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Jacob Stegenga, "Heart of Science: A Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
On December 12, Disney invites you to go behind the scenes with Taylor Swift in an exclusive six episode docuseries. I wanted to give something to the fans that they didn't expect. The only thing left is to close the book the end of an era and don't miss Taylor Swift. The Eras Tour, the final show featuring for the first time the Tortured poets department. Streaming December 12th only on Disney. I was groomed to become one of his wives. This week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her. I want to see action and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk, you need to start walking the walk now. It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh. Today I'm here with Dr. Jacob Estegenga about his most recent book, a very fascinating topic. The book we're going to discuss is called Heart of a Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry. The book was just published by Chicago University Press and Dr. Jacob Sekenga is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He's the author of Medical Nihilism and Care and Cure An Introduction to Philosophy of Medicine. Jacob, welcome to New Books Network.
- [01:50]
A
Thanks for having me.
- [01:51]
B
Before we start talking about the book, I would appreciate it if you could just very briefly introduce yourself, tell us about your field of expertise, and then more importantly, how did the idea of this book come to you? There are a lot of books on the philosophy of science or history of philosophy of science or scientific inquiry, but I'm keen to know how you approach the topic differently from existing books.
- [02:15]
A
Sure, yeah. Thanks. So, as you said in your introduction, I'm a philosopher of science. I'm based at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Most of my career I was based at the University of Cambridge as a professor. I moved to Singapore two years ago, but my training was in North America. I'm from Canada and I studied in Canada and I did my PhD in the United States. So my training really was in both the sciences and philosophy, philosophy of science, and most of my early work in my career was focused on medicine. So those books you mentioned, Medical Nihilism and Care and Cure, those are books in philosophy of medicine. But I view myself as a philosopher of science, primarily a general philosopher of science. I'm interested in these Very general questions and very fundamental questions about science. And I've been thinking about the topics that go into this book for really a long time. I didn't actually imagine that I would write a book like this. I just sort of dwelled on the various questions that motivate the book for many, many, many years. You know, as a philosopher of science, you read a lot and you go to conferences and you see other people presenting their work. And so you're dwelling on these topics for many years. Um, and then a few years ago, I was coming off of a, coming off of a break, a sabbatical, and I was thinking more and more about the topics that feed into this book. And at that time I built up a really, really great group of PhD students at the University of Cambridge. So we had this research group that was very talented, very intense, met every week reading draft papers or chapters of each other, and we were pushing each other really hard. And during that time, this was very early in 2023, say January 2023, I started writing parts of this book. So I wrote one paper, one draft. I circulated it among my research group and they gave me a lot of critical feedback on it. And then I had an idea for another paper. So I wrote that and then another paper, and before I knew it, I had six, seven chapters over six or seven months. And I started to see a book kind of coming together. And so then I just spent the next year, two years finishing up the book. So that's where the book came from. In short, it kind of took me by surprise. I hadn't really planned to write a book like this long in advance. It's just that a few ideas came to me and you asked about the kind of distinguishing feature of the book or what sets it apart from other books in philosophy of science. And in part, that's why it's this feature that motivated me to write the book in the first place. So what I had started to notice in a lot of the existing work in philosophy of science is that it's product oriented rather than process oriented in the sense that there's a real focus on what science's achievements are and basing our philosophical and evaluative concepts about science on science achieving its end. So, for example, some philosophers say that science can routinely achieve truth, and therefore we should base our evaluative concepts about science on that, on the achievement of truth. And my thinking at the time was that a process oriented approach to philosophy of science could freshen up many topics and many debates in philosophy of science. So I focus on justification or the process of scientific inquiry, rather than on the discovery of truth or knowledge, the product of scientific inquiry. So that's kind of what sets the book apart.
- [06:25]
B
This is wonderful, actually. That was my next question. But you made a lot of important points. I really like the idea that you mentioned that most of the books on philosophy of science are actually product oriented. They don't really care so much about that whole process. And I think I could be wrong. I'm not a philosopher of science, so
- [06:46]
A
I'll leave it to you to correct
- [06:47]
B
me if I'm wrong. But I guess there's a lot of obsession in the scientific community with the idea of truth, scientific truth or facts. But you make a simple, but at the same time a radical claim. That's actually the heart of your book. And I guess that's the title of the book, the Heart of Science. The heart of science is justification, as you just mentioned, rather than truth. But can you expand on that, tell us what it means and how does, let's say recentering our scientific endeavor around the idea of justification? How does it give us, how does it give us more, let's say, realistic and a fair way to evaluate science?
