Contemporary debates in philosophy of science

Speaker: Adrian Currie (University of Cambridge)

Title: Knowing unique events: contingency, analogy & sabre-teeth

Abstract: I’ve argued that analogous evidence plays a critical role in the evidential support of archaeological, geological and paleontological reconstructions of deep time. In particular, they provide evidence of ‘fragile regularities’ which are used to infer from past facts to further past facts. However, the past is often highly contingent, and I argue that this will often generate unique events. Unique events lack analogies, and so it looks as if there isn’t sufficient evidence to support models of regularities. By examining how paleobiologists reconstruct the killing style of the marsupial sabre-tooth Thylacosmilus atrox, I argue that putatively unique events are often amenable to analogous reasoning. This strategy, exquisite corpse reasoning, involves navigating between several imperfect analogues to build a model which includes the target (often as an extreme case). I finish by speculating about what a ‘truly’ unique historical event might be like.