Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Thesis Format

Monograph

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Philosophy

Supervisor

Smeenk, Christopher

Abstract

The Earth has not always been accompanied by its celestial partner, the Moon. In fact, the Moon was acquired by the Earth about 100 million years after the start of the solar system. It was acquired in the aftermath of a massive collision between the Earth and another planet, dubbed “Theia,” the mythological mother of the Greek goddess of the Moon. Most of the iron-rich cores of Earth and Theia merged almost immediately, while the rest of the two planets vaporized. Some of the impact ejecta was lost, but enough remained in gravitationally bound orbit around what was then $ 98\% $ of current-sized Earth. What remained of the impact eject derived from the outer, silicate portion of the Earth, cooled rapidly, condensed and accreted to form the body we are so accustomed to seeing in our sky.

I want to know how we can know all of that. Hempel (1942) famously argued that theories and hypotheses concerning history cannot meet the standard of a true scientific theory, and can, at best, only offer explanation sketches, i.e. how-possible scenarios, and at worst, amount to nothing more than in-principle untestable tales, i.e. just-so stories. This seed of distrust concerning scientific theories that have a narrative form has persisted, even if no one still thinks that Hempel's explication of what makes a theory justly scientific is adequate.

Yet we do seem to have much genuine scientific knowledge of the deep past. Such knowledge must, then, be justified or confirmed on the basis of some alternative inferential methodology that both makes up for the inability of historical scientists to perform controlled laboratory tests on past complex events and which makes the narrative form of theories inessential. This dissertation develops a new empiricist framework that answers Hempel’s challenge to the untestability of stories concerning the deep past.

Summary for Lay Audience

The Earth has not always been accompanied by its celestial partner, the Moon. In fact, the Moon was acquired by the Earth about 100 million years after the start of the solar system. It was acquired in the aftermath of a massive collision between the Earth and another planet, dubbed “Theia,” the mythological mother of the Greek goddess of the Moon. Most of the iron-rich cores of Earth and Theia merged almost immediately, while the rest of the two planets vaporized. Some of the impact ejecta was lost, but enough remained in gravitationally bound orbit around what was then $ 98\% $ of current-sized Earth. What remained of the impact eject derived from the outer, silicate portion of the Earth, cooled rapidly, condensed and accreted to form the body we are so accustomed to seeing in our sky.

I want to know how we can know all of that. Hempel (1942) famously argued that theories and hypotheses concerning history cannot meet the standard of a true scientific theory, and can, at best, only offer explanation sketches, i.e. how-possible scenarios, and at worst, amount to nothing more than in-principle untestable tales, i.e. just-so stories. This seed of distrust concerning scientific theories that have a narrative form has persisted, even if no one still thinks that Hempel's explication of what makes a theory justly scientific is adequate.

Yet we do seem to have much genuine scientific knowledge of the deep past. Such knowledge must, then, be justified or confirmed on the basis of some alternative inferential methodology that both makes up for the inability of historical scientists to perform controlled laboratory tests on past complex events and which makes the narrative form of theories inessential. This dissertation develops a new empiricist framework that answers Hempel’s challenge to the untestability of stories concerning the deep past.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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