Perspectival Realism

Michela Massimi (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

432 Seiten

2022
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-755562-0 (ISBN)

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What does it mean to be a realist about science if one takes seriously the view that scientific knowledge is always perspectival, namely historically and culturally situated? In Perspectival Realism, Michela Massimi explores how scientific knowledge grows and evolves thanks to a plurality of epistemic communities occupying a number of scientific perspectives. The result is a philosophical view that goes under the name of "perspectival realism", and it offers a new lens for thinking about scientific knowledge, realism and pluralism in science.

Perspectival Realism begins with an exploration of how epistemic communities often resort to several models and a plurality of practices, drawing on examples from nuclear physics, climate science, and developmental psychology. Massimi explains the perspectival nature of scientific representation, the role of scientific models as inferential blueprints, and the variety of scientific realism that naturally accompanies such a view. Perspectival realism is realism about phenomena (rather than about theories or unobservable entities). This novel realist view places epistemic communities and their situated knowledge center stage. The result is a portrait of scientific knowledge as a collaborative inquiry, where the reliability of science is made possible by a plurality of historically and culturally situated scientific perspectives. Along the way, Massimi offers insight into the nature of scientific modelling, scientific knowledge qua modal knowledge, data-to-phenomena inferences, and natural kinds as sortal concepts.

Perspectival Realism offers a realist view that takes the multicultural nature of science seriously and couples it with cosmopolitan duties about how one ought to think about scientific knowledge and the distribution of benefits gained from scientific advancements.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Michela Massimi is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Edinburgh. Massimi works on general philosophy of science, history and philosophy of modern physics, Kant's philosophy of nature and Kantianism in philosophy of science. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and Member of the Academia Europaea. She served as Vice-President of the European Philosophy of Science Association (2015-2019) and she is currently President-Elect of the Philosophy of Science Association. From 2016 to 2021 she was the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant "Perspectival Realism".

Part I. PERSPECTIVAL MODELLING
Chapter 1. The short tale of a long journey
Chapter 2. The perspectival nature of scientific representation
Chapter 3. Pluralism and perspectivism
Chapter 4. Perspectival modelling as modelling possibilities
Chapter 4.a: A tale from the atomic nucleus ca. 1930s-1950s
Chapter 4.b: A tale from the ice, the sea and the land: climate modelling
Chapter 4.c: A tale from the development of language in children
Chapter 5. Inferential blueprints and windows on reality

Part II. THE WORLD AS WE PERSPECTIVALLY MODEL IT
Chapter 6. From data to phenomena
Chapter 7. Natural Kinds with a Human Face
Chapter 8. The inferentialist view of natural kinds
Chapter 9. Sorting phenomena into kinds
Chapter 10. Evolving natural kinds
Chapter 11. Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism in science

Erscheinungsdatum	30.06.2022
Reihe/Serie	Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Science
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	242 x 163 mm
Gewicht	785 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Erkenntnistheorie / Wissenschaftstheorie
Themenwelt	Naturwissenschaften
ISBN-10	0-19-755562-4 / 0197555624
ISBN-13	978-0-19-755562-0 / 9780197555620
Zustand	Neuware