The Logic and Philosophy of Science Group is pleased to welcome as guest speaker Miguel Ohnesorge, an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Boston University. Dr. Ohnesorge is a philosopher of science and a historian of science and philosophy. He is broadly interested in the concepts and methods that structure scientific inquiry (e.g., measurement, quantity, evidence), and much of his work uses history to study these concerns. He research also attends to the logic, purpose, and evidential support of quantitative measures, especially when we apply them to very complex and socially consequential phenomena like earthquakes or human verbal ability.
Talk Title
Quantitative Science without Experiments
Talk Abstract
There are longstanding debates about which sciences can quantify the attributes they study. While these debates are especially prominent in the human sciences – psychology, medicine, economics, etc –, they draw heavily from the history and practice of quantitative physics. If we understand the conditions under which we first quantified attributes like temperature or acceleration, the basic intuition goes, we can judge whether we will be able to achieve quantitative measurement elsewhere.
We identify a basic problem within these debates: All prominent exemplars of physical quantification are drawn from experimental physics. As a result, researchers in measurement theory, psychology, and philosophy, have (i) misidentified experimental control as a necessary condition for quantification and (ii) overlooked central methodological lessons on how quantification without experiment might succeed.
To remedy this situation, we present novel historical research on how twentieth-century seismologists quantified “earthquake size” without being able to experimentally control earthquakes. The study serves to (i) refute the idea that experimental control is a necessary condition for quantification and (ii) provide a positive model on how quantitative measurement might be achieved without high degrees of experimental control. We then apply that model to cutting-edge measurements in psychology to illustrate its payoffs in understanding the potential and persistent problems of quantification in the human sciences.
About the Logic and Philosophy of Science Group
One of six departmental Research Interest Groups, the Logic and Philosophy of Science Group hosts talks on logic, general philosophy of science, and philosophy of the particular sciences, as well as talks in allied areas such as formal epistemology, decision theory, and the metaphysics of science.
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