Understanding, Normativity, and Scientific Practice Harry Lewendon-Evans PhD Thesis Department of Philosophy Durham University 2018 Recent work in epistemology and philosophy of science has argued that understanding is an important cognitive achievement that philosophers should seek to address for its own sake. This thesis outlines and defends a new account of scientific understanding that analyses the concept of understanding in terms of the concept of normativity. The central claim is that to understand means to grasp something in the light of norms. The thesis is divided into two parts: Part I (chapters one to three) addresses the question of the agency of understanding and Part II (chapters four to five) focuses on the vehicles of scientific understanding. Chapter One begins with an account of understanding drawn from the work of Martin Heidegger, which presents understanding as a practical, normative capacity for making sense of entities. Chapter Two builds on Robert Brandom’s normative inferentialism to argue that conceptual understanding is grounded in inferential rules embedded within norm-governed, social practices. Chapter Three argues that normativity should be located in the intersubjective nature of social practices. The chapters in Part II draw on and extend the account of understanding developed in Part I by focusing on how models and explanations function within scientific practice to facilitate scientific understanding. Chapter Four investigates the nature of model-based understanding. It defends the claim that constructing and using models enables a form of conceptual articulation which facilitates scientific understanding by rendering scientific phenomena intelligible. Chapter Five considers the connection between understanding and explanation through the role of explanatory discourse in scientific practice. I argue that the function of explanations is to sculpt and make explicit the norms of intelligibility required for scientific understanding. This thesis concludes that scientific understanding is an inherently norm-governed phenomenon that is unintelligible without reference to the normative dimension of our social and scientific practices.

This thesis focuses on the history of embryonic stem cell research, spanning in particular the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As yet, there has not been a comprehensive history of embryonic stem cell research carried out, which is a particular aim of this thesis. The first two chapters consider the conceptualisation of the stem cell, and the development and diversity of relevant disciplines and their establishment in the twentieth century; in particular, this covers heredity, genetics,embryology and development. This is illustrated through the use of experimental embryology, or ‘fantastical experiments’, that were proposed in the nineteenth century, and carried out in the twentieth. The third chapter considers the theoretical and practical links between cancer and embryonic cells. The fourth and fifth chapters explore the isolation and culture of murine and human embryonic stem cells, focusing on the social, political, and economic factors affecting stem cell research, and the motivations behind the isolation of embryonic stem cells in the 1980s and 1990s. The sixth chapter queries whether the history presented suggests that a new stem cell concept is emerging. There are three questions that this thesis aims to answer. Firstly, what are the (historical) social and political influences that affect (embryonic) stem cell research? Evidence presented suggests that this has occurred from the nineteenth century, and continues today. Secondly, this thesis queries the importance of cell fate, and cell fate studies, to embryonic stem cell research. Since one of the two abilities of stem cells is the ability to differentiate, cell fate and studies of cell fate are central to developing a stem cell concept, and may also be influential in changing that concept in the future. Lastly, this thesis asks which paradigms have affected embryonic stem cell research throughout its history. In particular, the genetic paradigm is shown to be influential from the early twentieth century onwards. More recently, it has been proposed that stem cell research needs to undergo a paradigm shift, from the stem cell entity view, to the stem cell state view. This is also explored through the thesis, with the aim of generating a better understanding of stem cells for future researchers.

Martha Nussbaum has produced a compelling account of how we might do justice to non-human animals, but in doing so she seems to have committed us to a project of ‘policing nature’, which appears to be at odds with many of the ethical commitments of the contemporary environmental movement. Intervening to make the circumstances of wild animals more conducive to their flourishing may be in accordance with the principles of Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, but it is at odds with the concerns of environmentalists who wish to ensure the functioning of ecosystems and the survival of species as an ethical imperative. Superficially, at least, it appears that one cannot endorse the capabilities approach and simultaneously be an environmentalist. In this thesis, I attempt to reconcile these two positions through appeal to the exercise of the virtues. While many of the premises of the capabilities approach and of the environmentalist accounts of ethics that I discuss are mutually exclusive, I suggest that an environmental virtue ethic, such as that described by Ronald Sandler, can justify many of the ethical stances that the environmentalist wishes us to adopt. In particular, characteristics of the virtue of humility can inform the agent as to why extending justice to wild animals is not a warranted course of action. I also apply virtue ethical considerations to the issues of species extinction and ecosystem destruction, areas in which the capabilities approach seems to offer little guidance. Thus, I propose augmenting our capabilities-based account of justice with an environmentally conscious appeal to the virtues in order to produce more consistent moral guidance with regard to the non-human world.

