Prediction and Explanation in Historical Natural Science (original) (raw)

Historical Explanation and Causality

Isis, 2019

Historical explanation is an ambiguous concept. Historical narratives usually aim for a mixture of causal and interpretative understanding. In this essay the author uses an article, written with Azadeh Achbari, that seeks to answer the question of how a Dutch meteorological rule of thumb was eventually turned into a law of nature. Part of the answer is found in the sudden British need for a scientific basis for the controversial practice of storm warnings. Clearly, this causal explanation hinges on the contemporary meaning of the concept "law of nature." Finally, the author discusses and rejects the recent tendency among historians to dismiss all causal analysis as fruitless.

Explaining Science Historically

Isis, 2019

The author brings out the many faces of explanation in history of science by commenting on the contributions to a Focus section of Isis on historical explanation. The essay starts by indicating several ways in which the term “explanation” is used in historiographical discourse. It then distinguishes the object of explanation from the process of explanation and points out common themes and points of contention among the thirteen contributions. It also discusses two of those points in more detail: the problems of causal explanation in history of science and the imperative of avoiding anachronism in historical interpretation. The essay concludes by suggesting a pluralist take on explaining science historically.

COIStories: Explanation and Evidence in the History of Science

Perspectives on Science, 2002

This paper takes as its point of departure two striking incongruities between scientiªc practice and trends in modern history and philosophy of science. (1) Many modern historians of science are so preoccupied with local scientiªc practices that they fail to recognize important non-local elements. (2) Many modern philosophers of science make a sharp distinction between explanation and evidence, whereas in scientiªc practice explanatory power is routinely used as evidence for scientiªc claims. I draw attention to one speciªc way in

Narratives, mechanisms and progress in historical science

Synthese, 2014

Geologists, Paleontologists and other historical scientists are frequently concerned with narrative explanations targeting single cases. I show that two distinct explanatory strategies are employed in narratives, simple and complex. A simple narrative has minimal causal detail and is embedded in a regularity, whereas a complex narrative is more detailed and not embedded. The distinction is illustrated through two case studies: the ‘snowball earth’ explanation of Neoproterozoic glaciation and recent attempts to explain gigantism in Sauropods. This distinction is revelatory of historical science. I argue that at least sometimes which strategy is appropriate is not a pragmatic issue, but turns on the nature of the target. Moreover, the distinction reveals a counterintuitive pattern of progress in some historical explanation: shifting from simple to complex. Sometimes, historical scientists rightly abandon simple, unified explanations in favour of disunified, complex narratives. Finally I compare narrative and mechanistic explanation, arguing that mechanistic approaches are inappropriate for complex narrative explanations.

Common cause explanation and the search for a smoking gun

The hypotheses of historical natural science are typically concerned with long past, singular events and processes, e.g., what caused the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Evidence for such occurrences is acquired through fi eld studies in the messy, uncontrollable world of nature. Because hypotheses about the remote past cannot be directly tested in the classical manner of experimental science, historical science is sometimes judged inferior. Following earlier work (Cleland, 2011, 2002, 2001), this essay explains the motivation for such arguments and why they are fundamentally mistaken. Traditional versions of the scientifi c method (inductivism and falsifi cationism) are based upon a deeply fl awed, one-size-fi ts-all, logical analysis of the evaluative relation between hypothesis and observation. The distinctive methodologies of historical and experimental science, however , refl ect pervasive causal differences in their evidential situations. The evidential reasoning of historical scientists is founded upon the principle of the common cause, which asserts that seemingly improbable associations among present-day traces of the past are best explained in terms of a common cause. The truth of the principle of the common cause rests upon a physically pervasive, time asymmetry of causation: In a nutshell, the present contains records of the past but not of the future. Viewed in this light historical scientists actually have an evidential advantage over classical experimentalists.

On the Historicity of Scientific Objects

The historical variation of scientific knowledge has lent itself to the development of historical epistemology, which attempts to historicize the origin and establishment of knowledge claims. The questions I address in this paper revolve around the historicity of the objects of those claims: How and why do new scientific objects appear? What exactly comes into being in such cases? Do scientific objects evolve over time and in what ways? I put forward and defend two theses: First, the ontology of science is so rich and variegated that there are no universally valid answers to these questions. Second, we need a pluralist account of scientific objects, a pluralist metaphysics that can do justice to their rich diversity and their various modes of being and becoming. I then focus on hidden objects, which are supposed to be part of the permanent furniture of the universe, and I discuss their birth and historicity: They emerge when various phenomena coalesce as manifestations of a single hidden cause and their representations change over time. Finally, I examine the conditions under which an evolving representation may still refer to the same object and I illustrate my argument drawing upon the early history of electrons.

The Rationality of Science in Relation to its History

Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50 Years On, 2015

Many philosophers have thought that Kuhn’s claim that there have been paradigm shifts introduced a problem for the rationality of science, because it appears that in such a change nothing can count as a neutral arbiter; even what you observe depends on which theory you already subscribe to. The history of science challenges its rationality in a different way in the pessimistic induction, where failures of our predecessors to come up with true theories about unobservable entities is taken by many to threaten the rationality of confidence in our own theories. The first problem arises from a perception of too much discontinuity, the second from an unfortunate kind of continuity, in the track record of science. I argue that both problems are only apparent, and due to under-description of the history. The continuing appeal of the pessimistic induction in particular is encouraged by narrow focus on a notion of method that Kuhn was eager to resist.

Historicism and Science Studies

One way to understand the diverse discourse known as science studies is to consider the ways in which different camps and theorists think (or do not think) the question of history, and to consider how historical theories and methods connect with epistemologies and the possibilities for critical discourse regarding science. Can the question of historical method or theory serve as a useful guide to the discourse, perhaps even a better index for considering the issue of critical engagement, than epistemological conviction (or lack thereof)? I will explore the issue by considering the historical methods and theories of history of several interlocutors located within the discourse of science studies, in order to illustrate the possibilities for this approach. As the discussion should make clear, the historical approach is productive of comparative reading of interlocutors in terms of the possibilities for a critical discursive relationship to their objects of knowledge, as well as for demonstrating the relationship between historical method and theory, and epistemology.