Search

Relationships of counterfactual dependence have played a major role in recent debates of explanation and understanding in the philosophy of science. Usually, counterfactual dependencies have been viewed as the explanantia of explanation, i.e., the things providing explanation and understanding. Sometimes, however, counterfactual dependencies are themselves the targets of explanations in science. These kinds of explanations are the focus of this paper. I argue that “micro-level model explanations” explain the particular form of the empirical regularity underlying a counterfactual dependency by representing it as a physical necessity on the basis of postulated microscopic entities. By doing so, micro-level models rule out possible forms the regularity (and the associated counterfactual) could have taken. Micro-model explanations, in other words, constrain empirical regularities and their associated counterfactual dependencies. I introduce and illustrate micro-level model explanations in detail, contrast them to other accounts of explanation, and consider potential problems.

Theoretical virtues play an important role in the acceptance and belief of theories in science and philosophy. Philosophers have well-developed views on which virtues ought and ought not to influence one’s acceptance and belief. But what do scientists think? This paper presents the results of a quantitative study with scientists from the natural and social sciences and compared their views to those held by philosophers. Some of the main results are: (i) there is broad agreement across all three groups about how the virtues are to be ranked, (ii) all groups agree that unification is an epistemic virtue and there is even some evidence that simplicity is viewed as epistemic by scientists, (iii) all groups consider syntactic parsimony as more important than ontological parsimony, and (iv) all groups consider unifying power as independent from simplicity.

Book review of Sabine Hossenfelder: "Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray." Forthcoming in Metascience.

Proponents of the “negative program” in experimental philosophy have argued that judgements in philosophical cases, also known as case judgements, are unreliable and that the method of cases should be either strongly constrained or even given up. Here we put one of the main proponent’s account of why philosophical cases may cause the unreliability of case judgements to the test. We conducted our test with thought experiments from physics, which exhibit the exact same supposedly “disturbing characteristics” of philosophical cases.

A theory’s fertility is one of the standard theoretical virtues. But how is it to be construed? In current philosophical discourse, particularly in the realism debate, theoretical fertility is usually understood in terms of novel success: a theory is fertile if it manages to make successful novel predictions. Another, more permissible, notion of fertility can be found in the work of Ernan McMullin. This kind of fertility, McMullin claims, gives us just as strong (or even stronger) grounds for realism. My paper critically assesses McMullin’s notion of fertility and its realist rationale. It concludes that McMullin’s preferred example, namely the fertile development of the Bohr-Sommerfeld model of the atom, does not support McMullin’s argument for realism. Although the implications for the realism debate are as of yet unclear, the case study offers some important methodological lessons.

What does it mean for a hypothesis to be ad hoc? One prominent account has it that ad hoc hypotheses have no independent empirical support. Others have viewed ad hoc judgements as subjective. Here I critically review both of these views and defend my own Coherentist Conception of Ad hocness by working out its conceptual and descriptive attractions.

Perhaps the strongest argument for scientific realism, the no-miracles-argument, has been said to commit the so-called base rate fallacy. The apparent elusiveness of the base rate of true theories has even been said to undermine the rationality of the entire realism debate. In this paper, I confront this challenge by arguing, on the basis of the Kuhnian picture of theory choice, that a theory is likely to be true if it possesses multiple theoretical virtues and is embraced by numerous scientists, even when the base rate converges to zero.

In this paper I defend Kuhn’s view of scientific discovery, which involves two central tenets, namely (i) that a scientific discovery always requires a discovery-that (i.e., the observation of X) and a discovery-what (i.e., the correct conceptualisation of X), and (ii) that there are two kinds of scientific discovery, resulting from the temporal order of the discovery-that and the discovery-what. I identify two problems with Kuhn’s account and offer solutions to them from a realist stance. Alternatives to Kuhn’s account are also discussed.

In the Kuhnian view of theory choice, theories, as a matter of empirical fact, often score differently well with regard to the standard theoretical virtues. The case I discuss in this paper, however, is a case in which there was one theory which was more virtuous than all its competitors. In such cases practitioners’ disparate weighting preferences, which Kuhn is so keen to emphasise, make no difference to theory choice: practitioners’ choices will converge on one theory despite their different weighting preferences. The case I discuss in this paper concerns the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam (GWS) model of electroweak interactions in the early 1970s. After considering the contemporary experimental evidence in its favour in detail, I argue that the GWS model was chosen not because the evidence in its favour was compelling, but rather because its virtues exceeded those of its competitors.

