Scientific Understanding: No Veritism Without Realism, No Realism Without Veritism

In the last decade, the “storyline” approach has been developed in the field of attribution and detection of extreme climate events. Despite its merits, the storyline approach has been met with harsh criticism, especially from advocates of probabilistic (or risk-based) approaches. This reaction is amplified by the conflicting conclusions to which storylines and probabilistic approaches often lead. However, this conflict is only apparent, given that probabilistic and storyline approaches typically pursue different research concerns. Accordingly, one way to foster the legitimation of the storyline approach is by conceptualizing its epistemic contributions as a distinctive form of genuine “scientific understanding” under deep uncertainty.The burgeoning philosophical literature on scientific understanding affords promising resources to undertake the endeavour mentioned above. However, given the recency and diversity of this philosophical field, there is still broad dissent on elementary matters, such as the nature of scientific understanding, its value, and its varieties. Following the school of "philosophy of science in practice", an informative strategy to advance philosophical debates on scientific understanding is to attend to the scientific debates between advocates of probabilistic and storyline approaches, inspect their specific practices, and assess how they should advise philosophical accounts of scientific understanding.In this sense, there is a twofold problem. On the one hand, storylines require legitimation as an approach that affords a distinct but genuine scientific understanding. On the other hand, the very notion of genuine scientific understanding requires further philosophical elaboration, informed by scientific practices. Accordingly, this paper aims to display the synergies between the storyline approach and the philosophy of scientific understanding to foster the legitimation of the former and advance internal philosophical debates in the latter.Three axes for synergies are identified and briefly discussed. First, the “factivity” of storyline-based understanding: Philosophers of science disagree on whether scientific understanding is solely grounded on facts or may involve non-factive representations. Storylines are a relevant method to inform these debates as they are not intended to represent factual unfoldings of extreme events. Second, the “effectiveness” of storyline-based understanding: Some philosophers of science argue that scientific understanding is not grounded on particular epistemic credentials (whether factive or non-factive) but rather on its effectiveness. However, it is unclear how untethered the effectiveness of scientific understanding can be from its epistemic credentials. The employment of storylines for decision-making under deep uncertainty affords relevant cases in which to assess the relation effectiveness and factivity of scientific understanding. And third, the “transdisciplinarity” of storyline-based understanding: An overlooked subject in the philosophical literature on scientific understanding is its relations to non-academic epistemic endeavours. This subject is relevant because i) non-academic epistemic agents and endeavours may contribute to scientific understanding, and ii) the integration of non-academic epistemic agents and endeavours into scientific research advances epistemic justice, which is critical to warrant trust in scientists and legitimize scientific understanding across stakeholders. The storyline approach is tailor-made for pondering over local knowledge and experiences, reported qualitatively, thus offering valuable opportunities for civil society to contribute to the scientific understanding of climate uncertainties.

Scientific understanding is a fundamental goal of science. However, there is currently no good way to measure the scientific understanding of agents, whether these be humans or Artificial Intelligence systems. Without a clear benchmark, it is challenging to evaluate and compare different levels of scientific understanding. In this paper, we propose a framework to create a benchmark for scientific understanding, utilizing tools from philosophy of science. We adopt a behavioral conception of understanding, according to which genuine understanding should be recognized as an ability to perform certain tasks. We extend this notion of scientific understanding by considering a set of questions that gauge different levels of scientific understanding, covering information retrieval, the capability to arrange information to produce an explanation, and the ability to infer how things would be different under different circumstances. We suggest building a Scientific Understanding Benchmark (SUB), formed by a set of these tests, allowing for the evaluation and comparison of scientific understanding. Benchmarking plays a crucial role in establishing trust, ensuring quality control, and providing a basis for performance evaluation. By aligning machine and human scientific understanding we can improve their utility, ultimately advancing scientific understanding and helping to discover new insights within machines.

An oracle that correctly predicts the outcome of every particle physics experiment, the products of every possible chemical reaction or the function of every protein would revolutionize science and technology. However, scientists would not be entirely satisfied because they would want to comprehend how the oracle made these predictions. This is scientific understanding, one of the main aims of science. With the increase in the available computational power and advances in artificial intelligence, a natural question arises: how can advanced computational systems, and specifically artificial intelligence, contribute to new scientific understanding or gain it autonomously? Trying to answer this question, we adopted a definition of ‘scientific understanding’ from the philosophy of science that enabled us to overview the scattered literature on the topic and, combined with dozens of anecdotes from scientists, map out three dimensions of computer-assisted scientific understanding. For each dimension, we review the existing state of the art and discuss future developments. We hope that this Perspective will inspire and focus research directions in this multidisciplinary emerging field.

