This paper defends a Hackingian approach to the scientific realism debate by arguing against mainstream realists’ and antirealists’ common claim that no experimental arguments for the reality of posited entities can be theory-independent. Opposing this claim, I argue that some experimental arguments can warrant belief in the existence of entities without depending on the truth of the theories that posit the entities and describe their properties and the theories that explain the interactions between the entities and the experimental devices. To (...) achieve this goal, I investigate Hacking’s case of electron spraying, the famous experiment of positioning atoms by means of a scanning tunnelling microscope, and some novel experiments that use Ashkin’s optical tweezers. By introducing the distinction between theoretical properties and ontic properties, I argue that we can build up some theory-independent criteria of reality on the basis of ontic properties. Manipulability is an ontic property and the manipulation criterion is thus a theory-independent one, which should be reexamined and used for those experimental cases along a local approach to the realism debate. Resisting the mainstream realists’ and antirealists’ objections, I contend that some experiments using optical tweezers can warrant belief in the existence of the experimented entities without depending on theories. (shrink)

Several philosophers have argued that ‘constraints’ constrain (and thereby explain) by virtue of being modally stronger than ordinary laws of nature. In this way, a constraint applies to all possible systems, for a variety of possibility that is broader (that is, more inclusive) than the variety we employ when we say that the ordinary laws of nature apply to all physically possible systems. Explanations by constraint are thus more broadly unifying than ordinary causal explanations. Philosophical examples of good candidates for (...) constraints have heretofore been drawn almost exclusively from fundamental physics. This paper argues for the existence of such constraints (even multiple levels of them) in at least one human science (linguistics), not just in physics. (shrink)

James Woodward’s manipulationist counterfactual theory of explanation offers strong tools for an adequate approach to explanation endeavours. One of these tools is the notion of intervention, which serves as a guiding principle for identifying explanations as causal, thus preserving the unidirectionality of explanatory praxis. Nevertheless, in this paper, I argue that in some cases of explanation, this notion has a rather redundant role since it is either impossible to define or it can be replaced by other types of manipulations or (...) both. I shall show these shortcomings of intervention in two particularly detailed analyses of an economic example pertaining to Okun’s law and the pendulum explanation. In analysing the former example, I contend that given the complex causal situation of economic phenomena, the notion of intervention is inept at helping explain them. In the latter example, I show that the notion of intervention is readily replaceable by other types of variation—conceptual or mathematical. Finally, I shall end this article by examining the case of pendulum explanation in light of Woodward’s new approach to explanation direction. In the end, the conclusion is that the variables of the pendulum law are in a symmetrical relationship. (shrink)

Cognitive modules are internal mental structures. Some theorists and empirical researchers hypothesise that the human mind is either partially or massively comprised of structures that are modular in nature. Is the massive modularity of mind hypothesis a cogent view about the ontological nature of human mind or is it, rather, an effective/ineffective adaptationist discovery heuristic for generating predictively successful hypotheses about both heretofore unknown psychological traits and unknown properties of already identified psychological traits? Considering the inadequacies of the case in (...) favour of massive modularity as an ontological hypothesis, I suggest approaching and valuing massive modularity as an adaptationist discovery heuristic. (shrink)

Fake research produces results that are invalid from the start. I take such research to be characterised by three jointly sufficient features. It is severely methodologically defective, and the relevant defects support certain nonepistemic (social, political, economic) interests and objectives, while the relevant objectives typically concern the interference with attempts at political regulation. I deal with two kinds of claimed fake research. One is agnotological ploys in which scientific dissent is created by interested parties from industry or politics in order (...) to support their own partisan goals. Another one is the populist antiscience movement that suspects fake research in the scientific mainstream. I suggest three remedies to reduce or eliminate the impact of fake research: disclosing fallacies, improving the understanding of scientific methods, and distinguishing more clearly between science and politics in political decision-making. (shrink)

The traditional mutual support of scientific progress and social advancement has given way to public reservation. Research is no longer considered worthwhile in general. Parts of the public have come to fear both scientific error and scientific success. This raises the question of how to deal with findings that could have a detrimental impact on society. In a different vein, fake research poses a serious challenge to science in that it could undermine the credibility of scientific accounts. Fake research actively (...) produces ignorance rather than knowledge (agnotology). The question is how such actively misleading approaches are to be identified and separated from usual scientific error. (shrink)