In a recent book and an article, Carl Craver construes the relations between different levels of a mechanism, which he also refers to as constitutive relations, by means of mutual manipulability (MM). Interpreted metaphysically, MM implies that inter-level relations are symmetrical. MM thus violates one of the main desiderata of scientific explanation, namely explanatory asymmetry. Parts of Craver’s writings suggest a metaphysical interpretation of MM, and Craver explicitly commits to constitutive relationships being symmetrical. The present paper draws attention to this shortcoming of Craver’s account. The paper furthermore explores the option of interpreting MM epistemologically, as a means for individuating mechanisms. It is argued that MM then is redundant. MM should therefore better be abandoned.

In this article I assess Alisa Bokulich’s idea that explanatory model fictions can be genuinely explanatory. I draw attention to a tension in her account between the claim that model fictions are explanatorily autonomous, and the demand that model fictions be justified in order for them to be genuinely explanatory. I also explore the consequences that arise from Bokulich’s use of Woodward’s account of counterfactual explanation and her abandonment of Woodward’s notion of an intervention. As it stands, Bokulich’s account must be deemed unworkable.

Predictivism is the view that successful predictions of ‘novel’ evidence carry more confirmational weight than accommodations of already known evidence. Novelty, in this context, has traditionally been conceived of as temporal novelty. However temporal predictivism has been criticized for lacking a rationale: why should the time order of theory and evidence matter? Instead, it has been proposed, novelty should be construed in terms of use-novelty, according to which evidence is novel if it was not used in the construction of a theory. Only if evidence is use-novel can it fully support the theory entailing it. As I point out in this paper, the writings of the most influential proponent of use-novelty contain a weaker and a stronger version of use-novelty. However both versions, I argue, are problematic. With regard to the appraisal of Mendeleev’ periodic table, the most contentious historical case in the predictivism debate, I argue that temporal predictivism is indeed supported, although in ways not previously appreciated. On the basis of this case, I argue for a form of so-called symptomatic predictivism according to which temporally novel predictions carry more confirmational weight only insofar as they reveal the coherence of facts as identified by the theory as real.

The thesis of theory-ladenness of observations, in its various guises, is widely considered as either ill-conceived or harmless to the rationality of science. The latter view rests partly on the work of the proponents of New Experimentalism who have argued, among other things, that experimental practices are efficient in guarding against any epistemological threat posed by theory-ladenness. In this paper I show that one can generate a thesis of theory-ladenness for experimental practices from an influential New Experimentalist account. The notion I introduce for this purpose is the concept of ‘theory-driven data reliability judgments’ (TDR), according to which theories which are sought to be tested with a particular set of data guide reliability judgments about those very same data. I provide various prominent historical examples (among others, the confirmation of Einstein’s prediction of star light bending in 1919) to show that TDRs are used by scientists to resolve data conflicts. I argue that the rationality of the practices which employ TDRs can be saved if the independent support of the theories driving TDRs is construed in a particular way.

Some twenty years ago, Bogen and Woodward challenged one of the fundamental assumptions of the received view, namely the theory-observation dichotomy and argued for the introduction of the further category of scientific phenomena. The latter, Bogen and Woodward stressed, are usually unobservable and inferred from what is indeed observable, namely scientific data. Crucially, Bogen and Woodward claim that theories, which we seek to test, predict and explain phenomena, not data. But then, of course, the thesis of theory-ladenness cannot apply. The idea that theory-ladenness does not occur in scientific practice is one of the claims I contest in this paper. More importantly, Bogen and Woodward held that the reliability of the data, which constitutes the first step towards an inference from the data to the phenomena, can be secured without the theory one seeks to test. Again, this appears not to be descriptive of actual scientific practice. In order to show this, I re-visit two case studies that have figured heavily in Bogen and Woodward’s publications and others: the discovery of weak neutral currents and the discovery of the zebra pattern of magnetic anomalies (Kaiser 1995). I show that, in the latter case, data can be ignored if they appear to be irrelevant from a particular theoretical perspective (TLI) and, in the former case, the tested theory can be critical for the assessment of the reliability of data (TLA). I argue that both TLI and TLA are much stronger senses of theory-ladenness than the classical thesis and that neither TLI nor TLA can be accommodated within Bogen and Woodward’s account.

