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Modelling of irrigation water withdrawals aims for accurate and relatively objective estimates, but three epistemological obstacles (the models’ elusive tie to reality, the issue of model plurality, and the indeterminacy of the target system) make this premise unattainable. However, if used to explore possibilities within the known and unknown, irrigation models can overcome these problems to inform action.

Kant’s philosophy of natural science has traditionally concentrated on a host of issues about the role of laws of nature and teleological judgments, among several others. However, so far, the literature has made virtually no contact with the no less important tradition in Kant’s legal and political philosophy. This paper explores one aspect of such connection in relation to the normative foundations of Kant’s notion of cosmopolitan right. I argue that Kant’s argument for cosmopolitan right is based on two main premises: the first is what I call the law of equilibrium, and the second is the premise of physical interaction (commercium in Latin) at work behind what Kant called the original “community of land”. The paper argues that the relevant notion of community qua commercium should be understood in the context of Kant’s metaphysics of nature as a “real community of substances” governed by a dynamical law of equality of action and reaction. This metaphysical-causal interpretive reading has far-reaching implications for the foundations of cosmopolitan right and its scope of applicability well beyond Kant’s envisaged right to universal hospitality.

Kant’s engagement with Newton’s notion of ‘absolute space’ is fascinating, complex, and spans over both the pre-Critical and the Critical period. The received view has it that in the pre-Critical period Kant shifted from an originally Leibnizian view of space (still visible in Physical Monadology [MonPh, 1756], and New Doctrine of Motion and Rest [NLBR, 1758]) to a proper Newtonian view of absolute space via the incongruent counterparts argument in Directions in Space (GUGR, 1768), for then abandoning absolute space in the Inaugural Dissertation (MSI, 1770). Indeed, the same argument from incongruent counterparts was later employed in the Prolegomena (1783) as an argument for space as “the form of outer intuition of … sensibility” (Prol, 4:286).

This topical collection in the European Journal for Philosophy of Science explores a variety of metaphysical and epistemological issues arising from perspectivism in science, in order to offer a better understanding of perspectivism and its relevance to science. Guest editor: Prof. Michela Massimi, FRSE (University of Edinburgh). &nbsp

This topical collection in the European Journal for Philosophy of Science explores a variety of metaphysical and epistemological issues arising from perspectivism in science, in order to offer a better understanding of perspectivism and its relevance to science. Guest editor: Prof. Michela Massimi, FRSE (University of Edinburgh). &nbsp

This topical collection in the European Journal for Philosophy of Science explores a variety of metaphysical and epistemological issues arising from perspectivism in science, in order to offer a better understanding of perspectivism and its relevance to science. Guest editor: Prof. Michela Massimi, FRSE (University of Edinburgh). &nbsp

What did Kant have to sayabout the lawfulness of nature and the necessity that seemingly goes with our nomic judgments? Like Hume before him, the Critical Kant toosaw the necessity of our nomic judgments as originatingsomehowin our mind, or betterinthe faculty of understanding. Yetagulf separates Kant from Hume. ForKant’smature view about the lawfulness of nature and the abil-ity of our facultyofunderstanding to prescribe laws to nature bringsthe discus-sion about the necessityofour nomic judgments onto an entirelynew realm, un-known to his predecessorsand hardlyacknowledgedbycontemporary philosophers of science, whose debates on nomic necessity have been polarized between Humeans and Necessitarians.In this essay, Iclarify the nature of the prescribingforcethatthe Critical Kant assigned to the faculty of understandinginexplaining nature’slawfulness and the modal necessity thataccompanies such move. Most importantly,Iclarify what Kant did not subscribe to. Forthere is awidespread and temptingview that for long time has interpreted Kant’sview on the lawfulness of nature along projectivist lines. Iexplain whyinmyviewKant’sbold claim about the un-derstandingprescribinglawstonature should not be understood along the lines of aform of projectivism about laws.

On David Lewis’s influential view, modal facts supervene on the mosaic of non-modal facts about sparse natural properties. I defend a Lewisian account of laws that abandons this supervenience claim in order to avoid the objections of subjectivity and lack of necessity that bedeviled Lewis’s original view. On my view, it is not the Humean mosaic of sparse natural properties that ultimately grounds laws of nature. Instead, it is the (always renegotiable) balance between our ever changing and perspectival standards of simplicity and strength that grounds laws of nature. My view reveals some unexpected resources available to a Humean account of lawhood, at the price of dispensing with Humean supervenience.

