Heidelberg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 2: History and Philosophy of Gravity

AGPhil 2.3: Vortrag

Montag, 21. März 2022, 17:30–18:00, AGPhil-H14

Holistic Eliminative Reasoning for Astronomy and Astrophysics — •Shannon Sylvie Abelson — Indiana University Bloomington, IN, United States

I argue that a promising epistemology for astronomy and astrophysics (A&A) involves a certain kind of eliminative reasoning. Unlike the traditional conceptions of such reasoning that propose to eliminate rival theories or models based upon quality of evidence, I build upon work by Paul Horwich (1982), Patrick Forber (2011), and Elisabeth Lloyd (2013; 2015) to argue that it is particular model assumptions (variables, parameters, etc.) that are weighed and eliminated. Rather than a veridical comparison between theory predictions and individual observational results, holistic eliminative reasoning has a web-like structure. Elimination is the end result of a multi-step reasoning program that holistically evaluates the introduction of a proposed assumption into the state space of previously accepted evidence. In particular and where possible, model assumptions should cohere with our well-confirmed pictures of dynamical processes and the mechanisms that underlie them. Holistic elimination then becomes a project of capturing dynamical accuracy. These ideas have been explored in the context of biology and genetics (see Lloyd, Lewontin, and Feldman (2008), Forber (2011) and Ratti (2015)), but have not been extended to A&A. I outline how this epistemic framework can be applied to competing dynamical pictures of the mechanisms and conditions underlying the evolutionary histories of black holes, including gas accretion, intermediate mass black hole mergers, and direct-collapse black hole models.