Understanding Scientific Understanding

It is widely acknowledged that a central aim of science is to achieve understanding of the world around us, and that possessing such understanding is highly important in our present-day society. But what does it mean to achieve this understanding? What precisely is scientific understanding? These are philosophical questions that have not yet received satisfactory answers. While there has been an ongoing debate about the nature of scientific explanation since Carl Hempel advanced his covering-law model in 1948, the related notion of understanding has been largely neglected, because most philosophers regarded understanding as merely a subjective by-product of objective explanations. By contrast, this book puts scientific understanding center stage. It is primarily a philosophical study, but also contains detailed historical case studies of scientific practice. In contrast to most existing studies in this area, it takes into account scientists' views and analyzes their role in scientific debate and development. The aim of Understanding Scientific Understanding is to develop and defend a philosophical theory of scientific understanding that can describe and explain the historical variation of criteria for understanding actually employed by scientists. The theory does justice to the insights of such famous physicists as Werner Heisenberg and Richard Feynman, while bringing much-needed conceptual rigor to their intuitions. The scope of the proposed account of understanding is the natural sciences: while the detailed case studies derive from physics, examples from other sciences are presented to illustrate its wider validity.

PrefaceAcknowledgementChapter 1. Introduction: The desire to understandChapter 2. Understanding and the aims of science2.1. The neglect of understanding2.2. Understanding as an epistemic skill2.3. Intelligibility, values, and objectivity2.4. Understanding: a means and an endChapter 3. Explanatory understanding: A plurality of models3.1. From covering law explanation to unificatory understanding3.2. Causal conceptions of explanatory understanding3.3. Is causal and unificatory understanding complementary?3.4. Unifying the plurality of modes of explanationChapter 4. A contextual theory of scientific understanding4.1. Understanding phenomena with intelligible theories4.2. Criteria for intelligibility4.3. Conceptual tools for understanding4.4. The context-dependence of understanding4.4.1. Contextuality and historical dynamics4.4.2. Contextuality and the intuitions of philosophers4.4.3. Contextuality and pragmatics4.5. Reduction, realism and understanding4.5.1. Understanding and realism4.5.2. Understanding and reduction4.6. Contextualism: risky relativism?Chapter 5. Metaphysics and intelligibility: Understanding gravitation5.1. The (un)intelligibility of Newton's theory of universal gravitation5.2. The seventeenth-century debate on gravitation5.2.1. Isaac Newton: reluctant revolutionary5.2.2. Christiaan Huygens: the conscience of corpuscularism5.3. Actio in distans and intelligibility after Newton5.4. Metaphysics as a resource for scientific understandingChapter 6. Models and mechanisms: Physical understanding in the nineteenth century6.1. Mechanical modeling in nineteenth-century physics6.1.1. William Thomson: master modeler6.1.2. James Clerk Maxwell: advocate of analogies6.1.3. Ludwig Boltzmann: promoter of pictures6.2. Molecular models for understanding gas phenomena6.3. Boltzmann' Bildtheorie: a pragmatic view of understanding6.4. The uses and limitations of mechanical modelsChapter 7. Visualizability and intelligibility: Insight into the quantum world7.1. Visualizability and intelligibility in classical physics7.2. Quantum theory and the waning of Anschaulichkeit7.3. The new quantum mechanics: a struggle for intelligibility7.4. Electron spin: the power of visualization7.5. Visualization in post-war quantum physics7.6. Visualization as a tool for understandingChapter 8. Conclusion: the many faces of understandingBibliographyIndex