Probably the reason the topic of scientific understanding has received relatively little independent attention from philosophers of science is because most regard the expression merely as an honorific synonym for the expression “scientific explanation.” And this surely often is the case. There is no loss of meaning, for instance, when the expression “scientific explanation” is substituted for the expression “scientific understanding” in the remark, “We simply have no adequate scientific understanding of the way T-receptors function in acquired immune deficiency.” But there are occasions when this substitution would be preposterous-for instance, in the statement, “The ultimate goal of scientific explanation is to obtain scientific understanding.” Indeed, yielding scientific understanding is used by many philosophers of science as a measure of scientific explanation.

Understanding natural phenomena is an important aim of science. Since the turn of the millennium the notion of scientific understanding has been a hot topic of debate in the philosophy of science. A bone of contention in this debate is the role of truth and representational accuracy in scientific understanding. So-called factivists and non-factivists disagree about the extent to which the theories and models that are used to achieve understanding must be (at least approximately) true or accurate. In this paper we address this issue by examining a case from the practice of synthetic chemistry. We investigate how understanding is obtained in this field by means of an in-depth analysis of the famous synthesis of periplanone B by W. Clark Still. It turns out that highly idealized models—that are representationally inaccurate and sometimes even inconsistent—and qualitative concepts are essential for understanding the synthetic pathway and accordingly for achieving the synthesis. We compare the results of our case study to various factivist and non-factivist accounts of how idealizations may contribute to scientific understanding and conclude that non-factivism offers a more plausible interpretation of the practice of synthetic chemistry. Moreover, our case study supports a central thesis of the non-factivist theory of scientific understanding developed by De Regt (Understanding scientific understanding. Oxford University Press, New York. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190652913.001.0001 , 2017), namely that scientific understanding requires intelligibility rather than representational accuracy, and that idealization is one way to enhance intelligibility.

SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND CULTURE

Literally speaking, "Philosophy of biology" is a rather old expression. William Whewell coined it in 1840, at the very time he introduced the expression "philosophy of science". Whewell was fond of creating neologisms, like Auguste Comte, his French counterpart in the field of the philosophical reflection about science. Historians of science know that a few years earlier, in 1834, Whewell had generated a small scandal when he proposed the word "scientist" as a general term by which "the students of the knowledge of the material world" could describe themselves, and distinguish themselves from artists. The term "philosopher", Whewell argued, was too wide. A new generic term, more or less equivalent to the French term "savant", was needed in order to prevent the disintegration of science that seemed to flow from its specialization in modern times.1 When Whewell first introduced the terms "philosophy of science" and "philosophy of biology" in his 1840 Philosophy of the inductive sciences, the latter term was merely a special branch of "philosophy of science". The expression "philosophy of science" itself had two justifications: firstly, this phrase expressed the idea that "science" remained cognitively coherent enough to justify a critical enquiry into its methodological unity and its foundation; secondly, the phrase "philosophy of science" was required in order to distinguish a properly "philosophical" enquiry from a "historical" approach to science. Although Whewell's 1840 Philosophy of the inductive sciences 2 had approximately the same chapter structure as his 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences 3 (that is, a series of chapters successively devoted to the concept of science in general, and although there was considerable overlap between the contents of the two books, then to particular sciences), its theoretical purpose was different. Clearly, Whewell was not willing to confuse the genres of history and philosophy as Auguste Comte had done in his 1830 Cours de philosophie positive.4 Note also that the word "biology" was still extremely rare in English when Whewell used it in 1840. In fact, Whewell's 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences does not make use of the word "biology": Whewell successively examines "botany", "zoology", "physiology" and "comparative antomy" as special branches of "analytico-classificatory science", then discusses palaeontology as a special case of the "palaeo-etiological sciences". Three years later, in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Whewell does use "biology" as a generic term for all the sciences dealing with life. The various sciences which were separately examined in the previous book are now collectively considered. Furthermore, the main philosophical problem raised by biology is its dual nature: biology is both nomological and a historical science. Modern philosophers of biology are generally unaware of the story of the origins of the expression "philosophy of biology", but Whewell's dual theoretical nature of biology is still a major concern for modern "philosophy of biology".