- [07:24]
A
Yeah, Good, thanks. So before I directly answer that question, I do want to clarify that. And sometimes people hear me speak about the book or they read the book and they misunderstand a really fundamental point. I'm not saying that truth is unimportant or knowledge is unimportant, or science can't achieve truth. In fact, I spend a couple of chapters arguing exactly the opposite in the book. So truth is extremely important. A particular form of truth, what I call common knowledge, is the constitutive aim of science. And science at its best achieves that aim. So the product of science at its very best is a very special kind of knowledge. And so that's a really important point that I argue for in a couple of chapters of the book. But the emphasis on justification or the heart of science. Right. The title of the book, the heart of Science, is justification. The emphasis there is about when we are articulating evaluative concepts for science, we should focus on justification rather than truth. So an evaluative concept is like a concept that has both a descriptive element and a normative element or an evaluative element. So for example, if I say morteza is brave, what I'm doing is I'm simultaneously describing features of your behavioral disposition, but I'm also praising. Right, so that word brave does two things at once. It conveys certain features of one's behavior or one's disposition. And it does so in a positive evaluative way. So some philosophers sometimes call this a fic concept or I use the term evaluative concept. And so we have a lot of evaluative concepts for science. So for example, scientific progress or scientific credit, um, and, or even just very basic notions of like objectivity or even the adjective scientific, right? Scientific is at this, at, at the same time both a descriptive feature of some endeavor like oh, that person is scientific or that activity is scientific, but it's also a term of praise, right? So oh, that theory is scientific rather than say, being pseudo scientific, or that person takes a scientific approach to blah, blah, blah. So the very adjective scientific is a thick evaluative concept. And then there are these more fine grained evaluative concepts like scientific credit and scientific progress. And what I argue in the book, really the key sort of fundamental claim of the book, the thesis, is that those evaluative concepts, the kind of success conditions that we build into those evaluative concepts, should be based on the extent to which some bit of scientific work properly justifies the claims that are being made rather than the claims being true. So the focus is on the process of justification, the kind of steps that scientists take in doing their work rather than the outcome. Now you ask why does that focus, like centering justification rather than truth in our evaluative concepts, why does that give us a kind of realistic way or a fair way to evaluate science? And in short, that's because the whole point of doing science, the whole point of science at its cutting edge is to discover truths. And so typically the articulation of some claim as true or as false, the discovery that some claim is true takes time and it's usually done in retrospect. So the determination that some cutting edge scientific claim is true or false can take years, decades, and sometimes even centuries. And so that's a kind of retrospective determination of some claim being true that takes time. So science at its cutting edge doesn't have access to whether or not some claim is true or false, but science at the cutting edge does have access to the extent to which some bit of scientific work is justificatory or not. So that's one of the key reasons is that degree of justification is accessible in real time as science is playing out, whereas access to truth is not. So, for example, suppose, just to use a kind of day to day example, just a kind of metaphor to illustrate the idea, suppose you, you are baking a loaf of bread and you want to Know if you're doing it well, of course you can take a product oriented stance on evaluation. You can wait until the bread is baked, you get it out of the oven and then you taste it. And what you're doing is you're judging the quality of the output and that's fine if you have access to the output. That's of course a reasonable thing to do. But another equally reasonable thing to do would be to carefully follow the recipe to make sure that the amount of salt you're putting in is what the recipe stipulates it should be, that the oven is at the right temperature and so on. So you take care in following the steps of the recipe. So that would be a process oriented evaluative stance, which is, you know, a very important stance to take. Now, in the context of science, science at the cutting edge, we routinely don't have access to the baked bread. That's the truth. We have to wait years, sometimes decades or centuries to get access to the baked bread of truth. But we do have access to whether or not the work is justificatory. So that's the key idea.
