Jacob Stegenga, "Heart of Science: A Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

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Welcome to the new books network.

Hello everyone.

Welcome to another episode of new books network.

This is your host, Moteza Haji Zadev.

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 Science, a philosophy of scientific

inquiry.

The book was just published by Chicago University Press, and Dr. Jacob Estegenga is professor

of philosophy in the School of Humanities at Nanyang, the technological university in

Singapore.

He's the author of medical, nihilism, and care, and cure, and his deduction to philosophy

of medicine.

Jacob, welcome to the new books network.

Thanks for having me.

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 philosophy of science or scientific

inquiry, but I'm keen to know how you approach the topic differently from existing books.

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.

Most of my early work in my career was focused on medicine.

So those books he 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.

And then a few years ago, I was 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.

And then every week, reading draft papers or chapters of each other, 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 like 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.

This is wonderful.

Actually, that was my next question, but you made a lot of important points.

I really liked 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 I'll leave it to you to correct me if I'm wrong.

But I guess there's a lot of obsession in scientific community with the idea of truth,

scientific truth, or facts.

But you make it 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, and there

were around the idea of justification.

How does it give us, how does it give us more, let's say, realistic?

Can a fair way to evaluate science?

Yeah, good, thanks.

So before I directly answer that question, I do want to clarify that 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, 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 thick 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, or even just very basic notions

of like objectivity, or even the adjective scientific, right?

Scientific is 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 that theory is scientific rather than, say, being pseudo-scientific, or that person

takes a scientific approach to blah, blah, blah, right?

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 when I argue in the book, really the key, key sort of fundamental claim of the book,

the thesis, is that those evaluative concepts, the kind of success conditions for, 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, like, 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 then 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 the kind of 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 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 unequally 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 and following the steps of the recipe.

So that would be a process-oriented evaluative stance, which is 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 the truth.

But we do have access to whether or not the work is just a regulatory.

So that's the key idea.

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last.

And I'm glad you made that clarification.

You're absolutely right.

When we talk about justification and 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 free, 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 you look at the aim of science as being common knowledge, that

idea of knowledge, 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 as

skepticism?

Yeah, good.

Yeah, thanks.

So there's really a lot packed into that question.

So I'll try to take things sort of once up at a time here.

So 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.

So 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 distinctly 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.

Now, and also going back to the notion of justification, this is a very standard idea

in philosophy.

And justification is like 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.

And okay, so another kind of clarity to our 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 like 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, like I might have a particular motivation for playing, like 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 like 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, namely, 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 for that

claim.

So I spend 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 like, 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.

Now, 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.

So scientific knowledge is like a public repository.

It's like an abstract encyclopedia.

This is a very old idea that goes back to historical philosophers like Leidenitz, 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.

Moreover, common knowledge is special in a variety of like practical social ways.

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.

The knowledge of course just helps us get by in the world.

Common knowledge is especially valuable because it involves multiple people, it involves

a community or a 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 of 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 and 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 of 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 the improvement upon those reasons, is what gets science

its objectivity.

It's what frees science from idiosyncratic biases.

That's what makes science more and more free of, say, 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 policy makers, and particularly

when science is achieved in common knowledge.

To be honest, I didn't realize how packed my question was, but you did a wonderful job

talking about different aspects.

When you were explaining about 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 on the media, that whole idea of indigenous science, I used to live in these

enough parts of my life, and now I live in Australia, and I guess it was two or four years

ago from now mistaken, there was again, the docking was involving 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 accept things, 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 a wonderful bit of words.

Okay, again, there's really a lot packed into your questions, so I'm sorry for my like

long-winded answers to your questions, but you're asking really good 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 dockins, who takes a, and 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.

So I think on the one hand, part of what I argue 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 answer that I would take, one idea that I would at least entertain, entertain

quite seriously.

Sometimes when people are speaking about indigenous knowledge, what they have in mind is

the thought that 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 we could be pluralist and sort of let both sides have their claims

to, 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.

