The Real World and its Many Models with philosopher Michela Massimi

Exploring Perspectival Realism: Are there many paths to the right place?
In this episode, Andrea talks with Michela Massimi, a philosopher renowned for her book 'Perspectival Realism.' They look at what these terms mean, discussing the relevance of perspectivism in the philosophy of science and its implications for understanding scientific models, realism, and pluralism. The conversation explores how different perspectives can coexist in scientific inquiry without leading to relativism, and the role of local and experiential knowledge in contributing to scientific understanding. Massimi also shares her personal journey into philosophy and science, the influence of community and historical context on her work, and inspirations of both physics and literature.

Perspectival Realism, the book we discuss:
Invisible Cities by Italio Calvino
Garden of Forking Paths

00:00 Introduction to Perspectival Realism
01:02 Exploring Perspectival Realism in Philosophy of Science
02:27 Quotes from Borges and Calvino
06:43 Michela Massimi's Journey into Philosophy
11:04 Combining Physics and Philosophy
17:39 Pluralism and Realism in Science
20:01 Situated Knowledge and Modeling Reality
33:33 The Role of Models in Scientific Inference
34:42 Stable Events and Realism in Science
37:29 Natural Kinds and Anti-Essentialism
41:57 Metaphysics of Reality: Stable Events, Robust Phenomena, and Natural Kinds
50:32 The Importance of Historical and Multicultural Perspectives in Science
57:14 Philosophy's Role in Addressing Structural and Systemic Issues
01:06:59 Personal Reflections and the Interconnectedness of Life and Philosophy

https://www.michelamassimi.com
https://academic.oup.com/book/43074?login=false
Natural Kinds: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/
Scientific Perspectivism https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/8471045/Massimi_2012_Scientific_perspectivism.pdf

Transcript

​[00:00:00] 

Andrea Hiott: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to love and philosophy. This episode is with Michela Massimi. She is a philosopher who wrote one of my favorite books, Perspectival Realism. She has also written many wonderful papers about perspectivism that are very important for my research and that relate to navigability and way making. There are other words for this idea of perspectival realism. Perspectivism epistemological, pluralism, pluralism. Is close and connected. Also realist metaphysics. Honestly, there's a whole history of situated knowledges and different terms that relate to this idea of what I would say is a path through a landscape that is unique to [00:01:00] each person making their way through that landscape. In any case in this episode, we talk about it from a perspective of philosophy of science. And how these ideas relate to rethinking the dichotomy of realism. And anti-racism. Or the problem of the plurality of models and how maybe that might not be a problem. It might be okay to have many different models. How might we be realist and pluralist? How might we believe there's a real world out there. But there might not need to be only one correct model to describe it. Many different models could be. Possibly. Helping us to understand that world , but at the same time, those models have to be rigorous. They have to be able to withstand criticism and observation of their parts. So it's not just saying any model is correct, but it might also not be saying that only one model is correct. We talk about this in-depth here. Also discussing how [00:02:00] to think of the connection between, for example, physics and philosophy, which are both very important to Michela and her work. In her book she also mentions a lot of writers such as Boris. And Calvina. Especially Italia Calvino there are many quotes in her book from him. And I love that because I also love Borges and I also love Calvino, especially Calvino's book, invisible cities. So just to get us started, here's a few quotes from that. . Memory is redundant. It repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist. The travelers path changes, according to the route he has followed. 

You take delight, not in a city seven or 70 wonders, but in the answer, it gives to a question of yours. And maybe one from Borges to. Let's see. I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the [00:03:00] past and the future. 

