时间：2025年10月24日 09:30—11:30
地点：清华大学人文楼B206
主题：Structural realism and the Dependency Account of Explanation
主讲人：Jim Woodward (University of Pittsburgh)
This talk will explore some of the connections between a dependency relation/what-if-things-had- been-different (w)-account of explanation of the sort I have defended elsewhere, and a version of structural realism understood in terms of finding effective theories. Dependency relations are laws and causal relationships that can figure in answers to what-if-things-had-been- different questions and it is these that I propose to identify with "structure" in my version of structural realism. In the mathematicized sciences, dependency relations are typically described mathematically but we can extend the notion of structure to causal relations in disciplines like molecular biology which are largely not formulated mathematically. I will argue that in both mathematicized and non-mathematical sciences explanation is an important goal of science and that getting the dependency relations right in some domain is more important to successful explanation than getting the ontology or entities in that domain right. The result is arguably a kind of realism but realism about dependency relations, and less so about ontology. (I called this "instrumental realism" years ago. The idea is that we should be realists about the dependency relations-- what so-called instrumentalists tend to focus on -- and perhaps less so about the ontology. A pleasing feature of this view-- to me-- is that it is contrary to the views of many philosophers. Which suggests there is likely some truth in it.) Indeed, it is well-known that the “same” theory individuated in terms of a set of claims about dependency relations often can be associated with apparently very different ontologies, highlighting the derivative character of the latter for purposes of explanation. Moreover, we can often learn important facts about dependency relations while getting the ontology fundamentally wrong, at least from the perspective of later developments. (These claims are among the "structural realism" friendly commitments of the account I will propose.) Time permitting, I will also discuss the implications of this picture for the common philosophical project of "interpreting" scientific theories by finding a unique ontology (often with the expectation that this will be describable in ordinary or at least classical language) to associate with them. Even more time permitting, I will discuss the implications of this picture for claims about the role of "idealization" in science and the contention that scientific theories are full of "falsehoods".
Jim Woodward is Distinguished Professor, Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught from 2010 to 2022. Prior to that he was the J.O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor at the California Institute of Technology. Woodward works in general philosophy of science, with a particular focus on causation and explanation. He is the author of Making Things Happen which won the 2005 Lakatos Award and Causation with a Human Face (2021). Woodward is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2024 he received the Hempel Award from the Philosophy of Science Association.
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