European Journal for Philosophy of Science最新文献

Scientific realists don’t standardly discriminate between, say, biology and fundamental physics when deciding whether the evidence and explanatory power warrant the inclusion of new entities in our ontology. As such, scientific realists are committed to a lush rainforest of special science kinds (Ross, 2000). Viruses certainly inhabit this rainforest – their explanatory power is overwhelming – but viruses’ properties can be explained from the bottom up: reductive explanations involving amino acids are generally available. However, reduction has often been taken to lead to a metaphysical downgrading, so how can viruses keep their place in the rainforest? In this paper, we show how the inhabitants of the rainforest can be inoculated against the eliminative threat of reduction: by demonstrating that they are emergent. According to our account, emergence involves a screening off condition as well as novelty. We go on to demonstrate that this account of emergence, which is compatible with theoretical reducibility, satisfies common intuitions concerning what should and shouldn’t count as real: viruses are emergent, as are trout and turkeys, but philosophically gerrymandered objects like trout-turkeys do not qualify.

We discuss the challenges that the standard (Humean and non-Humean) accounts of laws face within the framework of quantum gravity where space and time may not be fundamental. This paper identifies core (meta)physical features that cut across a number of quantum gravity approaches and formalisms and that provide seeds for articulating updated conceptions that could account for QG laws not involving any spatio-temporal notions. To this aim, we will in particular highlight the constitutive roles of quantum entanglement, quantum transition amplitudes and quantum causal histories. These features also stress the fruitful overlap between quantum gravity and quantum information theory.

We provide a quantitative analysis of the philosophy-neuroscience nexus using citation analysis. Combining bibliometric indicators of cross-field visibility with journal citation mapping techniques, we investigate four dimensions of the nexus: how the visibility of neuroscience in philosophy and of philosophy in neuroscience has changed over time, which areas of philosophy are more interested in neuroscience, which areas of neuroscience are more interested in philosophy, and how the trading zone between the two fields is configured. We also discuss two hypotheses: the supposed occurrence of a neuro-revolution in philosophy and the role of psychology as the disciplinary link between neuroscience and philosophy. Both the visibility of neuroscience in philosophy and the visibility of philosophy in neuroscience have increased significantly from 1980 to 2020, albeit the latter remains an order of magnitude lower than the former. Neuroscience is particularly visible in philosophy of mind, applied ethics, philosophy of science, but not in ‘core’ areas of analytic philosophy. Philosophy is particularly visible in cognitive and systems neuroscience and neuropsychiatry, but not in biomedical neuroscience. As for the trading zone between philosophy and neuroscience, our data show that it works differently in philosophy and in neuroscience. While some philosophy journals are active loci of bidirectional communication, neuroscience journals are divided between journals ‘importing’ philosophy in neuroscience and journals ‘exporting’ neuroscience to philosophy. Lastly, data do not support the hypothesis that a widespread neuro-revolution has transformed philosophy radically, but support the hypothesis that psychology functions as a mediating disciplinary link between philosophy and neuroscience.

We employ a pragmatic model of inquiry to distinguish the epistemological character of exploratory experimentation. Exploratory experimentation is not constituted by any intrinsic characteristics of an episode of experimentation but depends on the context and aims of the experiment and the ways in which these shape decisions about how the experimental inquiry is to be conducted: its tasks, resources, and aims, as well as the critical assessment of all of these. To demonstrate the usefulness of our pragmatist model, we apply it to the contrast between two kinds of searches for new physics at the Large Hadron Collider. Some searches are exploratory while others target specific Beyond Standard Model hypotheses, but this contrast can be understood only by considering the relations between these searches, their aims, and the way that these aims shape their respective experimental parameters and procedures. Our approach provides a model for establishing the epistemological significance of details of experimental practice.

This paper investigates the value of trust and the proper attitude lay people ought to have towards scientific experts. Trust in expertise is usually considered to be valuable, while distrust is often analyzed in cases where it is harmful. I will draw on accounts from political philosophy and argue that it is not only public trust that is valuable when it comes to scientific expertise – but also public vigilance. Expertise may be distorted in different ways, which cannot be remedied by internal control mechanisms alone. This reveals the importance of some forms of democratic oversight. The proper attitude is vigilant trust in expertise. However, vigilant trust seems to be a contradictory notion: How can one be trusting and watchful at the same time? I will show that it is not, and that trust and vigilance can be compatible to a certain extent. I will do so by distinguishing between different levels of both trust and vigilance. Interestingly, this argument requires acknowledging the value of some forms of distrust in scientific expertise, even if that distrust targets trustworthy experts.