In this paper I try to shed some light on how one discerns a physical effect or phenomenon from experimental background ‘noise’. To this end I revisit the discovery of Weak Neutral Currents (WNC), which has been right at the centre of discussion of some of the most influential available literature on this issue. Bogen and Woodward (1988) have claimed that the phenomenon of WNC was inferred from the data without higher level physical theory explaining this phenomenon (here: the Weinberg-Salam model of electroweak interactions) being involved in this process. Mayo (1994, 1996), in a similar vein, holds that the discovery of WNC was made on the basis of some piecemeal statistical techniques—again without the Salam-Weinberg model (predicting and explaining WNC) being involved in the process. Both Bogen & Woodward and Mayo have tried to back up their claims by referring to the historical work about the discovery of WNC by Galison (1983, 1987). Galison’s presentation of the historical facts, which can be described as realist, has however been challenged by Pickering (1984, 1988, 1989), who has drawn sociological-relativist conclusions from this historical case. Pickering’s conclusions, in turn, have recently come under attack by Miller and Bullock (1994), who delivered a defence of Galison’s realist account. In this paper I consider all of these historical studies in order to evaluate the philosophical claims that have been made on the basis of them. I conclude that—contrary to Bogen & Woodward (1988) and Mayo (1994)—statistical methods and other experimental inference procedures from the “bottom-up” (i.e. from the data to the phenomena) were insufficient for discerning WNC from their background noise. I also challenge Galison’s notion of the “end of experiments” and shall take the wind out of the sail of Miller and Bullock’s attack on some of Pickering’s claims, whilst rejecting Pickering’s sociological-relativist conclusions. Instead, I claim that an epistemic warrant f

In this paper I criticise Worrall's heuristic account of use-novelty and his and Scerri's attempt (Worrall and Scerri 2001) to give support to this account by a case study of Mendeleev's periodic table.

In this paper I discuss the discovery of the DNA structure by Francis Crick and James Watson, which has provoked a large historical literature but has yet not found entry into philosophical debates. I want to redress this imbalance. In contrast to the available historical literature a strong emphasis will be placed upon analysing the roles played by theory, model and evidence and the relationship between them. In particular, I am going to discuss not only Crick and Watson’s well-known model and Franklin’s x-ray diffraction pictures (the evidence) but also the less well-known theory of helical diffraction, which was absolutely crucial to Crick and Watson’s discovery. The insights into this ground-breaking historical episode will have consequences for the “new” received view of scientific models and their function and relationship to theory and world. The received view, dominated by works by Nancy Cartwright and Morgan and Morrison (1999), rather than trying to put forth a “theory of models”, is interested in questions to do with (i) the function of models in scientific practice and (ii) the construction of models. In regard to (i), the received view locates the model (as an idealized, simplified version of the real system under investigation) between theory and the world and sees the model as allowing the application of the former to the latter. As to (ii) Cartwright has argued for a phenomenologically-driven view and Morgan and Morrison (1999) for the “autonomy” of models in the construction process: models are neither determined by theory nor by the world. The present case study of the discovery of the DNA structure strongly challenges both (i) and (ii). In contrast to claim (i) of the received view, it was not Crick and Watson’s model but rather the helical diffraction theory, which served a mediating purpose between the model and the x-ray diffraction pictures. In particular Cartwright’s take on (ii) is refuted by comparing Franklin’s bottom-up approach with Cric

Glückwunschgedicht zur Amtseinführung in Kolckwitz auf Andreas Albert Fritz, Pastor, 17. Febr. 1737, Ein aufrichtiger Freund und Vetter S. L. Schindler, C. S. C., Autopsie nach dem Exemplar der ULB Sachsen-Anhalt, Vorlageform des Erscheinungsvermerks: Cotbus, Gedruckt bey Johann Michael Kühn. - Erscheinungsjahr nach Datierung im Titel

Hochzeitsgedicht auf Karl Heinrich Theune, Schulrektor in Sorau, und Anna Eleonora Fabricius, 26. Nov. 1737, S. L. Schindler und C. Hoffmann B. A. Cultores., Autopsie nach dem Exemplar der ULB Sachsen-Anhalt, Vorlageform des Erscheinungsvermerks: Cotbus den 26. Novembr. 1737. Gedruckt in der Kühnischen Officin.

Glückwunschgedicht zur Amtseinführung in Kolckwitz auf Andreas Albert Fritz, Pastor, 17. Febr. 1737, Ein aufrichtiger Freund und Vetter S. L. Schindler, C. S. C., Autopsie nach dem Exemplar der ULB Sachsen-Anhalt, Vorlageform des Erscheinungsvermerks: Cotbus, Gedruckt bey Johann Michael Kühn. - Erscheinungsjahr nach Datierung im Titel

Hochzeitsgedicht auf Karl Heinrich Theune, Schulrektor in Sorau, und Anna Eleonora Fabricius, 26. Nov. 1737, S. L. Schindler und C. Hoffmann B. A. Cultores., Autopsie nach dem Exemplar der ULB Sachsen-Anhalt, Vorlageform des Erscheinungsvermerks: Cotbus den 26. Novembr. 1737. Gedruckt in der Kühnischen Officin.