Existential risk,creativity & well-adapted science

Existential risks, particularly those arising from emerging technologies, are a complex, obstinate challenge for scientific study. This should motivate studying how the relevant scientific communities might be made more amenable to studying such risks. I offer an account of scientific creativity suitable for thinking about scientific communities, and provide reasons for thinking contemporary science doesn't incentivise creativity in this specified sense. I'll argue that a successful science of existential risk will be creative in my sense. So, if we want to make progress on those questions we should consider how to shift scientific incentives to encourage creativity. The analysis also has lessons for philosophical approaches to understanding the social structure of science. I introduce the notion of a ‘well-adapted’ science: one in which the incentive structure is tailored to the epistemic situation at hand.     

The diverse aims of science

There is increasing attention to the centrality of idealization in science. One common view is that models and other idealized representations are important to science, but that they fall short in one or more ways. On this view, there must be an intermediary step between idealized representation and the traditional aims of science, including truth, explanation, and prediction. Here I develop an alternative interpretation of the relationship between idealized representation and the aims of science. I suggest that continuing, widespread idealization calls into question the idea that science aims for truth. If instead science aims to produce understanding, this would enable idealizations to directly contribute to science's epistemic success. I also use the fact of widespread idealization to motivate the idea that science's wide variety aims, epistemic and non-epistemic, are best served by different kinds of scientific products. Finally, I show how these diverse aims—most rather distant from truth—result in the expanded influence of social values on science.     

Narrative possibility and narrative explanation

Narratives are about not only what actually happened, but also what might have. And narrative explanations make productive use of these unrealized possibilities. I discuss narrative explanation as a form of counterfactual, difference-making explanation, with a demanding qualification: the counterfactual conditions are historically or narratively (not merely logically or physically) possible. I consider these issues in connection with literary, historical and scientific narratives.     

Realizability and the varieties of explanation

What realization is has been convincingly presented in relation to the way we determine what counts as the realizers of realized properties. The way we explain a fact of realization includes a reference to what realization should be; therefore it informs in turn our understanding of the nature of realization. Conceptions of explanation are thereby included in the views of realization as a metaphysical property.Recently, several major views of realization such as Polger and Shapiro's or Gillett and Aizawa's, however competing, have relied on the neo-mechanicist theory of explanations (e.g,. Darden and Caver 2013), currently popular among philosophers of science. However, it has also been increasingly argued that some explanations are not mechanistic (e.g., Batterman 2009).Using an account given in Huneman (2017), I argue that within those explanations the fact that some mathematical properties are instantiated is explanatory, and that this defines a specific explanatory type called “structural explanation”, whose subtypes could be: optimality explanations (usually found in economics), topological explanations, etc. This paper thereby argues that all subtypes of structural explanation define several kinds of realizability, which are not equivalent to the usual notion of realization tied to mechanistic explanations, onto which many of the philosophical investigations are focused. Then it draws some consequences concerning the notion of multiple realizability.     

No understanding without explanation

Scientific understanding, this paper argues, can be analyzed entirely in terms of a mental act of “grasping” and a notion of explanation. To understand why a phenomenon occurs is to grasp a correct explanation of the phenomenon. To understand a scientific theory is to be able to construct, or at least to grasp, a range of potential explanations in which that theory accounts for other phenomena. There is no route to scientific understanding, then, that does not go by way of scientific explanation.     

A second look at the colors of the dinosaurs

In earlier work, I predicted that we would probably not be able to determine the colors of the dinosaurs. I lost this epistemic bet against science in dramatic fashion when scientists discovered that it is possible to draw inferences about dinosaur coloration based on the microstructure of fossil feathers (Vinther et al., 2008). This paper is an exercise in philosophical error analysis. I examine this episode with two questions in mind. First, does this case lend any support to epistemic optimism about historical science? Second, under what conditions is it rational to make predictions about what questions scientists will or will not be able answer? In reply to the first question, I argue that the recent work on the colors of the dinosaurs matters less to the debate about the epistemology of historical science than it might seem. In reply to the second question, I argue that it is difficult to specify a policy that would rule out the failed bet without also being too conservative.     

