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Maria Chiara Parisi (Universiteit van Amsterdam): »Mathematics & Scientific Explanation in Antiquity: A ›Slow Science‹ and ›Big Data‹ Study«
Science explainswhyreality is as it is. But what is scientific explanation? In philosophy of science, it is debated whether explanations are causal or can also be non-causal. Importantly, if all scientific explanations are causal, then mathematics does not explain, because mathematics provides non-causal, conceptual explanations. A virtually identical debate originated in antiquity with Proclus (412–485 CE), opposing two views:
(1) mathematics is explanatory
(2) mathematics is not explanatory.
This ancient opposition ruled the debate on scientic explanation for millennia. An unsolved mystery surrounds (2), however. Proclus follows (1) and attributes (2) to Aristotle, contradicting Aristotle's own
authoritativewritings.Whatdynamicsofthoughtcouldexplainsuchastarkandmomentous misattribution?
My main hypothesis is that, against current opinion, both the misattribution and the emergence of (2) are due to a conceptual shift regarding the objects of scientic knowledge. To show this, and to reconstruct this extremely consequential debate, I use a novel approach combining traditional, qualitative methods or ‘slow science’, and quantitative, computational techniques on a 'big data' corpus in Greek and Latin spanning 450 authors and nine centuries. This approach allows me to remain grounded in textual exegesis, while enlarging the evidence basis for a wide-scope investigation. In this talk, I focus on this novel approach. After introducing the theoretical framework, I discuss corpus selection and processing to enable (string and semantic) searches and collect relevant passages. Moreover, I illustrate the modelling of the concept of scientific explanation in Antiquity by adapting the Classical Model of Science (de Jong and Betti 2010) to the ancient context.
Mi/Wed · 15.02.2023 · 18:15–19:45
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