Books by Angela Potochnik
Elements in Public Engagement with Science, 2024
Science is a product of society: in its funding, its participation, and its application. This Ele... more Science is a product of society: in its funding, its participation, and its application. This Element explores the relationship between science and the public with resources from philosophy of science. Chapter 1 defines the questions about science's relationship to the public and outlines science's obligation to the public. Chapter 2 considers the Vienna Circle as a case study in how science, philosophy, and the public can relate very differently than they do at present. Chapter 3 examines how public understanding of science can have a variety of different goals and introduces philosophical discussions of scientific understanding as a resource. Chapter 4 addresses public trust in science, including responding to science denial. Chapter 5 considers how expanded participation in science can contribute to public trust of science. Finally, Chapter 6 casts light on how science might discharge its obligations to the public.
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Scientific literacy is an essential aspect of an undergraduate education. Recipes for Science res... more Scientific literacy is an essential aspect of an undergraduate education. Recipes for Science responds to this need by providing an accessible introduction to the nature of science and scientific methods appropriate for any beginning college student. The book is adaptable to a wide variety of different courses, such as introductions to scientific reasoning, methods courses in scientific disciplines, science education, and philosophy of science.
Recipes for Science was first published in 2018, and a thoroughly revised second edition was published in 2024. Special features include contemporary and historical case studies from many fields of physical, life, and social sciences; visual aids to clarify and illustrate ideas; text boxes to explore related topics; plenty of exercises to support student recall and application of concepts; suggestions for further readings at the end of each chapter; a glossary with helpful definitions of key terms; and a companion website with course syllabi, PowerPoint presentations, additional exercises, and original short videos on key topics.
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Idealizations are assumptions made without regard for whether they are true and often with full k... more Idealizations are assumptions made without regard for whether they are true and often with full knowledge they are false. Physicists sometimes assume a surface is a frictionless plane, or that gases are 'ideal' or 'perfect.' Biologists sometimes assume a population of animals is infinite in size. And economists sometimes assume humans are perfectly rational agents. These are all idealizations.
In this book, I motivate a strong view of idealizations' centrality to science, and I reconsider the aims of science in light of that centrality. On the account I develop, science does not pursue truth directly, but instead aims to support human cognitive and practical ends. Those are projects to which idealizations can directly contribute in a number of ways.
The first three chapters are used to develop my account of idealization's central role in science. In Chapter One, I discuss how science is shaped by its human practitioners and by the world's complexity. Together, these two ideas inspire a view of science as the search for causal patterns, a search that relies heavily on idealizations. Idealizations contribute to science in a variety of ways, including by playing a positive representational role. These ideas are developed in Chapter Two. In Chapter Three, I detail case studies that demonstrate the ubiquity of idealization in science, as well as the wide range of purposes it serves.
The last four chapters explore the implications of this account of idealization for central philosophical debates about the aims of science. Chapter Four motivates the idea that the epistemic aim of science is not truth but human understanding. Understanding is a cognitive achievement, and, unlike truth, it can be directly furthered by idealizations. In Chapter Five, I develop an account of scientific explanation that does justice to how the production of understanding depends on human cognizers. Then, in Chapter Six, I challenge classic conceptions of scientific levels of organization and develop a view that better accords with idealized representation across all fields of science. Finally, Chapter Seven shows how this account of idealization and the aims of science expands the influence of human characteristics and values on science's aims and products, while also constraining scientific and metaphysical pluralism.
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New York: Routledge, 2018
This text provides an accessible introduction to the main concepts and methods of scientific reas... more This text provides an accessible introduction to the main concepts and methods of scientific reasoning. With the help of an array of contemporary and historical examples, definitions, visual aids, and exercises for active learning, the textbook helps to increase students’ scientific literacy. The first part of the book covers the definitive features of science: naturalism, experimentation, modeling, and their merits and limitations. The second part covers the main forms of inference in science: deductive, inductive, abductive, probabilistic, statistical, and causal. The book concludes with a discussion of explanation, theorizing and theory-change, and the relationship between science and society. The textbook is designed to be adaptable to a wide variety of different kinds of courses. In any of these different uses, the book helps students better navigate our scientific, 21st-century world, and it lays the foundation for more advanced undergraduate coursework in a wide variety of liberal arts and science courses.
