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Scientific Progress, Understanding and Unification

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Romanian Studies in Philosophy of Science

Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science ((BSPS,volume 313))

Abstract

I review critically several accounts of scientific progress and discuss in some detail the most recent one, which I call the ‘knowledge-accumulation’ account. While I am sympathetic to it, I argue that it leaves out an important component of the notion of progress, namely the role of scientific understanding. A sketch of a complementary account (‘understanding-accumulation’) is offered, which construes understanding in terms of unification.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Bird himself alludes to this idea in his (2007, 84): ‘I will however leave a detailed discussion of the important question of what contributions to knowledge contribute most to progress (and in particular the role of understanding) for another occasion—not least because it is a much more difficult question.’

  2. 2.

    To clarify: I shall be drawing on these views here, as I agree with the core idea. However, there are aspects of unificationism which I find problematic, but I can’t discuss them here.

  3. 3.

    Needless to say, I might have missed certain answers; the ones I discuss here are among the most prominent. My presentation and discussion of these accounts of progress, in this section and the next, owes a lot to Niiniluoto (2011) and Bird (2007).

  4. 4.

    For more on this, in the context of a discussion of scientific progress in relation to Thomas Kuhn, see Bird (2000).

  5. 5.

    Note that the proviso here is that the beliefs constituting knowledge are not only justified, but well-justified, or reliably, conclusively justified; that is, justified in such a way as to preclude the famous Gettier-type counterexamples (Gettier 1963).

  6. 6.

    Grimm (2013, forthcoming), Hindricks (2013), Khalifa and Gadomski (2013), Khalifa (2013), Newman (2013), Strevens (forthcoming). Earlier discussions include Trout (2002), de Regt and Dieks (2005), de Regt (2009), Elgin (2009).

  7. 7.

    Not everybody agrees that the main and only way to increase understanding is by resorting to scientific explanations; see, for instance, van Fraassen (1985, 642).

  8. 8.

    W. Salmon’s causal (ontic) conception of scientific explanation (Salmon 1984, 1998) is also motivated by the various failures of DN model. However, Salmon maintains that the core idea of this model (namely that explanations are derivations, or arguments) is inadequate.

  9. 9.

    The difficulties of the DN model are various (and notorious). One of the most important, whose solution was attempted by Friedman in his 1974 paper, stems from the so called ‘conjunction problem’: given two laws L and K, we can formally derive L from L&K but this cannot intuitively count as an explanation of L. Obviously, our understanding as to why L holds is not enhanced by this sort of derivation – explanation.

  10. 10.

    For endorsements and elaborations of unificationism, see for instance Weber (1999), Schurz (1999), Bartelborth (2002).

  11. 11.

    Suggestively, this is the context in which Lord Kelvin’s famously remarked ‘It seems to me that the test of ‘Do we or not understand a particular subject in physics?’ is ‘Can we make a mechanical model of it?’ (Kargon and Achinstein 1987, 3; 111).

  12. 12.

    Pauli says: ‘I, for one, see a basic distinction between Newton’s astronomy and Ptolemy’s. (…) To begin with, Newton posed the whole problem quite differently; he inquired into the causes of planetary motions not into the motions themselves. These causes, he discovered, were forces (…)’ (Heisenberg 1971, 32).

  13. 13.

    Strictly speaking, we derive descriptions of phenomenona, not the phenomena themselves. In this paper I use the word ‘phenomenon’ liberally, referring to any kind of thing explained in science (laws, events, facts, etc.)

  14. 14.

    As Salmon (2002, 94) points out, Friedman is too quick in assuming that counting the number of fundamental laws (what serves as basis of derivation) is possible.

  15. 15.

    Of course, one can reply that the explanans (Y) may be easier to understand, more ‘familiar’ than the phenomenon to be explained (X). Friedman counters this objection by arguing that familiarity (and other related notions) should not to be confused with intelligibility (1974, 10).

  16. 16.

    Friedman’s proposal prompted a number of insightful objections (Kitcher 1976; Barnes 1992b), but none of them will concern me here.

  17. 17.

    Friedman (1974, 14–5) refers to this as a fact (and I followed his usage) although this is not, strictly speaking, a fact; it is rather something that Kitcher (1981, 1989) calls a ‘type of fact’.

  18. 18.

    There is a vast literature criticizing the unificationist approach (part of it mentioned here), but I’m not sure this objection has been advanced before.

  19. 19.

    Note that even if we count the new basic truths added as items of knowledge, diagram (3) is still depicting a more desirable situation than diagrams (1) and (2): in (3) we have three new items of knowledge (U, p and q), as compared to only two (K and t) in (1), or only one (t) in (2).

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Acknowledgments

I thank the editors for soliciting my contribution, an anonymous referee for suggestions and Alexander Bird for reading an early draft. I presented sections of this paper at Aarhus University and I’m grateful to Sam Schindler, Sara Green and Helge Kragh for comments. All responsibility for possible errors remains mine. I dedicate this paper to the memory of M-R. Solcan.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Sorin Bangu

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  1. Sorin Bangu
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Correspondence to Sorin Bangu .

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  1. Department of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Ilie Pȃrvu

  2. Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Gabriel Sandu

  3. Department of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Iulian D. Toader

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Bangu, S. (2015). Scientific Progress, Understanding and Unification. In: Pȃrvu, I., Sandu, G., Toader, I. (eds) Romanian Studies in Philosophy of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 313. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16655-1_15

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