Good. All right, thank you everyone actually here. I'm going to do that anyway. I'm afraid I won't be audible if I don't. I'll kind of back my chair up a little bit. So, thank you so much for being here. Hi everybody. Yeah. Sorry for the brief delay. Technical difficulties that we're quickly dealt with, or sort of quickly dealt with. Great. And thanks so much for arranging the work in progress this semester. This is perfectly timed for me as you'll see. I'll talk a little bit about the project that this actually comes from. But also, this is great for me. In early December, I'm going to go give this same talk at Bielefeld in Germany. If you're watching on the stream from Bielefeld, stop the stream. You can see it in real life later. Don't watch this. It'll be better because I'm going to change it. So, it's a great time for this. I really do have a work in progress that I'm super happy to get more feedback about. I should also mention the change titles. So, explanations became serious. I'll talk a little bit about that.  I would love to kind of pick some brains about... Well, briefly, explanatory virtues versus theoretical virtues, which is kind of an interesting whatever. Some overlap, some not overlap. The same concept, but also not the same concept. So, I want to talk about that later. But yes, what this is coming from... I'm going to make sure I'm not going to do slides. What this is coming out of, it's coming out of a future book project. So, I'm going to be writing up over the next about six months a book on the idea of breadth as an explanatory slash theoretical virtue in the life sciences.  It's one of... It's the first time I'm talking through one of the case studies, really. It's one of the case studies that I wanted to get the chance to present.  I'm going to introduce a little bit about the theoretical virtues in general. I'll talk a little bit about the idea of scope, which is sort of my launching point for talking about breadth, because it's the closest that people get in the kind of classic literature on explanation or theoretical virtues to talking about breadth. I'm going to kind of make trouble for scope in the context of the life sciences by offering some kind of hopefully interesting examples. I'm going to hand away past a bunch of context and kind of give you what I think is my current version of my final answer. And then I want to work through a case study, which is a fight that's been going on about the role of natural history. So, late 20th, but also 21st century context. There's been a really interesting argument going on in the biology literature. Long story short, what I want to claim is that it's a breadth fight. That's what they're fighting about. That's the theoretical virtue that they're arguing about. So, first thing we need to do is talk about what theoretical virtues even are. I don't want to overdo it and spend too much time on this. I like this fairly straightforward, fairly simple definition that comes out of Sam Schindler's new book or new issue book now, 2018. The pandemic makes 2018 seem like a new publication, like a fresh, great book. If you haven't read it, theoretical virtues in science, it's a lovely, lovely discussion of, in his case, an argument for realism coming out of discussion of the theoretical virtues. But I like this simplistic definition. It's just the kinds of things about a theory that scientists value and that guide choice between theories. That's characteristics that would encourage you to pick one theory over another. Right? Everybody reads Coon's classic list of the big five, accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness or fertility. Big argument, especially a little bit at the end of structure, but especially at the end of essential tension where he talks about why he thinks these should be understood as values and not as some kind of purely epistemic criteria. There are more Schindler-Kanvas as a couple of others. I think this is worthwhile, right? Testability is one that everybody talks about. Non-ad hocness is one that everybody talks about. You can also lean to get a little farther afield and talk about symmetry. You can talk about visualizability. It's actually, it's a lot of airtime in Hector Rex's book on scientific understanding and conservativeness. They're not going too far from the current state of affairs. You know, cool. This is kind of what we have in mind. I'm trying to stay kind of light in terms of overcommitting myself to stuff about what a theoretical virtue is, or even what other ones might be because really what I want to do is just to give myself a way to talk about breadth. I just really want to talk about scope because I think there's something really interesting here, namely scope is in every one of these lists and nobody theorizes about what it really is very much. So I want to dig out what theorizing there is about it and kind of go from there. So when Coon talks about it, he's mostly worried it seems about the problem of old evidence. So a theory's consequences should extend far beyond the particular observations, laws or sub-theories it was initially designed to explain. So this kind of has a novel prediction, old evidence, kind of classic mid-20th century philosophy of science flavor to it. Interesting, but let's keep going, not super trenchant. In Schindler's book, so here's the cover, if you don't know it. Yeah, awesome, awesome book. The scope, the word scope doesn't show up in the index. When he talks about scope at all, he actually caches it out as unifying power. So he says, look, a theory has unifying power or broad scope when, that's my emphasis, when it unifies phenomena which were previously considered distinct. So this is a pretty common way to think, to the extent that anybody has really theorized about scope, this is a pretty common way to do it, right? When people tend to talk about unifying power, I'll borrow from Philip Kitcher's analysis of Newtonian mechanics when in his theory of explanation, he leans very heavily on the idea that part of what made Newtonian mechanics exceptional was this idea that it could have this real unifying power about it. It could bring together all of these different kinds of phenomena. So just a brief aside, I don't want to sign up for Kitcher's theory of explanation as unification, but I'm just picking up on his analysis of Newtonian mechanics. Long quote, I know I'm sorry, but I think worth it about what he says about Newtonian mechanics. So Newton's achievements inspired some of his successors to undertake an ambitious program which I call dynamic corpuscularianism. Precipia had shown how to obtain the motions of bodies from a knowledge of the forces acting on them, but also demonstrated the possibility of dealing with gravitational systems in a unified way. The next step would be to isolate a few basic force laws akin to the law of universal gravitation so that applying the basic laws to specifications of the dispositions of the ultimate parts of bodies, all of the phenomena of nature could be derived. This really became a thing, right? There's some great history of science on this, especially in the last couple decades of Newton's life. Whenever everybody wanted to impress Newton, they would try to derive new force laws for something else cool. I'll come back to that in just a second. I want to do it in Newton's own words too, because I think this is important. I always try to, I love an excuse to quote Newton. This is the preface to the second edition of the Precipia. If only we could derive the other phenomena of nature from mechanical principles by the same kind of reasoning. For many things lead me to have a suspicion. That's so relevant, that's so new. Many things lead me to have a suspicion that all phenomena may depend on certain forces by which the particles of bodies by cause is not yet known, either are impelled toward one another and cohere in regular figures, or repelled from one another and recede. Since these forces are unknown, philosophers have hitherto made trial of nature in vain. This is what we're missing, right? We're missing the ability to write down all these other force laws, to understand what other kinds of forces are at work. If we could just do that, we could make everything be special cases of Newtonianism. That's the kind of broad scope or unification we mean. There's a great article by Brown who's talking about some medical practitioners who actually try to do this in medicine right after Newton publishes Precipia. A living body is a compounded of canals of diverse kinds, conveying different sorts of fluids. So all these capitalized letters, these are definitions elsewhere in the axioms of medicine. A disease is the circulatory motion of the blood too much increased or diminished. A fever is the motion of the blood increased. This goes on for like there's pages of this. There's very interesting questions about what they were really doing here. Were they just trying to make friends with Newton who was super powerful so they wanted to write down a force law of medicine? Unclear? Really great. I highly recommend this brown paper. It's a really fun article. Before we leave scope though, after talking about unifying power, before we leave scope, I want to pick up on one more thing in the Schindler. Namely, he makes this argument, he actually distinguishes two senses of scope, two ways that we might have meant scope. So on the one hand we have this unifying power sense. On the other hand we have what he calls the empirical scope of the theory which is just how much stuff does it apply to? How many situations phenomenon does it apply to in the natural world? And of course, right, they aren't certainly distinct. A theory can conjoin many facts and therefore have broad empirical scope but little unifying power. That would be the case if a theory gave us no clue as to how the conjoined facts were interrelated at a deeper level. So you can add empirical scope in this sense without adding unifying power if you just sort of stick a bunch more observations into your, confirmed observations into your theory. I'll use that distinction later. I bring it up because I want to come back to it. So this project got started for me when I started thinking about questions of scope in contemporary life sciences. So I'll come back to this organization a bit. I got a cool invite. I wouldn't even talk at the Graduate Conference of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg which was a ball. And I was trying to figure out like, what would a grad conference in mobile want from a philosopher of biology? I was like, okay, I'm going to get kind of weird and talk about scope and challenges for 21st century biology. That was sort of the theme of the conference with something along the lines of challenges for the next century of the life sciences.  