Towards a science of the individual: the Aristotelian search for scientific knowledge of individual entities

This article seeks to take a step towards recognizing that science can deal with the concrete and individual as well as the universal. I shall concentrate on some of Aristotle’s texts, as there is a long tradition going back to Aristotle, according to which science deals only with the universal, although his work also contains texts of a very different tenor. He tries to improve the process of definition as an attempt to bring science closer to the concrete, but ends up realizing that there are some unreachable limits. There is, however, a second Aristotelian approach to the problem in Metaphysica M 10, a passage which takes scientific rapprochement to the individual further by introducing a distinction between science in potential and science in act. The former is universal, but the latter deals with individual substances and processes. Aristotle himself acknowledges here that in one sense science is universal and in another it is not, a position that raises important ontological and epistemological problems. Some suggestions are also offered concerning the kind of truth applicable to science in act, that is, practical truth.     

A comparison of two models of scientific progress

Does science progress toward some goal or merely away from primitive beginnings? Two agent-based models are built to explain how possibly both kinds of progressive scientific change can result from the interactions of individuals exploring an epistemic landscape. These models are shown to result in qualitatively different predictions about what the resulting system of science should be like.     

Public scientific testimony in the scientific image

In this paper, I draw on philosophy of science to address a challenge for science communication. Empirical research indicates that some people who trust a meteorologist's report that they are in the path of a storm do not trust a climate scientist's report that we are on a path to global warming. Such selective skepticism about climate science exemplifies a more general challenge:

The Challenge of Selective UptakeLaypersons who generally accept public scientific testimony nevertheless fail to accept public scientific testimony concerning select, equally well warranted, scientific hypotheses.

A prominent response arising from the novel interdisciplinary science of science communication is a principle called Consensus Reporting. According to this principle, science reporters should, whenever feasible, report the scientific consensus or lack thereof for a reported scientific view.However, philosophy of science may offer a different perspective on the issue. This perspective is critical insofar as it indicates some inadequacies of Consensus Reporting. But it is also constructive insofar as it guides the development of an alternative principle, Justification Reporting, according to which science reporters should, whenever feasible, report aspects of the nature and strength of scientific justification or lack thereof for a reported scientific view. A central difference between these proposals is that Consensus Reporting appeals to the authority of the scientists whereas Justification Reporting appeals to the authority of scientific justification. As such, Justification Reporting reflects the image of science.The paper considers the philosophical and empirical motivation for Justification Reporting and its limitations. This includes prospects and problems for implementing it in a way that addresses The Challenge of Selective Uptake. From a methodological point of view, the paper illustrates how empirically informed philosophy of science may help address challenges for science communication.     

Isaac Newton and Augustan Anglo-Latin poetry

Although many historians of science acknowledge the extent to which Greek and Roman ideals framed eighteenth-century thought, many classical references in the texts they study remain obscure. Poems played an important role not only in spreading ideas about natural philosophy, but also in changing people’s perceptions of its value; they contributed to Newton’s swelling reputation as an English hero. By writing about Latin poetry, we focus on the intersection of two literary genres that were significant for eighteenth-century natural philosophy, but seem alien to modern science. We classify Augustan Latinate scientific poetry by considering the audiences for whom the poems were intended. We distinguish three broad categories. One type of poetry was circulated amongst gentlemanly scholars (we look particularly at Tripos verses, and laments for Queen Caroline). A second group comprised poetry written specifically to promote or criticise Newton and his books, particularly the Principia (we look at versions of Pope’s epitaph, and Halley’s Lucretian poem). After Newton’s death, a third type of poetry became increasingly significant, included in collections of poems rather than in texts of natural philosophy. Overall, we show how the classical past was vital for creating the scientific future.     

State of the field: Are the results of science contingent or inevitable?

This paper presents a survey of the literature on the problem of contingency in science. The survey is structured around three challenges faced by current attempts at understanding the conflict between “contingentist” and “inevitabilist” interpretations of scientific knowledge and practice. First, the challenge of definition: it proves hard to define the positions that are at stake in a way that is both conceptually rigorous and does justice to the plethora of views on the issue. Second, the challenge of distinction: some features of the debate suggest that the contingency issue may not be sufficiently distinct from other philosophical debates to constitute a genuine, independent philosophical problem. And third, the challenge of decidability: it remains unclear whether and how the conflict could be settled on the basis of empirical evidence from the actual history of science. The paper argues that in order to make progress in the present debate, we need to distinguish more systematically between different expressions that claims about contingency and inevitability in science can take. To this end, it introduces a taxonomy of different contingency and inevitability claims. The taxonomy has the structure of an ordered quadruple. Each contingency and each inevitability claim contains an answer to the following four questions: (how) are alternatives to current science possible, what types of alternatives are we talking about, how should the alternatives be assessed, and how different are they from actual science?     