Realism bit by bit: Part II. Disjunctive partial reference

In this second paper, I continue my discussion of the problem of reference for scientific realism. First, I consider a final objection to Kitcher’s account of reference, which I generalise to other accounts of reference. Such accounts make attributions of reference by appeal to our pretheoretical intuitions about how true statements ought to be distibuted among the scientific utterances of the past. I argue that in the cases that merit discussion, this strategy fails because our intuitions are unstable. The interesting cases are importantly borderline—it really isn’t clear what we ought to say about how those terms referred. I conclude that in many relevant cases, our grounds for thinking that the theoretical terms of the past referred are matched by our grounds for thinking that they failed to refer, in such a way that deciding on either result is arbitrary and bad news for the realist. In response to this problem, in the second part of the paper I expand upon Field’s (1973) account of partial reference to sketch a new way of thinking about the theoretical terms of the past—that they partially referred and partially failed to refer.     

‘Language,Truth and Reason’ 30 years later

This paper traces the origins of the styles project, originally presented as ‘styles of scientific reasoning’. ‘Styles of scientific thinking & doing’ is a better label; the styles can also be called genres, or, ways of finding out. A. C. Crombie’s template of six fundamentally distinct ones was turned into a philosophical tool, but with a tinge of Paul Feyerabend’s anarchism. Ways of finding out are not defined by necessary and sufficient conditions, but can be recognized as distinct within a sweeping, anthropological, vision of the European sciences. The approach is unabashedly whiggish. The emergence of these styles is part of what Reviel Netz calls cognitive history, and is to be understood in an ecological way. How did a species like ours, on an Earth like this, develop a few quite general strategies for finding out about, and altering, its world? At a more analytical level, the project invokes Bernard Williams’ notion of truthfulness to explicate the idea that these styles are ‘self-authenticating’ and without foundations. The paper concludes with open questions. What role (for example) have these few fundamentally distinct genres of inquiry played in the formation of the anomalous Western idea of Nature apart from Man?     

The natural selection of conservative science

Social epistemologists have argued that high risk, high reward science has an important role to play in scientific communities. Recently, though, it has also been argued that various scientific fields seem to be trending towards conservatism—the increasing production of what Kuhn (1962) might have called ‘normal science’. This paper will explore a possible explanation for this sort of trend: that the process by which scientific research groups form, grow, and dissolve might be inherently hostile to such science. In particular, I employ a paradigm developed by Smaldino and McElreath (2016) that treats a scientific community as a population undergoing selection. As will become clear, perhaps counter-intuitively this sort of process in some ways promotes high risk, high reward science. But, as I will point out, risky science is, in general, the sort of thing that is hard to repeat. While more conservative scientists will be able to train students capable of continuing their successful projects, and so create thriving lineages, successful risky science may not be the sort of thing one can easily pass on. In such cases, the structure of scientific communities selects against high risk, high rewards projects. More generally, this project makes clear that there are at least two processes to consider in thinking about how incentives shape scientific communities—the process by which individual scientists make choices about their careers and research, and the selective process governing the formation of new research groups.     

Detail and generality in mechanistic explanation

This article is about the role of abstraction in mechanistic explanations. Abstraction is widely recognised as a necessary concession to the practicalities of scientific work, but some mechanist philosophers argue that it is also a positive explanatory feature in its own right. I claim that in as much as these arguments are based on the idea that mechanistic explanation exhibits a trade-off between fine-grained detail and generality, they are unsuccessful. Detail and generality both appear to be important sources of explanatory power, but investigators do not need to make a choice between these desiderata, at least when an explanation incorporates further detail through the decomposition of the mechanism's parts.     

Uncertainty and probability for branching selves

Everettian accounts of quantum mechanics entail that people branch; every possible result of a measurement actually occurs, and I have one successor for each result. Is there room for probability in such an account? The prima facie answer is no; there are no ontic chances here, and no ignorance about what will happen. But since any adequate quantum mechanical theory must make probabilistic predictions, much recent philosophical labor has gone into trying to construct an account of probability for branching selves. One popular strategy involves arguing that branching selves introduce a new kind of subjective uncertainty. I argue here that the variants of this strategy in the literature all fail, either because the uncertainty is spurious, or because it is in the wrong place to yield probabilistic predictions. I conclude that uncertainty cannot be the ground for probability in Everettian quantum mechanics.     