What do we think of when we talk about scope in the life sciences? Biology is supposed to be about all kinds of stuff like reefs and it's also supposed to be about rainforests and it's also supposed to be about everything on this diagram, my favorite representation of the Tree of Life from the Hillis Lab. You, you're there. You can wave at yourself. This is all the other species on the planet, you know, lovely. I like the radial, the radial diagram is lovely because it helps to counteract this idea that we're more evolved than the other creatures on the planet. But it's also supposed to be about stuff like this. This is one of the old books talked about in the discussion of mechanical objectivity by Dustin Gallison. This is an old tissue section photographic manual. You're supposed to also include this kind of thing. It's a classic tissue-based physiological biology. Now we're doing more and more of this stuff. So here's a lovely mechanism of action for a antidepressant drug in between and the synaptic gap between some neurons. Even more broadly, this is great, although also shout-outs to the old silver theme for Windows XP. This screenshot isn't OG. This is an individual-based model of macaque monkeys from an old colleague that I've worked with at Notre Dame back in grad school.  And this is a proper modeling of their terrain, I believe in Indonesia, where you've got forests, you have the rivers, you have human habitation. There's roads, like if one has to cross a road, it has a risk of getting run over by a car. I mean, this is now also more of the toolkit of being a contemporary biologist. And every biotech book has a diagram in it that looks like this. This is really, thinking about this move right here is really what kind of got me started thinking about this project, right? Accepting maybe some of the details about the atoms and I guess biology technically only interests itself in part of the molecules, right? The rest of this stuff is supposed to be somewhere within the remit of some kind of biologist. And this is pretty wild. And this diagram is in every single textbook of biology anywhere. Like every kid's textbook has this picture in some form or another, right? And so, okay, great, fine, good. Here's what you might think, right? You might think very, very well done. You've just described what biologists are doing. This is the pursuit of scope in the life sciences, right? Why not? That's sure it's kind of what it looks like. I think the big argument for today is no. That's the idea. The idea is to push on something that actually these choices don't really seem like scope in the classic sense. And that for at least two reasons. The two reasons that I won't ever, many ways you can see this, I'm going to pick up on Schindler's distinction between two types of scope and use that to try to show it across some examples. On the one hand, it doesn't seem like it's the pursuit, excuse me, of empirical scope in a sort of raw and unadulterated way because that would be just about getting more parts of the world inside the domains of your theories. It doesn't seem like life scientists are doing that. Rather, they're offering very complex reasons and very careful choices for the kinds of extensions of domain that they engage in. And it also doesn't seem like it's the pursuit of unifying power because if you go back to that Adams to Ecosystems diagram, the theories that actually let us understand biochemistry and ecosystems are radically disunifying. Sometimes biologists will try to talk their way around this and this is something I'd be interested to talk more about and to know if maybe people have strong opinions about this. Sometimes biologists try to talk their way around this by saying, like, oh, well, it's actually evolution that unifies everything. Don't worry about it. Like, if you actually look at practice, that's not what actually happens. Arguments in biochemistry don't actually always or even very often make these kinds of appeals that would knit the whole thing together in a kind of kitschery and Newtonian mechanics kind of way. At least that's the argument I want to make. And so, in short, science doesn't look like it's the practice of the life sciences. It doesn't look like it's directed at scope. It looks like it's directed at something else. And so that's where I want to make room for another concept, another kind of theoretical virtue that's at play. So, yes, I'm going to call that breadth. As I mentioned, this is coming out of a larger book project and so I'm going to super briefly try to give you some context that will come from chapters of this book that are currently like one paragraph abstracts in my head and so I have no arguments at all. So, if you stop me and try to really ask me questions in the Q&A about the next two slides, you can just watch me all scroll up in the corner and like hum quietly to myself. So, what am I going to do, though, what I'm going to do eventually is I want to pick up, actually, this is the one that I've already talked about. I'm going to pick up to get some sort of context on how to introduce this idea before I get to anything of you, the kind of theoretical upshot for what I think breadth is and how it works. I think it's related to some of what Darwin was up to in his later natural history books and so I actually did, I have given a talk about trying to think about how his orchid work. So, a lot of people don't know this after Darwin finishes up his books, his major evolutionary works, so the Origin of Species and the Descentive Man. There are loads of books and they're about really nitty-gritty natural history. He goes and tries to catalog the fertilization method of every single species of orchid that he can get a sample of. He writes a book on how earthworms move earth around. He writes a book on all the plants that he can find that eat insects. All fashion, good old fashioned naturalist stuff. And I actually think there's a good argument to be made that Darwin's thinking in a kind of breadth kind of way rather than a scope kind of way so I'm not going to get into that today. I also think that much more contemporarily, some of our practices around big data and scientific publication also echo this in interesting kinds of ways. Again, I'm not going to get much deeper into that. I also want to take a couple of things off the table, so sort of nearby debates that I think are really important that I think will merit a chapter in the final book but that I'm not going to talk about anymore right now. First of those is mechanistic explanation. So I think mechanism is really helpful here but I think the ways that mechanistic explanation tends to get at the phenomena that I'm looking at in thinking about breadth tend to be things like mechanism sketches that aren't really well elaborated in the literature on mechanism that don't, I don't think they give us quite enough oomph to understand what the biologists are doing in these cases where I think they're making appeals to breadth. There's also of course and I'm already getting ready for the funny screenshot, hopefully one day if I can manage to get this book published when I can take a copy of breadth and put it next to a copy of Strevins' death so it'll be like the yin and yang of anyway. I think depth is also really important but I think one thing that is interesting about breadth is that it has a bit of a distinctive life science flavor to it and that's part of what I'm trying to explore. I'd be interested to know because I know there's a lot of people here who haven't worked in the life sciences or have worked in other parts of the life sciences than I have. If you think when you hear what I have to say about breadth, if you think that like oh yeah physicists are totally doing this all the time I would be very interested to hear that. But I don't know and I have a feeling that depth is more relevant which is part of why it forms such an important target of analysis for Strevins. That's the context that's not written yet so hand waving ended. So what's different? What I want to do is build out a competitor notion. A competitor notion to scope. Leave scope. I don't think that scope is wrong or bad or not a theoretical virtue at all. Not at all life to be. I want to be very clear about that. This is not an argument against scope. But I want to try to show that either unifying power or empirical scope in Schindler's senses, neither of those things is a thing that I have in mind. Neither of those things is capturing something that I think is really important about contemporary life science. How do I differentiate the two? So what am I seeing as the differences? I have three proposals for how we can do that. And I want to underline I don't think these are not mutually exclusive proposals. This isn't like three different ways of understanding breadth. It's sort of like three overlapping perspectives on the same kind of concept. This is three different ways all of which are kind of helpful to understand the sort of notion that I want to get to. I'm going to talk through each of them in turn. The first... It's a small question. I've been troubled by this. So you speak of expansions of biological theory. You mean eight biological theory? Ecology or something? You mean biological theorizing as a... Very good. This is an important precision. How can I do this quickly? This is an important precision that I worry that I don't have time to do justice to. Because this is actually really important. I just mean as a question for clarification. But it's spot on and it's a little hard to clarify. So I do in general mean... I guess the right way to say this quickly is I do in general mean expansions of theorizing in the life sciences in general. Now that means that I owe you a response to a sort of implicit objection that's hiding in there. Namely why is that a reasonable thing to talk about? As opposed to only talking about ecology, behavioral ecology and population dynamics and biochemistry and, and, and, and, and why is it legitimate to do what I just did and talk about biological theory more broadly? I owe you a response to that that I don't have time to give you today. The five second version is I think more and more that's how biologists are actually talking about what they're doing in their field. I think biologists themselves are seeing the integration of those bodies of theory as a progressively more and more important problem because they are different ways of describing the same kind of phenomena. But I owe you a lot... that's, that's a quick story to a heart... that's a quick answer to a long question.  