and itself contributes to philosophy of science. This interactive model is general yet based on exclusive attention to physics. In this paper and two sequels, I focus on the human sciences and argue that their role in the history of philosophy of science is just as important and it also involves a close involvement of the history of philosophy. The focus is on Gestalt psychology and it points to some lessons for philosophy of science. But, unlike the discussion of natural sciences, the discussion here brings out more complication than explication, and skews certain kinds of generalizations. (shrink)

Wilfred Carr; Can Educational Research be Scientific?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 17, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 35–43, https://doi.org/10.1111.

I argue against the tendency in the philosophy of science literature to link abduction to the inference to the best explanation (IBE), and in particular, to claim that Peireean abduction is a conceptual predecessor to IBE. This is not to discount either abduction or IBE. Rather the purpose of this paper is to clarify the relation between Peireean abduction and IBE in accounting for ampliative inference in science. This paper aims at a proper classification—not justification—of types of scientific reasoning. In (...) particular, I claim that Peireean abduction is an in-depth account of the process of generating explanatory hypotheses, while IBE, at least in Peter Lipton's thorough treatment, is a more encompassing account of the processes both of generating and of evaluating scientific hypotheses. There is then a two-fold problem with the claim that abduction is IBE. On the one hand, it conflates abduction and induction, which are two distinct forms of logical inference, with two distinct aims, as shown by Charles S. Peirce; on the other hand it lacks a clear sense of the full scope of IBE as an account of scientific inference. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an analysis of the radical disagreement over the adequacy of string theory. The prominence of string theory despite its notorious lack of empirical support is sometimes explained as a troubling case of science gone awry, driven largely by sociological mechanisms such as groupthink (e.g. Smolin 2006). Others, such as Dawid (2013), explain the controversy by positing a methodological revolution of sorts, according to which string theorists have quietly turned to nonempirical methods of theory assessment given (...) the technological inability to directly test the theory. The appropriate response, according to Dawid, is to acknowledge this development and widen the canons of acceptable scientific methods. As I’ll argue, however, the current situation in fundamental physics does not require either of these responses. Rather, as I’ll suggest, much of the controversy stems from a failure to properly distinguish the “context of justification” from the “context of pursuit”. Both those who accuse string theorists of betraying the scientific method and those who advocate an enlarged conception of scientific methodology objectionably conflate epistemic justification with judgements of pursuit-worthiness. Once we get clear about this distinction and about the different norms governing the two contexts, the current situation in fundamental physics becomes much less puzzling. After defending this diagnosis of the controversy, I’ll show how the argument patterns that have been posited by Dawid as constituting an emergent methodological revolution in science are better off if reworked as arguments belonging to the context of pursuit. (shrink)

A consensus exists among contemporary philosophers of biology about the history of their field. According to the received view, mainstream philosophy of science in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s focused on physics and general epistemology, neglecting analyses of the 'special sciences', including biology. The subdiscipline of philosophy of biology emerged (and could only have emerged) after the decline of logical positivism in the 1960s and 70s. In this article, I present bibliometric data from four major philosophy of science journals (Erkenntnis, (...) Philosophy of Science, Synthese, and the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science), covering 1930-59, which challenge this view. (shrink)

The received theories of epistemology identify abductive inferences with the cognitive patterns of speculation (hypothesis formation) and insist that they cannot verify or confirm hypotheses. I criticize various descriptions of abduction, offer a structural analysis of abductive inference,, characterize abduction without alluding to its putative role in inquiry, and then demonstrate that some abductions do provide evidence and that not all scientific hypotheses derive from abductive inferences. This result challenges those notions of scientific k knowledge that dismiss some central scientific (...) ideas (for example, evolution) as ‘meta-physical research programs’ or ‘just theories’ when they are instead well substantiated by abductive evidence. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine two important issues concerning the agency theory of causality: the charge of anthropomorphism and the relation of simultaneous causation. After a brief outline of the agency theory, sections 2–4 contain the refutation of the three main forms in which the charge of anthropomorphism is to be found in the literature. It will appear that it is necessary to distinguish between the subjective and the objective aspect of the concept of causation. This will (...) lead, in section 5, to contrast two kinds of anthropomorphism, one which has been rightly rejected by modern science and one which is fully compatible with the objective reality of the causal processes. Finally, section 6 will apply the preceding considerations to simultaneous causation. On the one hand, in a basic sense, there can be no simultaneous causal relations. On the other hand, simultaneous causation arises when we consider the natural change by abstracting from the agent and from her/his projects of interven.. (shrink)

