The Nature of Scientific Thinking

On Interpretation, Explanation and Understanding

J. Faye

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137389831
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

Scientific thinking must be understood as an activity. The acts of interpretation, representation, and explanation are the cognitive processes by which scientific thinking leads to understanding. The book explores the nature of these processes and describes how scientific thinking can only be grasped from a pragmatic perspective.

1

Forms of Understanding

In every area of human discourse we meet with explanations. We find them in the church, at the marketplace, in hospitals, in locker-rooms, in news media, in public administration, in the parliament, in private companies, in laboratories, and at the universities. Successful explanations are attractive because they provide us with an understanding of what they are supposed to explain. Yet, the world appears quite differently seen from the church, or the man on the street, or a research laboratory. Because of these different contexts people addressing the same kinds of phenomena may propose different kinds of explanations. Thus the complex and multifarious notion of explanation becomes a source of heated debates and controversies.

Even when we restrict the conversation to scientific explanation, these debates have not produced, as Newton-Smith notes, “some deeper theory of explanation that explained what it was about each of these apparently diverse forms of explanation that makes them explanatory.”¹ Today, although the consensus that explanations are explanatory because they yield understanding is growing, views about understanding remain very divergent.² Does all ‘scientific understanding’ have some distinct characteristic (or essence?) that distinguishes it from other forms of understanding? Is scientific understanding context independent in a way understanding in general is not? If scientific understanding is context independent, then every example of scientific explanation shares some common feature characterizing every scientific explanation in general independently of its aim, topic, or use. Furthermore, if understanding is often associated with knowledge, comprehension, intelligibility, and meaningfulness, do any of these associations help us to see what understanding, and in particular scientific understanding, involves? These are the questions this chapter addresses.

1 A subjective feature of explanation

Until recently it was quite common to argue that the notion of understanding is subjective and therefore could not help us in grasping the nature of explanation. Carl Hempel, for instance, assumed “such expressions as “realm of understanding” and “comprehensible” do not belong to the vocabulary of logic, for they refer to psychological or pragmatic aspects of explanation.”³ Despite his reluctance to deal with the pragmatic aspects of explanation, as we will return to in a later chapter, Hempel implicitly felt, so it seems, that the pursuit of science to produce explanations needed to be explained. Obviously in science as in everyday life, we pursue explanation because it provides us with understanding, but logic alone cannot give us an understanding of this phenomenon. Logic gives us a way to understand why the explanandum is expected when we are aware of the empirically determined initial conditions, i.e., it was logically necessary, given these empirical conditions, and naturalism presumes humans are hard wired to “expect” psychologically what is logically necessary. But Hempel’s own opinion concerning understanding is that “understanding” simply refers to a psychological state, so the only explication of ‘understanding’ is a psychological one. Understanding in this psychological sense is caused by our expectation. He claimed: “the argument shows that, given the particular circumstances and the laws in question, the occurrence of the phenomenon was to be expected; and it is in this sense that the explanation enables us to understand why the phenomenon occurred.”⁴ Indeed, such an expectation need not be subjective; it is objective or rational in the sense that being equipped with the relevant information about the particular circumstances and laws in question, including knowledge of deduction, most people, at least to the extent that they are rational, would not be surprised to know that the explained phenomenon did occur.

The fact that understanding comes with explanation is not a contingent feature of explanation but is the purpose of making explanations. Achieving understanding is the aim of explanation as of interpretation. Scientific explanation not only delivers one kind of understanding but also presupposes another kind. This presupposed understanding exists as background assumptions, beliefs, skills, and tacit knowledge. Moreover, since understanding involves persons, understanding is contextual. Its content may vary from one person to another. However, since we want understanding to have an epistemic role, and not to reduce it to a mere psychological state, we need to understand the cognitive use we make of understanding. Thus the proper notion of understanding is pragmatic in the sense that it depends on the function it serves for human agents.

Although Hempel agreed that there are pragmatic elements in the way explanation functions in scientific practice, he held the pragmatics of an explanation had nothing to do with its quality as explanatory. Thus his covering-law model is abstracted from any pragmatic context. An explanation – nothing more than a logical argument – provides understanding of the phenomenon to be explained by showing that it was to be rationally expected. Any other characteristic of understanding is subjective and can play no epistemic role.

