Stephanie Ruphy, “Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered: A New Approach to the (Dis)unity of Science (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2017)
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What is the central argument of Stephanie Ruphy’s book on scientific pluralism?
Thank you.
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together, we 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 Stephanie Ruffi, who is professor of philosophy and head of the Philosophy, Practices, and Languages Research Laboratory at Université Grenoble Alpes. Her new book, Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered, A New Approach to the Disunity of Science, is just out from University of Pittsburgh Press.
The idea that the sciences can't be unified, that there will never be a single theory of everything, is by now a bit of an orthodoxy in philosophy of science and in many sciences as well. But different versions of pluralism present different views of what exactly they are pluralistic about in science and about why sciences cannot be unified and what the failure of unification entails about the world and about our knowledge of the world. In her book, Ruffi untangles a number of different issues within the pluralist camp, arguing for a foliated pluralism in ontology and the interest relativity of knowledge claims and our representations of the world to historical features and our epistemic interests.
She also critically examines anti-reductionist arguments and both the generality of their conclusions and the support they may seem to provide for inferences to the disorder of the world. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Stephanie Ruffi, are you there? Yes, hello. Hi, welcome to New Books and Philosophy. I'm very happy to be talking to you about your new book, Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered. And I'd like to start out with a few words about your own background in terms of how you came to become a philosopher. and how you got into the areas you did and how you came to write this particular book.
Okay, so actually my background was initially in science and technology. And so I first graduated as an engineer and then I got a first PhD in astrophysics in Paris. I worked on the structure and evolution of the galaxy. But at the same time, I was very interested in philosophy. And so I started studying philosophy in addition to my scientific studies. And so I studied philosophy for five years, but it was at that time mainly history of philosophy, because in France that's what you get mainly in the university. So after five years, I was finishing my PhD in astrophysics, so I had to make up my mind and choose, because I couldn't do both anymore at the same time. So I had to make a choice, you know, astrophysics or philosophy.
And I took a break. I worked in the private sector for a while. And then I decided to go on with philosophy. And I applied to a PhD program in the States. And I was lucky to be accepted at Columbia.
How did Ruphy’s scientific background shape her turn to philosophy of science?
So I moved to the States and I got a second PhD in philosophy at Columbia.
And
quite naturally, given my background in science, I specialized in philosophy of science at that time. And when I arrived at Columbia, I was supposed to do philosophy of physics. But then Philip Kinshaw arrived at Columbia at that time, and I got interested in other branches of philosophy of science. And I was attracted more by broader question about the sciences rather than specializing in philosophy of physics. And so I started working in general philosophy of science during my PhD. And because I was interested in general questions about science, I got interested in the question of the articulation between different branches of science. And this is... At that moment, I started to write, you know, papers about well-known philosophers like Cartwright or Dupre who wrote about the plurality of science and the relationship between the various branches of science.
And that's how I started writing on these topics. And I was especially interested in basic issues like what can you learn about the world from science once you reject
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central argument of Stephanie Ruphy’s book on scientific pluralism?
0:02–3:31
2
How did Ruphy’s scientific background shape her turn to philosophy of science?
3:31–11:21
3
What are the main varieties of scientific pluralism discussed in the book?
11:21–21:23
4
How does “foliated pluralism” differ from other pluralist approaches?
21:23–30:01
5
What is “ontological enrichment” and how does it relate to scientific styles?
30:01–38:50
6
How does the map metaphor illustrate the pluralism of scientific representations?
38:50–46:56
7
What challenges do computer simulations pose for realism in scientific modeling?
46:56–55:33
8
What are Ruphy’s current research projects and future directions?
55:33–1:05:15
Speakers
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