This chapter assesses Newton’s legacy for Kant by concentrating on the evolution of Kant’s view of space in the pre-Critical period (1748–1768), with two main goals in mind. The first goal is to draw attention to the role that Newton’s matter theory and chemistry played for the young Kant. The second is to argue against the received view that has portrayed the young Kant as embracing Newton’s absolute space in 1768 via the argument from incongruent counterparts (short-lived as this conversion to Newton’s absolute space proved to be). By contrast to the received view, this chapter shows that in the period 1748–1768, Kant was working with a thoroughgoing relationalism, consonant with Kant’s matter theory, which was, in turn, inspired by speculative Newtonian experimentalism itself. Hence, the case is made for a slightly different interpretive stance on Newton’s legacy for the young Kant.

The paper proposes a combined account of identity for physical states and direct empirical significance for symmetries according to which symmetry-related state variables designate distinct physical states if and only if the symmetry that relates them has direct empirical significance. Strengthening an earlier result, I show that, given this combined account, the local gauge symmetries in our leading contemporary theories of particle physics do not have any direct empirical significance.

In this essay, I suggest bringing real realism closer home, namely back to its Kantian roots. The very same roots that make real realism a ‘homely’ kind of realism, against any Grand Metaphysical Conclusions about the world, its causal necessities, and natural kinds. I suggest reinterpreting a key aspect of real realism—i.e., the notion of success at stake in ‘working posits’—along more ‘homely’ lines, lines that acknowledge historical continuity, conceptual nuances and our role as epistemic agents in assessing success and inferring truth. The result is a form of perspectival realism—to adopt Ron Giere’s terminology— which is, however, already at a distance from what Giere himself intends by this term. Hence, my very own (loosely Kantian-inspired) perspectivalist slant to real realism.

In this opinion piece, the authors offer their personal and idiosyncratic views of the future of the philosophy of science, focusing on its relationship with the history of science and metaphysics, respectively. With regard to the former, they suggest that the Kantian tradition might be drawn upon both to render the history and philosophy of science more relevant to philosophy as a whole and to overcome the challenges posed by naturalism. When it comes to the latter, they suggest both that metaphysics has much to learn from the philosophy of science and that it offers an array of tools that philosophers of science can themselves appropriate.

Central to Kuhn’s notion of incommensurability are the ideas of meaning variance and lexicon, and the impossibility of translation of terms across different theories. Such a notion of incommensurability is based on a particular understanding of what a scientific language is. In this paper we first attempt to understand this notion of scientific language in the context of incommensurability. We consider the consequences of the essential multisemiotic character of scientific theories and show how this leads to even a single theory being potentially ‘internally incommensurable’. We then discuss Kuhn’s lexicon‐based approach to incommensurability and the problems associated with it. Finally we argue that this approach by Kuhn has interesting overlaps with the problem of meaning associated with multisemiosis, particularly the challenge of understanding the process of symbolization in scientific theories.

What makes scientific knowledge possible? The philosopher Immanuel Kant in his magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason, had a fascinating and puzzling answer to this question. Scientific knowledge, for Kant, is made possible by the faculty of reason and its demand for systematic unity (or, ‘systematicity’). In other words, cognition about empirical objects can aspire to be scientific only if it is rationally embedded within or transformed into a system. But how can such system form once we take into account the perspectival nature of knowledge, i.e., its being situated in individual human cognitive faculties? My PhD thesis has a two-pronged objective: (i.) to reconstruct the complexity of the notion of systematicity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; and (ii.) to defend its plausibility in contemporary debates on the unity or plurality of scientific knowledge. As far as (i.) is concerned, Kant’s position is far from being clearly understood in the literature. Despite a renewed interest in Kant’s notion of systematicity in recent decades, existing contributions fail to offer a satisfactory account of it. The aim of my thesis is to provide a unified reading of reason’s systematicity as an essential feature of Kant’s analysis of the sources of cognition. In particular, I defend a novel account of theoretical reason the aims to support the following claims: (a.) systematicity is grounded in a legitimate use of reason’s ideas as prescriptive rules for empirical investigation; (b.) it is necessary to make empirical cognition possible and generate scientific hypotheses; and (c.) it gives us fundamental insights into Kant’s ‘empirical realism’ and his understanding of the role of metaphysics in science. With regard to (ii.), I show that Kant’s account of theoretical reason has much more to offer than generally acknowledged. In particular, I present it as providing a reconciling solution to the conflict between unity and pluralism in contemporary philosophy of science. Drawing inspiration from Kant’s ‘perspectivism,’ I argue that unity and pluralism are to be thought as mutually inclusive principles of scientific knowledge.

