Adrian Currie – “Marsupial Lions and Methodological Omnivory: Function and Success in Paleobiology”

About the Talk Historical scientists frequently face incomplete data, and lack direct experimental access to their targets. This has led some philosophers and scientists to be pessimistic about the epistemic potential of the historical sciences. And yet, historical scientists often produce plausible, sophisticated hypotheses. I explain this capacity to generate knowledge in the face of apparent evidential scarcity by examining recent work on Thylacoleo carnifex, the ‘marsupial lion’. Here, we see two important features. First, historical scientists are methodological omnivores, that is, they construct purpose-built epistemic tools tailored to test highly localized hypotheses. This allows them to generate many streams of independent evidence and thus maximize their epistemic reach. Second, investigative scaffolding: research proceeds in a piece-meal fashion, information only gaining evidential relevance once certain hypotheses are well supported. This means that we systematically underestimate the amount of evidence ultimately available about the past. These two factors are part of the explanation of the success of historical science and undermine pessimism. I illustrate scaffolding in a discussion of the nature of functional ascription in paleobiology. Frequently, different senses of ‘function’ are not discriminated during paleobiological contexts–something which has marred many adaptationist investigations of extant organisms. However, I argue that, due to scaffolding, in some contexts conflating senses of ‘function’ is the right thing to do, as coarse-grained functional hypotheses are required before it is clear what evidence could discriminate between more fine-grained ones. About the Speaker Adrian Currie joined the Philosophy Department in July as one of the University of Calgary’s Eyes High Postdoctoral Fellows. He completed his PhD last winter at Australian National University with a dissertation entitled “Explanation and Evidence in Historical Science” (supervised by Kim Sterelny). His current research focuses on ‘paleoepistemology’: how historical scientists (palaeontologists, geologists, archaeologists, and so on) generate knowledge about the deep past, although he also dabbles in environmental philosophy, the philosophy of biology and issues of philosophical methodology. According to Adrian, he is keener to discuss metaphysics than you would expect.
Location:
Social Sciences Room 1256
More information at http://www.ucalgary.ca/events/calendar/adrian-currie-marsupial-lions-and-methodological-omnivory-function-and-success-paleobiology