- [13:28]
B
And I'm glad you made that clarification. You're absolutely right. When we talk about justification of knowledge, it's not actually a rejection of the idea of truth. And unfortunately, it's a reductive argument that I've heard a lot of either pre. Let's say, let's say science crusaders make and at the same time those who are skeptical of science as well. But let me ask another question about the aim of science. One of the arguments in the book you make is that the aim of science, as we just mentioned, is sort of common knowledge rather than truth. And that doesn't mean truth. That does not mean truth doesn't matter. But I'm keen to know if we look at the aim of science as being common knowledge, that idea of knowledge, how does it, what does that add beyond knowledge? And how does it help us in terms of, how does it help us to change public trust when it comes to debates and science and skepticism?
- [14:27]
A
Yeah, good. Yeah, thanks. So there's really a lot packed into that question. So I'll try to take things sort of one step at a time here. So. Right. You're correctly noting that one of the major chapters of the book, one of the foundational chapters, argues that the constitutive aim of science is what I call common knowledge. Now, common knowledge has a particular technical definition. It doesn't mean something like common sense, like, oh, everybody knows the sky is blue. That's common sense. Rather, common knowledge is a true claim for which there's broad consensus in a relevant community and there's broad consensus about the justification for that claim. And that's a very sort of, that's a distinctively scientific feature and it's an important feature of science. So truth here is built into the constitutive aim of science because common knowledge requires some claim to be true. And also going back to the notion of justification, this is a very standard idea in philosophy. And justification is a means towards achieving truth and knowledge. So if you have some true claim and that true claim is justified, then you're on your way to knowledge. So justification is very important. Truth is very important. Okay, so another kind of clarifatory remark here before proceeding is that when I argue that the constitutive aim of science is common knowledge, what I'm not doing is I'm not saying that the actual aims of particular scientists is common knowledge, although I think often that is the case. And I'm not saying that this particular scientific institution, like my university or some grant funding agency, that they have the aim of common knowledge, although I think often they do. So this isn't about the aims of particular people or particular concrete institutions. Rather it's about the constitutive aim of the abstract institution, science. So we can think of a constitutive aim, like for example, chess. So chess is an institution, the game chess, and it has a constitutive aim, namely victory, victory by checkmate. But if I play chess, I might have a particular motivation for playing. I just want to have fun, it doesn't matter if I win. Or when you play chess, you might be doing it to make money, or you might be doing it to entertain your five year old nephew, or whatever. So we all have different aims for playing chess, but when we're actually engaged in a game of chess, we're also kind of governed by the constitutive aim of chess. Aim we in this case victory, victory by checkmate. So that's what I mean by the constitutive aim of science. It doesn't matter what the particular aim of this scientist is or that scientist. Science as such, science as an abstract institution, has the constitutive aim of common knowledge. And as I said, common knowledge is the special kind of knowledge, knowledge in which there's a broad, strong consensus about a claim and consensus about the justification of for that claim. So I spent an entire chapter arguing for that. And your question here is what's special about common knowledge? In a way that goes beyond mere knowledge? And that's a really important question. And you're also asking, how does the importance of. How does emphasizing common knowledge help us make sense of or intervene on concerns about public trust and public trust in science? So let me take that first question. Philosophers, when they speak about knowledge, they're often referring to the cognitive state of a particular individual person. So if I say I know that there's a cup of coffee on this table, I'm referring to me in the first person. I. And so the knowledge state here is a state of a particular individual person. And I think scientific knowledge is special in the sense that it's not about the cognitive states of individual people and it's not about the summation of the cognitive states of a bunch of individual people. Rather, scientific knowledge is like a public repository. It's like an abstract encyclopedia. This is a very old idea. It goes back to historical philosophers like Leibniz, and I'm keen to sort of resuscitate this idea. So I think of scientific knowledge in this kind of encyclopedic way. So that's one way in which this notion of common knowledge goes beyond mere knowledge. But moreover, common knowledge is special in a variety of practical social ways.
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B
Practical.