You gave me a perfect answer to my question. I didn't raise the objection you did it yourself. Okay, fair, fair. So I'm going to go... these, these go from simplest to most complex so selectivity is almost, almost a trivial point but I think it still merits being underlined. So yeah, the idea is choices about, about theoretical breadth, choices about which phenomena to study next what phenomena to let in or to rule out of our theories don't ever seem to be made as though scope was the primary as the primary mover. One way to see this is that biologists very often either take on harder cases than they have to which isn't what you were, what you would do if you were just looking for empirical scope or fewer cases than you might expect, right? It's really not and we'll come back to this why the natural history case is important it's really not just stamp collecting as much data as you possibly can for any reason that you can possibly find it even in natural history. That's kind of a classic... I think that's a a misunderstanding that has some sociological roots that we can talk about in the Q&A if people are interested but I think that's not what's going on here I can say that's a pretty simple point that shouldn't really surprise anybody They're also opportunistic by which I mean these choices are really heavily conditioned by what else is already going on what else is already going on in the biosciences at the moment that we're thinking about pursuing a new domain looking at a new phenomenon trying to understand something that was hitherto not understandable One way to see this is of course there's lots of great literature on the role in nature of model organisms, right? Having a model organism around already doing a bunch of your work in mice is going to constrain the kinds of future work that you want to do and that's not that's going to cut against that's going to cut against the sort of classic scope type analysis and I don't want to say an important qualification here is and I don't want to say that that's just a bad thing that we're just choosing to limit our scope by sort of entrenching ourselves in the use of a certain kind of model for instance I think there's a positive way to spin this if you understand the role that Brett is playing now similarly there's a lot of effort on integrations so you might think ooh unifying power but there are always between very particular parts of biological theorizing they're very much they're very much targeted around what's already in play a good example we're starting to see calls for eco-evo-devo so we already had evo-devo which if you've been attending our various life science seminars for the last couple of years I've heard some about the integration of developmental biology with evolution which had been left aside to some extent one of the themes among many awesome themes of Miles Talk last week or two weeks ago now we're thinking about integrating ecology into this and it's been one of the leading scholars pushing for this kind of integration but these are very particular connections having a lot to do with this sort of state of play on the ground already it's less about in fact there tends to be some suspicion around grand efforts to really push for unifying power by going back to the fundamentals and re-deriving a grand unified theory that could explain biological phenomena is a bit suspect it depends on who's doing it there's obviously nobody that's up to that kind of approach but a lot of biologists just get a little queasy when you start talking like that and I think that has to do with this kind of targeted integration idea of unifying power now most importantly and I think this is where this is also the other kind of big thing that led me to want to think about this I think these these choices about how to expand biological theory are absolutely loaded with non-epistemic value commitments and I think that thinking about breadth in particular as a theoretical virtue is a great way to analyze to start to unearth those non-epistemic value commitments and to talk about the kind of role that they're playing in the theory and so that's another reason that I wanted to dig out this concept because I think scope along the lines of it being a kind of pure epistemic value I think scope doesn't tend very often to make room for these non-epistemic value choices and so I think if we just limit ourselves to thinking in terms of scope we're going to miss a big angle that helps us understand why biologists are making the kinds of the kinds of decisions that they're making there's lots of cool examples I think of this and I'm going to show you another one later this is I think part of the upshot of my natural history case study but I just wanted to pull on this thread a little bit so like I said I first played with this idea in a talk at the EMBL PhD symposium two years ago here's their theme from this year mostly I just want to show you the artwork because it's just like so cool starry night but that's with cell culture cells right? the big picture we're getting into life and so what are they talking about? they're talking about what you might think is kind of a scope so they're talking about integrating across scales they're talking about being able to move from organismic to systemic to tissue to cellular to biochemical levels in biological explanations but then if you look at how they think about justifying this like why do we care? why is this something that we need to do? to get to the end of the epidemic where researchers in different fields have collaborated to bring about a rapid research driven response against the novel coronavirus we are dedicated to creating a symposium that brings together researchers who study life sciences at different scales and explore the interdisciplinary approaches utilized to link the different scales of life so they go right to this is how we're going to this is how we stopped COVID integration across levels is how we stopped COVID to a kind of non-epistemic value move as an aside I also think this is really neat that's something I'll get into more later on not today more later on when I'm writing about this I think this is another really cool example of something that a number of scholars have actually been talking about a lot lately which is that the frontier between epistemic and non-epistemic values is a whole lot blurrier than a lot of people give it credit for I think breadth is really cool because it's smacking between the two so you get some considerations like I'm in a model organism and it's going to be much easier for me in my laboratory to contextualize my empirical data because I already know a lot about mice like oh yeah epistemic, you know, cool and then you get, and by the way we also want to stop COVID and they're really hard mixing those things together and I think that's a really lovely another really lovely aspect of this case so in short I think this is not the pursuit of scope I think it's the pursuit of breadth and I think that making this distinction gives us a really useful tool for understanding these kinds of moves with respect to theories in the contemporary life sciences so I haven't given you enough theory there to really sell how I think that's supposed to work but let me give you a case study with the hopeful, oh actually wait let me give you some objections and then let me give you a case study that I hope will help better sell it let me pause, yeah let me pause you've probably already thought of a couple objections I just want to canvas a few I know I'm already running a little over time but is breadth just a way of talking about fruitfulness so maybe you might think that that's sort of what I've meant is I'm not this isn't anything different this is just a way of sort of demonstrating to fellow collaborators that maybe you have a research program that can give interesting kinds of further insights, future lines of research but that's to me that seems to run afoul of a few of these cases insofar as what I want to argue is a lot of the times when biologists are pushing in the direction of increasing breadth they're doing it by picking up really experimental stuff that very well may not succeed so system integration stuff to talk about COVID is pretty hyper-experimental so is eco-evo-devo eco-evo-devo might not work at all so saying that that's a way of talking about fruitfulness seems a little off base to me is it just a way of talking about idealization or generalization this is another really good objection I think not but I need to work more on why I think idealization and generalization are really important because they're tools that you can use to get to breadth but they're not virtues in and of themselves so that requires me to talk a little bit more about what a theoretical virtue is and why I think people are pursuing breadth in itself but not idealization or generalization in themselves I really need to engage with with the Petashniks new book on idealization and I have not had the time to read it yet so I'm behind on that last objection is breadth just a way to talk about a bunch of pragmatic stuff so maybe we talk about COVID because we want money and maybe we talk maybe we do the kinds of integrations we can because we're cheap and we don't want to spend more on a new kind of lab animal maybe and I'll be happy to admit that this is a bullet that I'm biting but I think it gives us a way to analyze certain kinds of uses of these pragmatic concerns to kind of make them apparent in a way that they weren't really before so that's why I'm saying I think it's still useful even if sometimes it only seems like it's a sort of pragmatic thing so let me give you a case study about natural history I wanted to pick up on a few arguments that I think at least are actually debates about breadth in contemporary biology so yeah I want to talk through this fight really quickly I've got about 15 I can talk through this fight about the importance of natural history to contemporary biology so what exactly is natural history so in general it's a descriptive enterprise it's often pit against anything theoretical it involves doing stuff