Canonically, ‘classic’ tests of general relativity (GR) include perihelion precession, the bending of light around stars, and gravitational redshift; ‘modern’ tests have to do with, inter alia, relativistic time delay, equivalence principle tests, gravitational lensing, strong field gravity, and gravitational waves. The orthodoxy is that both classic and modern tests of GR afford experimental confirmation of that theory in particular. In this article, we question this orthodoxy, by showing there are classes of both relativistic theories (with spatiotemporal geometrical properties different from those of GR) and non-relativistic theories (in which the lightcones of a relativistic spacetime are ‘widened’) which would also pass such tests. Thus, (a) issues of underdetermination in the context of GR loom much larger than one might have thought, and (b) given this, one has to think more carefully about what exactly such tests in fact are testing.

There has been in recent years a huge surge of interest in the so-called extended Wigner’s friend scenario (EWFS). In short, a series of theorems (with some variation in detail) puts pressure on the ability of different agents in the scenario to account for each of the others’ measured outcomes: the outcomes cannot be assigned single well-defined values while also satisfying other reasonable physical assumptions. These theorems have been interpreted as showing that there can be no absolute, third-person, ‘God’s eye’ description of our reality. The focus of this paper is the strongest of these no-go theorems, the ‘local friendliness’ theorem of Bong et al. (2020, Nature Physics, 16, 1199–1205), which gives earnest consideration to the possibility of a measurement that unitarily reverses an entire lab system, including a conscious agent, thereby erasing the agent’s memory. The purpose of this paper is to begin the philosophical conversation regarding key questions concerning this process: Are the events in the lab merely ‘erased’, or do they in some sense not exist at all? What would it be like to be unitarily reversed? Should an agent care about any experiences they have inside the lab before they are reversed? This analysis employs a parallel case of memory erasure, to which this case can be contrasted, arising in the context of drug-induced amnesia as a result of administering anaesthesia during medical procedures (Carbonell, 2014, Bioethics, 28(5), 245–254). I argue that the consequences of unitarily reversing an agent are much more dramatic than simply memory erasure—the set of events themselves, and the personal timeline of the agent, leave no record at all inside or outside the lab. I consider the ramifications of this for the picture of reality that arises from the EWFS.

Scientists, either working alone or in groups, require rich cognitive, social, cultural, and material environments to accomplish their epistemic aims. There is research in the cognitive sciences that examines intelligent behavior as a function of the environment (“environmental perspectives”), which can be used to examine how scientists integrate “cognitive-cultural” resources as they create environments for problem-solving. In this paper, I advance the position that an expanded framework of distributed cognition can provide conceptual, analytical, and methodological tools to investigate how scientists enhance natural cognitive capacities by creating specific kinds of environments to address their epistemic goals. In a case study of a pioneering neuroengineering lab seeking to understand learning in living networks of neurons, I examine how the researchers integrated conceptual, methodological, and material resources from engineering, neuroscience, and computational science to create different kinds of distributed problem-solving environments that enhanced their natural cognitive capacities, for instance, for reasoning, visualization, abstraction, imagination, and memory, to attain their epistemic aims.

According to High-Dimensional Wavefunction Fundamentalism (HDWF) the wavefunction field evolving in configuration space is all that exists fundamentally. The main argument in favor of HDWF is an argument from separability and locality: separability is a desirable feature of a fundamental metaphysics and HDWF is indeed such a separable metaphysics. Separability in turn is desirable because it is simple and intuitive. Tim Maudlin has recently argued that intuitiveness and simplicity cannot motivate separability. In particular, our intuitions stem from our interactions with the three-dimensional world which is non-separable. Therefore, he concludes, there is nothing else HDWF theorists can appeal to motivate separability. I call this Maudlin’s challenge. The present paper addresses Maudlin’s challenge by showing how the facts that some plurality of entities are separable entail that its constituents are fundamental, for well-motivated notions of fundamentality.

Hempel never met Ramsey, but he knew his work. In his 1958 The Theoretician’s Dilemma: a study in the logic of theory construction, Hempel introduces the term Ramsey sentence, referring to Ramsey’s attempt in Theories to get rid of theoretical terms in formal accounts of scientific theories. In this paper, I draw the attention to another connection between Ramsey’s and Hempel’s works. Hempel’s Deductive-Nomological (DN) account of scientific explanation resembles very closely Ramsey’s account of a certain type of conditional sentences. In the first part of the paper, by introducing a fictional story, I highlight the similarities and differences between the two. In the last part of the paper, I claim that the most relevant difference between Ramsey and Hempel can be used to offer original solutions to Hempel’s Raven Paradox. Two possibilities are presented, arguing that the second, which requires a reconsideration of the formalisation of laws, is the most promising.