Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Duration: 2021 - 2025

Code: PID2020-115114GB-I00

Principal Investigator

Carl Hoefer (carl.hoefer@gmail.com)

José Antonio Díez (diez.ja@gmail.com)

All researchers

Summary

Although the uses of the terms ‘objective' and ‘objectivity' vary across different contexts, the objectivity sought by science has been generally taken to involve its outputs being factually correct and determined more by the nature of things in themselves than by preconceptions or concepts tied to a specific culture or paradigm. In the course of the 20th century, however, the objectivity of modern science came under attack from many directions. Some of the attacks highlighted genuine difficulties of the objectivity ideal in science, others were overblown and poorly reasoned; but the net effect of these attacks has been a crisis of confidence in science. Many citizens in countries with formerly-solid educational systems disbelieve in evolution and in concerning climate change, fear to give their children vaccines against potentially deadly viruses (the long-known ones, not Covid-19), and view academic science overall as a politically or economically driven enterprise. At the same time, critical attack has sometimes been warranted.  There have been a number of well-publicised scientific failures and retractions (even in physics), scandals involving data-doctoring or plagiarism, and claims of failure of replicability of experimental evidence in certain social sciences. With science's objectivity having been attacked for both good and poor reasons, there is an urgent need to reassess, reclaim and reshape the notion of scientific objectivity.

Our goal in this project is to contribute to the process of reassessing the notion of objectivity in science by exploring a number of issues both at a general level and in specific scientific fields or topics. By doing so we aim to contribute to restoring appropriate forms and levels of confidence in the knowledge generated by our best contemporary sciences.
Our project will have three branches of work:

(i) Representation, justification and explanation
We will carry out studies developing project memberss existing theories of scientific explanation and representation (particularly those of Díez and Frigg), and their application to new case studies from biological and physical sciences. We will also look at how novel types of models raise complications for the objectivity of scientific representations and explanations.

(ii) Objectivity of ontology in physics and biology
Do modern sciences give us objective knowledge about the basic constituents of the world, given the non-trivial disputes concerning the basic ontology postulated in our most successful theories? In this leg of our project, explore a number of ontological issues that arise in specific areas of physics and biology, such as: the ontological status of the quantum wavefunction and of quantum particles; of spacetime as it is described in general relativistic theories; of units of evolutions in general, and of some tricky biological organisms such as holobionts in particular.

(iii) Scientific realism / anti-realism
Can we be confident that contemporary sciences, or parts of them at least, give us objectively true descriptions of our world? What caveats, borders, or limitations need to be noted prior to making such a claim about science? This third leg of our project will address these questions. It will build upon work already produced in the PIs previous research project, as well as upon the results concerning specific issues that emerge from the first two legs of the project just described.

€70,180, with associated FPI PhD scholarship