Understanding Scientific Understanding

Henk W. de Regt is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His main research interest is scientific understanding and explanation. He has published on these topics in journals such as Philosophy of Science, Synthese, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Together with Sabina Leonelli and Kai Eigner, he edited the volume Scientific Understanding: Philosophical Perspectives, which was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2009.

• Preface AcknowledgementChapter 1. Introduction: The desire to understandChapter 2. Understanding and the aims of science2.1. The neglect of understanding2.2. Understanding as an epistemic skill2.3. Intelligibility, values, and objectivity2.4. Understanding: a means and an endChapter 3. Explanatory understanding: A plurality of models3.1. From covering law explanation to unificatory understanding3.2. Causal conceptions of explanatory understanding3.3. Is causal and unificatory understanding complementary?3.4. Unifying the plurality of modes of explanationChapter 4. A contextual theory of scientific understanding4.1. Understanding phenomena with intelligible theories4.2. Criteria for intelligibility4.3. Conceptual tools for understanding4.4. The context-dependence of understanding4.4.1. Contextuality and historical dynamics4.4.2. Contextuality and the intuitions of philosophers4.4.3. Contextuality and pragmatics4.5. Reduction, realism and understanding4.5.1. Understanding and realism4.5.2. Understanding and reduction4.6. Contextualism: risky relativism?Chapter 5. Metaphysics and intelligibility: Understanding gravitation5.1. The (un)intelligibility of Newton's theory of universal gravitation5.2. The seventeenth-century debate on gravitation5.2.1. Isaac Newton: reluctant revolutionary5.2.2. Christiaan Huygens: the conscience of corpuscularism5.3. Actio in distans and intelligibility after Newton5.4. Metaphysics as a resource for scientific understandingChapter 6. Models and mechanisms: Physical understanding in the nineteenth century6.1. Mechanical modeling in nineteenth-century physics6.1.1. William Thomson: master modeler6.1.2. James Clerk Maxwell: advocate of analogies6.1.3. Ludwig Boltzmann: promoter of pictures6.2. Molecular models for understanding gas phenomena6.3. Boltzmann' Bildtheorie: a pragmatic view of understanding6.4. The uses and limitations of mechanical modelsChapter 7. Visualizability and intelligibility: Insight into the quantum world7.1. Visualizability and intelligibility in classical physics7.2. Quantum theory and the waning of Anschaulichkeit7.3. The new quantum mechanics: a struggle for intelligibility7.4. Electron spin: the power of visualization7.5. Visualization in post-war quantum physics7.6. Visualization as a tool for understandingChapter 8. Conclusion: the many faces of understandingBibliographyIndex

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