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How Science Explains: Scientific Explanations and Their Limits

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Science and Human Freedom

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Abstract

This chapter goes into the achievements as well as the limits of scientific laws and explanations. It leads to making the case for science bringing out our freedom instead of infringing upon it. This case is made on the basis of an argument for a view of scientific theories, laws and explanations that is dubbed “Super-Humeanism”. In particular, this view provides a new and original rebuttal of the famous consequence argument of van Inwagen for scientific laws being incompatible with free will. This chapter thus leads to an argument to the effect that there is no fundamental conflict between the scientific and the manifest image as regards time and free will. Such conflicts are pseudo-problems that result from a misapprehension of the ontological commitments of scientific theories.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jackson (1994, p. 25). See also Jackson (1998, ch. 1).

  2. 2.

    For the sake of the example, let us leave aside here the view according to which “water” is a rigid designator such that the water-role can be realized only by H2O molecules. See Putnam (1975) for this view.

  3. 3.

    See Brown et al. (1995, 1996) and later Pylkkänen et al. (2015) as well as Esfeld et al. (2017).

  4. 4.

    See Goldstein et al. (2005a, b) and Esfeld et al. (2017).

  5. 5.

    See Friedman (1974) and Kitcher (1989). See furthermore Bhogal (2019, Sect. 2.1) for the link between explanation by unification and the metaphysics of laws.

  6. 6.

    See Bird (2007) and Mumford and Anjum (2011) as well as the papers in Marmodoro (2010) for prominent such positions.

  7. 7.

    See for this view of the wave-function Miller (2014), Esfeld (2014b), Callender (2015) and Bhogal and Perry (2017). See Dowker and Herbauts (2005) for a concrete model in the framework of the GRW flash ontology.

  8. 8.

    See Callender (2004); and see Chen (2019) as to spelling this stance out in quantum physics.

  9. 9.

    For an account in a similar vein in terms of there being more than the observed universe, see Carroll (2010, in particular chs. 14–15). See Lazarovici and Reichert (2019) for a philosophical assessment of these accounts.

  10. 10.

    For critical discussions of Super-Humeanism , see Wilson (2018), Marmodoro (2018), Darby (2018), Lazarovici (2018), Matarese (2019) and Simpson (2019).

  11. 11.

    See Hoyningen-Huene (2013) for an elaboration on systematicity as the central trait of science.

  12. 12.

    See Brown et al. (1995, 1996), Pylkkänen et al. (2015) and Esfeld et al. (2017) as mentioned in Sect. 2.1.

  13. 13.

    See the objection that Matarese (2019) builds on this fact.

  14. 14.

    Such an arbitrariness threatens, by contrast, the “package deal account” proposed by Loewer (2007) that is also directed against Lewis’s natural properties.

  15. 15.

    See the reading of the historical Hume that Strawson (1989) proposes . Cf. also Esfeld and Deckert (2017, p. 56).

  16. 16.

    But see also the position that von Wachter (2015) advocates: according to him, it is wrong-headed to associate laws with regularities; by contrast, they indicate tendencies that can be trumped by the intervention of external factors such as, for instance, free will.

  17. 17.

    Van Inwagen (1983, p. 16); for an earlier and more detailed version of the argument, see van Inwagen (1975).

  18. 18.

    See also Beebee and Mele (2002) for a detailed argument; and see already Swartz (2003, ch. 11, in particular p. 127).

  19. 19.

    See again Beebee and Mele (2002, pp. 209–217).

  20. 20.

    For such proposals, see Hoefer (2002) and Ismael (2016, ch. 6 and pp. 227–230). See Brennan (2007) for a criticism of Hoefer’s proposal.

  21. 21.

    See again Hoyningen-Huene (2013).

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  1. Section de Philosophie, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Michael Esfeld

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Esfeld, M. (2020). How Science Explains: Scientific Explanations and Their Limits. In: Science and Human Freedom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37771-7_2

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