Like Hempel, J. D. Trout argues that we cannot separate understanding from the sense of understanding. As he claims: “The psychological sense of understanding is just a kind of confidence, abetted by hindsight, of intellectual satisfaction that a question has been adequately answered.”⁵ The sense of understanding cannot count as an epistemic virtue, because “confidence is, notoriously, not an indicator of truth.”⁶ Rather he believes that the best accounts of explanation are objectivist by eliminating those properties that are dependent of the psychology of the explainer. Concerning our sense of understanding Trout emphasizes that “the sense of understanding is not produced by a reliable relation between belief and truth.”⁷ We can have both true and false beliefs and both may give us a sense of understanding but it is only true beliefs that can give us genuine explanation.⁸

Against Trout, Henk de Regt has objected that since scientists like Galileo, Newton, and Bohr supported false theories, “[t]he relevant question is not whether these scientists were wrong but whether they were irrational.”⁹ This reflects the prevailing view that the epistemic question is not whether scientists possess false beliefs but whether they have acquired them in a rational or a non-rational way. I agree with this and with de Regt’s remark that false theories can have explanatory force: “Today we can still explain phenomena with these false theories and rightfully experience a sense of understanding.”¹⁰ But I disagree with the weight de Regt throws on ‘rational.’ Did Kepler arrive at his laws “in a rational way”? If you believed in his cosmology, presumably it seemed ‘rational,’ but to us it hardly seems so. Unlike ‘truth,’ which most regard as non-relative, what is ‘rational’ depends very much on one’s world view; an actor might regard a certain action as perfectly rational, while to a spectator with a different world view it seems devoid of reason.

Thus, Trout fails to recognize that although the sense of understanding is a psychological concomitant of epistemic understanding, this feeling of understanding is not the same as having genuine epistemic understanding. Sometimes one may enjoy having understanding without having a sense of understanding, as seems to be the case with our understanding of our practical skills. Also Trout fails to realize that an appeal to so-called objective factors is no guarantee of truth and that scientific education and training has formed the psychology of the individual explainer. Even if a scientist shares the same norms of understanding as other scientists of his community, he (and the community) may still have an understanding based on false beliefs about the facts. Of course, one can truly feel that one understands, although in fact one does not really understand, because that feeling of understanding may be engendered by false beliefs. Thus the Creationists certainly feel that they understand the living world and its diversity, but in fact they are wrong and this confidence that they understand is of course unjustified. As we shall see, whatever the ‘objective’ norms of understanding are, they are valid only with respect to a certain historical context of science or a particular context of problems.

There is no shared opinion among those who hold that explanation delivers ‘objective’ understanding. Some philosophers like Michael Friedman and Philip Kitcher think of understanding in terms of theoretical unification. Wesley Salmon holds that our understanding of the world consists of knowing the underlying causal mechanisms. However, James Cushing opts for visualizability as the marker of understanding, and others like Newton and Einstein have pointed to locality and determinism. Henk de Regt and Dennis Dieks have truly pointed out that these proposed ‘objective’ standards of intelligibility all fail to hold in every historical situation.¹¹ But they also fail because their proponents’ use them to tell us what gives us objective understanding, but not why they give us that understanding. Answering this question requires that we know what understanding is. In the following three sections I shall analyse and criticize each of these proposals for being universal criteria of understanding.

2 The unification view

Michael Friedman’s and Philip Kitcher’s unification models of explanation have been developed in close response to the objections to Hempel’s ‘covering law’ model. Friedman’s notion of scientific understanding is ‘global’ by advocating that science encapsulates more and more phenomena into a single explanatory scheme, but Kitcher’s notion is ‘local’ by allowing a plurality of explanatory schemes.

Friedman claims scientific explanation provides understanding by the unification of general phenomena:

On the view of explanation that I am proposing, the kind of understanding provided by science is global rather than local. Scientific explanations do not confer intelligibility on individual phenomena by showing them to be somehow natural, necessary, familiar, or inevitable. However, our over-all understanding of the world is increased; our total picture of nature is simplified via a reduction in the number of independent phenomena that we have to accept as ultimate.¹²

Our scientific understanding of the world increases to the degree in which the total number of independently acceptable assumptions needed to explain the phenomena decreases.¹³ A ‘phenomenon’ here is not an individual, but the consequence of a general regularity that can be expressed by law-like statements.¹⁴ In fact, Friedman denies that explanation of one singular fact by reference to another fact is important in science. What is important is that empirical laws such as Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and Galileo’s law of the free fall can be derived from Newton’s fundamental law of gravitation and certain additions. In order for Friedman’s proposal to work, he needs a method for counting the acceptable assumptions in any given explanation. The rough intuition here is that each acceptable law-like sentence is an individually acceptable assumption, if there are sufficient grounds for accepting it, grounds which are not sufficient for accepting the others. Friedman’s contention that the scientific enterprise seems to be the continuous effort to integrate such general phenomena into an overall explanatory schema is not so far from the covering laws view in the sense that Hempel and Oppenheim already argued that higher-level laws with a broader scope had the power of explaining lower-level laws with a narrower scope. The power comes from the deductive inference of the lower-level laws from the higher-level laws.¹⁵ So, Friedman maintains, it is not expectation which gives us understanding, but the fact that a high-level law unites different low-level laws formerly considered mutually independent.

