It is widely acknowledged that a central aim of science is to
achieve understanding of the world around us, and that possessing
such understanding is highly important in our present-day society.
But what does it mean to achieve this understanding? What precisely
is scientific understanding? These are philosophical questions that
have not yet received satisfactory answers. While there has been an
ongoing debate about the nature of scientific explanation since
Carl Hempel advanced his covering-law model in 1948, the related
notion of understanding has been largely neglected, because most
philosophers regarded understanding as merely a subjective
by-product of objective explanations. By contrast, this book puts
scientific understanding center stage. It is primarily a
philosophical study, but also contains detailed historical case
studies of scientific practice. In contrast to most existing
studies in this area, it takes into account scientists' views and
analyzes their role in scientific debate and development. The aim
of Understanding Scientific Understanding is to develop and defend
a philosophical theory of scientific understanding that can
describe and explain the historical variation of criteria for
understanding actually employed by scientists. The theory does
justice to the insights of such famous physicists as Werner
Heisenberg and Richard Feynman, while bringing much-needed
conceptual rigor to their intuitions. The scope of the proposed
account of understanding is the natural sciences: while the
detailed case studies derive from physics, examples from other
sciences are presented to illustrate its wider validity.
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