- [19:21]
A
So knowledge itself, common knowledge or not, is clearly important because it allows us to get by in the world, and it allows us to make sense of the world, to understand the world and to control it, to intervene on it. So if you know what the weather's going to be like tomorrow, you can plan what to wear, you can plan whether or not to carry an umbrella. Knowledge, of course, just helps us get by in the world. Common knowledge is especially valuable because involves multiple people, involves, say, a community or society. And so common knowledge allows us to cooperate. It allows us to coordinate, often on really complex social phenomena. So, for example, if we have common knowledge about, say, climate change, then we can work together as a community to enact policies to help mitigate against climate change. Or if we have common knowledge about, say, the properties of the coronavirus, then we can enact social policies to try to control the coronavirus. And so common knowledge is an extremely important feature of social life. And that's one of the kind of benefits of. One of the goods of science, is that it can get us common knowledge. And then emphasizing the importance of common knowledge has all these slightly more intellectual benefits as well. So notice that there's like a publicity requirement on common knowledge. In other words, in order for us to have common knowledge, we've got to be in the business of publicly articulating our reasons for some claim in question and exposing those reasons to criticism from others. And then that then allows us to improve upon those reasons. And that's a really, really core aspect of science. So science has all of these channels of communication, like the scientific article, the conferences, training PhD students writing reports. Science has all these channels of communication that essentially force scientists to articulate reasons for their conclusions. And that articulation of reasons exposes those scientists to public criticism and that affords them the opportunity to improve upon those reasons. And science is just doing that all the time. So that's a very special making feature of science. And so this gets then to your next question about public trust in science. That special making feature of science, that public articulation of reasons, the exposure of reasons to criticism and then the improvement upon those reasons is what gets science its objectivity. It's what frees science from idiosyncratic biases. It's what makes science more and more free of, say, ethical, like social values and biasing values, methodological flaws in scientific work and so on. And so when science is moving towards common knowledge and in fact finally achieves common knowledge, that creates the conditions under which the results of that scientific work should be trusted. And so science at its best, and I don't mean all of science, it's a very naive view of science to think that science always should be trusted, but science at its best should achieve and should be granted trust by the public and by policymakers when and particularly when science is achieving common knowledge.
- [22:42]
B
To be honest, I didn't realize how packed my question was, but you did a wonderful job talking about different aspects. Yeah, yeah. When you were explaining about the common trust, I mean, the public trust in science, I was just reminded of this never ending debate that every now and then, you know, gets more attention than the media. That whole idea of indigenous science. I used to live in New Zealand for parts of my life and now I live in Australia. So and I guess it was three or four years ago, if I'm not mistaken. There was again, Dawkins was involved in this whole idea, completely rejecting indigenous knowledge, or let's say rejecting it because it's not science, it doesn't reveal truth or it can't go through that scientific inquiry, that scientific method. I'm keen to know your thoughts. If we look at, if the aim of science is around justification, how can we build more trust or how can we make more, let's say, hardcore scientists, maybe accepting, or I could be wrong, maybe the question is that it should be even more critical. I don't know. I'll leave it to you to correct me of Indigenous knowledge, let's say, or science, for want of a better word.