Orta çağ İslâm düşüncesinde bilim çalışmalarına katkı sunan ve bir bilim felsefesi oluşturmaya çalışan önemli filozoflardan biri de Fârâbî’dir (öl. 339/950). Bilim anlayışını, mantığın ilkelerine dayandırmıştır. Bilim konusunu epistemolojik ve metafiziksel bütünlük içerisinde değerlendirmeye çalışmıştır. O, dinî ilimler ile aklî ilimleri kendi sınırlılıkları içerisinde bir bütün olarak ele almıştır. Nitekim İhsâü’l-ulûm (İlimlerin Sayımı) adlı eserinde ilimlere ilişkin yapmış olduğu sınıflandırma onun bilim ve felsefe tasavvurunu en iyi yansıtan örneklerdendir.Bu çalışmada kısaca Ahkâmü’n-nücûm şeklinde ifade ettiğimiz “Makale Ebi Nasr el-Fârâbî fi ma yasihhu ve mâ lâ yaṣiḥḥu min aḥkâmi’n-nücûm” risalesi bağlamında Fârâbî’nin bilimsel araştırma anlayışı değerlendirilmiştir. Bahse konu olan bu değerlendirme astronomi bilimi ile astroloji sanatının ayrımı konusunda Fârâbî’nin kullandığı felsefî ve mantıkî argümanlar üzerinden onun yöntem anlayışını izah etmektir. Çalışmanın temel örgü-sünün ise bu iki disiplinin bilimsel niteliklerinin mukayesesinde ve konunun izahında kriter olarak öne çıkan kıyas, tümevarım, örneklem, tecrübe ve nedensellik kavramları etrafında şekillendiğini söyleyebiliriz.Fârâbî, yıldızlar bilimini (İlmu’n-nücûm) nazarî felsefenin bir alt disiplini olan matematik/teâ‘lîmi bilimler başlığı altında ele alır. Yıldızlar bilimi kavramının iki ilim için ortak kullanıldığını belirtir. Bunlardan biri; a) Yıldızlardan çıkarılan hükümler ilmi (İlmu ahkâmi’n-nücûm). Bu ilim astroloji olarak isimlendirilir. Yıldızların gelecekte olacak olaylar ile şu andaki insanî birtakım durumlara işaret etmesini inceleyen bir sanattır. b) Talîmî yıldızlar ilmi (İlmu’n-nücûmi’t-teâ‘lîmî). Bu ilim ise astronomi olarak isimlendirilir. Bu ilim gök cisimlerinin şekillerini, hareket türlerini, kozmik konumlarını, kütle ve ağırlık hesaplamalarını, yer küreyi, iklimler ve bunlarla ilişkili olarak yer-yüzü şekillerini kendine konu edinir. Dolayısıyla Fârâbî konusu bakımından değerli olan, öğrenilmesi ve öğretilmesi teşvik edilen bilimin Talîmî yıldızlar ilmi (İlmu’n-nücûmi’t-teâ‘lîmî) olduğunu belirtir. Bilimsel anlayışla uyumlu olmayan ve tezat teşkil eden Astroloji sanatının geçersiz kabul edilen önerme ve çıkarımlarından da uzak durulmasını önerir.Risaleyi önemli kılan husus, özelde astroloji genelde ise diğer bilimlerdeki araştırmalarda takip edilecek bir yöntem teklif etmesidir. Zira o, astroloji sanatında olduğu üzere ortaya çıkan birtakım felsefî ve mantıksal hataların temel sebebini işlevsel bir yöntembilimden uzak olmakta görür. Fârâbî’ye göre araştırma yapacak kişilerin öncelikle felsefî formasyona ve yetkin bir tabiata sahip olmaları gerekir. O, bu alandaki araştırma yönteminin felsefî bilgi ve mantık ilkeleri üzerinden temellendirilmesinin gerekli olduğunu söyler. Çünkü ona göre bu ilkeler bilinmeden geçerli ve doğru bir yargıya ulaşmak mümkün değildir. Dolayısıyla kıyas ve kıyasın uygulandığı sanatlar-dan burhanın bilinmesinin önemine vurguda bulunur. Zira bir bilim alanında araştırmacıyı hataya sevk eden olumsuzluklardan biri de kişinin zorunlu kesin kanıt olmayanı burhanmış gibi kabule yönelmesidir.Fârâbî, astroloji sanatıyla uğraşanların, “benzerler ortak yargıyı paylaşırlar” ilkesinde yaptıkları mantıksal ihlallere de dikkat çeker. Bir şeyin herhangi bir niteliğinin bir başka şeyin niteliğiyle benzerlik göstermesi, tüm o şeylerin özü ve mahiyeti itibariyle de diğer şeye benzemesini gerektirmeyeceğine işaret eder. Fârâbî ontolojik müsâvât ilkesine de vurguda bulunarak mümkün iki eşitten birinin diğerinden daha üstün olamayacağını belirtir.Bu bağlamda yöntembilim açısından akıl yürütme formlarından örneklem ve tümevarım metodunun uygulanmasında birtakım ilkelere dikkat edilmesi gerektiğini söyler. Fârâbî tümevarımdan elde edilen tümel yargının zorunlu kesin bir bilgi niteliği taşımadığını belirterek bu konuda düşülen hataya dikkat çeker. Tecrübî bilginin yöntembilim açısından epistemik değerini tartışarak astroloji açısından bize sağlayacağı sonuçları ortaya koymaya çalışır. O, geleceğe dair astroloji ilminin verileri üzerinden hayatı determine etmenin yaratacağı ahlakî, dinî ve toplumsal sorunlara dikkat çeker. Dolayısıyla Astroloji ilminin geleceğe dair mümkün önermelerin sonuçlarına ilişkin vermiş olduğu yargıyı geçersiz kabul eder. Metafizik bir esas olarak nedensellik ilkesi perspektifinde astroloji sanatıyla uğraşanların tutarsızlığını ve yanlış çıkarımlarını fizikî determinizm anlayışıyla yorumlayarak “rastlantı/ittifakî” ve “mümkün meçhul” kavramlarıyla beraber değerlendirmeyi tercih eder.

