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Understanding is a central aim of science and highly important in present-day society. But what precisely is scientific understanding and how can it be achieved? This book answers these questions, through philosophical analysis and historical case studies, and presents a philosophical theory of scientific understanding that highlights its contextual nature.

Though science and philosophy take different approaches to ontology, metaphysical inferences are relevant to interpreting scientific work, and empirical investigations are relevant to philosophy. This book argues that there is no uniquely rational way to determine which domains of ontology are appropriate for belief, making room for choice in a transformative account of scientific ontology.

Not all scientific explanations work by describing causal connections between events or the world's overall causal structure. In addition, mathematicians regard some proofs as explaining why the theorems being proved do in fact hold. This book proposes new philosophical accounts of many kinds of non-causal explanations in science and mathematics.

Between 1905 and 1913, French physicist Jean Perrin's experiments on Brownian motion ostensibly put a definitive end to the long debate regarding the real existence of molecules, proving the atomic theory of matter. While Perrin's results had a significant impact at the time, later examination of his experiments questioned whether he really gained experimental access to the molecular realm. In this case study in the history and philosophy of science, George E. Smithand Raghav Seth here argue that despite doubts, Perrin's measurements were nevertheless exemplars of theory-mediated measurement-the practice of obtaining values for an inaccessible quantity by inferring them from an accessible proxy via theoretical relationships between them. They argue that it wasactually Perrin more than any of his contemporaries who championed this approach during the years in question.

This monograph presents the first detailed exposition of the formal theory of Branching Space-Times (BST). The theory presented here by Nuel Belnap, Thomas Muller, and Tomasz Placek describes how real possibilities can be anchored in a spatio-temporal world that is rudimentarily relativistic. Things that are possible in Cleveland are not possible in San Francisco; other things were possible in 1988 but are not possible in 2021. BST represents such possibilities usinga mathematically rigorous framework that combines modality and rudimentary relativistic space-times. The book is divided into two parts: the first contains the exposition of the theory, including detailed proofs; the second contains three applications of BST in metaphysics and philosophy of science,focusing on the use of BST to represent pertinent forms of indeterminism in each area.This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

What does it mean to be a realist about science if one takes seriously the view that scientific knowledge is always perspectival, namely historically and culturally situated? In Perspectival Realism, Michela Massimi explores how scientific knowledge grows and evolves thanks to a plurality of epistemic communities occupying a number of scientific perspectives. The result is a philosophical view that goes under the name of "perspectival realism", and it offersa new lens for thinking about scientific knowledge, realism and pluralism in science.