Jump ship, shift gears, or just keep on chugging: Assessing the responses to tensions between theory and evidence in contemporary cosmology

Baerdemaeker, Siska De; Boyd, Nora Mills

doi:10.1016/j.shpsb.2020.08.002

Cited by 13 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…11 [12,13,15,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. 12 Some examples are the small-scale challenges [31,32], the Bullet Cluster (which, despite usually being put forward as a smoking gun against modified gravity explanations of dark matter data, is potentially also problematic for ΛCDM) [33][34][35], and the tension between different measurements of the Hubble constant. See also [36, §17.3.2].…”

Section: Example Of a (Maximally) Thick Concept Of Dark Mattermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similarly to the case for genes, advocates of dark 'matter' indeed being matter rather than a modification of gravity tend to expect that the galactic correlations that MOND is known to be able to explain as well as several 'small-scale challenges' (Bullock and Boylan-Kolchin, 2017;De Baerdemaeker and Boyd, 2020) are in fact due to a complex, messy interaction of dark matter and luminous/baryonic matter. Context matters.…”

Section: Genesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dark Matter Realism

Martens

2021

Found Phys

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According to the standard model of cosmology, $$\Lambda $$ Λ CDM, the mass-energy budget of the current stage of the universe is not dominated by the luminous matter that we are familiar with, but instead by some form of dark matter (and dark energy). It is thus tempting to adopt scientific realism about dark matter. However, there are barely any constraints on the myriad of possible properties of this entity—it is not even certain that it is a form of matter. In light of this underdetermination I advocate caution: we should not (yet) be dark matter realists. The “not(-yet)-realism” that I have in mind is different from Hacking’s (Philos Sci 56 (4), 555–581, 1989) anti-realism, in that it is semantic rather than epistemological. It also differs from the semantic anti-realism of logical empiricism, in that it is naturalistic, such that it may only be temporary and does not automatically apply to all other unobservables (or even just to all other astronomical unobservables, as with Hacking’s anti-realism). The argument is illustrated with the analogy of the much longer history of the concept of a gene, as the current state of the concept of dark matter resembles in some relevant ways that of the early concept of genes.

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Section: Example Of a (Maximally) Thick Concept Of Dark Mattermentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Genesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dark Matter Realism

Martens

2021

Found Phys

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“…The present article falls within the recently rising literature on the philosophy of dark matter (e.g., Vanderburgh 2014;Kosso 2013;Massimi 2018;Weisberg et al 2018;de Swart 2020;Martens and Lehmkuhl 2020;Smeenk 2020;De Baerdemaeker 2021;Jacquart 2021b;De Baerdemaeker and Boyd 2020), and its broader aim is to explore an existing methodological challenge in cosmology regarding the proliferation of viable models for the nature of dark matter by embedding it in the current philosophical literature on robustness. Although the main conclusion partly concerns the limits of robustness arguments in dark-matter research, the present study, at the same time highlights the need for a common ground of reference in dark-matter research for the integration of results from different methods and should not be seen as introducing any kind of pessimism or skepticism about dark-matter research.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robustness and Dark-Matter Observation

Antoniou

2023

Philos. sci.

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Current cosmological observations place little constraints on the nature of dark matter, allowing the development of a large number of models and various methods for probing their properties, which seem to provide ideal grounds for the employment of robustness arguments. In this article, the extent to which such arguments can be used to overcome various methodological and theoretical challenges is examined. The conclusion is that while robustness arguments have a limited scope in the context of dark matter research, they can still be used for increasing the scientists’ confidence about the properties of specific models.

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“…Given this underdetermination of pursuit-worthiness, we plea for modest conservatism as the methodological recommendation (more details in §4) for the way forward-as a useful heuristic (cf. De Baerdemaeker and Boyd (2020) for an analogous case for Dark Matter): on the one hand, to pursue the conservative approach, the ΛCDM model, especially with the goal of ever stricter tests; and on the other hand-the complementary modesty (or anti-dogmatism/liberalism) of the recommended conservatism-to embolden the foraging for unconventional answers to the Dark Energy probem.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Virtues of Pursuit-Worthy Speculation: The Promises of Cosmic Inflation

Wolf,

Duerr

2023

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

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The paper argues that we ought to conceive of the Dark Energy problem-the question of how to account for observational data, naturally interpreted as accelerated expansion of the universe-as a crisis of underdetermined pursuitworthiness. Not only are the various approaches to the Dark Energy problem evidentially underdetermined; at present, no compelling reasons single out any of them as more likely to be true than the other. More vexingly for working scientists, none of the approaches stands out as uncontroversially preferable over its rivals in terms of its rationally warranted promise, i.e. the reasons to further work on, explore and develop it. We demonstrate this claim by applying a Peircean economic model of pursuit-worthiness in terms of a cognitive cost/benefit estimate-with the instantiation of theory virtues as key indicators of cognitive gains-to the four main Dark Energy proposals (the cosmological constant approach, modified gravity, quintessence, and inhomogeneous cosmologies). Our analysis yields that these approaches do not admit of an unambiguous, or uncontroversial, ranking with respect to which ansatz deserves distinguished attention and research efforts. The overall methodological counsel that our analysis underwrites recommends a pragmatic double research strategy forward: to encourage and foster theory pluralism and the search for tests-with the goal of enhancing the testability of the ΛCDM model and "testing it to destruction".

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Jump ship, shift gears, or just keep on chugging: Assessing the responses to tensions between theory and evidence in contemporary cosmology

Cited by 13 publications

References 50 publications

Dark Matter Realism

Dark Matter Realism

Robustness and Dark-Matter Observation

The Virtues of Pursuit-Worthy Speculation: The Promises of Cosmic Inflation

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