_The Relevance of Judgment for Philosophy of Science_. Comptes Rendus de l’Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences, IV

The papers in this volume are revised versions of presentations delivered at the annual conference of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences (Brussels), held during the COVID pandemic at the University of Zadar, in Croatia, from 12 to 16 October 2021. Of the fifteen conference participants, ten prepared their presentations for publication. Due to the risks posed by COVID, AIPS members Mario Alai, Reinhard Kahle, and Fabio Minazzi, as well as invited speakers Johan van Benthem and Chen Bo, gave their talks online. Interest in the phenomenon of judgment within the philosophy of science has become increasingly prominent. Already in 2022, at the conference of the Academy in Pavia, organized by our colleague Lorenzo Magnani at the Department of Humanities, University of Pavia, the chosen theme was Justification, Creativity, and Discoverability in Science. More recently, at the annual AIPS conference in Rome, held within the framework of the World Congress of Philosophy (August ix 1–4, 2024), the theme was Scientific Understanding. In the days of Ernest Nagel, Carl Gustav Hempel, and Karl Popper, it would have been difficult to imagine that an academy for the philosophy of science would hold an annual conference on the topic of “scientific understanding,” because the intellectual activity of understanding was limited to the humanities, while philosophy of science primarily focused on discussion of explanation. Understanding, as an activity of the mind, was excluded from methodological argumentation by most representatives of the philosophy of science because it was thought to contain subjective statements and opinions lacking objective validity. Terms such as understanding and comprehensible did not belong to the vocabulary of distinguished scholars of the philosophy of science half a century ago, since they refer to the psychological and subjective aspects of explanation. The metaphor of the judge was a favorite theme of Kant’s philosophy of science, it is a vivid example of how the human capacity for criticism and judgment can be integrated into the scientific understanding and explanation of phenomena in the context of the laws of nature. This ability to judge should be practiced and constantly improved, both as an applicative activity of the existing laws to concrete cases and as a reflective power of judgment in which the appropriate law is investigated. Similarly, Pierre Duhem claims that in the choice of a scientific hypothesis, the spirit of refinement (l’esprit de finesse) and elegance plays a decisive role, not the spirit of logical and geometrical exactness, it is a question of prudent judgment (bon sens): “To judge correctly the agreement of some physical theories with the facts, it is not enough to be a good mathematician and a skilful experimenter, but it is necessary to be an impartial and just judge.” (Duhem, La Théorie physique, p. 357). Table of Contents "Preface" Jure Zovko v–ix "How should we judge current scientific theories?" Mario Alai 1–15 "Quine’s naturalism: clarification and vindication" Bo Chen 17–48 "Judgment and the quest for knowledge in science" Alberto Cordero 49–59 "Perspectives in physics" Dennis Dieks 61–75 "Judgment in hermeneutics" Hans-Peter Grosshans 77–87 "Axiomatic thinking and judgment" Reinhard Kahle 89–95 "Does neopositivist refutation of Kant’s synthetic a priori judgments"rule out the possibility of meaningful philosophical principles?" Giovanni Macchia & Gino Tarozzi 97–116 "On the Wertfreiheit of science: objective knowledge and axiology" Fabio Minazzi 117–157 "Interfacing logic and judgment" Johan van Benthem 159–166 "The relevance of judgment for the philosophy of science: reflections from the perspective of Kant’s Third Critique" Jure Zovko 167–177