Studies in History and Philosophy of Science最新文献

Hermann Weyl's philosophical reflections remain a topic of considerable interest in the history and philosophy of science. In particular, Weyl's commitment to a form of idealism, as it pertains to his reading of Husserl and Fichte, has garnered much discussion. However, much less attention has been given to Weyl's later, and at that only partial, turn towards a form of empiricism (i.e. from the late 1920s onward). This lack of focus on Weyl's later philosophy has tended to obscure some of the most significant lessons that Weyl sought to draw from his decades of research in the foundations of mathematics and physics. In this paper, I develop some aspects of what I will term as Weyl's ‘modest’ empiricism. I will argue that Weyl's turn toward empiricism can be read in the context of a development of Helmholtz's epistemological program and his unique form of ‘Kantianism’. The hope is that this reading will not only provide a better understanding of Weyl's later thought, especially his (1954) criticism of Cassirer, but that it may also provide the basis for a novel ‘Weylian’ account of the mathematization of nature underwriting the group-theoretic methodology of parts of modern physics.

“Excited Delirium Syndrome” (ExDS) is a controversial diagnosis. The supposed syndrome is sometimes considered to be a potential cause of death. However, it has been argued that its sole purpose is to cover up excessive police violence because it is mainly used to explain deaths of individuals in custody. In this paper, we examine the epistemic conditions giving rise to the controversial diagnosis by discussing the relation between causal hypotheses, evidence, and data in forensic medicine. We argue that the practitioners’ social context affects causal inquiry through background assumptions that enter inquiry at multiple stages. This analysis serves to better understand the wide usage of the controversial diagnosis of ExDS.

The understanding of artifacts and biological phenomena has often influenced each other. This work argues that at the core of these epistemic bridges there are shared teleological notions and explanations manifested in analogies between artifacts and biological phenomena. To this end, I first propose a focus on the logical structure of minimal teleological explanations, which renders said epistemic bridges more evident than an ontological or metaphysical approach to teleology, and which can be used to describe scientific practices in different areas by virtue of formal generality and minimalism (section 2). Second, I show how this approach highlights some epistemic features shared by the understanding of artifacts and biological phenomena, like a specific kind of epistemic circularity, and how functional analogies between artifacts and biological phenomena translate such epistemic circularity from one domain to the other (section 3). Third, I conduct a case study on the scientific practice around the brain's “compass”, showing how the understanding of artifacts influences purpose ascription and measurement, and frames mechanisms in biology, especially in areas where purpose ascription is most difficult, like cognitive neuroscience (sections 4 and 5).

A growing literature in philosophy of science focuses on the role of aesthetics in scientific practice, with the experiment recently recognized for its aesthetic value. However, the literature on aesthetics in experimentation grows out of case studies from the history of science, leaving open the question as to how contemporary scientists experience aesthetics in their experimental work. In this paper we offer the first qualitative, empirical analysis of aesthetic experiences regarding experimental practice, drawing from in-depth interviews with 215 scientists in four countries. We identify six categories of aesthetic experience we find in experimentation, their function, and new questions emerging from our study.

In a series of articles, Mauricio Suárez defends the neutrality of fictionalism with respect to the scientific realism-anti-realism debate. Suárez understands fictionalism from a strictly methodological point of view, linked to the practice of model building in the context of the philosophy of science. He moves away from the type of fictionalism analysed in other areas of philosophy such as metaphysics, the philosophy of language, aesthetics or the philosophy of mathematics. Following Vaihinger's position, he emphasizes the inferential role of fiction in scientific modelling and argues that scientific fictionalism is not incompatible with scientific realism, as is often believed. We argue against Suárez's position and reject the ubiquitous character assigned to fictions in scientific discourse, as well as the deflationary view of scientific realism defended by Suárez. We conclude that when the semantic, epistemic, and metaphysical aspects at stake in the realism-antirealism debate are taken into account, the alleged compatibility between scientific realism and fictionalism starts to generate some tension.

The interpretability of ML models is important, but it is not clear what it amounts to. So far, most philosophers have discussed the lack of interpretability of black-box models such as neural networks, and methods such as explainable AI that aim to make these models more transparent. The goal of this paper is to clarify the nature of interpretability by focussing on the other end of the “interpretability spectrum”. The reasons why some models, linear models and decision trees, are highly interpretable will be examined, and also how more general models, MARS and GAM, retain some degree of interpretability. It is found that while there is heterogeneity in how we gain interpretability, what interpretability is in particular cases can be explicated in a clear manner.