Philosophy of Science Assoc. 23Rd Biennial Mtg
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Philosophy of Science Assoc. 23rd Biennial Mtg San Diego, CA Version: 13 November 2012 philsci-archive.pitt.edu Philosophy of Science Assoc. 23rd Biennial Mtg San Diego, CA This conference volume was automatically compiled from a collection of papers deposited in PhilSci-Archive in conjunction with Philosophy of Science Assoc. 23rd Biennial Mtg (San Diego, CA). PhilSci-Archive offers a service to those organizing conferences or preparing volumes to allow the deposit of papers as an easy way to circulate advance copies of papers. If you have a conference or volume you would like to make available through PhilSci-Archive, please send an email to the archive’s academic advisors at [email protected]. PhilSci-Archive is a free online repository for preprints in the philosophy of science offered jointly by the Center for Philosophy of Science and the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA Compiled on 13 November 2012 This work is freely available online at: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/view/confandvol/confandvol2012psa23rdbmsandcal.html All of the papers contained in this volume are preprints. Cite a preprint in this document as: Author Last, First (year). Title of article. Preprint volume for Philosophy of Science Assoc. 23rd Biennial Mtg, retrieved from PhilSci-Archive at http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/view/confandvol/confandvol2012psa23rdbmsandcal.html, Version of 13 November 2012, pages XX - XX. All documents available from PhilSci-Archive may be protected under U.S. and foreign copyright laws, and may not be reproduced without permission. Table of Contents Page Catherine Allamel-Raffin, From Intersubjectivity to Interinstrumen- tality: The example of Surface Science. ................ 1 Holly Andersen, When to expect violations of causal faithfulness and why it matters. ............................. 24 Jonathan Bain, Emergence in Effective Field Theories. ........ 45 Matthew J. Barker and Joel D. Velasco, Deep Conventionalism about Evolutionary Groups. ............................ 58 Pierrick Bourrat, Time and Fitness in Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality. ................................. 94 Katherine Brading, Presentism as an empirical hypothesis. ..... 111 Matthew J. Brown, Values in Science beyond Underdetermination and Inductive Risk. ............................. 125 Manjari Chakrabarty, Popper’s Contribution to the Philosophical Study of Artifacts. ............................. 139 Michael E. Cuffaro and Wayne C. Myrvold, On the Debate Concern- ing the Proper Characterisation of Quantum Dynamical Evolution.161 Adrian Currie, Narratives .......................... 180 Gerald Doppelt, Does Structural Realism Provide the Best Expla- nation of the Predictive Success of Science? ............. 199 Heather Douglas, The Value of Cognitive Values. ............ 218 Matthias Egg, Delayed-Choice Experiments and the Metaphysics of Entanglement. ................................ 228 Shech Elay, What is the “Paradox of Phase Transitions?”. ..... 239 Alkistis Elliott-Graves, Abstract and Complete. ............. 250 i Philosophy of Science Assoc. 23rd Biennial Mtg -ii- Markus Eronen, No Levels, No Problems: Downward Causation in Neuroscience. ................................. 266 Melinda B. Fagan, The stem cell uncertainty principle. ........ 287 Robert Fischer, TRUE Is False and Why It Matters. ......... 311 Justin Garson, Broken Mechanisms: Function, Pathology, and Nat- ural Selection. ................................ 322 Till Gr¨une-Yanoff, Appraising Non-Representational Models. .... 344 David Harker, Inference to the Best Explanation and the Impor- tance of Peculiarly Explanatory Virtues. ............... 357 Daniel Hartner, From Desire to Subjective Value: On the Neural Mechanisms of Moral Motivation. ................... 379 Geoffrey Hellman and Stewart Shapiro, The Classical Continuum without Points. ................................ 393 Wybo Houkes and Sjoerd D. Zwart, Transfer and templates in sci- entific modeling. ............................... 421 Cyrille Imbert, Relevance, not Invariance, Explanatoriness, not Manipulability: Discussion of Woodward on Explanatory Rel- evance. ..................................... 438 Benjamin Jantzen, Piecewise Versus Total Support: How to Deal with Background Information in Likelihood Arguments. ..... 457 Inkeri Koskinen, Critical Subjects: Participatory Research needs to Make Room for Debate. .......................... 484 Laszlo Kosolosky and Dagmar Provijn, William Harvey’s bloody mo- tion: Creativity in Science. ........................ 504 Jaakko Kuorikoski and Samuli P¨oyh¨onen, Understanding non-modular functionality – lessons from genetic algorithms. .......... 