And in some way involve the stars. so the books of both Borges and Calveno are really good exercises in what Mikayla and I talk about here, philosophically. She also brings up forking, F O R K I N G paths, garden of forking paths. Is by Boris. And this idea of forking paths always moving away from each other, but cross again. In this kind of, Escher-like landscape where direction isn't binary. Borges, Calvino Escher. These are written or visual examples of what we are trying to talk about here, philosophically. I really find this a very important issue in philosophy of science and I love what. People like, um, Gary, who is a big inspiration for McKayla. And others are doing. It also extends back for those of you who love Nietzsche or Plato or Wittgenstein Kant.There [00:04:00] are traces. Very. Deep traces and important paths that lead from their work to this work. And we discussed that a little bit here. We think about landscapes and gardens and all the many paths in ways we might be making our way through those in terms of knowledge, space. So I just love this conversation. I love her book. I know I already said that, but I really do. And I hope that you will check it out. And even if it doesn't all make sense, because sometimes. It's a little annoying. All these. Words like essential ism. And realism and so on. It's an amazing exercise if you want to learn critical thinking to try to unravel all of this but I think also you can just listen to it in a big picture sort of way. You can go crazy with the philosophy of this. I'll put some links if you really want to look into it but the overall big picture important issue for me here is we're all trying to understand the world and we're all creating different models and artworks and different creations towards trying to understand that. And [00:05:00] sometimes we confuse those models, whether they're scientific or what have you for the reality. How do we unravel that strange tension, especially once we realized that language itself might be some sort of a model. And why does this matter in normal everyday life? I think it matters because we often associate one another's worldviews with. Whatever particular model or music or organization, et cetera, that we've identified ourselves with. And it can be helpful to realize none of us are any one of those things that we've identified ourselves with. And the people that we're talking to and trying to understand. We also can't identify them completely with any one of those models or representations or whatever you want to call it there. These are all difficult issues philosophically, but Mikayla unpacks them very [00:06:00] well in her writing. And I think we had a really lively and beautiful conversation about these big issues. So. Thank you for being here. If you want to help love and philosophy in any way, we would be very happy to have your support. There's lots of ways to do it. Please join the YouTube or join the sub stack. Or whatever way you can be creative. I'm glad you're here and. I hope wherever you are. Today. Something good. Is happening. Some kind of new insight is coming some exciting, motivating. Swirl of energy comes through your life and you feel connected to what's around you. Alright, here we go.

Andrea Hiott: hi, Michaela. Thank you so much for being here today. 

Michela Massimi: Hi, Andrea. Thank you very much for having me. 

Andrea Hiott: It's great to see you and talk to you. I want to talk about perspectival realism, your book mostly today.

 And one word that's big or important in that book, is community so [00:07:00] to start, I want to think about that word and how you found your community in terms of philosophy.

 I was trying to imagine when you were a kid, if you were reading a lot of science books or cause you, you seem to know so many science stories. And then also how the philosophy came in. The philosophy community, how you got into that, how you found that. 

Michela Massimi: Yeah, no, thank you. Wow. So how do I found my own community? I, where do I start? Maybe I start from the beginning. So you asked me how I got interested in philosophy. So I, as you can tell from my accent, I'm born and bred Italian and, uh, a great thing about the Italian system is that philosophy is actually thought as a compulsory subject in most senior school streams.

So, I encountered philosophy pretty early on at the age of 14, 15 when I was in my first or second year senior school. And I still remember, I still remember the moment. I remember my teacher. I remember we were studying Plato and, uh, the theory of knowing [00:08:00] as reminiscence. And I just, I remember I, I was completely, uh, amazed and enthused by the subject.

And then I started reading by myself during the summer holiday. I remember, suggestions by my high school teacher about Plato's dialogues and other small things that she suggested around Pascal and others. And so I, I just developed my own interest in philosophy, but I've always. been interested also in scientists.

So, I used to, I used to read again during my summer holiday kind of popular science books mostly on, uh, physics, cosmology just very simple ones, you know, but uh, and so when I had to choose what to do at the age of 19 in Italy, I was really torn because I really wanted to do physics. But then I knew inside myself that really my passion was for philosophy and, uh, and I just, yeah, I just couldn't let it go.

So I decided that I was gonna, I was gonna [00:09:00] do for a degree in philosophy. And that doesn't mean that I met my community at that point. I met, some, important mentors that have been inspiring for, I think some of the work I've been doing all along, so. 

Andrea Hiott: Had you met Kant, Immanuel Kant? 

Michela Massimi: Yeah, actually through some of those mentors. So my teacher of philosophy of science in, in Rome, La Sapienza, where I graduated somehow had a kind of Kantian, neo Kantian upbringing. So the name of Kant would appear, and obviously Kant would be everywhere in the Italian curriculum, you know, the theoretical philosophy, there would be Kant, the practical philosophy, there would be Kant, the aesthetics, there would be Kant, absolutely everywhere.

 It's really 

Andrea Hiott: fascinating to me that you have so much philosophy in Italy. So different from the way it is in America

Michela Massimi: yeah, I think the, the Italian curriculum, especially at the time, so it's a pre reform, I think they have reformed it since, but back in the day, 1993, [00:10:00] 1997 was still very much very much historical, in the kind of curriculum and so Kant was really pretty much everywhere.

