Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Kenneth Aizawa, "Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation: A Granular Approach" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Description: 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 Compositional Abduction and Scientific Interpretation: A granular approach (Cambridge University Press), Kenneth 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 char...