Copernicus and Fracastoro: the dedicatory letters to Pope Paul III, the history of astronomy, and the quest for patronage

Copernicus’s De revolutionibus (1543) and Girolamo Fracastoro’s Homocentrica (1538) were both addressed to Pope Paul III (1534-1549). Their dedicatory letters represent a rhetorical exercise in advocating an astronomical reform and an attempt to obtain the papal favour. Following on from studies carried out by Westman (1990) and Barker & Goldstein (2003), this paper deals with cultural, intellectual and scientific motives of both texts, and aims at underlining possible relations between them, such as that Copernicus knew of Fracastoro’s Homocentrica, and that at least part of the rhetorical strategy laid out in De revolutionibus’s dedicatory letter can be read as a sophisticated response to Fracastoro’s arguments.     

For the Glory of Athens: Xenophon’s Hipparchikos <Logos>, a technical treatise and instruction manual on ideal leadership

Xenophon’s Peri hippikes <technees>, “On Horsemanship,” and the Hipparchikos <logos>, “the Cavalry Commander”, writings which can be regarded as technical works with a didactic purpose, are almost unknown. Xenophon was interested in problems of leadership and the exercise of power (For the titles of the both writings and the analogous supplementary terms “technees” and “logos” compare Breitenbach, 1966, 1761. Angled brackets are used by modern editors of ancient texts as text-critical signs and are inserted here because “peri hippikes” and “hipparchikos” are adjectives and cannot stand alone; “technees” and “logos” are supplied as absent, but implied, substantives. The conventional signs “<>” clarify this supplementary act for the modern reader.). The “Cavalry Commander” (ca. 365 B.C.) intended for the instruction of potential hipparchs (calvary commanders) is simultaneously political and didactic and technical; in this text, categories of leadership that had been developed in earlier works are combined in a powerful manner. Xenophon constructed “leaders” as exempla (“examples”) of correct behaviour; military and political theory are synthesised. The Hipparchikos logos, as a didactic work, aims to produce specialists who master their techné (“art” or “skill”), to develop their ideal qualities. Both texts are directed at an Athenian society, in which the cavalry had lost their significance and pride as a result of recent political turbulence. Xenophon hoped to reform the cavalry for the benefit of Athens. The basic question of the didactic work is: how can I become the best hipparch, how can I go beyond simply filling the office, and instead develop it for the well-being of the polis and thus serve the city? The art of leadership consists in dealing with subordinates in such a manner that they obey and follow voluntarily—still an innovative and modern approach today.     

Structures and strategies in ancient Greek and Roman technical writing: An Introduction

Most of our knowledge of Greek and Roman scientific practice and its place in ancient culture is derived from our study of ancient texts. In the last few decades, this written evidence—ancient technical or specialist literature—has begun to be studied using tools of literary analysis to help answer questions about, for instance, how these works were composed, their authors’ intentions and the expectations of their readers.This introduction to Structures and strategies in ancient Greek and Roman technical writing provides an overview of recent scholarship in the area, and the difficulty in pinning down what ‘technical/specialist literature’ might mean in an ancient context, since Greek and Roman authors communicated scientific knowledge using a wide variety of styles and forms of text (e.g. poetry, dialogues, letters).An outline of the three sections is provided: Form as a mirror of method, in which Sabine Föllinger and Alexander Mueller explore ways in which the structures of texts by Aristotle and Plutarch may reflect methodological concerns; Authors and their implied readers, with contributions by Oliver Stoll, David Creese, Boris Dunsch and Paula Olmos, which examines what ancient texts can tell us about the place of technical knowledge in antiquity; Science and the uses of poetry, with articles by Jochen Althoff, Michael Coxhead and Laurence Totelin, and a new English translation of the Aetna poem by Harry Hine, which explores the (to us) unexpected roles of poetry in ancient scientific culture.     

Models and perspectives on stage: remarks on Giere’s Scientific perspectivism

Ron Giere’s recent book Scientific perspectivism sets out an account of science that attempts to forge a via media between two popular extremes: absolutist, objectivist realism on the one hand, and social constructivism or skeptical anti-realism on the other. The key for Giere is to treat both scientific observation and scientific theories as perspectives, which are limited, partial, contingent, context-, agent- and purpose-dependent, and pluralism-friendly, while nonetheless world-oriented and modestly realist. Giere’s perspectivism bears significant similarity to earlier ideas of Paul Feyerabend and John Dewey. Comparing these to Giere’s work not only uncovers a consilience of ideas, but also can help to fill out Giere’s account in places where it is not fully developed, as well as helping us understand the work of these earlier authors and their continuing relevance to contemporary concerns in philosophy of science.     