Kant as an order, so the sort of order that, yeah, we studied was kind of Plato, Aristotle, a bit of Descartes. I don't even think we, we got to Kant in, in secondary school. So yeah, the encounter with Kant was, was later, but it wasn't really until I graduated. And in fact, until after my PhD, that went back to Kant because my PhD, I was doing a pretty much history of physics and history and philosophy of physics on the early quantum theory.

But I've always had an interest in Kant and Kant philosophy of nature. So it was really after my PhD that during the year of my postdoc that I went back to Kant and I discovered this old trend of philosophers of science that had a Kantian, um, kind of interest and, uh, uh, we're working in the Kantian tradition.

I'm thinking of Michael Friedman, for example, has been a very influential figure in, uh, it's kind of [00:11:00] Kantian take applied to the history of, uh, of physics. 

Andrea Hiott: So you already loved science and physics when you were really young, but you felt more like you, you just wanted to understand the ideas of it or something because Yeah, you did your PhD combining both of them.

And of course, they've always been connected. We separated them and now that maybe they're coming back together. Was that important for you to finding a way of holding those things? I mean, physics itself, as I think of it, is doing that sort of holding the philosophical and the scientific in a special way, but.

Michela Massimi: What I loved about physics, was really, you know, the big idea, the big concept, the questioning of reality, which is not necessarily what actual working physicists, you know, have to have to do on a daily basis. There is a lot more kind of practical aspects involved in doing physics. And what fascinated me about physics were really the big questions.

So my kind of, laureate dissertation, which is. what you do at the end of your four year undergraduate degree in Italy was on the Bohr Einstein debate on [00:12:00] the concept of physical reality. So back in 1935, the Einstein Podolsky Rosen and the Bohr Kobenegan interpretation. And again, I found this absolute gem because it's it's one of those debates, which is really deeply philosophical about what is physical reality and we define an element of physical reality.

 Where do we draw the line between the observer and reality? And so that, that's what really fascinated me. And I think that, you know, going back to your question about finding the community, I thought, yes, this is, this is where I see myself going. This is what I want to study. That kind of questioning, uh, yeah, profound philosophical questions.

I think some of the best, best sciences, no matter if it's, you know, physics or biology or else typically, typically do going down to the very foundations of questions about knowledge and reality. So I found my community a bit, yeah, in that way, but then as I said, I went back to Kant later on.

So, but I continue to work in that area of [00:13:00] history and philosophy of the physical sciences and, uh, developed a more historical interest in Kant and Ugandanism. And, uh, but I think for a long time I was really trying to find some kind of I came with a platform where I could address the sort of Kantian questions about how is knowledge possible, and engage with questions about, you know, reality as science portrays science, uh, reality, And it really took me a long time to get to Giri perspectivism because I couldn't really see what was the genuine question that was really interesting from a philosophical point of view.

I didn't want to fall back into some kind of outdated dichotomy about, I don't know, the categories of the understanding and reality of the phenomenon, the noumena. I thought that all that really didn't find necessarily a counterpart in contemporary science. And then I encountered Ron Geary's book, and I thought, okay, this is [00:14:00] an interesting way of addressing the sort of questions that I've always been interested in about the natural physical reality, really, and the role of us human being in understanding that physical reality.

Without necessarily falling back into some sort of platitudes of, okay, the object and the subjects or , the dichotomy that you talk about. 

Andrea Hiott: He really tries to get past that. I think he talks about dyads in I don't know if it's in that book or in papers or in subject, object, but the reason I raised Kant and the reason I'm also trying to figure out how you found the community in philosophy and physics is because exactly that question you raised, how is not knowledge possible?

I feel like with your work, you're opening a different space, we just met, but you do know that I'm kind of obsessed with this getting beyond the dichotomy without rejecting it and the either or. And I'm trying to see in your own life if you, if that was a question that's posed, when you came into this environment, did you feel like you had to choose, you had to choose between philosophy and [00:15:00] science or this kind of mental exploration and physical exploration in this question of how is knowledge possible?

 To get closer to your work Is the world real? Are we going to talk about realism or are we going to talk about anti realism? Did you feel those pressures to choose your side early on or were you always trying to open up the space, maybe just opening it up naturally?

