Abstract
Computer simulations are widely used in current scientific practice, as a tool to obtain information about various phenomena. Scientists accordingly rely on the outputs of computer simulations to make statements about the empirical world. In that sense, simulations seem to enable scientists to acquire empirical knowledge. The aim of this paper is to assess whether computer simulations actually allow for the production of empirical knowledge, and how. It provides an epistemological analysis of present-day empirical science, to which the traditional epistemological categories cannot apply in any simple way. Our strategy consists in acknowledging the complexity of scientific practice, and trying to assess its rationality. Hence, while we are careful not to abstract away from the details of scientific practice, our approach is not strictly descriptive: our goal is to state in what conditions empirical science can rely on computer simulations. In order to do so, we need to adopt a renewed epistemological framework, whose categories would enable us to give a finer-grained, and better-fitted analysis of the rationality of scientific practice.
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Notes
We acknowledge that there is an important literature, both in engineering and in the philosophy of science (cf. for instance Winsberg 2003; Parker 2008a; Lloyd 2010) analyzing various methods, like “Verification & Validation” methods, helping simulation users to control and assess the validity of the outputs. In order to improve the justificational part of the assessment task with respect to simulation outputs, these methods aim at making control procedures explicit and accessible. In this paper, our goal is rather to uncover aspects of warrant that can hardly be made explicit (see Sect. 4). This is the reason why we exclude “Verification & Validation” methods from our analysis. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this aspect of the discussion.
Nobody, in fact, would claim that reliance on the word of others is irrational. The controversial question, which is at stake in the reductionism/anti-reductionism debate in the epistemology of testimony, rather concerns the nature of our warrant to rely on testimony. Reductionists, in the line of Hume (1740), argue that our epistemic right to trust others is derived from, and reducible to, our epistemic right to rely on observation and induction (roughly, we can trust others because we have observed that they are generally trustworthy). For anti-reductionists, whose classical figure is Reid (1764), reliance on testimony is a primary, fundamental, epistemic right.
This also applies to memory, but it is more controversial in the case of testimony (although reductionism about memory has some advocates, such as Chisholm 1966).
To be sure, memory sometimes plays a different role in our mental life, and it can sometimes serve as an independent element in justification: “Memory of events, objects, experiences, or attitudes may form a premise in a justification of an empirical belief” (Burge 1993, p. 464). In this case, it is better to talk about “substantive” memory, in order to distinguish this epistemic role from the purely preservative one.
It is worth highlighting the distinction between two different kinds of empirical facts about memory and testimony that might appear in one’s justification (but, according to Burge, do not). The first one is one’s empirical reasons to consider the source as reliable (“I have observed that my memory has most often provided me with reliable information”). This is the central point of reductionism (see note 2), and the most discussed. The other one is one’s present introspective experience of one’s remembering, or one’s auditory experience of being told something (“I happen to remember that \(p\)”, “this person is telling me that \(p\)”). Burge’s conception of a priori warrants provides an answer to the two issues together. However, they are in principle independent and should not be mixed up, as they sometimes are.
Burge (1998) shows that the different kinds of reasons one might have to “maintain acceptance” can all be analyzed as being grounded on our own reasoning abilities—hence that none of them transforms our warrant into an empirical one.
Here, we use “theoretical model” only to refer to the set of equations that are subsequently transformed into lines of code, and not to contrast “theoretical” with, e.g., “phenomenological”.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for asking us to mention these cases in order to make our analysis of computer simulations more complete.
It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between mathematical and empirical content; however, this distinction is not so important for our argument as we focus on the empirical warrants of content transformation (be the content mathematical or empirical).
We thank an anonymous reviewer from pointing out these two forms to us.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the example of the clerk. It shows that the epistemological problems raised by epistemic opacity are dependent on the context, and on the agent’s goal. The goal of the clerk might be described as collecting the amount that is indicated by the till (hence, his epistemic goal reduces to know what one can read on the machine), whereas the goal of the store manager might be to collect the amount of the goods the buyer actually has in his basket, which implies making sure that the machine does function properly. Now, the store manager himself might be entitled to rely on the tills company. Although epistemic goals, here, are subordinate to other practical goals (collecting money), this case provides us with a good analogy. In purely epistemological terms, and even assuming that the clerk’s goal is to know what the sum of the values he has entered into the till amounts to, he can easily be shown to be entitled to rely on the machine’s outputs.
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We warmly thank the anonymous referees who allowed us to avoid mistakes and to enrich our paper.
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Barberousse, A., Vorms, M. About the warrants of computer-based empirical knowledge. Synthese 191, 3595–3620 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0482-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0482-6