Nora Boyd (Siena College) - Empirical results can sometimes be fruitfully repurposed across epistemic contexts. Sometimes this happens in a single historical context, as when the same research outputs are shared between different contemporaneous groups investigating different phenomena, or when the same research is used to rule against several alternative theories. In addition, empirical results can sometimes be repurposed in new historical contexts—old data can be revived and given new life. Philosophers of science have discussed such cases of zombie data in biology, archaeology, and paleontology. Having the capacity to use empirical results in contexts besides those that generated them is also critically important for studying some astronomical phenomena. Historical astronomical observations can be valuable, sometimes irreplaceable, for certain research questions. For instance, some astronomical events are rare enough that few occurrences have been witnessed since the advent of the telescope (such as nearby supernovae), let alone since the adoption of contemporary conceptual categories or recent data distribution practices. And some phenomena of interest change subtly over very long periods of time. In order to study such phenomena, researchers have implemented clever strategies for coaxing historical astronomical records into epistemic contact with contemporary theory. I argue that, in general, in order for some empirical result to serve as a constraint on theorizing in some epistemic context, it must be “well-adapted” to the context of constraint. I defend a precise characterization of well-adaptedness and articulate one strategy by which an empirical result can be repurposed in a new context—using data records and their provenance metadata as the basis for transforming the empirical results codified in those records into useful empirical constraints in the contexts of interest— and I present a virtuoso example of this strategy in action. I develop the notion of “evidential forensics” to capture the clever chains of inference that researchers employ to render these historical records epistemically useful in the present. In particular I discuss and illustrate three aspects of evidential forensics: assessment of relevance, translation/transformation of information, and circumstantial reasoning. First, in the case of an exemplary Babylonian eclipse record, certain desiderata that researchers have identified as requisite for an historical record to be useful as a constraint in this context were met. For instance, it must be possible to determine the geographical location from which the observation was made, the observation must be of an event in the solar system so that it is possible to calculate the timing of the event in terrestrial time from the applicable dynamical equations, it must be possible to determine the exact date of the observed event, and it must be possible to determine the time of the even in universal time coordinates. Even if all of these desiderata are met, there is still the business of deciphering and translating the content of the records themselves to generate results that are well-adapted to the new context of interest. This involves, for instance, transforming observation records expressed in temporal units likely measured using a water clock referenced to the time to sunrise or sunset, and eclipse magnitudes given in si (fingers), where 12 fingers spans the diameter of the disk of eclipsed body, that is, the sun or moon. Finally, researchers recruited background knowledge about the historical and cultural context in which the observations were originally made in order to make a plausible argument about the timing of a particular eclipse. In the virtuoso example I want to discuss, Stephenson et al. (2016) determine a constraint on the long-term slowing of Earth’s rotation using a Babylonian record from 694 BC that states the Moon set while eclipsed. I explore the parallels between the epistemology of this sort of evidential forensics with strategies in historiography and archaeology arguing that it shares some features characteristic of each, the most important being that the epistemic utility of the artifact depends crucially on the accessibility of details regarding its provenance.