like cataloging species understanding their ranges understanding their behaviors their environmental relationships is a definition from a survey article by Tuxbury et al that I'm going to come back to the observation and description of the natural world with the study of organisms and their linkages to the environment being central okay cool reasonable enough in the extreme it's taken to be entirely a theoretical I literally laughed out loud at this quote in my office the other day and it's most stereotyped natural history has been and is strictly phenomenological this is unexciting but not totally evil so yeah and in extremist natural history might only be accumulation of data without putting them in any kind of theoretical framework as we'll see I think that's overdrawn I'm going to come back to that in a second but what all this means right is that natural history is seen as being increasingly old fashion over the end of the 19th and the early 20th there's some lovely work about how this shifts during the Victorian period Paul Farber is immense here as evolution and genetics start to give a structure a theoretical superstructure to natural history research even saying that you're doing natural history becomes steadily less fashionable you have to say that you're doing evolutionary biology or you're doing behavioral ecology or now molecular ecology eco evo diva um and so what starts to happen and yeah here this is from a quick little article by by Allah who writes that suddenly this is around in the late 19th early 20th centuries naturalists found themselves being told what they have all along been accustomed to think of as useful and even in some cases valuable scientific work was no longer a very much moment and worse ought for preference to be abandoned in a quite different approach adopted in its stead and so this is the story that we get told about this history that natural history sort of falls out of favor as people recognize an increasing necessity to kind of theoretically contextualize that kind of work especially with the aid of Darwinism and then genetics um and in contemporary science this is still a thing so this is an old article by Bartholomew well for science an old article from the from 86 by Bartholomew but I can find you examples up to last week if you want um in contemporary biology much of the glamour and most of the funding there's the real problem right um go to research on the lower levels of integration so biochemical molecular biological at these levels active researchers generally agree on the key questions this consensus is so complete that we see large numbers of highly intelligent investigators with a treasure trove of instrumentation and techniques all concentrating on a few questions and so this is part of an article that is an impassioned appeal to refund natural history to put more money into natural history research again um one thing I do want to point out because I'm going to I'm going to give this and then I'm going to take it away again um I want to point out that this actually looks pretty epistemic right this looks like one of the interesting distinctions between what happens in natural history what happens in molecular biology is that molecular biology is sort of better unified around a paradigm it's better able to narrow down and render more precise the kinds of questions that it wants to ask and so there's more shared context between the investigators it's easier to sell why your results are really important and you don't have that in natural in natural history um and that's really interesting I'd like to say I'm going to come back to that well so what's the problem anyway why do I care why is this a fight why should I listen to the impassioned appeals to refinance natural history um again we can pick up with some more sort of pretty epistemic reasons so here again from from Bartholomew um natural history allows an investigator to phrase questions with precision it facilitates synthesis from lower to higher levels of integration and can help orient those biological sectors that focus on physiological mechanisms and issues far removed from the organisms they make up and so this looks a bit like an appeal to you know accuracy and fertility in a classic kind of theoretical virtue sense right natural natural history helps us perform successful cross level integrations and it guides the generation of interesting novel research questions um you get the same argument from the eminent herpetologist Harry Green right so organisms themselves embody genetics development, morphology, physiology and behavior and they're the fundamental components of populations communities and ecosystems an understanding of organisms in nature is thus integral to studies at both lower and higher levels in the hierarchy of biological complexity so you get this idea again like it's in organisms that all these different parts of what's going on in the biological world get brought together and sort of hit the road it's where the rubber meets the road and so in that sense it's organisms that you should care about you should invest your time in understanding how they work and it will rebound both to lower and higher levels of um of the hierarchy but and this I think is really interesting you also get some pretty strong skepticism in the biology community about the relevance of these results um I'll give you a cited source in a second but also a bunch of the biologists that I follow on Twitter I was having a long I had a long twitter thread about this the other day and a bunch of people especially especially uh uh junior researchers were kind of going yeah but look you know people about my career stage were going kind of look wait um are we really fighting about this anymore does anybody really think that we shouldn't study organisms is there really anybody on the other side of this debate like who I posted the question trying to ask like mining for papers who argues against this imprint and there's not really anybody so there's a little bit of a skepticism about the depth of the epistemic side of this disagreement uh famous much-sided article expressing that skepticism by uh Stefan Arnold who writes the crux of the natural history tradition is search for order in nature so Arnold wants to kind of move the goalpost a little bit about how to understand what natural history is doing um that's a move that I don't really have time to get into right now it's kind of cool and we can talk about in the Q&A if you're interested um the goal of that tradition is and always has been to formulate concepts that allow us to perceive order in nature so now it's about concept formulation right not charting ranges of species it's the pursuit of the goal rather than the tools of employment that defines the tradition and hence the naturalist the tools of the naturalist are equations and sequencers as well as binoculars and notebook right so this is an attempt to kind of uh uh as he writes as he writes later to claim uh sort of under the mantle of natural history a bunch of the disciplines that sort of diverged from natural history right so now if we talk about behavioral ecology no longer as being part of natural history because it's become more theoretical and it has uh mathematical models and such like um well but no because it shares an evolutionary history it's sort of part of the the family natural history even if none of those people would call themselves natural historians or naturalists anymore um and so green Harry Green uh in a goes on to argue in that paper that I that I quoted from that I quoted from before and he's talking about this dispute between people like his former self I'll show you an earlier paper in a minute and Arnold over whether or not there is a problem with natural history what do we really have something we need to change or is everything actually fine do we all actually agree he says well when you unpack the epistemic side of this debate the dispute among us looks to be a red herring an emotional but largely inconsequential misunderstanding that's perhaps been fueled in part by fuzzy interchangeable use towards theory models and concept building on one hand and natural history organism focused and empiricism on the other so it turns out that we all agree about the majority of the epistemic side of this so for all that I could show you those quotes saying that it looks like there's some real epistemic value distinction between the kind of pro natural history people in the anti natural history people perhaps it turns out there's not really any epistemic distinction there at all maybe we agree about everything anyway so what's left of the debate why am I talking about this I said there was a debate I didn't say there was a happy fun agreement time what's left of the debate after we clear away these misunderstandings about epistemic values well moving among these levels is important for addressing what Green calls just after that last kind of conciliatory quote that I cited environmental dilemmas so Arnold expressed no concerns unlike Green and others for the empirical and educational aspects of natural history sensor stricto so the good old fashion stuff not not Arnold's expanded definition for two of the Dayton and I several illustrious natural history advocates are particularly concerned that we lack sufficient empirical reference points to move reliably among scales of time space and biological organization and here's the here's the kicker that science therefore cannot adequately address environmental dilemmas so we move right into a kind of what does it make something environmental dilemma what's a pretty paradigmatic non-epistemic value judgment if I ever saw one this is a societal question right what are the challenges that are being posed to us in the study of biodiversity and natural history today a few decades earlier Green again with Jonathan Losos cashed this out in terms of biodiversity and the special value of certain kinds of species so the importance of systematics and natural to us lies in defining the boundaries and contours of organismic diversity and a bit later in the paper it's because of phylogenetic systematics so that tracing out of relationships between species that we can place special value on the silicon the tuatara and other living fossils and then we hypothesize chimpanzees not gorillas are our closest relatives perhaps perhaps living fossils have some epistemic value that's a question that we could that's a question that we could unpack but it seems pretty clear