Kenneth Aizawa, "Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation: A Granular Approach" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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What is compositional abduction and why does it matter for scientific interpretation?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figtor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel along with Blaine Newfeld and Sarah Tyson. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Kenneth Aizawa, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, Newark. His new book, Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation, A Granular Approach, is just out from Cambridge University Press. How do scientists reason when they posit unobservables to explain their observed results? For example, how did Watson and Crick reason that DNA had a double helix structure when they observed Franklin's image 51?
Or how did Hodgkin and Huxley reason that sodium ions carried the current flowing into the membrane of a voltage clamped giant squid axon? In his new book, Aizawa argues for an account of such reasoning as singular compositional abduction, explaining particular experimental results in terms of lower level entities, such as the bonds between nucleotides or the positive charges of sodium ions. Aizawa draws on close examination of scientific practice to argue that dominant views in philosophy of science regarding abduction do not capture what scientists are actually doing. Instead, he articulates compositional abduction as a specific form of inferential practice in science, distinct from eliminating alternative hypotheses, employing hypothetical deductive confirmation, or identifying mechanism components.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Kenneth Aizawa. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Thank you, Carrie.
Um, I'm really s excited to be talking about compositional abduction and scientific interpretation, uh, a granular approach. Um, before we get to the book, tell us a bit about yourself, how you became a philosopher, why and and how this book came about.
Okay. Uh so how I became a philosopher. I guess I was in uh an advan what they called the advanced program in high school. I guess it's a they call magnet programs now. And I guess my best teachers were literature teachers. Um but I found literature unsatisfying. Um and when I went off to college, uh by then I'd gotten the idea of philosophy and And in my first semester, I took intro to philosophy and introduction to logic, and I liked it. And I guess it's all been downhill since then. What am I interested in? Uh well, I've mostly been a philosopher of psychology. I started out working on connectionism and then the systematicity of thought. And I wrote a book on that. And then I got interested in extended cognition or or or maybe irritated by extended cognition.
And and I wrote a book on that. And then I started working on multiple realization in psychology. And I started writing a book on that. And but then um I got sidetracked, I guess. So I had been, you I had read Craver's book on explaining the brain. I guess I read it in manuscript and I taught it a few years. And it j and it seemed to me that this mutual manipulability stuff, that to me it just came out of nowhere. It it didn't fit and it didn't seem to me like a very plausible view of how scientists confirmed their hypotheses. But to me at the time, you know, if I I was reading a It in you know, like two thousand five in manuscript. And uh but I just wasn't taken with the mutual manipulability stuff. And um it seemed to me that, well, you know, everyone in is reading this book and a lot of people are working on it.
So someone's gonna realize that there are probably problems with this mutual manipulability, and that probably a better account is something like mechanistic concept. constitution as mechanistic constitute explanation, IBE, some combination like that. So I just, you know, I said, okay, well, someone's gonna come up with that. Um, and so I didn't really worry about it. And then there was a critique of Kraver's book by Baumgartner and Cassini and Gebharder.
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