Perspectival Realism

Massimi, Michela

doi:10.1093/oso/9780197555620.001.0001

Cited by 89 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 370 publications

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“…For instance, dynamical systems modeling seeks to capture the temporal aspects of a cognitive process, whereas rational analysis focuses on the outcomes of cognition. A diversity of theoretical frameworks informs the design of new experimental paradigms, broadens the collective conceptualization of the relevant design spaces Massimi, 2022), and contributes to more comprehensive insights on cognition (Krakauer, Ghazanfar, Gomez-Marin, MacIver, & Poeppel, 2017;Marr, 1982;Medin & Bang, 2014). Constraining theory-building risks reinforcing biases that favor existing experimental paradigms, further inhibiting exploration of novel experimental and theoretical frameworks Sloman, Oppenheimer, Broomell, & Shalizi, 2022).…”

Section: Integrative Experimentation Exploits Existing Theoretical Pa...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Playing 20 Questions with Nature: Integrative Experiment Design in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

et al. 2022

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The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment's specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration is at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. The researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm—and with far greater efficiency.

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Section: Integrative Experimentation Exploits Existing Theoretical Pa...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Playing 20 Questions with Nature: Integrative Experiment Design in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

et al. 2022

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“…The other option is to abandon MBRA and explore alternatives. Alternatives that one might explore at this point are perspectivism (Giere 2006;Massimi 2022), modal modelling (Katzav 2014;Sjölin Wirling and Grüne-Yanoff 2021;Massimi 2022) and a programme focussed on managing severe uncertainty (Bradley and Steele 2015;Roussos et al 2021), but there may well be others.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate Models and Robustness Analysis–Part II: The Justificatory Challenge

Harris

Frigg²

2023

Handbooks in Philosophy

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Robustness analysis (RA) is the prescription to consider a diverse range of evidence and only regard a hypothesis as well-supported if all the evidence agrees on it. In contexts like climate science, the evidence in support of a hypothesis often comes from scientific models. This leads to model-based RA (MBRA), whose core notion is that a hypothesis ought to be regarded as wellsupported on grounds that a sufficiently diverse set of models agrees on the hypothesis. This chapter, which is the second part of a two-part review of MBRA, addresses the thorny issue of justifying the inferential steps taking us from the premises to the conclusions. We begin by making explicit what exactly the problem is. We then turn to a discussion of two broad families of justificatory strategies, namely top-down and bottom-up justifications. In the latter group we distinguish between the likelihood approach, independence approaches, and the explanatory approach. This discussion leads us to the sober conclusion that multi-model situations raise issues that are not yet fully understood and that the methods and approaches that MBRA has not yet reached a stage of maturity. Important questions remain open, and these will have to be addressed in future research.

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“…That models and theories distort their targets in this way does not disqualify them as tools for gaining an understanding of the world (Saatsi, 2020). According to perspectival realists, they are the only tools we have (Giere, 2006; Massimi, 2021; Teller, 2021). But it raises a complication in interpreting them.…”

Section: Perspectivismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The agential perspective: Countermapping the modern synthesis

Walsh

Rupik

2023

Evolution and Development

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We compare and contrast two theoretical perspectives on adaptive evolution—the orthodox Modern Synthesis perspective, and the nascent Agential Perspective. To do so, we develop the idea from Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther of a ‘countermap’, as a means for comparing the respective ontologies of different scientific perspectives. We conclude that the modern Synthesis perspective achieves an impressively comprehensive view of a universal set of dynamical properties of populations, but at the considerable cost of radically distorting the nature of the biological processes that contribute to evolution. For its part, the Agential Perspective offers the prospect of representing the biological processes of evolution with much greater fidelity, but at the expense of generality. Trade‐offs of this sort are endemic to science, and inevitable. Recognizing them helps us to avoid the pitfalls of ‘illicit reification’, i.e. the mistake of interpreting a feature of a scientific perspective as a feature of the non‐perspectival world. We argue that much of the traditional Modern Synthesis representation of the biology of evolution commits this illicit reification.

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Perspectival Realism

Cited by 89 publications

References 370 publications

Beyond Playing 20 Questions with Nature: Integrative Experiment Design in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

Beyond Playing 20 Questions with Nature: Integrative Experiment Design in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

Climate Models and Robustness Analysis–Part II: The Justificatory Challenge

The agential perspective: Countermapping the modern synthesis

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