that we want to know who our closest relatives are for not purely at least epistemic kinds of reasons this is a we're moving beyond a sort of raw epistemic value discussion here the best way to make this point so I brought up this definition of natural history from the survey article by Toogsbury at all and this survey is entirely structured around the importance of natural history for broader societal purposes so the sections of their paper the core sections where they defend the importance of natural history are about human health food security conservation and management and human recreation and it's all summed up in a section titled natural history in academia connecting science and society right this is why the debate this is what's left I should say of the debate over over natural history and so again just in case you weren't getting the point what's left is right I think what's left is a debate about breath right in fact it turns out that most of the epistemic stuff there may be a bit left around the edges here and there about how we understand what we're doing but most of the epistemic stuff turns out to actually not really be a matter of deep disagreement it's more like a kind of linguistic emphatic or in this matter of emphasis kind of fight about how we talk about what we're doing what's left is pitting on the one side I would say certain kinds of non-epistemic values so people who think that the point of biological science the point of biological theorizing should be to give us what we need to intervene in these kinds of non-epistemically important cases these kinds of conservation human health etc. cases and then people on the other side to the extent that I think that we can reconstruct on the other side who are arguing more opportunistically for sort of tool use like look that stuff is good but it's really hard to do that kind of work will be much better off if we stick with the kinds of broad scale sequencing projects for example that we've been up to already and don't try to make those connections in natural history to the extent that there's a fight here then I think this looks a lot like a breath fight I think this bears all the hallmarks of invoking exactly the kind of concept that I wanted to talk about earlier so believe it or not with that I am actually done and I'm really happy to talk about this get rotten fruit thanks comments questions etc so thank you all for being here let me get Appender Wrighten I was about to ask I also wanted to say perfect timing and I'm not against breaks I like breaks as well let's do breaks and the coffee machine yeah let's take 5 that sounds great I'll cut the mic but we'll be back on stream in 5 no I didn't there you go I should have turned the microphone back on cool first I saw Christian Peter was first so he already has this 5 minutes and you're not the last one okay then I saw first thank you for the talk this type of of values it's kind of a thing for like neutral research in physics and 60s it's a difference that your approach is more important like the century decides about the impact of society or the society or the family money to do this kind of research yeah I think that's right I do want to say that this is internally driven right I think it's very you hear talked about very much in these kinds of career motivation kind of terms I think right where people really talk about what yeah they talk about it in terms of what kinds of impacts they want to have how they want to yeah so I think I think you're exactly right I think it's less that's really interesting actually by comparison it would be interesting to compare some of these cases because there are cases in the life sciences where this kind of thing is imposed external so you see something like a little bit the human genome project just because it wasn't seen amount of money but also I would think more pertinently it was in the Obama administration the US government launched this thing they called the brain initiative which was just an extremely vague way to say that they were going to back up trucks of money in front of every laboratory that could say they were working on brains and it would be interesting to see how kind of what people say about those kinds of projects and if it's different than what people say when they do something like try to defend natural history because it's going to help human health I don't think I mean the even more the even more provocative way to put that one objection that I mentioned when I say argue you know is this just pragmatic stuff is all this just totally insincere garbage that they write because they want people to like them and give them money and I do think the answer to that is no I mean I really do I really honestly think the answer to that is no I think when they write a defense of natural history that they do think it will help human health and food security and conservation I think they legitimately believe this I don't want to impugn their motives but I do think it would be interesting to compare an internally driven case and an externally driven case that's a really cool idea I have the eyesight of a cow so I saw right and left the first I don't think I saw it should yet I'm seeing today you didn't have a question? not yet no it's not about being first it's about me deciding who I am that's what I'm saying it's a question for you now Miss ooh good I want to say yes yes I'm tempted to say so this is actually one where I have to confess that I have much more work to do again one of those chapters I skipped over the best answer might be death that is to say trying to going out instead of going down I mean in that sense the problem with that answer is that in cases like natural history you see breadth arguments that talk a lot about level integration which also feels like death the relation here is going to be really complicated that's why I have a chapter penciled in for it that I haven't started work on yet so in some sense the contrary is death but at the same time people are invoking both at the same time so there also may be a kind of trade off question you know sometimes you'll hear scientists describe a sort of tension between how to put it this kind of natural drive again whether we think this is philosophically well founded or not that's not my position to talk about for the moment but this kind of natural drive toward the quality of a reductionist answer right so oh yes you know how do we make our systems biology explanations better we put in more biochemical detail and you know how do we make our biochemical explanations better we put in more biophysical detail and you'll hear scientists talk about the tension between doing that and making their job so bloody complicated that they have no idea what they're supposed to do now they have models they can't use and so maybe there's a bit of a trade off dynamic here but I need basically what I really need to do is I need to get much clearer on both Strevins and Woodward and Hitchcock who are the kind of main people who've talked about depth and try to think about how that contrasts with what I'm trying to build here and I don't have a good answer about it yet that's what we need to do my next question one of the concepts here I don't talk about mechanisms I don't talk about relations either yeah good this is specifically I don't understand that you're looking for an explanation or a theory a theory is to narrow it down to narrow it down yeah no I think I think I would want to say I think again I knew you guys would make me have opinions about the stuff I haven't thought about yet dang I think what I want to say is that I want to talk about reductionism in a depth context is how I want to get at that same kind of drive but I don't know enough to be able to really cash that out that's where I want to pick up on that thread but I don't know how to do it yet but yes two very important things that I'm going to have to talk a lot about absolutely so do you let me be first and don't worry for all of you my question is is really again about the concept of web because I'm still a bit struggling to almost almost the distinction with scope so I'm going to ask you a difficult question what would you translate in French yeah it is it is hard I've actually I've run across this I gave a very short version of this talk at the SPS and I was like I can't give it in French because I don't know how to translate the central concept I mean it's en pleur but en pleur was also scope yeah yeah yeah it's a really funny problem it's a really funny problem I mean perhaps the most in some sense there's no way to put it but I think it might be illustrative one might be one might reduce I'll make a joke at my own expense one might reduce the entire theoretical apparatus I tried to build about what breadth is breadth is scope but when you do it on purpose like carefully can't you just call it motivated I don't know there is another interesting question that's right around here that I've received before and I'm still not sure what to do with and that is is this a theoretical virtue or is it more like I don't know like an axiological motivational something is this your question go for it I don't have a Matthew I was going to brush your hand no I don't have one I don't have one it's because I really don't I would have tried to give the S.B.S. talk in French just to give a shot at a professional talk because in only 20 minutes it's a pretty chill environment I would have given it a try but I was like if I can't translate breadth into French I guess I'm not giving the talk in French étendu etendu does that make sense that's like physical that's like the example sentence is l'étendu des connaissances du scientifique remarquable doesn't that sound beautiful well okay hmm I'm not asking this to be annoying it's just because it helps to yeah like can you hmm not sure yeah maybe not sure with hmm I feel like this is something we have to workshop over a beer after this this is the perfect workshop over a beer question were you saying that you have like fast to the point remark about this very question otherwise I have to ask the next question if it's related there's also time for everybody maybe not okay many thanks Charles for the talk it was really interesting great yeah my blank is more or less the discussion about epistemic also non-empirical a bit of theories what you usually have is different competing theories right I mean you have some evidence and you have this under determination so you have different competing theories that