Derek D. Turner

Scientific realism is fundamentally a view about unobservable things, events, processes, and so on, but things can be unobservable either because they are tiny or because they are past. The familiar abductive arguments for scientific realism lend more justification to scientific realism about the tiny than to realism about the past. This paper examines both the “basic” abductive arguments for realism advanced by philosophers such as Ian Hacking and Michael Devitt, as well as Richard Boyd’s version of the inference to the best explanation of the success of science, and shows that these arguments provide less support to historical than to experimental realism. This is because unobservably tiny things can function both as unifiers of the phenomena and as tools for the production of new phenomena, whereas things in the past can only serve as unifiers of the phenomena. The upshot is that realists must not suppose that by presenting arguments for experimental realism they have thereby defended realism in general.Author Keywords: Author Keywords: Realism; Abduction; Historical science; Hacking; Devitt; Boyd

One of the first questions that paleontologists ask when they identify a large-scale trend in the fossil record (e.g., size increase, complexity increase) is whether it is passive or driven. In this article, I explore two questions about driven trends: (1) what is the underlying cause or source of the directional bias? and (2) has the strength of the directional bias changed over time? I identify two underdetermination problems that prevent scientists from giving complete answers to these two questions.

This paper examines a particularly egregious example of a NIMBY claim and considers three proposals for explaining what about that claim might be ethically problematic: The NIMBY claimant is being selfish or self-serving; The NIMBY claim cannot be morally justified, because respecting everyone's NIMBY claims leaves communities worse off; and if policymakers were to defer to people's NIMBY claims, they would end up perpetuating environmental injustices. We argue that these proposals fail to explain why there is anything wrong with the NIMBY claim per se.

The distinction between idiographic science, which aims to reconstruct sequences of particular events, and nomothetic science, which aims to discover laws and regularities, is crucial for understanding the paleobiological revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Stephen Jay Gould at times seemed conflicted about whether to say (a) that idiographic science is fine as it is or (b) that paleontology would have more credibility if it were more nomothetic. Ironically, one of the lasting results of the paleobiological revolution was a new way of doing historical science that defies categorization as idiographic or nomothetic. Yet the tension between (a) and (b) persists in some recent work in the philosophy of science, with Carol Cleland defending a version of (a) and Dan McShea and Robert Brandon defending a version of (b). In placing Cleland's work into conversation with that of McShea and Brandon, this paper defends a third (c) synthetic approach that emphasizes the blending of idiographic and nomothetic work

Carman argues, in ‘The electrons of the dinosaurs and the center of the Earth’, that we may have more reason to be realists about dinosaurs than about electrons, because there are plenty of observable analogues for dinosaurs but not for electrons. These observable analogues severely restrict the range of plausible ontologies, thus reducing the threat of underdetermination. In response to this argument, I show that the observable analogues for ancient organisms are a mixed epistemic blessing at best, and I discuss some cases from the history of paleontology in which the observable analogues—ducks, shrimp, and lizards—have led scientists into persisting error. I also give reasons for thinking that underdetermination will be just as serious a problem in historical as in experimental science. I conclude that Carman has not succeeded in showing that dinosaurs ‘come off better’ than electrons.Keywords: Paleontology; Pessimistic induction; Realism; Unobservables

This paper develops responses to several critics who commented on an earlier paper that we published in this journal. In that paper, we argued that there is nothing necessarily wrong with NIMBY claims or those who make them. The critics raised some important issues, such as whether “NIMBY” is essentially a pejorative term; the possibility that NIMBY claimants are saying something deep about the noncomparability of places; what exactly it means for policy makers to defer to a NIMBY claim; the relationship between NIMBY and environmental justice claims; and whether there is any principled way to distinguish good from bad NIMBY claims. We explore these issues further, and in the course of responding to the critics, we develop some further reasons for skepticism about the prospects for distinguishing good from bad NIMBY claims in a principled way.