Colligation in modelling practices: From Whewell’s tides to the San Francisco Bay Model

“Colligation”, a term first introduced in philosophy of science by William Whewell (1840), today sparks a renewed interest beyond Whewell scholarship. In this paper, we argue that adopting the notion of colligation in current debates in philosophy of science can contribute to our understanding of scientific models. Specifically, studying colligation allows us to have a better grasp of how integrating diverse model components (empirical data, theory, useful idealization, visual and other representational resources) in a creative way may produce novel generalizations about the phenomenon investigated. Our argument is built both on the theoretical appraisal of Whewell’s philosophy of science and the historical rehabilitation of his scientific work on tides. Adopting a philosophy of science in practice perspective, we show how colligation emerged from Whewell’s empirical work on tides. The production of idealized maps (“cotidal maps”) illustrates the unifying and creative power of the activity of colligating in scientific practice. We show the importance of colligation in modelling practices more generally by looking at its epistemic role in the construction of the San Francisco Bay Model.     

Ernst Cassirer's transcendental account of mathematical reasoning

Cassirer's philosophical agenda revolved around what appears to be a paradoxical goal, that is, to reconcile the Kantian explanation of the possibility of knowledge with the conceptual changes of nineteenth and early twentieth-century science. This paper offers a new discussion of one way in which this paradox manifests itself in Cassirer's philosophy of mathematics. Cassirer articulated a unitary perspective on mathematics as an investigation of structures independently of the nature of individual objects making up those structures. However, this posed the problem of how to account for the applicability of abstract mathematical concepts to empirical reality. My suggestion is that Cassirer was able to address this problem by giving a transcendental account of mathematical reasoning, according to which the very formation of mathematical concepts provides an explanation of the extensibility of mathematical knowledge. In order to spell out what this argument entails, the first part of the paper considers how Cassirer positioned himself within the Marburg neo-Kantian debate over intellectual and sensible conditions of knowledge in 1902–1910. The second part compares what Cassirer says about mathematics in 1910 with some relevant examples of how structural procedures developed in nineteenth-century mathematics.     

Mechanistic artefact explanation

One thing about technical artefacts that needs to be explained is how their physical make-up, or structure, enables them to fulfil the behaviour associated with their function, or, more colloquially, how they work. In this paper I develop an account of such explanations based on the familiar notion of mechanistic explanation. To accomplish this, I (1) outline two explanatory strategies that provide two different types of insight into an artefact’s functioning, and (2) show how human action inevitably plays a role in artefact explanation. I then use my own account to criticize other recent work on mechanistic explanation and conclude with some general implications for the philosophy of explanation.     

Setting up a discipline, II: British history of science and “the end of ideology”, 1931-1948

For the history of science the 1940s were a transformative decade, when salient scholars like Herbert Butterfield or Alexandre Koyré set out to shape postwar culture by promoting new standards for understanding science. Some years ago I placed these developments in a tradition of enduring arts-science tensions and the contemporary notion that previous, “scientistic”, historical practices needed to be confronted with disinterested codes of historical craft (Mayer, 2000). Here, I want to further explore the ideological dimensions of the processes through which the academic study of science became institutionalized. Butterfield’s generation of science historians moulded perception of science in highly specific ways. Whereas the scientist-historians of the 1930s put scientific innovation into its socio-economic contexts, postwar accounts portrayed the birth of modern science as an intellectual revolution. Anti-Marxism formed a defining feature of the process by which the image of scientific work as a disinterested journey of the mind came to be institutionalized. Rather than spelling the end of ideology, appointments processes in the early Cold War years reveal disagreement about what science was to be invariably coextensive with dissent about social and political order. Rather than testifying to irreconcilable conflicts between interestedness and historical craft, the work of both the 1930s and 40s speaks of surprisingly productive relations between the two.     

Historicity and explanation

Some scientific explanations are distinctively historical. The aim of this paper is to say what gives such explanations their historical character. A secondary aim is to describe what makes an explanation a stronger or weaker historical explanation. We begin with a critical discussion of John Beatty's and Eric Desjardins' work on historicity and historical narrative. We then offer an alternative account of historical explanation that draws on the work of earlier philosophers (Gallie, Danto, Mink, and Hull). In that alternative account, we highlight four features of narrative explanation that Beatty and Desjardins underemphasize: central subjects; historical trajectories; the idea that historical narratives are known retrospectively; and criteria for determining what is a stronger or weaker historical narrative.     

