Samuel Schindler- academic interests

 


Intuitions can be deceptive. It is not intuitive that we share a common ancestor with fruit flies. It is not intuitive that the apparently stable ground below our feet moves with a velocity of 1666 km/h. Interestingly enough, not only facts discovered by but also facts about science can be rather counterintuitive. And often it is history which helps us to unearth such facts. This is why my research seeks to combine philosophical with historical methods. My research topics include
 
Prediction. We have very strong intuitions that a theory that predicts phenomena which we then go to discover, should receive a major boost in our acceptance of the theory. Yet, as it turns out, this intuition is not warranted by the historical record of science. As S. Brush (inspired by pioneering work by J. Worrall) has shown in a number of case studies, the successful explanation of already known phenomena by a particular theory was valued much higher in the scientific community than the prediction of novel facts by that theory (e.g. Einstein’s explanation of Mercury’s perihelion vs. the prediction of light bending). This can be explained thus: 1. really novel phenomena are often hard to control with the devices, which had to be invented for the discovery of those phenomena and which themselves are subject to a number of uncertainties; 2. novel phenomena might be explained equally well (or even better) by other (yet unknown) theories than the one that predicted them. On the other hand, phenomena that resisted explanation for some time before eventually being accommodated by a new theory will count very much in favour of it.
    Those, who have taken these findings seriously (by no means the majority of philosophers!), have tried to save at least some form of the concept of novel predictions. In particular, Zahar and Worrall have tried to defend the notion of so-called use-novel predictions, according to which all those facts count as novel which are not only (i) derivable from a theory T, but which also (ii) were not used in the construction of T. The latest attempt to lend support to such a notion (Scerri and Worrall 2001) I criticised in a recent publication (Schindler 2008). Not only are there well-known conceptual difficulties with such an account (how can we ever know for sure that certain facts were or were not used in the construction of a theory by certain scientists and, perhaps more severely, why should such information be relevant for the assessment of theories in the scientific community to which such information is likely to be inaccessible), but I also think that the heuristic account is hard to justify historically.
 
Explanation. Intuitively, scientific explanations that are not true cannot be scientific explanations proper. However, particularly in the context of scientific models, it has been appreciated for some time now that scientists deliberately simplify and distort real systems, for instance, in order to be able to apply higher level theory to the world and to facilitate mathematical treatment. Yet, not many philosophers would agree that false postulates about a real system can serve as the basis for explanations that are on a par with explanations that rely on postulates that are true. Especially causal-mechanistic accounts of explanation explicitly make the contrary assumption. I believe that this assumption is entirely dispensible.
 
Scientific discoveries and data reliability judgments. Intuitively, we discover the furniture of the world by conducting experiments and by making observations. How else could we learn about the world other than empirically? But how do we know that the results produced by our experiments are trustworthy? For instance by repeating experiments, by comparing the results gained with one experimental technique or instrument with another, by calibrating our instruments (instrument A produces the same results in a certain spectrum of the phenomenon as instrument B, which already has proved its reliability), and so on. All this is very intuitive. And yet again, a closer reading of history may raise doubts about the above strategies. As N. Rasmussen has shown, in the 1950s and 60s robustness arguments pointed to the existence of so-called “mesosomes“, but they later were nevertheless deemed to be artefacts of the preparation techniques. Thus the most prominent criterion for probing the reality of experimental results is not infallible. This would only prove problematic if there were no other strategies for probing experimental results. But of course, A. Franklin has proposed a whole list of such criteria that scientists allegedly use in their day-to-day-practices. Yet, as I shall argue in a forthcoming paper, Franklin’s list of “epistemological strategies” is too weak for securing the reliability of experimental results.