Teru Miyake

That philosophical issues can, at times, have a profound influence on the development of a science, is by now a familiar idea to historically-minded philosophers of science. Studies of such influences have been limited, however, to a few sciences, with by far the most work being done on physics. I am quite confident, for example, that only a handful of philosophers are at all aware of a connection between the development of the field of seismology in the early decades of the twentieth century and the school of philosophy centered around Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at Cambridge. The main aim of this paper is to bring this connection to light through an examination of the work of Dorothy Wrinch and Harold Jeffreys, each of whom were students of this tradition of philosophy, and who went on to do important work in several different fields of science.

One of the distinctive features of George Smith’s work on celestial mechanics is his emphasis on the role of what he calls “second-order phenomena” in the production of high-quality evidence. On Smith’s view, these gaps between theoretical predictions and observations can, under certain circumstances, be a source of evidence far stronger than that achievable through the hypothetico-deductive method. The practice of examining gaps between predictions and observations for the purposes of discovery and testing is commonplace in certain sciences such as seismology, and has played an important role in their development. I use the term reasoning from residuals as a general term for this practice. I think it is worth investigating examples of this set of practices from the history of science, in order to understand the different ways in which reasoning from residuals is done, under what situations it is done, and how it contributes to the growth of knowledge in certain sciences.

Although the realism debate has focused on the work of Jean Perrin on Brownian motion, this chapter claims that the best place to look for a resolution of this debate is the period after the late 1920s, when stable theory-mediated measurement of molecular parameters first became possible through the application of quantum mechanics to spectroscopy. The chapter first examines how stable measurement of the molecular parameters of diatomic molecules was achieved in spectroscopy and then gauges what evidence there is that this stable measurement is giving spectroscopists access to the real properties and structure of molecules. It argues that an evaluation of the latter question requires a distinction to be made between physically meaningful representations and those that are not, and a full answer requires the deployment of that distinction in the analysis of scientific research on atoms and molecules in the period after 1950.

This paper examines the history of two related problems concerning earthquakes, and the way in which a theoretical advance was involved in their resolution. The first problem is the development of a physical, as opposed to empirical, scale for measuring the size of earthquakes. The second problem is that of understanding what happens at the source of an earthquake. There was a controversy about what the proper model for the seismic source mechanism is, which was finally resolved through advances in the theory of elastic dislocations. These two problems are linked, because the development of a physically based magnitude scale requires an understanding of what goes on at the seismic source. I will show how the theoretical advances allowed seismologists to re-frame the questions they were trying to answer, so that the data they gathered could be brought to bear on the problem of seismic sources in new ways.

This article introduces the notion of a kind of inference called black box measurement and argues that it is both historically and philosophically significant. Thinking about certain classic cases of underdetermination using this notion can give us a better understanding of how these cases are resolved. I take the main philosophical problem of black box measurement to be the justification of assumptions that are needed in order to make these measurements. I sketch some ways in which such enabling assumptions might be justified

This paper examines the epistemological implications of a particular underdetermination problem from geophysics, with an emphasis on understanding how the scientists themselves tried to deal with the problem. The problem is from the highly influential work of the geophysicists Backus and Gilbert in the late 60’s, who were trying to determine the internal structure of the Earth using seismic waves. I find that actual underdetermination problems can be vastly complex, with different sources of underdetermination having different epistemological implications. A better understanding of actual cases of underdetermination is needed before we can make epistemological conclusions based on underdetermination.

Reference models of the earth’s interior play an important role in the acquisition of knowledge about the earth’s interior and the earth as a whole. Such models are used as a sort of standard reference against which data are compared. I argue that the use of reference models merits more attention than it has gotten so far in the literature on models, for it is an example of a method of doing science that has a long and significant history, and a study of reference models could increase our understanding of this methodology.

This paper examines the underdetermination between the Ptolemaic, Copernican, and the Tychonic theories of planetary motions and its attempted resolution by Kepler. I argue that past philosophical analyses of the problem of the planetary motions have not adequately grasped a method through which the underdetermination might have been resolved. This method involves a procedure of what I characterize as decomposition and identification. I show that this procedure is used by Kepler in the first half of the Astronomia Nova, where he ultimately claims to have refuted the Ptolemaic theory, thus partially overcoming the underdetermination. Finally, I compare this method with other views of scientific inference such as bootstrapping.