account for the empirical data more or less in the same way so you start to apply different criteria for theory choice simplicity is called but it's clear that this this beer just makes sense if you have authentic theories competing so simplicity in isolation makes no much sense if you simply with respect to another theory that's right but in your account of breadth seems something that is not related to a theory it's not that pure to a theory but it's like a normative normative stance to integrate different theories in a particular way even within a particular field so my question was more if you were thinking more in this line good good and so this actually gets at this worry that I had so something like that worry is why I started initially thinking about this in terms of explanations instead of the theories because now we're talking about if the question is what kinds of resources should we draw on in order to explain certain kinds of biological phenomena or for that matter one can still say that it's a question of explanatory virtues which phenomena merit and explanation and which do not um now I started there because of these kinds of worries I was pushed back toward theoretical virtues well precisely because so then you start thinking about so what are you going to build this with reference to and if you want to use if you're thinking about it in terms of a comparison with scope will scope really an explanatory virtue will not really it seems more like a theoretical virtue but it is related to bread and so maybe the long the long-winded answer to this is that what this is showing me is that what I really need is an account about sort of so clearly there's some kind of relationship between theoretical virtues and the virtues of explanations provided by those theories um but there's not really a lot of good discussion about explanatory virtues in literature and so I'm torn about what to do about this um yeah in some sense my ideal answer to your question would be to have an account where I basically said you know you might think that this was all just about getting theories that have more scope but it turns out theories with more scope won't generate explanations with more breadth maybe that's the right move here but man actually defending that move and figuring out even how to define your terms to be able to state that move clearly it's really hard and I don't have I'm not sure what to do about it yet um but you may be I mean that's I worried about I worried about when I was going through a few days ago and kind of so when I gave this uh DSBS it was all in terms of explanatory explanatory virtues and I think very rightly Tomas Fadel from the back was like the heck is an explanatory virtue I mean not I know he's much nicer than that not on me to say that he's a good friend of mine but like he was like come on what do you like can you give me an account of what those are and if you can like how can you tell me about how to evaluate them and I'm like what kind of account might even look like for what those are and that's bad whereas there is a really nice account there's a lot of philosophy that's been done about what's going on with theoretical virtues so I really don't know how to this is a knot that I haven't figured out how to crack and it is kind of it's a little scary because it is pretty central to the project but you're exactly right about like who exactly is evaluating what that's not clear but part of the problem is that that's not ever really clear in the philosophy of science so yeah if anyone has clever ideas about how to or a paper I've missed about that will help me understand this I would love to hear them because yeah I feel this and I don't know what to do about it yeah let's pass the button to Max yes my question is also on that line because I was trying to understand exactly what it meant by breath and exactly what it was and I was a bit confused by saying it was theoretical value because especially I was thinking of a specific example where sort of the idea of theoretical value seems to apply so much which is in the relationship between breath and data and this idea of data-driven science which I think is very common in the natural sciences in the life sciences and so it seems that epistemic virtues rather than theoretical virtues are more applyable here so the epistemic virtues in the sense of that one kind of song is to mention so I didn't understand what was the difference between epistemic and theoretical virtues because I feel like there is a different theoretical virtues to be a subset of epistemic virtues as a student epistemic virtues are a bit more broad the importance of their kind of scientific practices good so we have a little bit of conflict of terminology here but actually this may be really productive because maybe it's this broader sense because I had actually entirely forgotten about that broader sense of epistemic virtue in terms of like the virtues of a good scientist right so just to be super precise right yeah so in that sense to be hyper clear epistemic virtue, theoretical virtues are applied to theories but it still is probably a subset of the same kind of virtues of those some of those are epistemic values and others are non-epistemic values right in the uh sorry who wrote that McMullan the Arnie McMullan sense so some of some kinds of values some kinds of theoretical virtues we value because they lead us toward we think they lead us toward true theories and those are the epistemic ones and some we value because they lead us toward something else like a notion of the good and those are the non-epistemic values so there is a bit of a kind of terminology overlap here but maybe exactly epistemic virtue in this kind of STSE sense is exactly what I need I need to go sit and think about that right because so my how I was understanding breath is like you mentioned later is like scope and motivation for everything not breath as scope plus social relevance I don't know if that's how you were thinking of it but that's how I was picturing my mind so in that sense if you add the theoretical aspect and the epistemic aspect the scope plus the social relevance that's where you have the epistemic virtues in the sense of applying the design yeah so I don't just want to say social relevance right because I think the kind of I think the kind of opportunism angle is also really important and isn't quite social relevance it's still it's more practical it's more practically focused than that but I do think I do think they're how to talk about what these how to talk about what these virtues attach to and in herein you know I'm a little worried because if you get too broad right in some of these I don't want to go all the way to like a Stephen Shepin type thing where I say that you know it's like the scientist must appreciate must have breath I don't want them to be like properties of a good knower I don't think I want to go quite that far so I need to find somewhere in between and I haven't quite cracked the code yet on where to do that yeah I hesitate to go because I do think there is something kind of well there's nothing interpersonal about the epistemic virtues in that broader STS sense but you know what I mean I think there's something more they are about the science more than they are about the people no it's a yeah that's a that's a potentially really useful resource thanks I need to go back and think about that I haven't picked that stuff up like that that gales and stuff in forever I'm just one more time yeah so yeah I'm thinking about the because you see breath to so the people who are super or large links several stages really that's what some that's how some people can shout I think yeah I was thinking of the human brain project that sort of had this image of making this models of the brain through modeling right I was thinking what does the place of data and data through the time especially the half in this because they process the claim the opposite right to be theory less and that's the way they can link between different different levels of the model especially the unbiased and the sort of sort of objective right so I was thinking what role does data play yeah good well as you saw another thing I want to write a chapter about so what can I say given my given my current lack of research about that chapter yeah I think it's a really important well the long and short of it is I think it's a really important case study I think it's a really important piece of context because I think it is how what's interesting here is I think it is how it is one of the ways it's probably the best way to say it it's one of the ways that a variety of contemporary life scientists I think would say would tell you if I if I just went blind and described to a biologist what breadth is and it was like look so so to what extent and in what ways do you think your work exemplifies this kind of concept I think a lot of contemporary practitioners would give you some kind of an answer that had the word database in it somewhere right I think you're exactly right right that's going to be a really common element of a response and I don't want to say that that's wrong so actually this is another really in point of fact that's another really good argument against calling that a theoretical virtue right but because today precisely say that at least they claim now I think that's I mean I think that doesn't make any sense in the end I think most philosophers of science don't think that that makes any sense but at the same time it would be weird to say that they simultaneously are taking as very central something that I'm saying has to do with theory at the same time as they are also taking as very central to claim that they're not doing any theory that would feel like a very odd conjunction of points to claim yeah that's another that links really well with the current kind of with the current run of worries that people are having about that which I think is really nice now more directly like what do I want to say about it in particular being short what I want to say is exactly and what I also want to say is at least let me advance a provocative hypothesis that I haven't even begun to research so I have no idea if it would end up being falsified my suspicion is that it's going to look a whole lot like the natural history case in the sense that they're going to talk sometimes as though they're hoovering up everything they can find willy-nilly just because they want to have as much data on their databases as they