This thesis tackles the problem of realism in science by examining the analyses and insights that pluralism and perspectivism might o0fer. Scientific perspectivism was introduced by Giere (2006) as a way to use insights from the semantic analysis of theories to strike a middle ground between realism and anti-realism about science, which I discuss in chapter 1. The project here attempts a similar balance in the context of disagreement in specific scientific-historical contexts. It does so by suggesting we think of some forms of disagreement as taxonomic, or identity, disagreements. Scientists use perspectival taxonomies and when problems with a given taxonomy arise, rival “perspectives” emerge (hence perspectivism is a form of pluralism). Such problems can be resolved by appeal to trans-perspectival standards of assessment. This approach has the advantage of being sensitive to the historical context in which past theories were used, a virtue that anti-realist views typically have. At the same time, perspectivism does not fall into an anti-realist attitude toward science because it is compatible with stronger realist commitments to the interpretation of scientific theories. To make this argument, I first discuss how data and data-to-phenomena inferences depend upon perspectival taxonomy (in chapter 2) and hence cannot always be used unambiguously to resolve disagreements. I next articulate the perspectival view, defend it, and situate it within the literature on scientific pluralism in chapter 3. Chapter 4 provides a perspectival interpretation of a paradigmatic case of historical disagreement: the Chemical Revolution and the debate between Lavoisier and Priestley on oxygen and phlogiston. In chapter 5 I distinguish and defend my own view against two influential alternatives (relativism and pragmatism) that also aspire to provide insightful analyses of disagreement in science.

This open access book – as the title suggests – explores some of the historical roots and epistemological ramifications of perspectivism. Perspectivism has recently emerged in philosophy of science as an interesting new position in the debate between scientific realism and anti-realism. But there is a lot more to perspectivism than discussions in philosophy of science so far have suggested. Perspectivism is a much broader view that emphasizes how our knowledge (in particular our scientific knowledge of nature) is situated; it is always from a human vantage point (as opposed to some Nagelian "view from nowhere"). This edited collection brings together a diverse team of established and early career scholars across a variety of fields (from the history of philosophy to epistemology and philosophy of science). The resulting nine essays trace some of the seminal ideas of perspectivism back to Kant, Nietzsche, the American Pragmatists, and Putnam, while the second part of the book tackles issues concerning the relation between perspectivism, relativism, and standpoint theories, and the implications of perspectivism for epistemological debates about veritism, epistemic normativity and the foundations of human knowledge.

Knowledge and error have a quantitative dimension – we can know more and less, and we can be wrong to a greater or lesser extent. This fact underpins prominent approaches to epistemic normativity, which we can loosely call truth-consequentialist. These approaches face a significant challenge, however, stemming from the observation that some truths seem more epistemically valuable than others. In this paper I trace out this perspectivalist challenge, showing that although it arises from a mistaken picture of the quantitative dimension of knowledge and error, when we reconceive how that quantitative dimension should be understood we find the perspectivalist challenge has survived unscathed.

Defences of perspectival realism are motivated, in part, by an attempt to find a middle ground between the realist intuition that science seems to tell us a true story about the world, and the Kuhnian intuition that scientific knowledge is historically and culturally situated. The first intuition pulls us towards a traditional, absolutist scientific picture, and the second towards a relativist one. Thus, perspectival realism can be seen as an attempt to secure situated knowledge without entailing epistemic relativism. A very similar motivation is behind feminist standpoint theory, a view which aims to capture the idea that knowledge is socially situated whilst retaining some kind of absolutism. Elsewhere I argue that the feminist project fails to achieve this balance; its commitment to situated knowledge unavoidably entails epistemic relativism (though of an unproblematic kind), which allows them to achieve all of their feminist goals. In this paper I will explore whether the same arguments apply to perspectival realism. And so I will be asking whether perspectival realism too is committed to an unproblematic kind of relativism, capable of achieving scientific goals; or, whether it succeeds in carving out a third view, between or beyond the relativism/absolutism dichotomy.

In Chapter 6, Johanna E. Wolff uses models of measurements as a case for exploring two forms of scientific realism that are meant to address the problem of plurality of models in science: structural realism and perspectival realism. She distinguishes their motivations in the following way: structural realists address the plurality of models by looking for similarities, namely structural commonalities, between the models, whereas perspectival realists emphasize how differences among a plurality of models can be complementary. In comparing these realist alternatives, Wolff chooses to focus on measurement theory. Wolff urges the idea that perspectival realism and structural realism are not competing realist accounts but complementary ones.

