Abstract
Talk of “levels” can be found throughout the sciences, from “levels of abstraction”, to “levels of organization”, to “levels of analysis” (among others). This has led to substantial disagreement regarding the ontology of levels, and whether the various senses of levels each have genuine value and utility to scientific practice. In this paper, I propose a unified framework for thinking about levels in science which ties together the various ways in which levels are invoked in science, and which can overcome the problems that different senses of levels have faced. I argue that levels can best be understood as choices scientists make regarding what sort of information to foreground in their models and theories, and what sort of information to push into the background. To change levels is to change the foregrounding and backgrounding of information for different representational and pragmatic purposes.
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Notes
This sense of levels is also sometimes referred to as “levels of explanation”.
For more on the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic senses of levels in science, see: Kersten et al., 2016.
A similar idea is also defended by Kersten et al., 2016.
This is one of the reasons that Potochnik and McGill (2012) suggest that we should think of levels of scale as merely “quasi-levels” instead of full-blooded levels.
For clarity, we must to be careful not to take this zooming metaphor too literally. Changing levels isn’t literally zooming in and out. After all, the sorts of information foregrounded and backgrounded by our models can vary in any number of different ways based on the choice of working scientists. “Zooming in” often implies going smaller, while zooming out implies going larger. But this is not always the case with the sense of levels proposed here. The zooming metaphor is only intended to intuitively illustrate how a compositional sense of levels need not be committed to literal metaphysical layers, only complex integrated systems that we can describe different parts of in isolate of others depending on what we wish to learn.
A similar sort of response is proposed by Kästner (2018), who argues that both are true from different epistemic perspectives.
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Acknowledgements
An earlier draft of this paper was given as a colloquium talk to the philosophy department at the University of Waterloo. I am very grateful for the constructive and helpful feedback I received from faculty and students there. In addition, there are certain individuals who were particularly helpful in shaping this paper that I would like to thank. Specifically: Joseph McCaffrey, Chris Eliasmith, Doreen Fraser, Vince Lombardi, Elena Holmgren, Nathan Haydon, and Peter Blouw.
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Hochstein, E. Foregrounding and backgrounding: a new interpretation of “levels” in science. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 12, 23 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-022-00457-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-022-00457-x