Although science is our most reliable producer of knowledge, it can also be used to create ignorance, unjustified doubt, and misinformation. In doing so, agnotological practices result not only in epistemic harms but also in social ones. A way to prevent or minimise such harms is to impede these ignorance-producing practices. In this paper, I explore various challenges to such a proposal. I first argue that reliably identifying agnotological practices in a way that permits the prevention of relevant harms is (...) more difficult than it might appear. I focus on an identifying criterion that many find apt for the task: bad faith motives. I then consider an objection—that reliable criteria are unnecessary to successfully address the concerns raised by agnotological strategies—and I show that it fails. I conclude by exploring other ways of conceptualising the problems attributed to agnotological practices. In particular, I challenge the focus on misinformation as the main problem of concern. (shrink)

The paper seeks to contribute to clarifying agnotology as an ‘epistemic strategy’, conceived as ‘epistemically damaging and hurt[ing] the production of knowledge’. My general claim is that the grammar of intentions ‘embedded’ in agnotological arguments is often not considered accurately. I use considerations from the philosophy of action as a theoretical framework to make more explicit what is implied in agnogenetic manoeuvres. Agnotology, as a ‘theory’ about epistemic states, in particular knowledge and ignorance, would be seriously incomplete without that component. (...) The following can thus be read as a contribution to an analysis of the presuppositions of the strategic variant of Agnotology. My first claim is that the more common objections to the introduction of intentions are in no way definitive. My second, more specific, claim is that we need a room, in our conceptual toolbox, for ‘anti-epistemic intentions’, which play a key role in agnotological arguments. (shrink)

This paper concerns a project to right a wrong, an epistemic as well as social wrong. The wrong? Science was to serve all humankind; that is what Francis Bacon and the other founders of modern science had promised and what a long line of their successors had signed on to. But by the twentieth century it had become clear that this science was regularly serving some of humankind far more than others and was even, quite frequently, actually harming those others (...) rather than helping them. The problem lay with the knowledge that science offered about those others: the damaging ‘information’ that was really ignorance in disguise. But the problem also lay with the systematic ignorance science allowed, even encouraged, about those others: the helpful, uplifting knowledge about them that the science could have offered but did not. And the project to right the wrong? A transformation of the science-provided pattern of knowledge and ignorance engineered to achieve a more egalitarian result (what I call an epistemological-agnotological reengineering project). Of course, there are many groups of others relevant here. I will focus my attention in the present paper on only two of them: women, and men of colour (especially Black men).. (shrink)

This paper discusses how to deal with research that threatens to cause harm to society—in particular, whether and in what cases bans and moratoria are appropriate. First, it asks what normative resources philosophy of science may draw on to answer such questions. In an effort to presuppose only resources acknowledgeable across different comprehensive worldviews, it is claimed that the aim of credibility provides a good basis for normative reflection. A close analysis reveals an inner tension inherent in the pursuit of (...) credibility, referred to as the paradox of credibility: Although the aim of credibility involves the goal of being trusted, the immediate pursuit of the goal of being trusted as much as possible can run counter to and undermine the pursuit of credibility. From this inner tension, considerations are derived on what it means to uncompromisingly strive for trustworthiness. When applied to the problem of harmful research, it becomes apparent that it is important to distinguish between different types of cases. Some cases allow science to prevent harm while relinquishing credibility in the associated research area. In contrast, other cases demand preserving subject-specific scientific credibility in order to manage potential harm. (shrink)

According to Kuhn's speciation analogy, scientific specialisation is fundamentally analogous to biological speciation. In this paper, we extend Kuhn's original language-centred formulation of the speciation analogy, to account for episodes of scientific specialisation centred around methodological differences. Building upon recent views in evolutionary biology about the process of speciation by genetic divergence, we will show how these methodology-centred episodes of scientific specialisation can be understood as cases of specialisation driven by value divergence. We will apply our model of specialisation by (...) value divergence to an episode of methodology-centred scientific specialisation: the emergence of molecular biology. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Thomas Kuhn’s epistolary and in-person exchanges with Richard Rorty, and their significance to the former’s work on the nature of scientific development during the years 1976–1986. Accordingly, it corresponds to a significant evolution of Kuhn’s thought from the position expounded earlier in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. These letters show how Kuhn’s philosophy of science evolved towards a greater emphasis on a key aspect of his former work—the nature of ‘the essential tension’—and that his more (...) linguistically-oriented perspective in these latter years has that emphasis as its goal—at least as a significant part. (shrink)