Michela Massimi: Yeah, no, absolutely. It was a constant, constant struggle to overcome you know, dichotomous choices. You either, especially the Italian system where I grew up, but didn't really allow any combination of physics and philosophy. So, in the UK, where I now live is obviously possible to

combine the two. So there are degrees that specialize in philosophy and physics, but that was impossible in Italy at the time.

Definitely in the Italian system, I grew up it was impossible.

So it was a very stark choice out there. You do humanities and you do a 19 exam philosophy and only philosophy or physics. And I remember I started. Kind of subverting a little bit the order by going to [00:16:00] physics and auditing classes. But I could I could not take them for credit, which I always regret, because I think, you know, I would have had a much better education if I were allowed to actually sit those classes and, and do the coursework like the others.

 You couldn't 

Andrea Hiott: use it for credit, but you just went anyway. 

Michela Massimi: No, you couldn't let you put it, it wouldn't be recognized. I remember just going because I was interested and I took some classes with yeah, Marcello Chini at the time, I was in the physics in La Savienza, but just really auditing, just sitting in the class.

And, uh, I remember, yeah, I was preparing my dissertation, spending a lot of time in the basement, a very dusty basement of physics department in the, uh, , campo, the main campus, university campus in Rome. Is that Where 

Andrea Hiott: all those Bohr Einstein documents were? Yeah. 

Michela Massimi: So it was one of those archives, but you need to turn the

I remember it was really spooky. I was the only one there. There was no one around. There was just books covered in dust. Because obviously at the time it was all digitized, right, and now you [00:17:00] go online and you click and one click you get the EPR paper on your computer, but at the time it was not digitized so you had to go down in the basement, uh, yeah, which was exciting, so it was part of the thrill of kind of, yeah, slightly subverting the technology.

Andrea Hiott: Early on you were pushing into kind of that new space. I don't know if you would agree with this, but your book, Perspectival Realism, feels to me like it is opening the space of dichotomy, the way you put it together assumes a space around things that were once considered. choices you had to make in the way that you've kind of described the way the Italian system was. That's how I see it. 

Michela Massimi: No, absolutely. So, well later on during my PhD year in my postdoc care, I kind of started delving into the bait of realism in science.

It was very clear that, again, there was this other dichotomy. You either are a scientific realist or you are an antirealist. And obviously there are different nuances and families of realist and anti realist, [00:18:00] but there is really this gap in between and so that the big problem was. You can't really be a realist about science if you take seriously pluralism.

So at the time, really the background, and also I think the background of Giri's book is really pluralism, scientific pluralism. And there was this flurry of scholarly work that's been influential for me on scientific pluralism, where philosophers plurality of method, plurality of expression. explanatory modes, the plurality of approaches and so forth.

But all that debate about pluralism was very often presented in the light of varieties of anti realism. So it's the idea that if you're really a pluralist, So then you can be a realist because to be a realist about science, there is one way and one way only in which, you know, theories are true or false, obviously.

And, you know, the best theories in mature [00:19:00] science are approximately true and, uh, past theories, uh, that have been rejected, they were false. So there was no middle way of kind of understanding what it means. So A way of overcoming the dichotomy was really through the situated knowledge thesis, so something that came from the feminist literature, feminist philosophy of science, standpoint theory in epistemology.

So I thought, uh, probably a better way of asking the question about how to be realist about science, but also You know, give you credit to the fact that it is a pluralist enterprise is not by starting with the question of, oh, look, there's this plurality of models and then make contradictory or incompatible assertions about the target system.

How can you be realist about that? One of them must be true. The others must be false or. What is even the purpose of having all this plurality of models? So in a way, the problem of inconsistent model was what got me into this [00:20:00] debate in philosophy of science. But I thought the way of overcoming the dichotomy was by stressing the situated knowledge thesis, the idea that, you know, if we start with the human standpoint, that our knowledge is situated, is the product of communities that are historically and culturally situated, that should be on people at real time, that.

live in a particular culture, have access to particular resources and so forth. Then the question about realism, it's not a question of how we map the model into reality and why is it that we have this plurality of models here and just one reality there, but the problem is how do we model reality from our situated vantage point so that we can understand, comprehend, and, and produce the epistemic fit of science that we have produced over centuries and millennia.

So that became the project of the book. 

