Day 2: 14th December 2021
|| Scientific Understanding||

Scientific research doesn’t just aim at describing or predicting what happens. One of the central aims of science is to help us understand why things happen the way they do. The answer to these why-questions often come in the form of causal explanations, but is simply discovering causes enough to help us understand why something happens, or do we need more – an account of underlying mechanisms, perhaps? Are there forms of scientific understanding that are non-causal? For instance, could scientific understanding, in certain situations, be about discovering reasons or purposes rather than causes, or about interpreting a phenomenon rather than explaining how it came about? And how is the goal of scientific understanding impacted by a world of big data processed by complex computational models whose workings we cannot fully follow?