Information, data, and inferences in 19th century chemistry

Franklin Jacoby

Objectives
The objectives of this project are to understand (1) the relationship between data and information and (2) how data are used in data-to-phenomena inferences, especially in historical contexts.

Justification
Since Bogen and Woodward’s seminal paper on data and phenomena (1988), philosophers have increasingly recognized the importance of clarifying what data are and what they tell us about the empirical character of scientific knowledge. It is the hypothesis of this project that an examination of what data are and how they are used supports neither strong forms of empiricism nor forms of idealism. We will instead explore the possibility that the use of data presupposes both empirical and conceptual elements.

Part 1: Data and Information
This project takes the approach that data is a type of record, typically of an observation (Jacoby, 2020). As such, data are representational and they represent events, objects, or anything that can be observed. Some authors have, given this representational feature of data, associated data with information (Woodward, 2010), but such treatment has not taken into account the dependence of data upon context. Accounts that do address this contextual dependence of data (e.g. Jacoby, 2020; Leonelli, 2016; McAllister, 2010, 2011) have not addressed the relationship between data and information. Since information is often assumed to be organized and systematized data there obviously is a close connection between the two. This part of the project will clarify how data are both contextually dependent and related to information, thereby synthesizing two separate features of data that different accounts in the literature have emphasized, though have thus far never fully connected.

Part 2: Data in 19th Century Chemistry
Using the results of part 1, part 2 will address a simple case of this connection, namely how data in 19th century chemistry reveals the jointly empirical and conceptually situated character of experimental science during this period. Particularly important is the modification and adoption of atomic theory, a development in the history of chemistry that was fraught, slow to develop, and also not clearly resolved through experimental data. This case shows the complexity and situated character of using data to make inferences about phenomena, a form of reasoning that, if taken out of context, seems deceptively simple. The results of this study may be generalized to more complex cases of the use of data in information and inferences to phenomena such as in social or political contexts.

Literature Cited
Bogen, J., & Woodward, J. (1988). Saving the phenomena. The Philosophical Review, 97(3), 303–352.
Jacoby, F. (2020). Data identity and perspectivism. Synthese, 1–17.
Leonelli, S. (2016). Data-centric biology: a philosophical study. University of Chicago Press.
McAllister, J. W. (1997). Phenomena and patterns in data sets. Erkenntnis, 47(2), 217–228.
McAllister, J. W. (2011). What do patterns in empirical data tell us about the structure of the world? Synthese, 182(1), 73–87.
Woodward, J. (2010). Data, Phenomena, Signal, and Noise. Philosophy of Science, 77, 792–803.


How to think and what to do: Kant’s understanding of moral and logical cognition in light of his break with his predecessors

Dr. Lorenzo Sala

Usually, historians of philosophy credit Kant for having shown that the difference between sensible and intellectual cognition is one in kind, and not simply in degree. Whereas Kant's predecessors took this difference to lie in the distinctness or confused nature of the cognition in question, Kant took it to lie in their intuitive and discursive nature, a difference which cannot be bridged through an activity of analysis. Although this picture is correct, it generally leads interpreters to ignore how Kant's predecessors nonetheless had a quite articulate notion of intuitive cognition as a specific kind of cognition: intuitive cognition was in fact a knowledge “through ideas”, and was taken to be characterised as an immediate form of cognition, precisely like in Kant. In this respect, Kant's notion of “intuition” and its identification with sensibility looks much more as a limitation of the previous notion of intuitive knowledge rather than the introduction of a radically new element.  This, however, does not mean that, with his new notion of intuition, Kant is getting rid of the idea of an immediate, purely-rational access to universal truths. On the contrary, Kant admits in fact the presence of some principles which are unrelated to sensibility and, at the same time, universal and immediately certain: these are precisely the laws of logic and the moral law. In my project, I consider Kant’s understanding of moral and logical cognition against the background of his break with the Wolffian epistemology.


Editionsprojekt: Christian Wolffs Deutsche Ethik

Andree Hahmann (Peking), Dieter Hüning (Trier) und Gideon Stiening (Münster)

Christian Wolff gehört zu den einflussreichsten Philosophen der deutschen Aufklärung, sein umfassender systematischer Begründungsanspruch, der sich in zahl- und umfangreichen Schriften niederschlägt, war auch für die Entwicklung der deutschen Aufklärungsphilosophie prägend. Noch die Metaphysikkritik, die Kant in seiner Kritik der reinen Vernunft formuliert, dokumentiert die Rolle, die der Wolffianismus im 18. Jahrhundert gespielt hat.

Der eigentliche Schwerpunkt von Wolffs philosophischer Arbeit lag auf dem Gebiet der praktischen Philosophie. Ein achtbändiges Werk zum Naturrecht, ein umfangreicher Band zum Völkerrecht, eine zweibändige Philosophia practica universalis, eine fünfbändige Moralphilosophie und weitere Abhandlungen geben davon Zeugnis. Den Ausgangspunkt von Wolffs praktischer Philosophie bildete die erstmals 1720 erschienen Vernünfftigen Gedancken von der Menschen Thun und Lassen, zu Beförderung ihrer Glückseeligkeit, den Liebhabern der Wahrheit mitgetheilet von Christian Wolff. Diese Schrift, besser bekannt unter ihrem geläufigen Titel als Deutsche Ethik, enthielt den umfassenden Entwurf einer eudämonistischen Vervollkommnungsethik, die für die weiteren Debatten der deutschen Aufklärung richtungsweisend war: Bis zum Kants revolutionärer Neubegründung der Ethik und durch deren radikale Absage an den Eudämonismus blieben Glückseligkeit und Vollkommenheit die beiden Konzepte, welche die Rahmenbedingungen für die ethischen Debatten absteckten.

Wegen der Bedeutung der Deutschen Ethik planen wir – Andree Hahmann (Peking), Gideon Stiening (Münster) und Dieter Hüning (Kant-Forschungsstelle der Universität Trier) – eine Neuedition der Schrift, die in der Philosophischen Bibliothek des Felix Meiner Verlags erscheinen wird. Damit soll allen Interessierten eine Studienausgabe zur Verfügung gestellt werden, die das Hauptwerk von Wolffs praktischer Philosophie durch Einbettung in den historischen Kontext und Aufarbeitung der impliziten Bezüge der Ethik Wolffs aufarbeitet.