Andrea Hiott: I love that. , I noticed the terms coming from feminine studies and so on, even like the intersectionality but it's interesting to make that connection. And you, in the book, one thing I really [00:21:00] love is you do you call attention to that we often start with the models and say that they're incompatible, therefore you must be anti realist, if there's so many different ways of getting there, if there's so many different models, it must be that we can't even ask the question of the target system which after you read your book and you kind of look at it in a different way, it makes not a lot of sense, right? If you go back to lived experience and you go back to the phenomena and so on, then you can see how these different models might, build up from different experiences.

 You talk about paths and gardens and landscapes, and that's something I'm also in common with me interested in. And as I was reading your book, I was I was thinking, well, it's almost like saying, okay, there's many different paths to the fountain in the garden. You speak of gardens a lot. So there must be no fountain, which is actually weird. When you flip the script the way you did, it becomes almost the opposite. If there's many paths to the fountain, the fountain is probably there.

At 

Michela Massimi: some point they will appear in this meandering path we're gonna find it, actually we [00:22:00] find precisely because all those paths at some point intersect. 

Andrea Hiott: Exactly. 

Michela Massimi: So yeah, no, I think you nicely summed up the book. So yeah, I think one of the problem is that the traditional debate on realism and anti realism for many decades has always been rehashed in the form of this sort of, yeah, get me.

God's eye view on view from nowhere is the idea that here is science and here is reality. How do the two talk to one another? Is there a way of showing that your models or parts of your model map into parts of the target system? And then obviously, The problem with one consistent model is what if you have many models for the same target system?

So some of the literature started with was from nuclear physics and models of the nucleus. Why is it that we represent the nucleus in different ways? Sometimes it's just a collections of nucleons that in turn is made of quarks according to quantum chromodynamics. But if we want to [00:23:00] study, say, nuclear fission, we use a different model.

We use the liquid drone model. So we represent the nucleus as a, as a, as a squeegee bubble of incompressible nuclear fluid. And if we want to study other phenomena like stellar nucleosynthesis, then we use a, another familial model, the cluster model. So, philosophers started wondering, why is it that we have this plurality?

And what can we really say about the nature of the nucleus if we have this plurality model? But if that. As I said, it took me a long time to figure out what what was the problem really with this impasse that people were describing? Why is it that pluralism shouldn't land us necessarily into some kind of anti realist view?

And what is the value of the pluralism? Pluralism not as a problem, pluralism not as a stumbling block. Pluralism as actually a bonus of what scientific inquiry is. And, and so not some kind of, I don't know kind of collateral, collateral damage of [00:24:00] scientific inquiry that you have all these communities that come up with their model and somehow, okay, we need to, we need to make sense of it.

But actually as the typical example of why those communities work as well as they do by producing the plurality of models. And so the question for me became the question of exactly going back to the Kant question, how is knowledge possible? How is it possible for human beings like us? that are historically and culturally situated.

How is it possible for communities working quantum chromodynamics as opposed to stellar nucleosynthesis or, you know, any other area to produce knowledge through their modeling practices, that is reliable knowledge that doesn't have to be pitted against one another, but it's actually part of the fabric of knowing, uh, that those communities.

Many plural communities produce over time without necessarily having to pick and choose and who's right, who's wrong, what is the best model, what is the model [00:25:00] and what is the value of the others if they're not the model. So that became, yes, so that became the motivation behind the book and I attempted to tell a story from within the scientific practice and looking really at modeling as the practice of what perspective does.

So perspective is. In my language, really, the historically culturally situated practice of a community. But what the practice does is to model reality, to produce what I call perspectival modeling. And the modeling doesn't just include the models. It includes inferences that we make from the data to the phenomena via the models, via sometimes experiential practices and know how that is not necessarily relying on any sophisticated models who have a very kind of general stake on what is the scientific practice and what are the epistemic communities, communities capable of knowledge.

But once, once you, you pose the question in that way, then reality, [00:26:00] uh, you know, we encounter reality in a reliable way, precisely by, uh, going back to what you were saying, I use this metaphor taken from Borges, Walking in the garden of walking path by making inferences that we learn how to refine and improve and, uh, and, and, and make more and more sophisticated over time so that we know that we're never lost in our wandering.