possibly can but when you actually go interrogate the practice you find that they're hoovering up data according to exactly these kinds of opportunistic and value driven kinds of choices that are being made in natural history context that's my completely unsupported hypothesis I can't give you a, I literally can't give you a single example because I haven't started research on that part of the book yet but that's, my official guess is that in point of fact data driven science practice is going to show us instances of breath arguments or breath related decisions made with the goal of improving breath in my sense I think but I can't like I said I don't have any examples yet did you still have a question Peter because you haven't been able to but it's still 29 minutes okay then maybe you were more assertive, sorry okay so you were wondering we can say you didn't have any arguments in mind about this topic but so I got interested into the medical data collections practice I guess because it's very similar to what happens to natural history although it happened basically to medical museums that they were collecting you know that's not happening anymore or it's happening differently and so one argument that was very interesting was that sometimes there's a lot of bad stuff and we don't know why yet so there's no theoretical goal but in the future we might discover that it's very useful and actually it happened in a medical museum for instance you know they suddenly went back to this old organ in a bottle and a body in a grave and they discovered stuff that was very useful in the future there's like some uncertainty about what usefulness we have for the data yeah that's really cool there's something in there about that's an aspect I'd have to think about this more but my initial instinct is to say that's a cool aspect yeah yeah I've seen for example there's some that are oh yeah we confirmed if I'm remembering my case study correctly we confirmed some of the damaging effects of DET, pesticide use by going back and looking at like birds collected in natural history exhibits and we realized that their skeletons were wasting away over the course of the like middle of the 20th century I mean medicine we did some stuff from Spanish food for instance so it could be very relevant yeah so I'm inclined to say that there's an interesting question here so both there are obviously some interesting value judgments going on in there and I have to think a lot harder about what is actually at stake what the motivations really are there's also a sort of there's like a double reverse of opportunism here too about like don't be too opportunistic in terms of just going with what you have because this becomes this will become a burden later on that's a really cool idea for another way to think about part of the case study yeah that's really helpful yeah please do that's great so well I tried to understand the concept of bread I find it inspiring like I have the feeling that there's something in there that is not in the other virtue that I've been described in literature so I think it's very worthwhile but I'm not sure I understand it yet fully and first I'm wondering whether it's a concept that's created by you in the sense of like it's some intuition you have and you just looked for a word and you put that word on it or it's something that scientists actually use they claim that my theory has more breath and that's kind of a thing that you want to give rational reconstruction of the word is mine the pattern I detected this pattern in practice that I want to give a decent explanation for that's what I thought to the best of my knowledge nobody's thought about this yet and I got very lucky I tried to do a pretty exhaustive literature search and nobody's used breath yet to describe anything in the philosophy of science so well maybe it's a terrible word never sure about it so we shouldn't use too much our information about these things you stipulate it is intended to be a stipulative definition but nevertheless I'll try to say something about my intuitions about it given everything that has been said and you can say I'm the wrong because they probably are wrong so breath seems like it is derived from broad like depth from deep so the property that a theory has or that a theorizing has is to be broad or be broader than some other phenomenon of theorizing right is it then true that a theory is a broader of theorizing is broader than another one if it's for the same phenomena provides or potentially will provide answers to more useful questions other more useful questions we don't enlarge the scope necessarily they might be exactly the same phenomena and the same empirical stuff but you you can answer more useful and then useful can be theoretically useful or whatever questions about those very empirical stuff happening yeah that's kind of does that make any sense at all or that's a really interesting way to think about it so to try to define it very what that does is that would be a fun way to get out of the scope plus frame that I'm in right now which is kind of how I've been thinking about it which is not there's anything wrong with that I think that captures the phenomenon decently well but maybe also that there's a sense in which I like invoking useful too because in some sense you might say that those various overlapping ideas about how to pick out breadth is distinct from scope that I offered are sort of different ways of thinking about utility or different concepts of utility right again I mean utility not in a strictly non-epistemic way exactly and utility is cool because it has both of those sense that's why that's a great word in that context yeah that's a really I'm gonna go sit very quietly and think very hard about that that's a really cool proposal that may be exactly right now that still doesn't mean again we're still having we still run into the question about what exactly it is that that property applies to but that said I don't like theorizing rather than theories yeah and I mean practices something like that theorizing practices scientific but also I was going to say it seems that does that also seems like something that at least could theoretically apply to explanations as well could get the back toward where I started which is a scientific practice yeah of course but that actually could that could be a way to sort of integrate and actually what's lovely about that is you know it's the other nice thing about how to put this that could it could be a virtue that could in here in anything for which the relationship provides makes sense right which is to say sometimes you could you could justifiably and legitimately talk about it as a theory property because theories provide answers to questions but explanations also provide answers to questions certain other kinds of practices also plausibly provide then are you not running the risk of ending in the same boat like what is understanding people write books about understanding it's also yeah I mean yeah well I guess I guess this is important to you I guess I'm willing to say that I'm willing to fall back on the scientific community as the arbiter for what it means to provide an answer to a question that doesn't necessarily bug me I mean maybe I just maybe I've read too much wrong for awesome explanation but like I'm kind of I think I'm kind of okay saying you know is that a good answer to that question in that context is that just for the scientific community to decide providing answers to more useful to more useful questions could just be a the scientific community can evaluate whether that's the case or not in a given kind of context philosophers can too but by understanding the criteria used by the scientists I'd be okay with that by the same thing that's I want to think about intersecting that idea with both Christian and Max's worries and see if that is a way to answer those worries that we had from before or not if it is if it is you may have just done me a real favor I will owe you several beverages I can't live with that I have another question with the the reasons why you do this with who are you can you imagine some philosopher that is not important no I prefer now I prefer now I see that this is not scientific it's not scientific that we should go now I don't have an opponent here which is kind of fun I legitimately think that the point of this is there's a cool way to understand a kind of repeating pattern of the way that life scientists especially have been constructing their theories and explanations recently that isn't really captured by any of the ways that philosophers of science talk about what's going on right now it really is that simple it's like there's something cool happening here we don't really have a way to talk about it yet that I'm aware of it deserves a word because I think if we give it a turn you can find cool commonalities between things like you know Darwin's Orchid book and the brain for the human brain project actually start to you know you start to see weird commonalities between those things that you didn't see before so it really is that kind of it is a kind of I guess my opponent would say the pure opponent would say something like there's actually not enough in common to really tie these things together you're seeing kind of phantoms of like resemblance between practices that should be kept distinct that are really just too separate sorry you know good nice try but there's no commonality here there's no story to tell you understand your past as a concept and there's a let's admit that it's something like a value shared by something it's about a scientific community but we know that those values are not shared by everyone in the community and that sometimes they know that they have some values other values so you say that it's a value for life sciences and not in physics they're not applied physics is it because everyone knows that it is and it is no I don't even want to go that far but I do think that there is I do think what I do want to say is that this is the in terms of where I want to go for the payoff with the book at least I do want to say if you go look at how right now contemporary biologists frame for themselves what are the challenges that we're going to have to deal with in the next 50 years of biology I think you find that a ridiculously large amount of that kind of discussion as it goes on makes a lot of sense in a breadth kind of framework and this kind of framework lets you see some of this sort of interplay between epistemic