Abstracts

Rani Anjum and Stephen Mumford: For Methodological Pluralism in the Causal Sciences

A number of methods are used to established causation. Different sciences favour different approaches, and some sciences use multiple methods. But do the different methods discover the same thing, namely causation? Or do they discover a number of different things, such as statistical correlations, difference making, probability-raising or causal mechanisms? Perhaps causation could be all these things. This would support a pluralistic notion of causation and at least it would mean that the different types of causation are all reconcilable. Otherwise we might find that two different methods could be used for opposite evidence: to establish and deny the same causal relationship. If our methods provide us with contradicting results, we need a way to choose between them. Here we give support to a single, uniform theory of the nature of causation. The suggestion is that although there is only one thing that is causation, because it is not reducible to anything else, there isn’t one single, infallible way of uncovering it. There are, however, a variety of methods we can use, all of which have some weakness. They detect slightly different things, such as regularity and difference making and whether there is a plausible mechanistic theory. But these are all symptoms of causation rather than causation itself. And epistemically, in attempting to uncover causes, the best position to adopt is a methodological pluralism.

M. J. García-Encinas: Is Science a Limit to Metaphysics?

Should it be? No. There are reasons why Metaphysics still keeps its extraordinary name. It is undeniable that Science and Metaphysics affect each other: they are, sometimes, a mutually reliable source of new and inspiriting ideas; their being on good terms is always good news for both of them, as ideas keep on moving. But do they NEED each other for their proper tasks, or to defend their own results, in their own fields? I do not think so. During my talk I will consider some philosophical categories that are the object of serious study in both Metaphysics and Science, and I show that scientific theories cannot verify, nor falsify, different metaphysical proposals. In fact, Science is enlightening indifferent to Metaphysics; as indifferent as Metaphysics has the right to be regarding Science. My particular cases of study will be Time and Laws of Nature, but I think that my argumentation can be easily generalized to other categories, like substance, events, causation, identity, number, existence, and so on.

María Cerezo: Towards a liberal naturalism - with a view to philosophy of biology

This paper intends a dialogue between recent philosophical reflection on naturalism and some issues in philosophy of biology. I will present some reasons why one could defend a liberal naturalism, that is, a naturalism in which the idea of nature usually presupposed in modern science should be expanded to include features proper of biological entities. The paper has two Sections. In the first Section, I present what I understand by liberal naturalism as opposed to restricted naturalism, and revise Dupré's criticism of monism and the unity of science, arguing mainly that a pluralistic view of science such as the one defended by Dupré should accept a corresponding wider notion of nature. In the second part, I will exemplify the kind of phenomena that such broadening allows to take into account, paying attention to the specific teleological nature of some biological processes and to the notion of organization.

Claus Emmeche: Borderology and the limits of multiple sciences
By changing context from limits to what science can discover and explain, to borders between different perspectives and investigative strategies that fruitfully can be applied to approach a question, the metaphysics of science also changes. This shift is hypothesized to be related to changing modes of research with an increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary formats. It motivates a notion of borderology as an exploration of styles of scientific inquiry and how disciplinary knowledge interacts with the intellectual organization of research. The phenomenon of friendship – as an interpersonal relation or a cluster of highly diverse relationship types across epochs and cultures – will exemplify the limits of scientific approaches to complex phenomena, and borderology as an alternative to unificationist, systemic or reductionist approaches. The borderology of friendship is illustrated by ethological research on social relations similar to friendship among non-human primates, and neuroimaging research on the neural correlates of social interactions with friends.

Álvaro Moreno: The limits of science as biological limits of human beings
In this talk I will analyze the nature of Science considered as a specific form of human action. I will first analyze the epistemic dimension of science, its limits, and the role that philosophy could play in this domain. Second, I will consider science from a broader perspective, as a system embedded in the development of human society. From this perspective, science has caused an accelerated process of economic growth. But this process, which lacks a global regulatory control, is potentially self-destructive because it undermines the ecological logic, which is based on building sustainable cycles among species. As I will explain, a clash between the specific expansion of the human niche (as driven by science) and the induced transformations in the global ecosystem seems inevitable because the change in the forms of human interaction with other species is cultural, not genetic, and therefore its speed makes it virtually impossible a re-adaptation by most of the biological species.

Jan Faye: How evolution sets the cognitive limits of science. Exemplified by possible worlds, many worlds and multiworlds

In 1969 Quine published the paper ”Epistemology Naturalized” in which he argued that epistemology should be informed by the sciences instead of acting independently of them. What he had in mind was first and foremost psychology. However he didn’t say much about what such an epistemology would look like. A promising way to follow is in my opinion to look at the evolution of human beings and how our cognitive capacities have arisen due to our ancestors’ adaptation to their environment. These cognitive capacities also set the limits for an epistemology of science. Originally our cognitive abilities evolved to handle information from the world, processing and storing this information, for the purpose of immediate or later action. All this happened because it increases our survival and reproduction. The consequence seems to be that much of the more speculative part of physics has no epistemological foundation. Those scientists who still believe it has are standing behind in the Cartesian tradition with all its difficulties. As an illustration I point to those discussions which take place in physics concerning many worlds and multi-universes.

Mauro Dorato: The now, the passage of time and the limits of physics

Einstein once said to Carnap that he was worried by the fact that the now can have no role in physics, despite its importance in our lives. This statement raises an important question about the limits of the physical theorization of reality. On the one hand, the main aim of my talk is to defend the objectivity of the passage of time without invoking any form of presentism (the view that only the present is real, and that "being present" is an objective and intrinsic property of events). On the other, the fact that the view of passage that I defend is rather deflationary raises the question whether physics is either currently or in principle incomplete, exactly in virtue of the fact that is incapable of recognizing the now as an objective feature of reality.

Svend E. Rugh and Henrik Zinkernagel: On the limits of physics and cosmology

We discuss different kinds of limits for physics and cosmology. Rugh first points out that the language of mathematics is closely connected to the physical structure of the Universe we inhabit. This sets limits to the possibility of formulating scenarios for universes radically different than our own (within, say, a multiverse). We then introduce the idea that physical concepts need a “physical underpinning” in order to be elevated from the realm of mathematics to the realm of concepts with a “basis” in physics and cosmology. Some examples (notably the physical underpinning of the concept of “time”) will be given and discussed. Zinkernagel points out that physical theories have limited domains of application, and that any application of a physical theory assumes, as given, certain elements (e.g. initial conditions or an experimental context). Related to this, we critically discuss the prospects for reductionism within physics. We identify problems for the (among physicists and philosophers of physics) widely held idea that we live in a “quantum mechanical universe”, and for the idea that physics might be able to provide a “Theory of Everything”.

Henk de Regt: The limits of scientific understanding

What are the limits of scientific understanding, if there are any? To answer this question we first need to know what exactly scientific understanding is, and how it is achieved. These questions have long been neglected by philosophers of science because of the misguided assumption that understanding is purely subjective. I will offer an analysis of the nature of scientific understanding that accords with scientific practice and accommodates the historical diversity of conceptions of understanding. Its core idea is a general criterion for the intelligibility of scientific theories that is essentially contextual: which theories conform to this criterion depends on contextual factors, and can change in the course of time. To illustrate my account I will discuss a well-known episode in the history of physics: the debates about the intelligibility of gravitation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These debates were (partly) concerned with the relation between science and metaphysics and shed light on the question of limits of scientific understanding.