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Understanding, Values, and the Aims of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Henk W. de Regt
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Abstract

The understanding that comes with scientific explanation is regarded as one of the central epistemic aims of science. In earlier work I have argued that scientists achieve understanding of phenomena by basing their explanations on intelligible theories, where intelligibility is a contextually determined value. In this article, I address the question of how the aim of understanding relates to other epistemic aims of science, such as prediction of empirical evidence and accurate description of phenomena. Moreover, I examine the associated values and analyze their role and interaction through a historical case study.

Type
Understanding and Imagination
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 87 , Issue 5: PSA 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 biennial meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part II Symposia Papers , December 2020 , pp. 921 - 932
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank my cosymposiasts, Angela Potochnik, Kate Elgin, and Kareem Khalifa, and the audiences at PSA 2018 (Seattle, November 2018) and the inaugural SURe workshop (Bordeaux, February 2019), for helpful discussions. This article was completed during a research stay at the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Ghent University. I thank Erik Weber and the scientific research network Logical and Methodological Analysis of Scientific Reasoning Processes sponsored by the Research Foundation Flanders for making this possible.

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