The Faculty Colloquia aim to cover the broad scope of Erasmus School of Philosophy (ESPhil), in analytic and continental philosophy as well as the history of philosophy. In this third session of 2022-2023, Henk de Regt (Radboud University, Nijmegen) will talk about his understanding of scientific understanding.
It is widely acknowledged that a central aim of science is to achieve understanding of the world around us, and that possessing such understanding is highly important in our present-day society. But what precisely is scientific understanding, and when is it achieved? In my talk, I will address these questions and present the philosophical theory of scientific understanding that I have developed in my book Understanding Scientific Understanding (OUP, 2017). In contrast to most existing studies of understanding, my approach takes seriously scientists’ own views on understanding and their contextual variation. I will illustrate my contextual theory with a case study from the history of science.