In this dissertation, I assess the ethical debate surrounding the development of pre-emptive psychiatry, and propose to reframe it around models of vulnerability. This leads me to advocate for nonspecific staging models over the creation of attenuated syndromes. Chapter 1 delineates the ‘mid-level’ approaches I selected for the ethical appraisal of various models of vulnerability: mainly, Beauchamp and Childress’ principlism and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. It is followed in Chapter 2 by an outline of the current state of research in pre-emptive psychiatry. I argue in Chapter 3 that the debate surrounding these new developments has missed an opportunity to discuss the ethical issues they raise in a constructive manner. Various conceptualisations of psychiatric vulnerability ought to be more clearly at the heart of this conversation. I explore in Chapter 4 the wide-ranging relevance of the concept of vulnerability in ethical theory, so as to explain in Chapter 5 how it can serve as the foundation of a normative approach that favours resilience and relational autonomy over outright protective responses to vulnerability. Consequently, I highlight in Chapter 6 the advantages of integrating more traditional nosologies into the larger framework of nonspecific staging models. I aim to show that, through fostering a greater focus on resilience rather than on diagnosis and treatment, hybrid diagnostic models promote a better management of the ethical issues associated with pre-emptive psychiatry. The main outcome of this project is a new framework for discussions regarding the ethics of pre-onset early detection and interventions in psychiatry, re-centring them around conceptualisations of vulnerability. Altogether, this dissertation shows how ethical concerns arise concretely in pre-emptive psychiatry, and defends its prospects for addressing them.

In this thesis I will examine the philosophy of the physicist Max Born (1882-1970). As well as his scientific work, Born wrote on a number of philosophical topics: causation, realism, determinism, and probability. They appear as an interest throughout his career, but he particularly concentrates on them from the 1940s onwards. Born is a significant figure in the development of quantum mechanics whose philosophical work has been left largely unexamined. It is the aim of this thesis to elucidate and to critically examine that work. I will give a defence of presentist historiography in the history and philosophy of science and a (relatively) brief biography of Born. With regards to causation, the thesis will argue that he holds that there exist principles regarding causal relations that have guided the development of physics and have, in the modern formulation of the subject, been confirmed as having an empirical status. I will argue that he is a selective realist, initially with regards to invariant properties and, later on, a structural realist. With regards to determinism, I will argue that Born has produced an argument, compatible with modern philosophical definitions of determinism, that we were never entitled to conclude from the success of classical mechanics that the world was deterministic. Finally, I will argue that Born holds an objective interpretation of probabilities in quantum mechanics which, due to his strong belief in the physical reality of quantum-mechanical probabilities and his apparent disbelief in the superposition of the wave-function, is most likely a long-run propensity theory.

Is the musically aesthetic an objective property, or an effect that emerges from, and is dependent on, our perceptual apparatus? Certain things clearly do not depend on perception: concrete physical objects like the screen in front of me continue to exist whether they are perceived or not. However, other things I perceive do not persist beyond their perception, most obviously perceptual illusions such as the Waterfall or Muller-Lyer illusions, or the illusion that is created when I stare at an object and press the side of my eye. This thesis offers a novel cross-disciplinary approach to musically aesthetic experience, where the musically aesthetic is presented as an effect of perception similar to such illusions; this is in opposition to the prevailing view in musicology and aesthetics that the musically aesthetic is a feature of objects that listeners become acquainted with. The perception-dependent view is characterised as what I call the phenomenal conception. This is contrasted with the abstract conception, where the musically aesthetic is taken to be independent of perception. Scruton’s arguments on the separation of tone from sound are used to characterise the latter, abstract view as involving acquaintance with a conceptual order that is independent of any particular instance of perception. The contrasting phenomenal view is initially argued for in the case of musical movement specifically: by demonstrating that such movement can be understood as psycho-acoustic using several models from music psychology, and elucidating musical movement as nonconceptual by showing that our beliefs about how music moves conflicts with our experience. The thesis’ purview is widened to the musically aesthetic generally and various issues relating to the distinction between phenomenal and abstract views are discussed, including: internalism and externalism about aesthetic experience, concessions a phenomenal view makes to certain putatively formalist notions and the explanatory problems that manifest when approaching musically aesthetic value.

