Cross-Medium Science

APSE-CEU-IVC Talks
The Philosophy Department of the Central European University, the Institute Vienna Circle and the Unit for Applied Philosophy of Science and Epistemology APSE (of the Department of Philosophy of the Universtiy of Vienna) are jointly organising a series of talks this term

Date: 27/05/2021

Time: 15h00

Online Plattform: The meeting will be online via Zoom | Talks in Philosophy of Science and Epistemology PSE

Access:

univienna.zoom.us/j/98767758229

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Meeting-ID: 987 6775 8229

Password: IVC-APSE

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Abstract:

I  offer an account of the epistemology of science, focused not on what scientific knowledge is, but on what scientific knowledge is about. On this view, scientific knowledge is of conditional properties exhibited by ‘mediums’. A medium is a material system that exhibits a set of conditional properties in virtue of (1) its constitution, (2) our capacity to intervene/observe it, (3) our ‘procedural constraints’ (that is, the sets of operations that are considered legitimate concerning that medium). Scientific knowledge, on this view, is fundamentally constrained by the material systems scientists examine. I’ll illustrate the view by examining some experimental and modelling practices in ecology, before putting the account to work, demonstrating how it can make sense of scientific diversity, generalizations and idealizations.