This paper examines ‘The Natures of Conceptual Change’, the Notre Dame lectures given by Kuhn in 1980. In particular, I aim to examine the content of these lectures which was not published before. This exegetical task will shed light on the sources of the notion of taxonomy used in these lectures for the first time with the explicit philosophical purposes. It also will shed new light on Kuhn's position regarding the causal theory of reference. Reviewing these archival materials paves the (...) way for intertextual comparisons, as Kuhn included part of these lectures in the texts published later and in the book Plurality of Worlds: an Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development. In recent years, the publication of Kuhn's archival material and the research on these texts increased in quantity and quality. Faced with this encouraging landscape, a comparative examination of the different unpublished texts is crucial to refining both our research tools on Kuhn's intellectual biography and the philosophical work inspired by his proposal. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) is widely considered as one of the most important philosophers of science of the 20th century, while his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) is regarded as one of the most influential works in the philosophy ofscience. At the same time, however, his place within philosophy of science remains ambiguous. On the one hand, despite the popularity of SSR, there is no proper ‘Kuhnian school of thought’ in HPS. On the other hand, the interest towards Kuhn does (...) not seem to fade away and the number of publications about his work does not seem to decrease. We suggest that there are at least three different ways to go ‘beyond SSR’: (i) by scrutinising the development of Kuhn’s thought, from his pre- to his post-SSR writings; (ii) by contextualising Kuhn in the philosophical milieu of his time, thus interpreting his view as emerging from the intellectual exchanges he had with contemporary philosophers; (iii) by reinterpreting and developing some of his most known ideas, in ways that perhaps Kuhn himself was not able to contemplate. (shrink)

1. Biomedical sciences are fast-growing fields with unprecedented speed of research outputs, especially in the quantities of papers. Philosophers aiming to study ongoing biomedical changes face cha...

A longstanding criticism of Ernest Nagel's model of reduction is that it fails to take theory change into account. This criticism builds on the received view that Nagelian reductions are incompatible with theory change. This article challenges the received view by showing that Nagel's model can easily accommodate theory change. Indeed, Nagel's model is essentially static as it only gives unchanging formal and nonformal conditions for reduction; in contrast, theory change belongs to the dynamic history of science; as a result, (...) the application of Nagel's model to scientific knowledge from different historical periods yields a series of Nagelian reductions of different degrees of reductive success. This Nagelian treatment of theory change is illustrated by considering the enterprise of reducing thermodynamics to statistical mechanics in the late nineteenth century. It is also contended that, in handling theory change Nagel's model has greater merits than subsequent models (exemplified by Kenneth Schaffner's general reduction-replacement model). This article concludes by suggesting that Nagel's model of reduction deals with theory change exactly in the same way as logical empiricism does with historicism. (shrink)

The English language now dominates scientific communications. Yet, many scientists have English as their second language. Their English proficiency may therefore often be more limited than that of a ‘native speaker’, and their scientific contributions (e.g. manuscripts) in English may frequently contain linguistic features that disrupt the fluency of a reader’s, or listener’s information processing even when the contributions are understandable. Scientific gatekeepers (e.g. journal reviewers) sometimes cite these features to justify negative decisions on manuscripts. Such justifications may rest on (...) the prima facie plausible assumption that linguistic characteristics that hinder fast and easy understandability of scientific contributions are epistemically undesirable in science. I shall raise some doubts about this assumption by drawing on empirical research on processing fluency and its biasing effects. I also argue that directing scientists with English as a foreign language toward approaching ‘native-level’ English can have the negative consequence of reducing their potential to make scientific belief formation more reliable. These points suggest that one seemingly compelling justification for linguistically discriminating against scientific contributions in ‘non-native’ English is questionable and that the common insistence by scientific gatekeepers on ‘native-like’ English may be epistemically harmful to science. (shrink)

Practice-based philosophy of science has gradually arisen in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and science and technology studies (STS) during the past decades. It studies science as an ensemble of practices and theorising as one of these practices. A recent study has shown how the practice-based approach can be methodologically justified with reference to Peirce and Dewey. In this article, I will explore one consequence of that notion: science, as practice, is necessarily social. I will disambiguate five different senses (...) in which science is social. First, science presupposes language, which is essentially social. Second, practices, including science, are adaptations of the behaviour of an organism to an environment, of which other organisms are a part. Third, practices, including science, are public and hence shareable. Fourth, scientific knowledge can serve as a vehicle of social and moral reform. Fifth, scientific knowledge can be applied to improve the human condition. This fivefold result bears on the problem of realism. (shrink)

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