There are different types of copular sentence. \textit{Cicero is tall} does not mean the same thing as \textit{Cicero is Tully}. The former is typically called a predication and the latter an identity. But where does this difference come from (and the difference between these sentences and \textit{Cicero is a Roman statesman}, \textit{This is Cicero}, and \textit{The culprit was Cicero} for that matter)? This thesis is an attempt to bring the combined forces of modern linguistics and philosophy together to understand how we make meaningfully distinct sentences. It is useful to focus on copular sentences for this task because they are the minimally-sized sentences in many of the world's languages. A debate in linguistics has persisted for some years about the status of sentences like \textit{The culprit was Cicero}, in particular, in terms of whether they should be aligned with predications or identities. The linguistic evidence points in different directions. I think there are conceptual clarifications that could elucidate the terms of this debate. I start by investigating the obvious logical starting point: logic. Can copular sentences really be exhaustively specified as logical predications or identities in the first place? What about syntax? Does it have a problem-free definition of predication that might serve as a way of distinguishing meanings? I answer in the negative in both cases. From there the copula itself is studied, and I argue that it isn't any kind of real lexical verb that can be semantically ambiguous (like the verb \textit{bank} can in \textit{I'm going down a driveway banked by boulders and wildflowers} vs.\ \textit{I banked the cheque then went for lunch}). I then give some examples of the sort of thing linguists have shown copulas actually can do. I argue that distinguishing copular sentence meanings is not something that can be truly \textit{explained} in logical or syntactic terms; the best we can hope for is to \textit{describe} the different uses of the biological capacity for language, to talk of `functions' of copular sentences and their components. I argue for an approach to a full description of copular sentences that is based mainly on use and information structure properties of the flankers of the copula. Different permutations of these give rise to different sentence types, and thus to a more pluralistic copular taxonomy. Syntax has a foundational role, but it does not serve to discriminate copular sentence meanings. Copular sentences are argued to be \textit{uniformly} syntactic predications. Overall, then, I argue that the taxonomy of copular sentences cannot be explained in terms of logical predication or logical identity. Rather, we can describe (not explain) the distinct meaning types of copular sentences in terms of the number of different licit permutations of flanker properties, where these are mainly use and information structure properties.

This thesis draws on the work of Franz Neumann, a critical theorist associated with the early Frankfurt School, to evaluate liberal arguments about political legitimacy and to develop an original account of the justification for the liberal state.

This thesis explores the modes of subjectivation and the forms of power encompassed by the epistemic category of the secular with specific reference to recent controversies over Islam in Europe. The inquiry moves from the observation that contemporary reflections on postsecularity conceived as a normative ideal of inclusion of religious sensibilities in secular societies tend not to be grounded in an exploration of the constitution of the moral subject under conditions of secularity. Accordingly, the key questions driving this thesis are: How does the secular episteme as a power/knowledge formation based on the separation between knowledge and faith affect the process of constitution of the secular subject, with specific reference to his/her practices of solidarity and exclusion? And, how is it possible to conceive the postsecular? Drawing on Michel Foucault and engaging with the work of scholars such as Talal Asad, José Casanova, Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Charles Taylor, Roberto Esposito, Jürgen Habermas, Pope Benedict XVI, William Connolly, and Martin Buber, I suggest that the process of secular subjectivation is characterised by a triple process of withdrawal from the empirical other, from the senses and from the transcendent Other/God that confines the self in an iron cage of subjectivity, and accounts for an immunitary reaction towards those perceived to be ‘other’. This framework is employed to read some recent controversies over Islam in Europe, including the French controversy over the headscarf, the publication of the so-called Danish cartoons, and the speech of Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg. Drawing on this analysis, the thesis concludes by laying down the foundations of a post-immunitary model of postsecularity that, through the recovery of the subject’s embodies dimension and the reappropriation of the transcendent Other/God as a common medium of identification between self and other, may help directing the always imperfect knowledge of the other into an act of love and pluralism’s disconcerting flow of becoming into possibilities of life yet to come.

This thesis is about how we develop as moral agents and come to realise the virtuous activity on which flourishing depends. Aristotle’s account of how this is effected is familiar: we become virtuous through practice of the actions in which virtue finds its expression. But how should we understand the difference between the doings of the learner and the activity of the virtuous agent, and what is it that happens when a learner does these things that results in her realisation of virtuous activity? Whilst both agents perform virtuous actions, the two are engaged in different activities: one is in the process of acquiring a disposition, the other is engaged in its exercise. But we can also see each as related to the actions they perform in different ways. The learner is not yet the author of her actions in the strict sense that the virtuous agent is, who chooses these actions as an expression of a settled way of seeing and valuing things; indeed, the learner’s actions stand in the relation of copy to those of the virtuous agent, or so I argue. How, then, does the learner’s practice of these alienable actions result in her becoming an author of virtuous actions in the strict sense? I argue that by seeing the learner as engaged in the imitation of a virtuous agent we can begin to explain this transition. In imitating a virtuous agent and adopting her perspective, the learner is positioned so as to perceive the value of virtuous action, and thus to discover its attraction. With the aid of Aristotle’s psychological works, I offer a picture of the learner’s habituation which shows how it is that through acting, her perceptions, desires and other capacities are shaped in such a way that she comes eventually to perceive things and to act in the way that the virtuous agent does.