The Truth About Better Understanding?

The notion of understanding occupies an increasingly prominent place in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of science, and moral theory. A central and ongoing debate about the nature of understanding is how it relates to the truth. In a series of influential contributions, Catherine Elgin has used a variety of familiar motivations for antirealism in philosophy of science to defend a non-factive theory of understanding. Key to her position are: (1) the fact that false theories can contribute to the upwards trajectory of scientific understanding, and (2) the essential role of inaccurate idealisations in scientific research. Using Elgin’s arguments as a foil, I show that a strictly factive theory of understanding has resources with which to offer a unified response to both the problem of idealisations and the role of false theories in the upwards trajectory of scientific understanding. Hence, strictly factive theories of understanding are viable notwithstanding these forceful criticisms.

Modelos falsos en la ciencia: un valioso recurso para la comprensión de los fenómenos

En las ciencias basadas en modelos, como la biología, los modelos desempeñan un papel explicativo fundamental e imprescindible. En los últimos años, algunos autores han señalado que la noción de ‘comprensión’ (understanding) puede arrojar alguna luz en el análisis de la explicación científica basada en modelos. Esta noción ha atraído una creciente atención en la filosofía de la ciencia y, en particular, en la filosofía de la biología. Tres preguntas centrales se han planteado en el debate que ha surgido al respecto: (1) ¿Qué es la comprensión científica?, (2) ¿es “factiva” (factive) la comprensión, es decir, presupone o implica la verdad de las creencias involucradas?, y (3) ¿puede ser objetiva la comprensión? En este trabajo me centraré en la cuestión (2) y asumiré para ello la respuesta a la cuestión (1) ofrecida por Catherine Elgin. Defenderé que la comprensión no es factiva en lo que respecta al uso de modelos falsos –no implica aceptar como verdaderas las creencias involucradas. Distinguiré cuatro tipos de modelos falsos según el papel que la falsedad juega en su función explicativa y argumentaré que estos modelos falsos son herramientas muy útiles para la comprensión de los fenómenos y que su uso es frecuente en biología.

Inquiry in the Arts and Sciences

In his 1836 lectures to the Royal Institute, the great landscape painter John Constable stated that ‘Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.’ Landscape, he went on to say, should ‘be considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments.’1 Constable makes two claims in this striking passage. The first is that painting is a form of inquiry. This is, by itself, a bold claim, but Constable goes on to state that painters and scientists inquire in the same way. As controversial as these views are, both of them have been sympathetically entertained in recent years by several philosophers. In particular, Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin have maintained that painting, and the other arts, are forms of inquiry, and that they are akin to the sciences in important respects.2 I think, however, that Constable is only half right. Although I agree that the arts are forms of inquiry, I will argue that the arts and the sciences employ radically different methods. That the arts and the sciences are very different forms of inquiry might seem to be a point so obvious as to be scarcely worth making. We can, however, appreciate more clearly how the arts can contribute to our knowledge by contrasting its methods with those of science.