- [23:58]
A
Okay, yeah. Again, there's really a lot packed into your question, so I'm sorry for my like, long winded answers to your questions, but you're asking really good and, and rich questions. Okay, so, yeah, Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous forms of inquiry, Indigenous science. What should we say about this? So, right, as you know, there are these kind of science warrior figures. You're referring to Dawkins, who takes an especially critical stance towards this idea of Indigenous knowledge. And I think basically what you're asking is, now that I've written this book, what would I say about that topic? I don't mention it so much. I don't mention these kinds of ideas in the book, but it's a really interesting question to think through. Um, I think so. I think on the one hand, part of what I argue in, in the book is that having as many diverse perspectives in a research community as possible is important. And that's because having diverse perspectives, diverse methods, diverse metaphysical assumptions, diverse forms of inquiry, all of that kind of epistemic diversity can help control for idiosyncratic biases. There's a lot of examples of this in the history of science. So for example, primatology in the 20th century, until say the 1960s and 1970s was dominated by middle aged white men. And that led to assumptions about say, primate behavior that looked kind of male centric. And then with the broader inclusion of a more diverse group of primatologists, we just learned more truths about primate behavior, primate social structure. And so that's a very general point about science and that's important to your question because Indigenous forms of inquiry contribute to that kind of diversity. So Indigenous knowledge at the very least can be a means toward helping science ultimately become more objective, to become less biased. That's one, one, one answer that I would take. One, one idea that I would at least entertain, entertain quite seriously. Um, sometimes when people are speaking about Indigenous knowledge, what they have in mind is the thought that there, there are particular established claims to thinking about the world, say to thinking about medical practice, say like indigenous forms of medical practice, those are settled and they may come into conflict with so called Western science or mainstream science. And when they do, there's a question about who's got to be the victor, who's got to win out, or maybe more maybe we could be pluralist and sort of, you know, let, let both Sides have claims to describing the way the world is. Now on this issue, I am a bit old fashioned. I mean, I would say basically that when there's a conflict in description about the nature of the world, we should just be trying to resolve that conflict in the best way possible. We should just be deploying our scientific justificatory tools as well as we can. And one of the things that makes mainstream standard science so great is going back to my answer to your last question is the development and refinement of those justificatory tools. You know, experimental methodologies, statistical tests, theoretical models, and so on. And so that's what makes science so successful. And so when it comes to actual claims about the world, you know, I'm gonna, I would speculate, and I think on pretty good grounds that if we had to referee between, you know, this side and that side, mainstream science is, is going to win out most of the time. But then there's a kind of added dimension to thinking about the relationship between mainstream science and indigenous science, which is more about cultural sensitivity rather than refereeing claims about the world. Because often the kind of science warrior type like Dawkins is articulating one's view in a way which may be sort of strictly true on metaphysical grounds or epistemological grounds, but is articulated in a way which is culturally insensitive. And so it would be better for careful commentators about science to find ways to articulate those views about the relationship between mainstream science and indigenous science in sort of more, more nuanced fashion. Your little one grew three inches overnight. Adorable. Also expensive. Sell their pint sized pieces on Depop and list them in minutes with no selling fees because somewhere a dad refuses to pay full price for the clothes his kids will outgrow tomorrow and he's ready to buy your son's entire wardrobe. Wardrobe right now. Consider your future growth Bird budget secured. Start selling on Depop where taste recognizes taste. Payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details.
- [29:18]
B
And I think the idea of science and value, again, there are a lot of science warriors, as you mentioned, that if they believe that science is completely objective, it cannot, it should not be the way they put it, contaminated by ideology, let's say. And part of your book, I'm keen to know, what does it mean in practice? What does it look like, let's say in practice, I'm quoting from your book to act as if science should be value free. And how's it different from pretending values, pretending values aren't present in science. Could science ever be Value free in practice.
- [30:00]
A