513 P.D. Magnus, What scientists know is not a function of what sci- entists know. ................................. 527 San Diego, CA -iii- Alexandre Marcellesi, Is race a cause? .................. 538 Joseph D Martin, Is the Contingentist/Inevitabilist Debate a Matter of Degrees? .................................. 548 Moti Mizrahi, Reconsidering the Argument from Underconsideration.567 Cecilia Nardini and Jan Sprenger, Bias and Conditioning in Sequen- tial medical trials. .............................. 577 John D. Norton, The End of the Thermodynamics of Computation: A No Go Result. ............................... 592 Thomas Pashby, Do Quantum Objects Have Temporal Parts? .... 607 Charles H. Pence, It’s Okay to Call Genetic Drift a “Force”. .... 625 Johannes Persson and Annika Wallin, Why internal validity is not prior to external validity. ......................... 637 Daniel Peterson, Physical Symmetries, Overarching Symmetries, and Consistency. .............................. 652 Angela Potochnik, Defusing Ideological Defenses in Biology. .... 670 Grant Ramsey, Human nature in a post-essentialist world. ..... 687 Forest Rohwer and Katie Barott, Viral Information. .......... 704 Kyle Sereda, Was Leibniz the First Spacetime Structuralist? .... 719 Benjamin Sheredos, Daniel Burnston, Adele Abrahamsen, and William Bechtel, Why do biologists use so many diagrams? ........ 737 Michael Silberstein and Tony Chemero, Constraints on Localization and Decomposition as Explanatory Strategies in the Biological Sciences. .................................... 748 Jan Sprenger, Testing a precise null hypothesis: the case of Lind- ley’s Paradox. ................................ 763 Michael Tamir, Geodesic Universality in General Relativity. .... 776 Philosophy of Science Assoc. 23rd Biennial Mtg -iv- M. Hayden Thornburg, New Work for a Theory of Emergence. 793 Adam Toon, Models, Sherlock Holmes and the Emperor Claudius. 808 Andrew Wayne, Causal relations and explanatory strategies in physics.825 Karen R. Zwier, An Epistemology of Causal Inference from Exper- iment. ..................................... 836 Mazviita Chirimuuta, Psychophysical Methods and the Evasion of Introspection. ................................. 855 Joan Roughgarden, Individual Based Models in Ecology: An Eval- uation, or How Not to Ruin a Good Thing. ............. 869 San Diego, CA -1- Catherine Allamel-Raffin University of Strasbourg (France) [email protected] From Intersubjectivity to Interinstrumentality. The Example of Surface Science. Abstract: My aim is to show how a strategy used in the experimental sciences, which I name “interinstrumentality”, can minimize the role of sociological factors when one tries to understand how the debates about the interpretation of data come to an end. To defend this view, two examples are presented. The first is historical – the invention of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) – and the second is collected during an ethnographic study in a surface science laboratory. I would like to emphasize that interinstrumentality contributes to objectivity of the experimental results and constitutes a part of it as well as intersubjectivity. Philosophy of Science Assoc. 23rd Biennial Mtg -2- 1. Introduction Among the methodological requirements to which all scientific work is submitted, one of the first is the objectivity of processes and results. But what is objectivity? And how should one use the notion in a meta-epistemological perspective? If one thinks along with Daston (1992) that the term is unclear, it is probably because it is an umbrella-term. Let us just say that “absolute objectivity” (Megill, 1994) is based on the belief that the reality could be described literally, weeding out most of the subjectivity’s effects. Such a definition constitutes more a problem than a solution. If the aim of our study is to take into account the day-to-day practices of laboratory, perhaps it would be better to agree with Putnam when he writes (2003, 142): “In scientific practice, the questions about objectivity do not concern metaphysics.” Thus, objectivity has to be conceived as a continuum. Putnam asserts: “If we consider our statements as based on a continuum (…), the statements which eminently depends on our interests, on our points of view and on our idiosyncratic characteristics, are the subjective extremity of the continuum, whereas the statements become more objective and could pretend to be more true as they less rely on idiosyncratic points of view or on personal interests” (2003, 141). Usually, objectivity is related to intersubjectivity. Even if contemporary philosophers of science admit that intersubjectivity is hard to define, this notion permits to emphasize on the collective dimension of the scientific activity. To constitute intersubjectivity, a communication between