Hermeneutical contributions to the history of science: Gadamer on ‘presentism’

This article examines how Hans G. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics can contribute to contemporary debates on the concept of ‘presentism’. In the field of the history of science, this term is usually employed in two ways. First, ‘presentism’ refers to the kind of historiography which judges the past to legitimate the present. Second, this concept designates the inevitable influence of the present in the interpretation of the past. In this paper, I argue that both dimensions of the relationship between the present and the past are explored by Hans G. Gadamer in Truth and Method and other texts. In the first place, Gadamer’s critique of historicism calls into question the anti-presentist ideal of studying the past for ‘its own sake’. In the second place, Gadamer’s thesis that all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice poses the question of the inherent “present-centredness” of historical interpretations. By examining Gadamer’s hermeneutics, I seek to provide historians with new arguments and perspectives on the question of ‘presentism’.     

A tale of three theories: Feyerabend and Popper on progress and the aim of science

In this paper, three theories of progress and the aim of science are discussed: (i) the theory of progress as increasing explanatory power, advocated by Popper in The logic of scientific discovery (1935/1959); (ii) the theory of progress as approximation to the truth, introduced by Popper in Conjectures and refutations (1963); (iii) the theory of progress as a steady increase of competing alternatives, which Feyerabend put forward in the essay “Reply to criticism. Comments on Smart, Sellars and Putnam” (1965) and defended as late as the last edition of Against method (1993). It is argued that, contrary to what Feyerabend scholars have predominantly assumed, Feyerabend's changing attitude towards falsificationism—which he often advocated at the beginning of his career, and vociferously attacked in the 1970s and 1980s—must be explained by taking into account not only Feyerabend's very peculiar view of the aim of science, but also Popper's changing account of progress.     

Carnap on unified science

Unified science is a recurring theme in Carnap's work from the time of the Aufbau until the end of the 1930's. The theme is not constant, but knows several variations. I shall extract three quite precise formulations of the thesis of unified science from Carnap's work during this period: from the Aufbau, from Carnap's so-called syntactic period, and from Testability and Meaning and related papers. My main objective is to explain these formulations and to discuss their relation, both to each other and to other aspects of Carnap's work.     

The letter,the dictionary and the laboratory: translating chemistry and mineralogy in eighteenth-century France

SUMMARY

Eighteenth-century scientific translation was not just a linguistic or intellectual affair. It included numerous material aspects requiring a social organization to marshal the indispensable human and non-human actors. Paratexts and actors' correspondences provide a good observatory to get information about aspects such as shipments and routes, processes of translation and language acquisition (dictionaries, grammars and other helpful materials, such as translated works in both languages), texts acquisition and dissemination (including author's additions and corrections, oral presentations in academic meetings and announcements of forthcoming translations).

The nature of scientific translation changed in France during the second half of the eighteenth century. Beside solitary translators, it also happened to become a collective enterprise, dedicated to providing abridgements (Collection académique, 1755–79) or enriching the learned journals with full translations of the most recent foreign texts (Guyton de Morveau's ‘Bureau de traduction de Dijon’, devoted to chemistry and mineralogy, 1781–90). That new trend clearly had a decisive influence on the nature of the scientific press itself. A way to set up science as a social activity in the provincial capital of Dijon, translation required a local and international network for acquiring the linguistic and scientific expertise, along with the original texts, as quickly as possible. Laboratory results and mineralogical observations were used to compare material facts (colour, odour, shape of crystals, etc.) with those described in the original text. By providing a double kind of validation – with both the experiments and the translations – the laboratory thus happened to play a major role in translation.     

Generative models: Human embryonic stem cells and multiple modeling relations

Model organisms are at once scientific models and concrete living things. It is widely assumed by philosophers of science that (1) model organisms function much like other kinds of models, and (2) that insofar as their scientific role is distinctive, it is in virtue of representing a wide range of biological species and providing a basis for generalizations about those targets. This paper uses the case of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) to challenge both assumptions. I first argue that hESC can be considered model organisms, analogous to classic examples such as Escherichia coli and Drosophila melanogaster. I then discuss four contrasts between the epistemic role of hESC in practice, and the assumptions about model organisms noted above. These contrasts motivate an alternative view of model organisms as a network of systems related constructively and developmentally to one another. I conclude by relating this result to other accounts of model organisms in recent philosophy of science.     