Scientific understanding as a subject of inquiry has become widely discussed in philosophy of science and is often addressed through case studies from history of science. Even though these historical reconstructions engage with details of scientific practice, they usually provide only limited information about the gradual formation of understanding in ongoing processes of model and theory construction. Based on a qualitative ethnographic study of an ecological research project, this article shifts attention from understanding in the context of historical case studies to evidence of current case studies. By taking de Regt's (Understanding scientific understanding. Oxford University Press, New York, 2017) contextual theory of scientific understanding into the field, it confirms core tenets of the contextual theory (e.g. the crucial role of visualization and visualizability) suggesting a normative character with respect to scientific activities. However, the case study also shows the limitations of de Regt's latest version of this theory as an attempt to explain the development of understanding in current practice. This article provides a model representing the emergence of scientific understanding that exposes main features of scientific understanding such as its gradual formation, its relation to skills and imagination, and its capacity for knowledge selectivity. The ethnographic evidence presented here supports the claim that something unique can be learned by looking into ongoing research practices that can't be gained by studying historical case studies.

In this paper, I propose that the debate in epistemology concerning the nature and value of understanding can shed light on the role of scientific idealizations in producing scientific understanding. In philosophy of science, the received view seems to be that understanding is a species of knowledge. On this view, understanding is factive just as knowledge is, i.e., if S knows that p, then p is true. Epistemologists, however, distinguish between different kinds of understanding. Among epistemologists, there are those who think that a certain kind of understanding—objectual understanding—is not factive, and those who think that objectual understanding is quasi-factive. Those who think that understanding is not factive argue that scientific idealizations constitute cognitive success, which we then consider as instances of understanding, and yet they are not true. This paper is an attempt to draw lessons from this debate as they pertain to the role of idealizations in producing scientific understanding. I argue that scientific understanding is quasi-factive.

The case of embryo research provides insight into the challenges for historians and philosophers of science who want to engage social issues, and even more challenges in engaging society. Yet there are opportunities in doing so. History and philosophy of science research demonstrates that the public impression of embryos does not fit with our scientific understanding. In cases where there are competing understandings of the phenomena and public impacts, we have to negotiate social responses. Historians and philosophers of science can both inform and learn from engaging in the process, by helping to recognize underlying assumptions and by demonstrating changing ideas over time and what factors have caused the changes.

This chapter introduces the volume, highlighting key themes and programmatic features of a pragmatist approach to topics in philosophy of science and metaphysics. Pragmatism is a potent tool at the interface between methodological and applied questions arising from scientific practice, and the underlying ontological or metaphysical commitments that are implied by or frame those questions. For topics at the intersection of philosophy of science and metaphysics, pragmatism is an effective way to take entrenched debates and re-frame them in ways that challenge old dichotomies and offer more fruitful paths forward. Pragmatist approaches here involve the inextricability of methodological or epistemological commitments with more fundamental or metaphysical questions. Many traditional dichotomies such as realism versus antirealism, truth versus idealization, unification versus disunity, are challenged, and alternatives developed from a more holist and pragmatist perspective.