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Papers by Angela Potochnik
Routledge eBooks, Nov 1, 2022
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The Philosophical Quarterly, Jan 27, 2023
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Scientific literacy is an essential aspect of an undergraduate education. Recipes for Science res... more Scientific literacy is an essential aspect of an undergraduate education. Recipes for Science responds to this need by providing an accessible introduction to the nature of science and scientific methods appropriate for any beginning college student. The book is adaptable to a wide variety of different courses, such as introductions to scientific reasoning, methods courses in scientific disciplines, science education, and philosophy of science. Recipes for Science was first published in 2018, and a thoroughly revised second edition was published in 2024. Special features include contemporary and historical case studies from many fields of physical, life, and social sciences; visual aids to clarify and illustrate ideas; text boxes to explore related topics; plenty of exercises to support student recall and application of concepts; suggestions for further readings at the end of each chapter; a glossary with helpful definitions of key terms; and a companion website with course syllabi, PowerPoint presentations, additional exercises, and original short videos on key topics.
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Routledge eBooks, Nov 1, 2022
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Idealizations are rampant and unchecked in science. That is, they exist throughout our best repre... more Idealizations are rampant and unchecked in science. That is, they exist throughout our best representations, and there is little focus on eliminating them or controlling their influence. This is because idealizations, despite their falsity, play a positive representational role. This account of idealization motivates a reconstrual of the aims of science. Science has a variety of epistemic and non-epistemic aims, and the ultimate epistemic aim is understanding, which can be furthered by sacrificing truth. The deemphasis of scientific truth drives a wedge between scientific results and any metaphysical implications regarding ontology, causation, or levels of organization.
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Philosophy of Science for Biologists, 2020
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Philosophy of Science, 2012
The concept of hierarchical organization is commonplace in science. Subatomic particles compose a... more The concept of hierarchical organization is commonplace in science. Subatomic particles compose atoms, which compose molecules; cells compose tissues, which compose organs, which compose organisms; etc. Hierarchical organization is particularly prominent in ecology, a field of research explicitly arranged around levels of ecological organization. The concept of levels of organization is also central to a variety of debates in philosophy of science. Yet many difficulties plague the concept of discrete hierarchical levels. In this paper, we show how these difficulties undermine various implications ascribed to hierarchical organization, and we suggest the concept of scale as a promising alternative to levels. Investigating causal processes at different scales offers a way to retain a notion of quasi-levels that avoids the difficulties inherent in the classic concept of hierarchical levels of organization. Throughout, our focus is on ecology, but the results generalize to other invocations of hierarchy in science and philosophy of science.
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Levels of Organization in the Biological Sciences, 2021
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Philosophy of Science for Biologists, 2020
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Levels of Organization in the Biological Sciences, 2021
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Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018
Philosophical accounts of scientific explanation tend to focus on developing a conception of the ... more Philosophical accounts of scientific explanation tend to focus on developing a conception of the kind of dependence that is explanatory, e.g., nomic, causal-mechanical, difference-making, etc. Disagreements about other features of explanation are often presented as secondary issues linked to specific accounts of explanatory dependence. As a result, many features of explanatory practices about which philosophers disagree have not received sufficient attention. This chapter articulates several of those features—eight, to be exact—and discusses some of the ideas that have been raised about each. The purpose of this chapter is not to defend any one conception of any of these features, but to distinguish among the relatively distinct features of explanation about which philosophers disagree and, for each, to clarify what is at stake. Most of these disagreements have little to do with the nature of explanatory dependence and, in particular, whether or not explanation is causal in nature.