This edited collection is the first of its kind to explore the view called perspectivism in philosophy of science. The book brings together an array of essays that reflect on the methodological promises and scientific challenges of perspectivism in a variety of fields such as physics, biology, cognitive neuroscience, and cancer research, just as a few examples. What are the advantages of using a plurality of perspectives in a given scientific field and for interdisciplinary research? Can different perspectives be integrated? What is the relation between perspectivism, pluralism, and pragmatism? These ten new essays by top scholars in the field offer a polyphonic journey towards understanding the view called ‘perspectivism’ and its relevance to science.

Virtue perspectivism is a bi-level epistemology according to which there are two grades of knowledge: animal and reflective. The exercise of reliable competences suffices to give us animal knowledge; but we can then use these same competences to gain a second-order assuring perspective, one through which we may appreciate those faculties as reliable and in doing so place our first-order (animal) knowledge in a competent second-order perspective. Virtue perspectivism has considerable theoretical power, especially when it comes to vindicating our external world knowledge against threats of scepticism and regress. Prominent critics, however, doubt whether the view ultimately hangs together without succumbing to vicious circularity. In this paper, I am going to focus on circularity-based criticisms of virtue perspectivism raised in various places by Barry Stroud, Baron Reed and Richard Fumerton, and I will argue that virtue perspectivism can ultimately withstand each of them.

Classifications are useful and efficient. We group things into kinds to facilitate the acquisition and transmission of important, often tacit, information about a particular entity qua member of some kind. Whilst it is universally acknowledged that classifications are useful, some scientific classifications (e.g. chemical elements) are held to higher epistemic standards than folk classifications (e.g. bugs). Scientific classifications in terms of ‘natural kinds’ are considered to be more reliable and successful because they are highly projectible and support law-like and inductive generalisations. What counts as a natural kind is, however, controversial: according to essentialists (e.g. Putnam, Kripke, Ellis) natural kinds are mind-independent and possess essential characteristics; according to promiscuous realists (e.g. Dupre ) there are ‘countless legitimate, objectively grounded ways of classifying objects in the world’; and according to scientific realists (e.g. Boyd, Psillos) natural kinds are grounded in the ‘causal structure of the world’. More specifically, realism about kinds can be understood as a commitment to the existence of natural divisions (kinds) in the world that we come to know as a result of mature scientific investigation into the nature of such kinds. Realism about natural kinds is supported and articulated in terms of three main arguments, metaphysical, semantical, and epistemological. In the first part of my thesis I offer a sustained and systematic investigation of these three main arguments, with their respective promises and prospects for the viability of realism about kinds and I find them wanting, whilst in the second part of the thesis I pursue an unexplored line of inquiry regarding natural kinds and propose a mild realism about natural kinds via the ontology of real patterns.

The aim of this thesis is to defend a reading of Descartes’ theory of sensory perception in which, against a widespread interpretation, the mind is not a passive receiver of inputs from the environment, but an active decoder of neural information that contributes to the representational content of ideas. I call this the ‘mental activity thesis’ and, in the overall picture, I identify it as one of the philosophical implications of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. Within Descartes’ dualism, to offer a theory of sensory perception amounts to describing the interplay between the natural world, the brain, and the mind. Given his mechanistic, micro-corpuscular conception of matter, Descartes developed detailed physiological descriptions of the interaction between external objects and the brain. He envisaged it as an isomorphic relation in which the characteristics of objects are transmitted through the nerves to the brain as patterns of geometrically reduced properties. This process is often read as culminating with the mind being passively affected by a corporeal isomorph. Descartes’ doctrine becomes elusive in its mental phase, but the passivity reading, so I contend, remains inadequate. I argue for the mental activity thesis through four claims. First, I subscribe the known view that Descartes is concerned about a version of the mind-body problem that is not equivalent to the problem of substance interaction. It is rather a problem of dissimilarity between mental representations and mechanistic explanations. The question is how the qualitative character of sensory experiences can arise from the quantitative notions of physical science. As a way of emphasising the weight that the problem of dissimilarity has for Descartes’ philosophical decisions, I show that it motivates a metaphysically interesting distinction between types of causes for the case of brain-mind interaction. Second, I defend the position that, despite not holding a perfectly unambiguous doctrine, Descartes’ introduction of natural signs is the closest that he got to formulating a full-fledged theory of sensory perception. The appeal to natural signs has been normally deemed as metaphorical in the literature. I argue that, on the contrary, it is possible to reconstruct a causal story for brain-mind interaction along the lines of a semantic model based on Descartes’ identification of neural events with natural signs. A causal-semantic model emerges as a charitable, plausible reading that reveals the mind as an active interpreter. Third, in light of the mental activity thesis, I read Descartes’ late appeal to the innateness of all ideas (notably in the Comments on a Certain Broadsheet) as a strategy to account for a type of representational content needed for sensory ideas that, while produced by the mind, is different from that of his paradigmatic innate ideas. I assist Descartes in exploring how the category of innateness captures mental activity within a causal-semantic theory. Fourth, in the course of this argumentation, and for further support, I address the role of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities in Descartes’ theory. I tackle a pervasive objection stemming from his alleged association of the perception of primary qualities with the intellect. By reassessing Descartes’ views on mental activity, this interpretation aims at a lucid description of sensory perception that goes beyond the rigid rationalism that is often credited to him.

