Ludo L. J. Schoenmakers

Understanding is a generally acknowledged aim of science, but the way in which understanding is pursued and criteria for when it is achieved differ widely across scientific disciplines. This paper offers a comparative analysis of this disciplinary variation, aimed at revealing differences as well as commonalities in methods and criteria for achieving understanding. Starting point is the contextual theory of scientific understanding (De Regt 2017), which was developed to accommodate contextual variation in criteria for understanding. While this work focused on historical variation and used mainly case studies from the history of physics, the current paper applies the contextual theory to disciplinary variation. We present brief descriptive accounts of how understanding figures in nine scientific disciplines: mathematics, theoretical physics, astrophysics, chemistry, geoscience, biology, neuroscience, psychology, and the engineering sciences. Subsequently, we compare and evaluate these accounts in light of the contextual theory of scientific understanding.

In this paper, I show how explanatory and objectual scientific understanding can be used to explain the early 1980s controversy over adaptationism. In this controversy, criticasters of adaptationism argued that adaptationists put too much emphasis on organismal traits as adaptations resulting from natural selection. Defenders of adaptationism argued that anti-adaptationist arguments were largely based on misconceptions. Building on work in the epistemology of scientific understanding, I show how criticasters and defenders of adaptationism can be read as accusing each other of inferior scientific understanding and that these accusations were an important source of fuel for the debate. In the process, I will argue that the philosophical accounts of the adaptationist controversy that has been suggested so far have offered at best partial explanations of the controversy and that the understanding-based account presented here can serve a coordinating role with respect to these accounts.

The role of evolutionary theory at the origin of life is an extensively debated topic. The origin and early development of life is usually separated into a prebiotic phase and a protocellular phase, ultimately leading to the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Most likely, the Last Universal Common Ancestor was subject to Darwinian evolution, but the question remains to what extent Darwinian evolution applies to the prebiotic and protocellular phases. In this review, we reflect on the current status of evolutionary theory in origins of life research by bringing together philosophy of science, evolutionary biology, and empirical research in the origins field. We explore the various ways in which evolutionary theory has been extended beyond biology; we look at how these extensions apply to the prebiotic development of (proto)metabolism; and we investigate how the terminology from evolutionary theory is currently being employed in state-of-the-art origins of life research. In doing so, we identify some of the current obstacles to an evolutionary account of the origins of life, as well as open up new avenues of research.

Discussions on the status of definitions of life have long been dominated by a position known as definitional pessimism. Per the definitional pessimist, there is no point in trying to define life. This claim is defended in different ways, but one of the shared assumptions of all definitional pessimists is that our attempts to define life are attempts to provide a list of all necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as alive. In other words, a definition of life is a strict, descriptive definition. Against this, several pragmatic alternatives have been put forward. On these pragmatic accounts, definitions of life are not strictly, but rather loosely descriptive. Their purpose is not to be true, but to be useful to scientists by guiding scientific practice. More recently, this position has come under attack for not being able to explain how our attempts to define life are connected to scientific progress within the biological sciences. Here, I argue to the contrary by showing how pragmatic definitions of life can be, and in fact are, conducive to scientific progress. Additionally, I show how the pragmatic account of definitions of life can be brought to bear upon our normative discussions involving definitions of life.