Right, okay, good, thanks. Yeah. So your question here is channeling the key thesis of one of the chapters of the book. I should say that this chapter comes out of work that I've done with a friend of mine, Tarun Menon, over many years. We've written several articles together on this topic. And so the thesis that Tarunai have been arguing for is a novel version of what philosophers call the value free ideal for science. So the value free ideal says particular aspects of science, namely scientific inference itself should be value free one way or the other. Now the backstory here is that clearly values influence science in all sorts of ways. So the kind of short answer to your last question there can science ever be value free? The short answer is a resounding no, because broadly construed values influence science in all sorts of ways. So values influence, for example, the choice of which topics to research in the first place. Scientists can get grants to build bigger bombs or they can build safer hospitals. So the choice of research topic, constraints on research methods. So there's just some things that scientists can do and can't do based on very basic ethical constraints or what technologies to develop after the basic scientific work is done. So that's also clearly a value laden decision. So science has all of these different dimensions that are value permeated. Values influence science in all of those ways. But in philosophy there's been this very active, quite a boutique debate about the value free ideal, about a very narrow way in which values influence science. The question here is, can and should values influence scientific reasoning itself? The value free ideal says no. And there's been, surprisingly to my mind, in the last 30 years or so, many critics of the value free ideal. So my friend Tarun and I, we've been trying to resuscitate this value free ideal. We've been trying to argue that scientific reasoning at its best should be value free, or at the very least, scientists should act as if science should be value free. Now what that means is scientists should be constantly striving to improve their scientific reasoning, to improve their scientific methodology, to improve their basic scientific methods, their statistical tools and so on, in a way that as far as possible, eliminates the influence of values. So in other words, we want science to be as objective as possible, just based on the way the world is. You were asking can science ever be value free in that particular sense? I argue that it can. So if we think about some very basic scientific findings, like some established findings, like, you know, the sun is at the center of the solar system, or the structure of DNA is a double helix, or the COVID 19 pandemic was caused by a virus. Right. These are very basic claims. We have just an overwhelming mountain of evidence that supports those claims. Those claims are value free. So science at its best can be value free. Now, that doesn't involve just sort of pretending that values aren't present. Right. Because these are cases in which
- [33:45]
B
the
- [33:45]
A
final result of long hard scientific work are claims that are value free. So there's no pretense involved at all. I think the worry about pretense pretending the values aren't there, when they pretend they perhaps are, comes more in scientific work which is less settled, which hasn't had the time to become fully objective, and especially scientific work, which is policy facing. So think about a lot of the scientific work that went into guiding policymakers during the COVID 19 pandemic. These are examples that I draw on a lot in the book. Examples from COVID 19 that science happened really quickly under extreme time pressure. For example, the modeling, the projection work that was done to make predictions about the spread of the virus in different countries over time, that modeling work was done really quickly under time pressure and was directly fed to policymakers to inform, say, lockdown policies and vaccine mandates. Was that science value free? I would argue, and I think many would agree, that that science was not value free. It was shot through with values and that influenced the objectivity of the resulting findings. And so just science just didn't have the kind of luxury, the time to become as objective as science can be at its best. So again, sorry for the long winded answer, but there's really a lot packed into your questions.
- [35:20]
B
Yeah, I'm aware that I'm asking terribly generic questions because I want to cover as many chapters as I can in the limited amount of time that I have. But the idea is to provide a very broad overview of the different concept and themes of the book to the audience. And I think you're doing a wonderful job in kind of piquing everybody's curiosity to read the book, to be able to get more out of it. Speaking of value, there's another, I guess, controversial topic or issue in the whole debate about science. And that's something you discuss in the book, which is about the idea of diverse perspectives. Again, a lot of science warriors are against the whole idea of diversity because science is objective according to them. But how can we, or how do diverse perspective, let's say, help reduce and even multiply that value influence in scientific inferences?
- [36:16]
A
Yeah, thanks for this question. So I was starting to touch on this when we were speaking about indigenous knowledge. I'll keep this answer short. So, yeah, there's a view in philosophy of science, I think this view is correct, basically, which says that having a diverse scientific community can help that community achieve objectivity. Because the more diverse the community is in its various perspectives, the more that community is able to make explicit potential biases and then mitigate those biases. So diversity of perspectives is basically a bias exposing mechanism. And again, there's a lot of examples of this in the history of science. So yeah, that's my short answer to your question.
- [37:16]
B
And another topic that I'm really keen to discuss is scientific progress. What are some of the indicators in the field? Again, if we look at science as justification, the aim of science being justification, what does scientific progress mean? And what are the indicators that the particular scientific field is making progress before even scientists can agree and have consensus on, on what is truth, scientific truth in that field.