Three major views of the observation?theory relation are now extant: (1) Observation and theory are mutually independent and observation provides the basis for evaluating theories. (2) Observations are theory?dependent and do not provide objective grounds for evaluating theories. (3) The concept of observation should be extended in a way that includes many so?called ?theoretical?entities? among the observables. Analyses of these views set the stage for a new approach that incorporates lessons learned from discussions of earlier accounts. The central idea of (...) this new approach is that empirical testing requires comparison of results arrived at by derivation from the theory being tested (plus appropriate auxiliary premises) with results derived from an interaction with aspects of nature in the theory's domain. These routes are independent in that each can be pursued without knowledge of the details or results of the alternative route. The approach accounts for the role of empirical results in evaluating theories without requiring that these results be theory?free or more certain than theoretical results. It also provides a basis for understanding the conditions under which a conflict between observation and theory can result in rejection of the observational result. (shrink)

This paper proposes a set of criteria for an appropriate experiment on the issue of the theory ladenness of perception. These criteria are used to select a number of experiments that use: belief-based ambiguous figures, fragmented figures, or memory color. Crucially, the data in experiments of this type are based on the participant’s qualitative visual experience. Across many different types of experimental designs, different types of stimuli, and different types of belief manipulation, these experiments show the impact of belief/theory on (...) visual perception. Using an ecological validity argument, I conclude that attention-based interpretations of these findings are not successful because the relevant epistemological issues only require that we examine final perception, in the sense of visual awareness of the everyday world. Finally, I argue that the epistemological consequences of theory-ladenness can be reduced by using a top-down/bottom-up theoretical framework and by adopting appropriate methodological procedures to data derived from individual observations. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper addresses the question of what scientific realism implies and what it does not when it is articulated so as to provide the best defense against plausible philosophical alternatives. A summary is presented of “abductive” arguments for scientific realism, and of the epistemological and semantic conceptions upon which they depend. Taking these arguments to be the best current defense of realism, it is inquired what, in the sense just mentioned, realism implies and what it does not. It is concluded (...) that realism implies the strong rejection of epistemological foundationalism, a non‐Humean conception of causation and of explanation, and a causal rather than conceptual account of the unity of natural definitions. It is denied that realism implies bivalence or the existence of one true theory, one preferred vocabulary or one distinctly privileged science. It is further denied that realism implies that there are no unrecognized conventional aspects to scientific theorizing and it is denied that realism implies that scientists routinely do good experimental metaphysics. (shrink)

The term Monte Carlo method indicates any computer-aided procedure for numerical estimation that combines mathematical calculations with randomly generated numerical input values. Today it is an important tool in high energy physics while physicists and philosophers also often consider it a sort of virtual experiment. The Monte Carlo method was developed in the 1940s, in the context of U.S. American nuclear weapons research, an event often regarded as the origin of both computer simulation and “artificial reality” (Galison 1997). The present (...) paper interrogates this strong claim by focusing on the emergence of Monte Carlo event generators in particle physics in the early 1960s. This historical case study shows how, as Monte Carlo computation became part of the toolbox of particle physicists around 1960, it was neither usually referred to as a “computer simulation” nor was it regarded as a surrogate for experimentation. In revising the history of this method, this paper asks, in what context did particle physicists of the 1960s decide to create FAKE, the first high-energy-physics Monte Carlo event simulator? What was their goal? And what epistemic role did FAKE play? In answering these questions, it is argued that Monte Carlo computations were not introduced into particle physics to simulate experiments, but rather they played the role of theoretical tools. The Monte Carlo method was able to do this thanks to its random component, a property which provided a means of modeling a specific phenomenon, so-called “(particle) resonances”. Indeed, in doing so, event generators even came to mutually assimilate and reshape the notions of particle and resonance, taking up an epistemic function which had previously been confined to physical-mathematical formulae: that of a medium which could express aspects of particle theory. (shrink)

Este ensayo busca mostrar que la ciencia macroeconómica desde hace mucho tiempo no es una disciplina cuyas investigaciones están encuadradas dentro del denominado empirismo lógico y tampoco sus controversias se dirimen dentro del algúnparadigma al estilo de Thomas Kuhn, sino que está conformada por un conjunto de propuestas teóricas que conforman lo que Laudan denomina como “tradiciones de investigación”. Aunque los fenómenos que estudia la macroeconomía son externos a la consciencia del investigador, del diseñador de política económica y del público (...) en general, sus realizaciones tienden más hacia las propuestas de un realismo perspectivistade corte naturalista y que sus hallazgos expresan verdades acerca de las “tendencias” y “capacidades” que subyacen en los fenómenos económicos.This essay tries to show that macroeconomic science from a long time rather to make economic research taking account neo positivist principles and point of view is a discipline with different perspectives and theories within “research traditions” as Larry Laudan said. Although, whether the macroeconomic phenomena is outside of researchers, public policy makers, and people in general, the understanding of macroeconomic as a science trends to be a form of perspective realism with a methodological commitment to naturalism, using models as primary representational entities of economic problems, and where truth are about its trends and capacities as suggested Ronald GiereandNancy Cartwright. (shrink)