PPIG: Philosophy, Psychology, and Informatics Group

Speaker: Kareem Khalifa (University of California, Los Angeles), in collaboration with Sandy Goldberg (Northwestern University)

Title: Do Scientific Communities Understand? A Fictionalist Account

Abstract: Scientific understanding of a phenomenon typically involves multiple specialists performing interdependent tasks. For these reasons, contemporary social epistemology suggests that the scientific community is the primary locus of understanding, and that individual scientists’ understanding is merely tributary to that understanding. Using the current neuroscientific understanding of hunger’s effects on aggression as a case study, we argue instead for a fictionalist position. On our view, sentences that attribute understanding to scientific communities are not to be taken literally, but are instead a convenient way of talking about how social environments associated with a scientific community foster individual scientists' understanding. Relative to the more prevalent social-epistemological positions that take these sentences literally (e.g., summativism and non-summativism), our fictionalism is both distinctive and accords better with scientific practice.