Interweaving categories: Styles,paradigms, and models

Analytical categories of scientific cultures have typically been used both exclusively and universally. For instance, when styles of scientific research are employed in attempts to understand and narrate science, styles alone are usually employed. This article is a thought experiment in interweaving categories. What would happen if rather than employ a single category, we instead investigated several categories simultaneously? What would we learn about the practices and theories, the agents and materials, and the political-technological impact of science if we analyzed and applied styles (à la Hacking and Crombie), paradigms (à la Kuhn), and models (à la van Fraassen and Cartwright) simultaneously? I address these questions in general and for a specific case study: a brief history of systematics.     

An early stage in the evolution of Aristotle's physics

Aristotle's Physics V and VI deal with the same concepts: motion, change and continuity. The two books, however, employ altogether different approaches to the study of these concepts, thus presenting different orders of conceptualization. Abraham Edel (1982, 42) claims that Aristotle is a systematic philosopher “not in the sense of [i] one who pursues a deductive system … but in the sense of [ii] one who has a well-constructed and fairly clearly analyzed conceptual network that he uses with considerable power in field after field of human inquiry.” Truly, [ii] is more typical of Aristotle, but in the Physics both approaches are present. Books VI and V (respectively) are good examples. It is commonly taken for granted that Physics V prepares for VI, because of the order in which they appear in the corpus, and because V includes the definitions of the main concepts that are used in VI. A closer look at the texts, however, reveals that the definitions of V are not used in VI. I argue that the definitions of V were not only unknown when VI was written, but are actually incompatible with the spirit of Physics VI and with the main thesis underlying it. Physics VI is close in method, conceptual basis and in its radical formal approach to the Posterior Analytics, and a part of it (the early stratum) looks like a mathematical exercise. The mathematical-logical approach was abandoned, and gave way to the more mature Aristotelian style, which is already dominant in Physics V.     

The abundant world: Paul Feyerabend's metaphysics of science

The goal of this paper is to provide an interpretation of Feyerabend's metaphysics of science as found in late works like Conquest of Abundance and Tyranny of Science. Feyerabend's late metaphysics consists of an attempt to criticize and provide a systematic alternative to traditional scientific realism, a package of views he sometimes referred to as “scientific materialism.” Scientific materialism is objectionable not only on metaphysical grounds, nor because it provides a poor ground for understanding science, but because it implies problematic claims about the epistemic and cultural authority of science, claims incompatible with situating science properly in democratic societies. I show how Feyerabend's metaphysical view, which I call “the abundant world” or “abundant realism,” constitute a sophisticated and challenging form of ontological pluralism that makes interesting connections with contemporary philosophy of science and issues of the political and policy role of science in a democratic society.     

Kant and the scope of analogy in the life sciences

In the present paper I investigate the role that analogy plays in eighteenth-century biology and in Kant's philosophy of biology. I will argue that according to Kant, biology, as it was practiced in the eighteenth century, is fundamentally based on analogical reflection. However, precisely because biology is based on analogical reflection, biology cannot be a proper science. I provide two arguments for this interpretation. First, I argue that although analogical reflection is, according to Kant, necessary to comprehend the nature of organisms, it is also necessarily insufficient to fully comprehend the nature of organisms. The upshot of this argument is that for Kant our understanding of organisms is necessarily limited. Second, I argue that Kant did not take biology to be a proper science because biology was based on analogical arguments. I show that Kant stemmed from a philosophical tradition that did not assign analogical arguments an important justificatory role in natural science. Analogy, according to this conception, does not provide us with apodictically certain cognition. Hence, sciences based on analogical arguments cannot constitute proper sciences.     

Descartes’s changing mind

Descartes is always concerned about knowledge. However, the Galileo affair in 1633, the reactions to his Discourse on method, and later his need to reply to objections to his Meditations provoked crises in Descartes’s intellectual development the import of which has not been sufficiently recognized. These events are the major reasons why Descartes’s philosophical position concerning how we know and what we may know is radically different at the end of his life from what it was when he began. We call this later position Descartes’s epistemic stance and contrast it with his earlier methodological, metaphysical realism. Yet Descartes’s epistemic views cannot be separated from other aspects of his work, for example, his views concerning God, causality, metaphysics, and the nature of science. A further meta-implication is that serious errors await any scholar who cites early Cartesian texts in support of late Cartesian positions, or who uses later texts in conjunction with early ones to support a reading of Descartes’s philosophy.