Mastodawn

🧵 Post 3 / 3 — Why This Matters
🌀 Why this feels new (but isn’t wrong)
Physics didn’t get this wrong — the mathematics works beautifully.
But often we stop at abstraction because it’s sufficient for calculation, even when mechanical intuition still exists underneath.
Sometimes understanding doesn’t come from more abstraction,
but from slowing down and examining constraints we already know.
A childhood toy just made those constraints visible again.
🌀
#FromFirstPrinciples #ScientificUnderstanding #LearningNeverStops
#EverydayPhysics #ChemistryIsPhysics

Brian J. Enquist Apr 18, 2023

This past year I have been pondering what is ‘#ScientificUnderstanding’. Stumbled on this quote by #LordKelvin where ‘understanding’ is connected to the ability to build causal #models “It seems to me that the test of ‘Do we or not understand a particular subject in physics?’ is, ‘Can we make a mechanical model of it?’ " https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-005-5000-4

A Contextual Approach to Scientific Understanding - Synthese

Achieving understanding of nature is one of the aims of science. In this paper we offer an analysis of the nature of scientific understanding that accords with actual scientific practice and accommodates the historical diversity of conceptions of understanding. Its core idea is a general criterion for the intelligibility of scientific theories that is essentially contextual: which theories conform to this criterion depends on contextual factors, and can change in the course of time. Our analysis provides a general account of how understanding is provided by scientific explanations of diverse types. In this way, it reconciles conflicting views of explanatory understanding, such as the causal-mechanical and the unificationist conceptions.

SpringerLink