Achieving understanding of nature is one of the aims of science. In this paper we offer an analysis of the nature of scientific understanding that accords with actual scientific practice and accommodates the historical diversity of conceptions of understanding. Its core idea is a general criterion for the intelligibility of scientific theories that is essentially contextual: which theories conform to this criterion depends on contextual factors, and can change in the course of time. Our analysis provides a general account of how understanding is provided by scientific explanations of diverse types. In this way, it reconciles conflicting views of explanatory understanding, such as the causal-mechanical and the unificationist conceptions. Synthese (2005) 144: 137-170

This book is about scientific understanding. It is widely acknowledged that a central aim of science is to achieve understanding of the world around us, and that possessing such understanding is highly important in our present-day society. But what does it mean to achieve this understanding? What precisely is scientific understanding? These are philosophical questions that have not yet received satisfactory answers. While there has been an ongoing debate about the nature of scientific explanation since Carl Hempel advanced his covering law model in 1948, the related notion of understanding has been largely neglected because most philosophers regarded understanding as merely a subjective byproduct of objective explanations. By contrast, this book puts scientific understanding center stage. It is primarily a philosophical study, but also contains detailed historical case studies of scientific practice. In contrast to most existing studies in this area, it takes into account scientists’ views and analyzes their role in scientific debate and development. The aim of the book is to develop and defend a philosophical theory of scientific understanding that can describe and explain the historical variation of criteria for understanding actually employed by scientists. The theory does justice to the insights of such famous physicists as Werner Heisenberg and Richard Feynman, while bringing much-needed conceptual rigor to their intuitions. The scope of the proposed account of understanding is the natural sciences: while the detailed case studies derive from physics, examples from other sciences are presented to illustrate its wider validity.

The present paper presents a philosophical analysis of earth science, a discipline that has received relatively little attention from philosophers of science. We focus on the question of whether earth science can be reduced to allegedly more fundamental sciences, such as chemistry or physics. In order to answer this question, we investigate the aims and methods of earth science, the laws and theories used by earth scientists, and the nature of earth-scientific explanation. Our analysis leads to the tentative conclusion that there are emergent phenomena in earth science but that these may be reducible to physics. However, earth science does not have irreducible laws, and the theories of earth science are typically hypotheses about unobservable (past) events or generalised-but not universally valid-descriptions of contingent processes. Unlike more fundamental sciences, earth science is characterised by explanatory pluralism: earth scientists employ various forms of narrative explanations in combination with causal explanations. The main reason is that earth-scientific explanations are typically hampered by local underdetermination by the data to such an extent that complete causal explanations are impossible in practice, if not in principle.

Nerve impulse generation and propagation are often thought of as solely electrical events. The prevalence of this view is the result of long and intense study of nerve impulses in electrophysiology culminating in the introduction of the Hodgkin-Huxley model of the action potential in the 1950s. To this day, this model forms the physiological foundation for a broad area of neuroscientific research. However, the Hodgkin-Huxley model cannot account for non-electrical phenomena that accompany nerve impulse propagation, for which there is nevertheless ample evidence. This raises the question whether the Hodgkin-Huxley model is a complete model of the nerve impulse. Several alternative models have been proposed that do take into account non-electrical aspects of the nerve impulse and emphasize their importance in gaining a more complete understanding of the nature of the nerve impulse. In our opinion, these models deserve more attention in neuroscientific research, since, together with the Hodgkin-Huxley model, they will help in addressing and solving a number of questions in basic and applied neuroscience which thus far have remained outside our grasp. Here we provide a historico-scientific overview of the developments that have led to the current conception of the action potential as an electrical phenomenon, discuss some major objections against this conception, and suggest a number of scientific factors which have likely contributed to the enduring success of the Hodgkin-Huxley model and should be taken into consideration whilst contemplating the formulation of a more extensive and complete conception of the nerve impulse.

This article analyzes the epistemic value of understanding and offers an account of the role of understanding in science. First, I discuss the objectivist view of the relation between explanation and understanding, defended by Carl Hempel and J. D. Trout. I challenge this view by arguing that pragmatic aspects of explanation are crucial for achieving the epistemic aims of science. Subsequently, I present an analysis of these pragmatic aspects in terms of ‘intelligibility’ and a contextual account of scientific understanding based on this notion.