Miguel Ohnesorge

The philosophy of the geosciences is an emerging subfield in philosophy of science. Although past and present geoscientific disciplines differ substantially, we argue that they frequently face common epistemological and ethical problems. We survey several of these problems that have already attracted sustained philosophical interest, related to the use of measurements, data, and models to study relatively inaccessible target phenomena, responses to (epistemic) injustices, and the management of epistemic risks.

This article discusses the ways in which nineteenth-century geodesists reflected on precision as an epistemic virtue in their measurement practice. Physical geodesy is often understood as a quintessential nineteenth-century precision science, stimulating advances in instrument making and statistics, and generating incredible quantities of data. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, geodesists indeed pursued their most prestigious research problem – the exact determination of the earth’s polar flattening – along those lines. Treating measurement errors as random, they assumed that remaining discordances could be overcome by manufacturing better instruments and extending statistical analysis to a larger amount of data. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, several German geodesists developed sophisticated methodological critiques of their discipline, in which they diagnosed a too-narrow focus on precision among their peers. On their account, geodesists urgently needed to identify and anticipate the causes of the remaining measurement errors that arose from the earth’s little understood interior constitution. While mostly overlooked in the literature, these critiques paved the way for many empirical successes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century geodesy, including the first convergent measurements of the earth’s polar flattening.

Derived measurements involve problems of coordination. Conducting them often requires detailed theoretical assumptions about their target, while such assumptions can lack sources of evidence that are independent from these very measurements. In this paper, I defend two claims about problems of coordination. I motivate both by a novel case study on a central measurement problem in the history of physical geodesy: the determination of the earth's ellipticity. First, I argue that the severity of problems of coordination varies according to scientists' predictive and experimental control over perturbations of the measurement process. Second, I identify a methodology by which scientists can solve hard problems of coordination and gradually increase their predictive control over perturbations. I dub this methodology ‘operational pluralism’ since it is driven by the introduction of alternative measurement operations that involve different physical indicators.

Philosophers and metrologists have refuted the view that measurement’s epistemic privilege in scientific practice is explained by its theory-neutrality. Rather, they now explicitly appeal to the role that theories play in measurement. I formulate a challenge for this view: scientists sometimes ascribe epistemic privilege to measurements even if they lack a shared theory about their target quantity, which I illustrate through a case study from early geodesy. Drawing on that case, I argue that the epistemic privilege of measurement precedes shared background theory and is better explained by its pre-theoretic function in enabling a distinctive kind of inquiry.

This paper reconstructs the history of the trigonometrical surveying of Kashmir from 1855 to 1865. It highlights the strategies through which surveyors had to justify the employment of high-precision instruments and methods in Himalayan terrain. Only by tediously manipulating their institutional environment in India and Britain did the staff of the Kashmir survey manage to complete its operations in light of constant financial and physical hardship. To sustain their measurements, surveyors aligned themselves with various political projects, entertaining and shifting allegiances with local rulers, scientific societies, and colonial institutions. After suffering severe cuts to instruments and assistance staff, the party was entirely stripped of funds by the East India Company in 1857 and relied on the material support of Maharaja Gulab Singh. Subsequently, surveyors adopted an expansionist rhetoric to gather the support of the Royal Geographical Society. In doing so, they framed precision as an essential contribution to imperial expansion, effective colonial rule, and intervention in ‘backward’ Kashmiri society and infrastructure. The Kashmir survey illustrates that rendering precision valuable requires an ongoing performative effort of justification to align epistemic with political and institutional interests.

The development of nineteenth-century geodetic measurement challenges the dominant coherentist account of measurement success. Coherentists argue that measurements of a quantity are epistemically successful if their numerical outcomes converge across varying contextual constraints. Aiming at numerical convergence, in turn, offers an operational aim for scientists to solve problems of coordination. Geodesists faced such a problem of coordination between two indicators of the earth’s ellipticity, which were both based on imperfect ellipsoid models. While not achieving numerical convergence, their measurements produced novel data that grounded valuable theoretical hypotheses. Consequently, they ought to be regarded as epistemically successful. This insight warrants a dynamic revision of coherentism, allowing to judge the success of a metric based on both its coherence and fruitfulness. On that view, scientific measurement aims to coordinate theoretical definitions and produce novel data and theoretical insights.

This article develops a constructive criticism of methodological conventionalism. Methodological conventionalism asserts that standards of inductive risk ought to be justified in virtue of their ability to facilitate coordination in a research community. On that view, industry bias occurs when conventional methodological standards are violated to foster industry preferences. The underlying account of scientific conventionality, however, is problematically incomplete. Conventions may be justified in virtue of their coordinative functions, but often qualify for posterior empirical criticism as research advances. Accordingly, industry bias does not only threaten existing conventions but may impede their empirically warranted improvement if they align with industry preferences. My empiricist account of standards of inductive risk avoids such a problem by asserting that conventional justification can be pragmatically warranted but has, in principle, only a provisional status. Methodological conventions, therefore, should not only be defended from preference-based infringements on their coordinative function but ought to be subjected to empirical criticism

Author's summary: I discuss the lessons that scientific realism, understood as a thesis about the metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic interpretation of scientific theories, has to learn from the philosophy of scientific practice. The standard arguments for scientific realism are shown to be incompatible with a practice-based understanding of theories, as they fail short of offering operationally sound concepts of "truth" and "reality. " I propose Hasok Chang's Active Realism (AR) as a solution to this compatibility problem and defend it against common anti-realist arguments. Finally, I hold that AR offers important lessons for discussing the epistemic authority of scientific theories in public discourse: instead of the claims of scientific theories to truth, these discussions should focus on correct and incorrect domains of theory application.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus and Edmund Husserl’s Experience and Judgement (Erfahrung und Urteil) are based on remarkably different conceptual frameworks and methodologies. After analyzing their respective accounts on the foundations of (formal) logic, I map out their common aims and different conclusions. I hold that Husserl and Wittgenstein both use the epistemic necessity of the existence of logical relations among things as an argument against philosophical scepticism, but their different epistemological convictions lead them to decisively diverging accounts of the nature of those relations. Wittgenstein assumes a syntactic correspondence theory of truth, which identifies general logical form as a necessary condition for accurate representation, apparent in the existence of local truth-functions between propositions. As logical form is the (transcendental) necessary condition of every meaningful proposition, he infers that it is itself not representable and without ontological status. Husserl, by contrast, does not draw from a correspondence theory, but from a processual theory of certainty and truth, which offers genetic instead of categorical distinctions between perception and the logical relations apparent in conceptual knowledge. His theory of formal logic ultimately offers a coherent ontology for logical objects, which avoids logical mysticism