Realism and Explanatory Perspectives

Saatsi, Juha

doi:10.4324/9781315145198-5

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 19 publications

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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).…”

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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Section: Perspectivismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The agential perspective: Countermapping the modern synthesis

Walsh

Rupik

2023

Evolution and Development

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Do fictions explain?

Nguyen

2020

Synthese

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I argue that fictional models, construed as models that misrepresent certain ontological aspects of their target systems, can nevertheless explain why the latter exhibit certain behaviour. They can do this by accurately representing whatever it is that that behaviour counterfactually depends on. However, we should be sufficiently sensitive to different explanatory questions, i.e., ‘why does certain behaviour occur?’ versus ‘why does the counterfactual dependency invoked to answer that question actually hold?’. With this distinction in mind, I argue that whilst fictional models can answer the first sort of question, they do so in an unmysterious way (contra to what one might initially think about such models). Moreover, I claim that the second question poses a dilemma for the defender of the idea that fictions can explain: either these models cannot answer these sorts of explanatory questions, precisely because they are fictional; or they can, but in a way that requires reinterpreting them such that they end up accurately representing the ontological basis of the counterfactual dependency, i.e., reinterpreting them so as to rob them of their fictional status. Thus, the existence of explanatory fictions does not put pressure on the idea that accurate representation of some aspect of a target system is a necessary condition on explaining that aspect.

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Perspectivism in current epigenetics

Bschir

2020

Euro Jnl Phil Sci

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Discussions about perspectivism in the current philosophical literature often focus on questions concerning perspectival modeling or the compatibility between perspectivism and realism. In this paper, I propose to extend the debate on perspectivism by taking into account the social dimension of scientific perspectives. Scientific perspectives are always adopted and advocated for by individual scientists and groups of scientists with different epistemic affinities. I describe an example of a current and ongoing controversy in the field of epigenetics in order to illustrate that diverging scientific perspectives on open scientific questions are often not fully explained by empirical underdetermination or diverging theoretical approaches alone. Opposing perspectives frequently arise from differences in systems of practice and the scientific socializations of the involved scientists, including differences in training, experimental skills, and epistemic priorities. The paper ends with a discussion of the important epistemic function of perspectives in scientific discovery. Ultimately, perspectivism is described as a valid philosophical position that explains how scientific knowledge is generated in situations of empirical underdetermination and why trust in science can be justified even in the absence of a community consensus.

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Realism and Explanatory Perspectives

Cited by 5 publications

References 19 publications

The agential perspective: Countermapping the modern synthesis

The agential perspective: Countermapping the modern synthesis

Do fictions explain?

Perspectivism in current epigenetics

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