This article identifies the benefits of adopting a critical realist ontology to researching esports in the social sciences. The article outlines some of the challenges in researching esports, paying particular attention to the emerging specialisms and sub-disciplines. The article suggests that different schools of thought have different ontological and epistemological commitments, resulting in a complex and somewhat fragmented or contested set of definitions and research directives. The article considers how the philosophy of science can enable researchers to gain a more complete understanding and appreciation of esports. More specifically, the article outlines some of the central philosophical commitments of critical realism and considers their benefits for researching the multi-layered and multifaceted nature of esports. What results is a stratified ontology of esports, in which various biological, psychological and sociological factors interact to produce emergent outcomes at micro, meso and macro levels of causality. Such an interdisciplinary approach resists previous attempts to reduce esports research to singular (and competing) epistemological claims. Instead, this article invites sports researchers to investigate the complex ways natural and social factors interact to generate and change esports structures, institutions and agential behaviours.

This volume lays out a programmatic view for taking a pragmatist approach to topics in philosophy of science and metaphysics. Pragmatism is a potent tool at the interface between methodological and applied questions arising from scientific practice, and the underlying ontological or metaphysical commitments that are implied by or frame those questions. For topics at the intersection of philosophy of science and metaphysics, pragmatism as explored in this volume is an effective way to take entrenched debates and re-frame them in ways that challenge old dichotomies and offer more fruitful paths forward. Pragmatist approaches here involve the inextricability of methodological or epistemological commitments with more fundamental or metaphysical questions. Many traditional dichotomies such as realism versus antirealism, truth versus idealization, unification versus disunity, are reconceieved and alternatives developed from a more holist and pragmatist perspective.

nicolaus Steno (niels Stensen, 1638–86) is considered to be the founder of geology as a discipline of modern science, and is also considered to be founder of scientific conceptions of the human glands, muscles, heart and brain. With respect to his anatomical results the judgment of posterity has always considered Steno to be one of the founders of modern anatomy, whereas Steno’s paternity to the me­ thods known to day of all students of geology was almost forgotten during the 130 yr from 1700 to 1830. Besides geology and anatomy there are still important sides of Steno’s scientific contributions to be rediscovered. Steno’s general philosophy of science is one of the clearest formulated philosophies of modern science as it appeared during the 17th Century. It includes • separation of scientific methods from religious arguments, • a principle of how to seek “demonstrative certainty” by demanding considerations from both reductionist and holist perspectives, • a series of purely structural (semiotic) principles developing a stringent basis for the pragmatic, historic (diachronous) sciences as opposed to the categorical, timeless (achronous) sciences, • “Steno’s ladder of knowledge” by which he formulated the leading principle of modern science i.e., how true knowledge about deeper, hidden causes (“what we are ignorant about”) can be approached by combining analogue experiences with logic reasoning. However, Steno’s ideas and influence on the general principles of modern science are still quite un­ known outside Scandinavia, Italy, France and Germany. this unfortunate situation may be explained with the fact that most of his philosophical statements have not been translated to english until recent decades. Several Latin philologists state that Steno’s Latin language is of great beauty and poetic value, and that translations to other languages cannot give justice to Steno’s texts. thus, translations may have seemed too difficult. Steno’s ideas on the philosophy of science appear in both his many anatomical and in his fewer geological papers, all of which with one exception (in French) were written in Latin. a concentration of his philosophy of science was given by himself in his last scientific lecture “Prooemium” (1673), which was not translated from Latin to english before 1994. therefore, after the decline of Latin as a scientific language Steno’s philosophy of science and ideas on scientific reasoning remained quite unknown, although his ideas should be considered extremely modern and path finding for the scientific revolution of the bio­ and geo­sciences. Moreover, Steno’s philosophy of science is com­ parable to Immanuel Kant’s 80 yr younger theory on perception, Charles S. Peirce’s 230 yr younger theory on abduction, and—especially—Karl r. Popper’s 300 yr younger theory on scientific discovery by conjecture and refutation. the general outset of Steno’s philosophy of science constitutes an important step from the Medi­ eval’s and the renaissance’s way of thinking into the 17th Century’s appearance of modern sciences and the 18th Century’s enlightenment. the 18th Century’s as well as present day’s dichotomy of science into the traditional creationistic and the new historical interpretations to some extent can be traced back to Steno and his methods.