J.D. Trout, “Wondrous Truths: The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science” (Oxford UP, 2016)
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What is the overall premise of J.D. Trout’s book *Wondrous Truths*?
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Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together we'd bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with J. D. Trout, who is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Loyola University in Chicago. His new book Wondrous Truths The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science is just out from Oxford University Press. The social practice we call science has had spectacular success in explaining the natural world since the seventeenth century, and that success shows no sign of abating.
Advanced mathematics and other precursors of modern science were not all originally from or unique to Europe, but it was in Europe that the revolutionary advances in scientific knowledge began, where Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and others came up with theories that got modern physics and chemistry off the ground. Why Europe and why then? And why do the answers to these questions uh have implications for scientific as well as philosophical views of the relation between scientific theories and the phenomena they explain? In his new book, Trout mounts a spirited defense of the claim that the best explanation of the rise of science in the seventeenth century Europe is that Newton and others got lucky.
They happened to come up with versions of pre existing ideas that were just right enough, just true enough to explain just enough of the world, and that was enough to get the ball rolling. Trout defends the scientific realist view. That scientific theories are successful because they are, by and large, true and not merely predictively accurate. He also sharply distinguishes the psychology of explanation, the aha feeling of understanding, from the truth of an explanation, arguing that while a feeling of understanding may be a useful heuristic, we can experience that feeling of being satisfied with an Explanation when an explanation is false, and that conversely there may be theories that are true that we will never really feel that we understand.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, J D Trout, are you there?
I am. How you doing?
Hi, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Thanks very much.
Um glad to have you here to talk about your new book, Wondrous Truths, The Improbable Triumph of Modern Science, which I mean as the uh as the subtitle makes clear, it's it it's sort of about how um the rise of science in Europe in the seventeenth century with Newton and and
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the overall premise of J.D. Trout’s book *Wondrous Truths*?
0:00–7:42
2
How does Trout introduce his background and the motivation for writing the book?
7:42–13:58
3
What is the psychology of explanation and why does the ‘aha’ feeling matter for scientific theories?
13:58–19:02
4
How does Trout define the ontic view of explanation and its relation to truth?
19:02–25:06
5
Why do we often accept explanations that feel right even when they may be false?
25:06–53:12
6
What are the main arguments in the realism vs. anti‑realism debate presented in the book?
53:12–1:08:56
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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