The Scientific Imagination PDF
Preview The Scientific Imagination
The Scientific Imagination The Scientific Imagination Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives Edited By ARNON LEVY AND PETER GODFREY- SMITH 1 3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019033333 ISBN 978– 0– 19– 021230– 8 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America Cover image: M.C. Escher’s “Depth” © 2019 The M.C. Escher Company-The Netherlands. All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com Contents About the Contributors vii Introduction 1 Arnon Levy and Peter Godfrey- Smith 1. Capturing the Scientific Imagination 17 Fiora Salis and Roman Frigg 2. If Models Were Fictions, Then What Would They Be? 51 Amie L. Thomasson 3. Realism About Missing Systems 75 Martin Thomson- Jones 4. The Fictional Character of Scientific Models 102 Stacie Friend 5. Models and Reality 128 Stephen Yablo 6. Models, Fictions, and Conditionals 154 Peter Godfrey- Smith 7. Imagining Mechanisms with Diagrams 178 Benjamin Sheredos and William Bechtel 8. Abstraction and Representational Capacity in Computational Structures 210 Michael Weisberg 9. “Learning by Thinking” in Science and in Everyday Life 230 Tania Lombrozo 10. Is Imagination Constrained Enough for Science? 250 Deena Skolnick Weisberg 11. Can Children Benefit from Thought Experiments? 262 Igor Bascandziev and Paul L. Harris 12. Metaphor and Scientific Explanation 280 Arnon Levy vi Contents 13. Imaginative Frames for Scientific Inquiry: Metaphors, Telling Facts, and Just-S o Stories 304 Elisabeth Camp Index 337 About the Contributors Igor Bascandziev is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology at Reed College. He completed his doctoral training at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and his postdoctoral training in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. In addition, Igor spent one year as a Mind Brain Behavior Research Associate in the Department of Psychology and the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University, where he worked on questions concerning thought experiments. Some of the central questions of his research program concern the origins and development of concepts. How is it that humans, and only humans, know what the concept “1/ 5th” means or what the concept “density” means? In particular, Igor is interested in the cognitive re- sources and the learning mechanisms that support the acquisition of such conceptual knowledge. William Bechtel is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Center for Circadian Biology at the University of California, San Diego. His research examines explanatory practices in molecular and cell biology, network systems bi- ology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. In particular, he focuses on how biolo- gists invoke mechanisms in their explanations, with an emphasis on the ways in which the conception of mechanisms has evolved over time. For several years he led a research group examining how scientists employ diagrams in their reasoning. He is the co- author of Discovering Complexity and Connectionism and the Mind and author of Discovering Cell Mechanisms and Mental Mechanisms. Elisabeth Camp is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She works in the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics, fo- cusing on thoughts and utterances that don’t fit standard propositional models. She has written extensively about the cognitive and communicative effects of cogni- tive perspectives, especially with figurative speech, such as metaphor and sarcasm, and with loaded language, such as slurs. She also works on the theory of concepts, on nonhuman animal cognition, and on non- sentential representational systems such as maps. She was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to Rutgers. Her papers have appeared in venues including Analytic Philosophy, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Noûs, Philosophical Perspectives, and Philosophical Studies. Stacie Friend is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research focuses on issues at the intersection of aesthetics, language, and mind, especially in relation to our engagement with fictional narratives. She has published on the metaphysics of fictional characters, the nature and cognitive value of viii About the Contributors fiction, thought and discourse about the nonexistent, and emotion and imagination in response to literature and film. She has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan and a British Academy/ Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow, and has held visiting professorships at the University of Barcelona and the Institut Jean Nicod/ Ecole Normale Supérieure. She is the President of the British Society of Aesthetics, an organizer of the London Aesthetics Forum series of talks at the Institute of Philosophy, and a co- investigator on the Leverhulme Trust research project “Learning from Fiction: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives” (2018– 2021). Roman Frigg is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS), and Co-D irector of the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series (CATS) at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the winner of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is a permanent Visiting Professor in the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy of the Ludwig-M aximilians- University Munich, and he has held visiting appointments at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Utrecht, the University of Sydney, and the University of Barcelona. He was asso- ciate editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science and a member of the steering committee of the European Philosophy of Science Association. He currently serves on a number of editorial and advisory boards. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of London and master’s degrees in both theoretical physics and philosophy from the University of Basel, Switzerland. His research interests lie in ge- neral philosophy of science and philosophy of physics, and he has published papers on climate change, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, randomness, chaos, complexity, probability, scientific realism, computer simulations, modeling, scien- tific representation, reductionism, confirmation, and the relation between art and science. Peter Godfrey- Smith studied at the University of Sydney and the University of California, San Diego. He taught at Stanford, Harvard, the Australian National University, and the CUNY Graduate Center before moving to his current position as Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. His main interests are in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind, though he also works on pragmatism and various other parts of philosophy. He has written five books, including Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2003), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). Paul L. Harris is a developmental psychologist with interests in the development of cognition, emotion, and imagination. For many years he taught at Oxford University, where he was a Professor of Developmental Psychology and a Fellow of St John’s About the Contributors ix College. In 2001 he migrated to Harvard, where he holds the Victor S. Thomas Professorship of Education. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book on children’s understanding of emotion, Children and Emotion, appeared in 1989 and his book on play and imagination, The Work of the Imagination, in 2000. He currently studies how young children learn about history, science, and religion on the basis of what trusted informants tell them. His latest book, Trusting What You’re Told: How Children Learn from Others, describing this research, was published by Harvard University Press in 2012. It has received the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award from the American Psychological Association and the Cognitive Development Society Book Award. Arnon Levy is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds an AM in organismic and evolutionary biology and a PhD in philosophy, both from Harvard University. Levy’s research centers on modeling and explanation, especially in the life sciences. He has also worked on connection between biology (especially evolutionary theory) and moral norms. His papers have been pub- lished in a range of philosophical venues, including Nous, the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, the British Journal for Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy and Public Affairs. He currently heads the Interuniversity Program in the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, sponsored by the Council for Higher Education, and is a member of the Hebrew University’s Center for Logic, Language, and Cognition. Tania Lombrozo is a Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, as well as an Associate of the Department of Philosophy. She received her PhD in psychology from Harvard University in 2006 after receiving a BS in symbolic systems and a BA in philosophy from Stanford University. Dr. Lombrozo’s research aims to address foun- dational questions about cognition using the empirical tools of cognitive psychology and the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy. Her work focuses on explanation and understanding, social cognition, causal reasoning, learning, and folk episte- mology. She is the recipient of numerous early-c areer awards, including the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science, a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, and a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition. Fiora Salis is Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York and Research Associate at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics. She has held positions at the University of Lisbon and the London School of Economics, and visiting appointments at the University of London and the University of Geneva. She received a PhD and a master’s degree in cognitive science and language from the University of Barcelona and a master’s degree in phi- losophy and history of ideas from the University of Turin.
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