Friedman objects to the covering-law model on the grounds that contrary to Hempel’s assumption scientific explanations rarely deal with singular events. Far more often science is concerned with explaining general regularities or patterns of events. (Astronomy and geology may be exceptions.) Hempel realized the covering-law model cannot easily cope with general regularities because the explanandum must be restricted to singular sentences. The covering-law cannot block the possibility that regularities, like Kepler’s laws, are derivable not only from Newton’s laws but also from a conjunction of Kepler’s laws and, say, Boyle’s law.

Friedman proposes that scientific understanding consists in having as few unexplained phenomenon or regularities as possible, and that explanation “increases our understanding of the world by reducing the total number of independent phenomena that we have to accept as ultimate or given.”¹⁶ Understanding cannot come with rational expectation since expectation is always at a particular time, but general regularities do not occur at any definite time. Scientists do not experience any expectation when these laws are unified under the Newton’s laws of motion. Rather they get their understanding from the fact that Kepler’s laws together with Galileo’s law, Hook’s law, and Huygens’ law can all be united under one set of general laws of motion as specified in Newtonian mechanics.¹⁷

Thus, the goal of unification is cognitive economy. A successful explanation results in a decrease in the number of primitive or non-derivative postulates. But explaining so-called lower laws by higher laws confronts the inevitable logical point that the highest laws will have to go unexplained and simply taken as given, a brute contingency that flies in the face of ‘scientific’ explanation. Moreover, the unificationist criteria of understanding fail to do justice to singular explanations because in every single case we need at least one premise stating the initial conditions in order to be able to derive the fact to be explained.

Unfortunately, Friedman is rather vague on precisely what it is about unification which furnishes us with scientific understanding. It cannot be because unification embeds the general phenomenon in a causal pattern. The kind of understanding it provides has something to do with theoretical integration. Mill and Ramsay provide a hint: in characterizing laws of nature as statements, they point to a system of sentences expressing the fewest and most simple assumptions from which any regularity in the world might deductively be derived. David Lewis improves the unification view by maintaining that the system of laws must achieve the best balance between simplicity and strength.¹⁸ These features can oppose one another; a theory may be strong in having a high amount of information content, at the expense of simplicity or vice versa. ¹⁹ The balance between strength and simplicity must be ‘fair,’ but what one considers ‘fair’ seems to depend on pragmatic considerations.

Obviously, Ramsay and Lewis regarded laws of nature as sentences and not as natural relations among phenomena. I agree that some laws are nothing but sentences about the explicit use of a language, namely those called principles or theoretical laws, but I disagree in holding that other laws are generalizations about causes among phenomena. So perhaps we can exploit their ideas to say something about theoretical unification.

But first I want to examine van Fraassen’s disagreement with Lewis’ analysis of laws.²⁰ He thinks that Lewis’ account has problems with the identification of laws. He correctly points out that the notions of strength and simplicity are not straightforward and their degree is often reciprocally related. They also fail with respect to the historical development and the actual pursuit of science. Moreover, strength and simplicity are not translation invariant from one theoretical framework to the next. He concludes that Lewis’ account of laws does not guarantee laws have explanatory powers. The only way to escape this objection would be to argue that laws have to be formulated in a correct language referring to natural classes. But van Fraassen rejects such anti-nominalism because actual science seems to move away from real distinctions in nature. We can easily imagine a new theory which is more informative than its alternatives but whose theoretical terms are not definable in terms of the old theory and therefore do not stand for natural classes.

Of course, the persuasiveness of van Fraassen’s objection depends on one’s understanding of information and explanatory power. Although I believe that van Fraassen is right in opposing essentialism, I am not convinced by his arg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Forms of Understanding
• 2  Understanding as Organized Beliefs
• 3  On Interpretation
• 4  Representations
• 5  Scientific Explanation
• 6  Causal Explanations
• 7  Other Types of Explanations
• 8  The Pragmatics of Explanation
• 9  Not Just Why-questions
• 10  A Rhetorical Approach to Explanation
• 11  Pluralism and the Unity of Science
• Notes
• Literature
• Index