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Trends in ecology & evolution, May 1, 2018
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Books by Angela Potochnik
Recipes for Science was first published in 2018, and a thoroughly revised second edition was published in 2024. Special features include contemporary and historical case studies from many fields of physical, life, and social sciences; visual aids to clarify and illustrate ideas; text boxes to explore related topics; plenty of exercises to support student recall and application of concepts; suggestions for further readings at the end of each chapter; a glossary with helpful definitions of key terms; and a companion website with course syllabi, PowerPoint presentations, additional exercises, and original short videos on key topics.
In this book, I motivate a strong view of idealizations' centrality to science, and I reconsider the aims of science in light of that centrality. On the account I develop, science does not pursue truth directly, but instead aims to support human cognitive and practical ends. Those are projects to which idealizations can directly contribute in a number of ways.
The first three chapters are used to develop my account of idealization's central role in science. In Chapter One, I discuss how science is shaped by its human practitioners and by the world's complexity. Together, these two ideas inspire a view of science as the search for causal patterns, a search that relies heavily on idealizations. Idealizations contribute to science in a variety of ways, including by playing a positive representational role. These ideas are developed in Chapter Two. In Chapter Three, I detail case studies that demonstrate the ubiquity of idealization in science, as well as the wide range of purposes it serves.
The last four chapters explore the implications of this account of idealization for central philosophical debates about the aims of science. Chapter Four motivates the idea that the epistemic aim of science is not truth but human understanding. Understanding is a cognitive achievement, and, unlike truth, it can be directly furthered by idealizations. In Chapter Five, I develop an account of scientific explanation that does justice to how the production of understanding depends on human cognizers. Then, in Chapter Six, I challenge classic conceptions of scientific levels of organization and develop a view that better accords with idealized representation across all fields of science. Finally, Chapter Seven shows how this account of idealization and the aims of science expands the influence of human characteristics and values on science's aims and products, while also constraining scientific and metaphysical pluralism.
Papers by Angela Potochnik
Recipes for Science was first published in 2018, and a thoroughly revised second edition was published in 2024. Special features include contemporary and historical case studies from many fields of physical, life, and social sciences; visual aids to clarify and illustrate ideas; text boxes to explore related topics; plenty of exercises to support student recall and application of concepts; suggestions for further readings at the end of each chapter; a glossary with helpful definitions of key terms; and a companion website with course syllabi, PowerPoint presentations, additional exercises, and original short videos on key topics.
In this book, I motivate a strong view of idealizations' centrality to science, and I reconsider the aims of science in light of that centrality. On the account I develop, science does not pursue truth directly, but instead aims to support human cognitive and practical ends. Those are projects to which idealizations can directly contribute in a number of ways.
The first three chapters are used to develop my account of idealization's central role in science. In Chapter One, I discuss how science is shaped by its human practitioners and by the world's complexity. Together, these two ideas inspire a view of science as the search for causal patterns, a search that relies heavily on idealizations. Idealizations contribute to science in a variety of ways, including by playing a positive representational role. These ideas are developed in Chapter Two. In Chapter Three, I detail case studies that demonstrate the ubiquity of idealization in science, as well as the wide range of purposes it serves.
The last four chapters explore the implications of this account of idealization for central philosophical debates about the aims of science. Chapter Four motivates the idea that the epistemic aim of science is not truth but human understanding. Understanding is a cognitive achievement, and, unlike truth, it can be directly furthered by idealizations. In Chapter Five, I develop an account of scientific explanation that does justice to how the production of understanding depends on human cognizers. Then, in Chapter Six, I challenge classic conceptions of scientific levels of organization and develop a view that better accords with idealized representation across all fields of science. Finally, Chapter Seven shows how this account of idealization and the aims of science expands the influence of human characteristics and values on science's aims and products, while also constraining scientific and metaphysical pluralism.