Realist Rejoinders: Inference to the Best Explanation

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Del curso dictado por The University of Edinburgh

Introduction to Philosophy

2958 calificaciones

The University of Edinburgh

Introduction to Philosophy

2958 calificaciones

This course will introduce you to some of the main areas of research in contemporary philosophy. Each module a different philosopher will talk you through some of the most important questions and issues in their area of expertise. We’ll begin by trying to understand what philosophy is – what are its characteristic aims and methods, and how does it differ from other subjects? Then we’ll spend the rest of the course gaining an introductory overview of several different areas of philosophy. Topics you’ll learn about will include: Epistemology, where we’ll consider what our knowledge of the world and ourselves consists in, and how we come to have it; Philosophy of science, where we’ll investigate foundational conceptual issues in scientific research and practice; Philosophy of Mind, where we’ll ask questions about what it means for something to have a mind, and how minds should be understood and explained; Political Philosophy, where we'll investigate whether we have an obligation to obey the law; Moral Philosophy, where we’ll attempt to understand the nature of our moral judgements and reactions – whether they aim at some objective moral truth, or are mere personal or cultural preferences, and; Metaphysics, where we’ll think through some fundamental conceptual questions about free will and the nature of reality. The development of this MOOC has been led by the University of Edinburgh's Eidyn research centre. To accompany 'Introduction to Philosophy', we are pleased to announce a tie-in book from Routledge entitled 'Philosophy for Everyone'. This course companion to the 'Introduction to Philosophy' course was written by the Edinburgh Philosophy team expressly with the needs of MOOC students in mind. 'Philosophy for Everyone' contains clear and user-friendly chapters, chapter summaries, glossary, study questions, suggestions for further reading and guides to online resources. Please click "Start Here" and navigate to the "Optional Reading" page for more information.

De la lección

Are Scientific Theories True?

(Professor Michela Massimi) In this module we will explore a central and ongoing debate in contemporary philosophy of science: whether or not scientific theories are true. Or better, whether a scientific theory needs to be 'true' to be good at all. The answer to this question comes in two main varieties. Scientific realists believe that theories ought to be true in order to be good. We will analyse their main argument for this claim (which goes under the name of 'no miracles argument'), and some prominent objections to it. Scientific antirealists, on the other hand, defend the view that there is nothing special about 'truth' and that scientific theories and scientific progress can be understood without appeal to it. The aim of this session is to present both views, their main arguments, and prospects.

The Aim of Science: Saving the Phenomena vs. Truth2:29

Saving the Phenomena? Ptolemeic Astronomy5:15

Truth? Galileo and Copernican Astronomy2:05

Scientific Realism and the No Miracles Argument3:31

Scientific Anti-Realism: Constructive Empiricism7:26

Realist Rejoinders: Inference to the Best Explanation5:50

Concluding Summary2:06

Conoce a los instructores

Dr. Dave Ward
Lecturer in Philosophy
University of Edinburgh
Professor Duncan Pritchard
Professor of Philosophy
University of Edinburgh
Professor Michela Massimi
Full Professor
Philosophy
Dr. Suilin Lavelle
Lecturer in Philosophy
University of Edinburgh
Dr. Matthew Chrisman
Reader in Philosophy
Philosophy
Dr. Allan Hazlett
Dr. Alasdair Richmond
Dr.
Philosophy
Guy Fletcher
Lecturer
Philosophy
Elinor Mason
Senior Lecturer
Philosophy

Should we then abandon scientific realism, and embrace constructive empiricism?

Well, the realists are not going to be impressed.

And here are two possible realist rejoinders.

The first one would say that the notion of empirical adequacy doesn't really do when

it comes to explaining the success of science.

And van Fraassen‘s Darwinian reformulation of the no miracles argument

doesn't really cut any ice. One thing is to explain why only

successful theory survives, another thing is to explain what makes a theory

successful. So scientific realist would claim that she

has a story to tell about what makes the theory successful, namely that,

the theories that survive are successful because they are true, because

the entities that they postulated are real, and because what the theory says

about those entities is true or approximately true.

The theories that didn't survive, the theories that failed, failed because they

were simply false, like the Ether theory or Phlogiston Theory or the Caloric Theory.

So this is the first rejoinder against van Fraassen and the reformulation of the

no miracles argument. The second rejoinder attacks van Fraassen’s

distinction between the observable phenomena and the unobservable entities.

This distinction has been at the center of a very voluminous literature which I won't

have the time to cover today. But, philosophers have been concerned

about the way in which this distinction is drawn or can be drawn.

Because it seems to be too stringent as an empiricist criterion.

Why should we not rely on our scientific instruments, be they an electron

microscope, or a particle collider, to deliver us a reliable image about what

there is? Why should we trust our naked eye more

than our scientific instruments? So here I won't enter into the intricate

details of the arguments pros and against the observable and unobservable

distinction, but I do want to mention one prominent realism response to constructive

empiricism and this is a response that has been formulated by two philosophers

of science, Philip Kitcher and Peter Lipton.

The response says that we are justified to believe in unobservable entities because

the inferential path that leads us to such unobservable entities is one and the same

inferential path that leads us to unobserved observables.

So what is an unobserved observables? Well consider the many ways in which

perfectly observable objects may go unobserved.

None of us has ever seen a dinosaur, yet if you could travel back in time, we could

in principle be able to see a dinosaur with our naked eye.

So a dinosaur is a classical example of an unobserved observable.

So people like Kitcher and Lipton have been arguing that we are justified to

believe in electrons, atoms, DNA sequence, unobservable entities on the same grounds

on which we are justified to believe in dinosaurs.

So how do we know about dinosaurs? Fossil evidence is what paleontologists use

to reconstruct the past history of our planet. From fossil evidence of this type,

we can reconstruct some important information about the life of extinct

marine species like this trilobites in the Paleozoic era:

for example, we can come to know whether they swam, they moved on the sea-bed,

whether they ate plankton, how many different genders they were, are

geographically distributed and so on. But as fossils provide evidence for now

extinct species, similarly one can argue, the Large Hadron Collider's outcomes can

provide evidence for the elusive explosion, inferential path to the

unobservable explosion is one and the same as the inferential path that leads us to

the unobserved observable trilobites. Philosophers of science call this

inferential path “inference to the best explanation”.

The idea behind inference to the best explanation is that we infer the

hypothesis which would, if true, provide the best explanation of the available

evidence. Thus, we infer the existence of marine

anthropods like trilobites because this is the best explanation for these fossils

as we infer the exposed one as the best explanation for the sort of evidence

coming out of the LHC. Namely, we choose from a pool of

competing explanatory hypotheses the one that we regard the best, the one that if

true would provide a deeper understanding of the available evidence.

Inference of the best explanation is a powerful tool in the scientific realist

toolkit. It shows that the scientific hypothesis that we

choose and we are willing to believe tend to be those that would provide a deeper

understanding, the best explanation of our evidence, and this is what we tend to do

every day in life. For example, in medical diagnostics, when

the doctor infers the hypothesis that best explain the patient's symptoms, as well as

in astronomy and cosmology, where we infer that the, the universe is expanding, as

the best explanation for the cosmological redshift in the spectrum of the stars.

The realists would say, this is what science is all about.

We don't rely necessarily on our eyes or technological instruments to believe in

the unobservable entities but on the validity and robustness of our inferential

practices informed by a wealth of experimental data in order to draw

conclusions about how our universe is going to be like.

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