Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Duration: 2017 - 2021

Code: FFI2016-76799-P

Principal Investigator

José Antonio Díez (diez.ja@gmail.com)

All researchers

Carl Hoefer (co IP)

David Pineda, Antonio Diéguez, Adán Sus, Albert Sole, Romina Zuppone, Roman Frigg, Stathis Psllos, Julian Reiss, Ulises Moulines, Elliot Sober, Pablo Lorenzano, Javier Suárez, Alfonso García, Johanes Findl, Javier Anta

Summary

Searching for laws and giving explanations are two central components of scientific practice. These activities commonly are set within broader scientific constructs such as models and theories. Epistemic scientific realism (ESR) is a philosophical thesis about the epistemic accessibility and justification of certain scientific posits. The goal of this project is to explicate the relationship between lawhood and explanatoriness in scientific practice and to assess the epistemic import of this relationship for realist (& anti-realist) theses, focusing on case studies in the physical sciences (classical/relativistic/quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, climate science, cosmology) and biomedical sciences (biochemistry, genetics, evolution, neuroscience, medicine). Physical and biomedical sciences are nowadays the most robust parts of scientific practice and, at the same time, provide the most prominent examples discussed in the realism debate. In the last two decades or so, a pluralistic attitude with respect to laws and explanation has predominated in philosophy of science, holding that there is no single notion of lawhood that applies to both physical and biological theories, and that there is no single notion of explanatoriness that applies to both fields, or even with all generality to each field. In this regard, the first general hypothesis of this research, to be tested and eventually confirmed or disconfirmed, is that, although there are relevant differences with regard lawhood and explanatoriness in physics and biomedicine, there is a minimal notion of law as non-accidental regularity in a given (maybe restricted) domain, that plays an essential role in both physical and biomedical explanations. In recent times, there are some approaches to the problem of scientific realism that try to analyze nomic-realism and unobservables-realism also pluralistically, distinguishing their scope and arguments in physical and biomedical theories. The second general hypothesis our project will explore is that there is no principled difference, with respect the plausibility of anti/realist stances (about both modal and unobservable posits) between physical and biomedical theories. The two hypotheses are linked since data from the former are relevant for the latter.