Measurements,disturbances and the quantum three box paradox

A quantum pre- and post-selection paradox involves making measurements at two separate times on a quantum system, and making inferences about the state of the system at an intermediate time, conditional upon the observed outcomes. The inferences lead to predictions about the results of measurements performed at the intermediate time, which have been well confirmed experimentally, but which nevertheless seem paradoxical when inferences about different intermediate measurements are combined. The three box paradox is the paradigm example of such an effect, where a ball is placed in one of three boxes and is shuffled between the boxes in between two measurements of its location. By conditionalising on the outcomes of those measurements, it is inferred that between the two measurements the ball would have been found with certainty in Box 1 and with certainty in Box 2, if either box been opened on their own. Despite experimental confirmation of the predictions, and much discussion, it has remained unclear what exactly is supposed to be paradoxical or what specifically is supposed to be quantum, about these effects. In this paper I identify precisely the conditions under which the quantum three box paradox occurs, and show that these conditions are the same as arise in the derivation of the Leggett–Garg Inequality, which is supposed to demonstrate the incompatibility of quantum theory with macroscopic realism. I will argue that, as in Leggett–Garg Inequality violations, the source of the effect actually lies in the disturbance introduced by the intermediate measurement, and that the quantum nature of the effect is that no classical model of measurement disturbance can reproduce the paradox.     

The role of heuristic appraisal in conflicting assessments of string theory

Over the last three decades, string theory has emerged as one of the leading hopes for a consistent theory of quantum gravity that unifies particle physics with general relativity. Despite the fact that string theory has been a thriving research program for the better part of three decades, it has been subjected to extensive criticism from a number of prominent physicists. The aim of this paper is to obtain a clearer picture of where the conflict lies in competing assessments of string theory, through a close reading of the argumentative strategies employed by protagonists on both sides. Although it has become commonplace to construe this debate as stemming from different attitudes to the absence of testable predictions, we argue that this presents an overly simplified view of the controversy, which ignores the critical role of heuristic appraisal. While string theorists and their defenders see the theoretical achievements of the string theory program as providing strong indication that it is ‘on the right track’, critics have challenged such claims, by calling into question the status of certain ‘solved problems’ and its purported ‘explanatory coherence’. The debates over string theory are therefore particularly instructive from a philosophical point of view, not only because they offer important insights into the nature of heuristic appraisal and theoretical progress, but also because they raise deep questions about what constitutes a solved problem and an explanation in fundamental physics.     

Will the real scientists please stand up? dead ends and live issues in the explanation of scientific knowledge

Reflection on the method of science has become increasingly thinner since Kant. If there's any upshot of that part of modern philosophy, it's that the scientists didn't have a secret. There isn't something there that's either effable or ineffable. To understand how they do what they do is pretty much like understanding how any other bunch of skilled craftsmen do what they do. Kuhn's reduction of philosophy of science to sociology of science doesn't point to an ineffable secret of success; it leaves us without the notion of the secret of success.Relativism is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps, about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional co-operative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called ‘relativists’ are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought.Richard Rorty1,2     

Aspects of Aristotelian statics in Galileo's dynamics

This paper examines geometrical arguments from Galileo's Mechanics and Two New Sciences to discern the influence of the Aristotelian Mechanical Problems on Galileo's dynamics. A common scientific procedure is found in the Aristotelian author's treatment of the balance and lever and in Galileo's rules concerning motion along inclined planes. This scientific procedure is understood as a development of Eudoxan proportional reasoning, as it was used in Eudoxan astronomy rather than simply as it appears in Euclid's Elements. Topics treated include the significance of the circle in Galileo's demonstrations, the substitution of rectilinear elements for heterogeneous factors like weight and curvilinear distance, and the way in which elements of a motion are used to measure other elements of the same motion. The indirectness of Galileo's proofs, his conception of speed as relative and comparative, and the meaning of his concept of moment all come into clearer focus. Conclusions are drawn about Galilean idealization, and also about the contrast of literal versus figural modes of explanation in Galileo's science.