- [37:46]
A
Yeah, great, great. Okay, so just to repeat, so the aim of science is common knowledge. But I argue that our evaluative standards for science should not be based on the achievement of common knowledge, but rather should be based on the extent to which some unit of scientific work engages in good justificatory practices. And so one can have an account of progress which is end oriented, like namely accumulating truth or accumulating knowledge, for example. And I argue instead that a good account of scientific progress is means oriented, taking the steps towards achieving truth or knowledge. So we can think of another metaphor. Think about a person who was climbing a mountain. You might have a kind of progress account of mountain climbing which stipulates that progress is made once the mountain has been, once the peak has been summited. Or you can have an account of progress which involves taking the good and required steps towards climbing the mountain. So namely one step after another, physically, actually climbing, but also all the preparatory steps, like making sure the climber's got enough water, the backpack, enough food, proper clothing and so on, and background training. So we can take those quality of process as the basis for an account of progress. And that's what I argue for in the case of scientific progress. Scientific progress should be articulated in means terms rather than ends terms. And then you're asking, so what are the indicators that a field is making progress? And that's one of the virtues of my account is that quality of justification is typically the kind of thing that people can assess in real time, rather than achievement of truth or achievement of knowledge, which as I said, can take centuries Just to give you an example of that latter point, when Copernicus devised his sun centered model of the solar system, which of course we know is true, it took other astronomers about 100 years or more than 100 years to finally come around and start really fully accepting the sun centered model as true. So it took about more than a century for astronomy to determine that the sun centered model of the solar system was true. That's an extreme example in science, but 20th century science is filled with examples that involve, say, a decade or two before the scientific community determines that some claim is true. So the advantage of my account is that scientific progress is accessible in real time by focusing on justification rather than achievement of truth or knowledge. Because scientists are able to judge each other's, the quality of each other's scientific work, the methodological features of each other's scientific work, whether or not the scientific work is relatively free from biases, whether or not there were attempts to control those biases, whether or not the scientific reasoning itself was sound, whether or not the conclusions are sufficiently modest hedged. Those are the kinds of things that are routinely publicly accessible to critics. And so quality of justification is accessible to scientists themselves and to their critics and to the public. Whereas truth and knowledge in real time is not
- [41:38]
B
just one. I mean, before we come to the end of this interview, I know that you've just recently published this book and it's just excruciating to finish a book that I understand. But I'm just keen to know if there is any other project or books you have in mind or anything underway that might be published sometime soon.
- [42:00]
A
Yeah, thanks for that question. Well, I've always got a handful of projects on the go that are smaller in scale than a book. Research projects that will lead to one article or three articles. So I'm always doing that and I often do that in collaboration with others. So co authoring, say with two or three other authors. So I've got a lot of that on the go. But I really like to work with a big project in front of me, like a book length project in front of me. My first book took me six years to write. I thought it would take me two, but I was young and ambitious at the time. It took me six years. My second book took me about two years to write and this book took me about two or three years to write. So I like to work with that scale of a project in front of me. But, and I have been thinking about what that's going to be like, I haven't fully settled on it yet one structural feature of my next book that I'd like to see is I'd like to try to basically bend the genre of an academic book. And I'd be very curious to hear from you and your listeners about model examples of that. So an academic book which is a serious research book, but does so in a way which breaks the mold of the traditional academic manuscript. So one model for me is a really wonderful book by the author Philip Sands called East west street, which is a history of the concepts crime against humanity and genocide. And the way he writes the book is extremely personal, but also biographical. So he traces the. The stories of the main architects of those concepts and it's just written in a totally fantastic way. So I'm looking for models like that for my next book because I want to bring that kind of writing to philosophy in terms of substance. I'm more and more changing gears. I'm moving away from philosophy of science to others of philosophy. So I'm currently thinking a lot about ethics of war because sadly, as you know, our world today has become much more warlike with the terrible war in Ukraine and now in the Middle East. Even in my region recently we had this war between Thailand and Cambodia, which thankfully it didn't last too long. So I'm thinking a lot about the ethics of war and the philosophical literature on ethics of war. It's very interesting, it's very rich. But there are ways in which I can see myself contributing to that with a book length project. So that's the main topic that I have in mind these days.
- [44:48]
B
It's all wonderful ideas, especially these days with the, you know, with advances in technology, AI autonomous systems and they use in war zones. And I think it's a fantastic topic and I'm sure it will be of interest to the general public as well to read about that, especially AI. Yeah. Dr. Jacob, thank you very much for your time. I really enjoyed talking to you. The book we just discussed was Hearts of Science, published by Chicago University Press. What we just discussed was scratching the surface. There are lots of wonderful ideas and I must say that it is an academic world, but most of Chicago University Press books, I find they are really, really accessible to the public as well. I'm no background in philosopher of science. I really enjoyed your book and I'm sure our listeners will enjoy reading it too. So I do strongly recommend our listeners to pick up the book and read it to be able to better engage with the ideas and get more details and depth about some of the ideas we just discussed today. Jacob, thank you so much for your time.
- [45:52]
A
Thank you very much.