In this paper I argue that understanding is an indispensable epistemic procedure when historians use texts as evidence. On my account understanding installs a norm that determines what kind of event or object a texts is evidence of. Historians can debate which norms should govern a body of texts, and if they reach consensus, they can use that body of texts as an empirical constraint over their historical claims. I argue that texts cannot perform this constraining function without understanding – it is thus indispensable. In order to argue for this position I first discuss two existing accounts of textual evidence in analytic philosophy of science by Kosso and Hurst. Both defend a coherentist position. I show that their coherentist position is flawed by applying it to the famous case of Lucien Febvre's argument that François Rabelais was not an atheist. I show that a coherence between texts leaves the debate concerning Rabelais' religious beliefs underdetermined, even though this should not be necessary. I argue that my account of understanding better captures Febvre's actual reasoning with texts. In the final section of the paper I show that the two most famous accounts of understanding in analytic philosophy by Hempel and Taylor ignore either the epistemic indispensability of understanding, or the actual success of evidentiary reasoning in the historical sciences that was enabled by understanding.

The view that psychiatry should be elucidating the mechanisms behind mental phenomena is gaining momentum. This view, coupled with an intuition that such mechanisms must, by nature, be biological, has inspired the field to look to cognitive neuroscience for classification of mental illnesses. One example of this kind of reorientation can be seen in the recent introduction of the Research Domain Criteria project (RDoC) by the U.S National Institute of Mental Health. The RDoC project is an attempt to introduce a new classification system based on brain circuits. The central idea behind the project is that mental disorders can be understood in terms of brain disorders. The problem with this kind of whole- scale reductionism is that multilevel models citing mental and social factors as part of the causal structures are rejected as non-scientific, or accepted only as provisional “stand-ins” for causal factors to be found at the biological level. However, it is precisely such multilevel models that are necessary for progress in this fundamentally interdisciplinary science. This paper analyses the reductive nature of the RDoC project and investigates the potential for an interventionist account of causation and mechanism to bridge the gab between mechanistic explanations and multilevel models of mental disorders.

The idea that humans are prone to widespread and systematic biases has dominated the psychological study of thinking and decision-making. The conclusion that has often been drawn is that people are irrational. In recent decades, however, a number of psychologists have started to call into question key claims and findings in research on human biases. In particular, a body of research has come together under the heading of adaptive rationality (henceforth AR). AR theorists argue that people should not be assessed against formal principles of rationality but rather against the goals they entertain. Moreover, AR theorists maintain that the conclusion that people are irrational is unsupported: people are often remarkably successful once assessed against their goals and given the cognitive and external constraints imposed by the environment. The growth of literature around AR is what motivates the present investigation, and assessing the plausibility of the AR challenge to research on human biases is the goal of this thesis. My enquiry analyses several aspects of this suggested turn in the empirical study of rationality and provides one of the first philosophically-informed appraisals of the prospects of AR. First and foremost, my thesis seeks to provide a qualified defence of the AR project. On the one hand, I agree with AR theorists that there is room for a conceptual revolution in the study of thinking and decision-making: while it is commonly argued that behaviour and cognition should be assessed against formal principles of rationality, I stress the importance of assessing behaviour against the goals that people entertain. However, I also contend that AR theorists have hitherto failed to provide compelling evidence in support of their most ambitious and optimistic theses about people’s rationality. In particular, I present a great deal of evidence suggesting that people are often unsuccessful at achieving prudential and epistemic goals and I argue that AR theorists have not made clear how, in light of this evidence, optimistic claims about human rationality could be defended.