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, I would speculate, and I think on

pretty good grounds, that if we had to referee between this side and that side, mainstream

science 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, you know, careful commentators about science to find ways

to articulate those views about the relationship between mainstream science and indigenous

science in sort of more nuanced fashion.

Hmm.

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Um, I think, uh, the idea of science and value.

Well, again, there are a lot of science warriors, as you mentioned, if they believe that

science is a complete objective, it cannot, it should not be, let's, the way they put

it contaminated by our ideology, let's say, um, and part of your book, you, I'm, I'm

keen to know what it, what does it mean in practice?

What does it look like?

Let's in practice.

Uh, I'm quoting from your book to act as if science should be value free and, um, how

is it that, how is it different from pretending values, pretending values aren't present

in something?

Is science ever be value free in, in practice?

Right.

Okay.

Good.

Thanks.

Yeah.

So your question here is channeling, uh, the key thesis of one of the chapters of the

book.

I should say that this, this chapter, um, comes out of, uh, work that I've done with

the friend of mine, Taroon Menin, over many years.

We've written several articles together on this topic.

And so the, the thesis that Taroon, I have been arguing for.

Um, is a novel version of what philosophers call the value free ideal for science.

So the value free ideal says, um, particular aspects of science, namely scientific inference

itself should be value free one way or the other.

Now the, 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, um, 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, you know, build bigger bombs or they can build safer hospitals.

Um, so the choice of research topic constraints on research methods, right?

So there's just some things that scientists can do and can't do based on very basic ethical

constraints.

Um, or what technologies to develop after the basic scientific work is done.

Um, so that's also clearly a value laden decision.

So science has all these different dimensions that are, that are value permeated values

influence science in all of those ways.

But in, 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 Thruin 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 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.

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 are present, right?

Because these are cases in which the final kind of, the 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 that values aren't there when 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 policy makers 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, like 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 policy

makers 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 thought through with values, and that influenced the objectivity of the resulting

findings.

So science just didn't have the kind of luxury at 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.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm aware that I'm asking terrible, generic questions because I want to cover as many chapters

as I can in the limits of the amount of time that I have.

But the idea is to provide a very broad overview of the different concepts and themes of the

book to the audience.

I think you're doing a wonderful job in kind of peaking everybody's curiosity to read the

book, to be able to get more out of it.

Speaking of values, another controversial topic or issuing 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 perspectives, let's say, help reduce and even multiply

that value influence in scientific inferences?

Yeah, thanks for this question.

So I was starting to touch on this when we were speaking about indigenous knowledge.

So 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, and

it's 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, but that's my short answer to your question.

Another topic that I'm really keen to discuss is scientific progress.

What are some of the indicators in the field?

You know, again, if we look at the science as justification, the aim of science being

justification, what does scientific progress mean?

And what are the indicators that fill the particular scientific field is making progress

before even scientists can agree, have consensus on what is true scientific truth in that

field?

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 like means oriented,

taking the steps towards achieving truth or knowledge.

So we can think of another metaphor, think about like 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, like physically actually climbing, but also all the preparatory

steps, like making sure the climbers got enough water in the backpack and about food,

proper clothing, and so on, and then background training.

So we can take those like process, quality of process as the basis for an account of

progress.

And that's what I argue for in the case of scientific progress.

It 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 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 a hundred years or more than a hundred 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 science, 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 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 is in real time as not.

Just before we come to the end of this interview, I know that you've just recently

published this book, and it's just excruciating the finished 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 on the way that might be published sometime soon.

Oh, well, thanks for that question.

Well, I've always got a handful of projects on the go that are smaller and scaled in 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, yeah.

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, 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 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, you know, the 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 very, there are ways in which I can, I can see myself contributing

to that with a book length project.

So that's the, that's the main topic that I have in mind these days.

It's all wonderful ideas, especially these days with the, you know, with the 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.

Dr. Jacob Estonagno, 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 philosophy of science, I really enjoyed your book, and I'm sure

I'll listen as well, we'll enjoy reading it too.

So I do strongly recommend our listeners to pick up the book and read it to be able to,

you know, 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.

Thank you very much.

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