Understanding and the Aims of Science

Scientific understanding is increasingly focal as a topic in its own right, distinct from questions about scientific explanation. In this session, we tackle the issue of what the nature of scientific understanding indicates about the aims of science, especially its epistemic aim(s). Each session participant has published a book in 2017 that develops a view of the aims of science with understanding at the center. Yet, the differences among the resulting views are significant. A central point of disagreement regards the role of falsehoods in providing understanding, most notably idealizations, and the epistemic value of such falsehoods. Some contributors take idealizations and other falsehoods to show that accuracy cannot be science's aim; others believe these falsehoods are justified merely by their instrumental epistemic value. This relates to a second important point of disagreement: whether pluralism about scientific aims and methods results chiefly from pragmatic considerations, epistemic considerations, or some combination thereof. This exchange will help define the lay of the land for positions regarding the nature of scientific understanding and its relationship to other putative aims of science.