and non-epistemic value judgments see the motivation for some of these kinds of choices about what are we going to look on next where do we want to push the frontiers of biological theory and so I think that's what you get I think the payoff is kind of there's a way of talking about the future of the life sciences in particular that this is again there may be other examples that I think really resonates with this way of understanding what the scientists involved are up to that at least I think you hear less of in other sciences for one thing just to give one concrete example I will not give a name here this anecdote should remain anonymous but I once heard a director a very high up of a major U.S. national funding organization tell the anecdote and I think it was something like breadth that he had in mind although here it was a liability so he was telling the following anecdote he was saying you know look I go to meetings that you guys don't go to I go to meetings not where we talk about six digit or seven digit project grants I go to the meetings where we talk about eight digit and nine digit initiative grants hundreds of millions national level initiatives and the physicists can come into those meetings and go to the chalkboard or put on a power point and tell us a beautiful story about here's the fundamental theory of how the universe works except that we don't know the answer to X and if you give me $800 million I'm going to answer it and like here's the exact node of the network right here's everything we know and we don't know that and we're going to get it and all the directors in the room are like and the biologists come in and they go what a sequence the human genome and they're like why they're like we don't know yet it'll be great though personalized medicine and it's like wait a minute what you know what what's what's what's going on and I think I think part of the I think part of the part of what's at issue there is that a lot of these goals the way that these the way that the life scientists are thinking about their future goals you know that's not about perhaps most provocatively you know we're going to sequence the whole human genome because it's going to give us personalized medicine is sort of trying to bring too much theory when really what they mean to be making is a breadth or they need to be making a non-epistemic value argument they need to be making some other different kind of argument but they don't make it they try to make epistemic value based arguments when that's not really their motivation for doing what they want to be doing in the first place so we kind of rethink when they talk this way in terms of like really what they're gunning for is something more like breadth I think it helps us understand how they're engaging with the future of their own field and so that's the payoff I think I think it's just I really it's useful lens more than anything else and maybe in the end you know maybe in the end you really got on the planet who thinks it's a useful lens and I'll take that I'll take the L and go home but I hope not I hope that other people would find other reasons that it would be a fun way to think about your concept of breadth is maybe even in the temple there is a temple aspect to it and so maybe because the world itself is more like physical and there is a you can try to find a concept of world in English that had a relation to the future yeah I don't know the really cocky thing to do would be to call it promise but I don't think I have the guts that's too weird that's too like hand wavy and vague right I mean I wish I wish that importance in English had that sense that it does in French like weight too but that sense is totally gone in English weight we want to answer weighty questions and not light questions I mean yeah that's maybe there's something there yeah I mean promise would be probably too cocky but maybe it's sort of what I had in mind because I thought that uncertainty aspect to it right part of the problem is yeah for instance by contrast with fruitfulness where you want fruitfulness to be a bet fruitfulness is a bet and you want your bet to be a good bet promise can be a bad bet maybe you just renamed my book that's okay they don't care once you sign the contract you can do whatever you want look I think the contract already I can write whatever the heck I want to write just has to make it pass the peer review okay I'm going through my chindler's list so a lot of things have been covered yet already maybe it could be fruitful to your theory to also get into the scope I hear two words I understand like non straight forward sciences like psychology economy social science because it can be I think interesting if you could flesh this concept of breath out with respect to these science I think it might be an interesting exercise that's a really good idea I'll say I have to answer this well I'm going to answer this I think you're right that's really good that's really cool I would love to be able to do that can I do it? I don't know if you take commission you take commission community science so we have this story of community science where at the beginning community science is all about creativity very narrow creativity and our core for functionalism and so first case case creativity started with this character and then we have a lot of people that were too much it's tomorrow the computer it takes commission as a function of the brain or the computer and then maybe we should get into more depth which should go maybe into neuro applications you evolve into creating new science so that would be kind of an extension of depth then you have also people next time so in a way we should do community science of everything we should have community science not only for psychology but we can do we can apply it to sociologists we can do with the relationship of psychology we can do we can apply community science we can replace sociology by community science so this would be an extension of the scope of community science in terms of objects that concern the brain and then you have this debate about external, external commission when you're like well many commission is not only kind of since that happened in the brain maybe we should expand, maybe we should take into account under a lot of words maybe we should take into account other like material for the mirror external part of the commission you know like this kind of notebook so what does that look like so would that be in your perspective would that be an extension of the price of a community explanation and that could not be reachable to scope of discussion about mechanisms people listening to the conversation are not discussing the relevance of neural information yeah I'd love to say yes but I would have to think a lot longer about my answer I want to say yes though that sounds like a cool because yeah in some sense it I guess I'll put it this way that example has the same kind of flavor as the examples that first motivated me on the project that is to say you can point to something that feels like scope and then you can point to this other thing that feels also like the only word you would have to describe it is scope but it feels different from the thing that you just said was scope and that's exactly the sort of flavor of these cases in the biosciences that made me think in the first place that maybe there's a new kind of something happening a new kind of virtue being pursued here was exactly for that for that same reason to kind of say you know wait a minute like we can imagine what scope would be and here's the story about that so yeah I mean I really attempted to say yes but I'd have to think a lot harder about whether extended cognition would count it's a really cool it's a really cool example though yeah okay so I will assign the last five minutes to my and the neuroscience in this case there's an omnia of translation where you have these laboratories which are actually embedded in neurology in departments where they actually surgeries with humans and so there's this translational laboratories where they this sort of some of the theories and some of the techniques that they use they sort of interchange between the lab the clinic I wonder is this breath good this gets to a question that I've asked myself and I'm not yet sure write this down is another question I've asked myself and I'm not entirely sure what I want my answer to be yet that is to say maybe one thing that this concept could also be useful for and I'm going to even generalize a little from your example stop me if you think I'm doing violence to it maybe another thing that breath could be useful for is recovering a bit of a good legitimate sense of a much maligned concept in the philosophy of science namely the basic applied distinction maybe there's a bit of something going on in here where some of the phenomena that we not all obviously not everything that we used to think was qualified as applied science maybe part of the difference between basic and applied or part of the cases that we might have described as applied science are like exactly this scientist deciding making a conscious choice to move their theory in the direction of a particular kind of society relevant problem and maybe that that could be a good way to think about some of these translational medicine cases we don't just want to do neuroscience and rats we want to make a very deliberate choice that we're going to push it in the direction of engagement with clinical populations maybe some things on the you know by the time you get I don't want to get all the way off into the weeds of talking about the distinction between science and engineering but at some point by the time you get way off into engineering this analysis won't work anymore but maybe some of the kind of first steps in that direction where people are inclined to you know kind of want to depreciate the value of what the scientists are doing if you could instead say well look it's not that they're not like ceasing to do science and starting to do engineering they're driving their science in a particular kind of direction for certain kinds of well-motivated reasons could be a more enlightening way of looking at some of those kinds of border cases yeah that's one that I'm absolutely on board with and I haven't thought about translational neuroscience in particular but those kinds of cases in general are something that's on my radar I have no idea if I'll have enough space to actually talk about it in the book but it's on my radar