At the same time, you have to go through that kind of zigzagging of inferences and, you know, producing modeling that. eventually give us that knowledge of reality. Reality is not there on a silver plate for us to discover. And it's not a matter of us stepping back as if we had a God's view and say, here's the model, here's reality, have them up.

We're always in the model. We are part of the model. We're part of the modeling practices. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, exactly. And it changes as we know it. That's a basic thing of physics too, right? But is it, I guess it's really hard to hold [00:27:00] all of this. I mean, I can't understand how, even in my own life or when I study that you just want something definite and because the thing is, it's not just one garden, right.

Or it's not just one city. I mean, this is very Borges like too, but it's almost like a matrix of many overlapping multi dimensional gardens and matrices. And so even though all of that is connected in the way you say and changing each other, it becomes harder to talk about it. , once you.

understand that it's there, you almost go into metaphysics or you almost lose this robustness and reliability, which are important words in your book. And I think one way that you your counteract this or open up a new path is, you're kind of telling us a different story of what a model is, but you're not just stopping there, I think this is how you developed the idea of the blueprint, maybe, right?

Michela Massimi: Yeah. So yeah, kind of zooming in into the detail of how you know, this is done in the book and the kind of positive view apart from, okay, going beyond the dichotomy between realism and anti realism or pluralism and [00:28:00] realism, then the question is how do we know that we are making reliable inferences from within our situated knowledge?

How do we know that, you know, we're not subject to Hallucination or whatever we produce is just a figment of our imagination and maybe doesn't really exist. Or, you know, that's the threat of anti realism that keeps on coming back. As soon as you again, put the human standpoint to center stage, even through the, as I said, the feminist, uh, idea of situated knowledge thesis, but that question keeps on coming back.

But how do you know, how you know that it's reliable? How do you know that you're you know, ending up in some form of idealism or constructivism or whatever you want to call it. 

Andrea Hiott: You talk about stable events and I think about regularities and it's almost like we're trying to figure out how we're talking about the same regularities 

Michela Massimi: yeah, so there are these two components in the book. So in the first part of the book, I try to explain the kind of the epistemology. So how do we come to know the world in a reliable way? Exactly. That's [00:29:00] the idea of inferential blueprints. What is a model? How do we use those models to make those reliable inferences?

Uh, and in the second part of the book, I address the metaphysical questions about what is reality going to look like once we take that step, assuming we're willing to take that first step of situated knowledge thesis. And so the idea of inferential blueprints, is really kind of going back to the metaphor of perspectivism.

What does it mean to draw in perspective? And so back to the history of art, it means to be able to, represent on a two dimensional canvas effectively three dimensional space means we are able to skillfully arrange. Planes and angles so that we can give the impression of a space that opens up in front of us, even if we're just, it's just a flat canvas.

And so that got me thinking about what is so special about modeling is exactly that we encounter reality. Through those exact [00:30:00] technique of opening up the space of reality which doesn't mean that the space is not real. The space is real, but it's a space that we have to open up for ourselves by using those models as inferential blueprints.

And so the idea that really and something that I want to stress is that very often people may think, oh, well, the spectacled drawing is just an example of us as human spectator of nature. So it kind of reiterated the dichotomy. There's us. spectators and nature. But no, because actually the image of the inferential blueprint is patterned on perspectival technique in architecture.

So the example I gave is, you know, building a house. You need a blueprint, which was this technique used before serography became common. And what you have in a blueprint, is effectively a collaboration of engineer and architect and carpenter and mason that they are able to use the blueprint as a way of exchanging instructions about [00:31:00] how tall the door should be, what the relation between the height of the door and the height of the windows and so forth.

So I see models as having that role of allowing different communities of people, doesn't matter whether they are I don't know, nuclear physicists as opposed to chemists or biologists to come together and exchange that information in a way that the inferences that we make ultimately, uh, are reliable, are inferences that we can trust upon that lead us to what I call modally robust phenomena.

So, the second part of the book is the part where I try to support that. So I'm going to show you how to spell out exactly what it means to be a realist once you take that step and how reality looks like. So I introduced technical term like, yeah, more than a robust phenomena, stable events and support.

I'm not sure we want to go into it. 

Andrea Hiott: The reason I brought it up here is because something I want to ask you about or get your advice about or ask you to unpack more is okay, so realism, is connected to truth and [00:32:00] representation, broadly, and then you're showing us a different idea of the model and what you just described about the blueprint. I love it in the book that you go into architecture and So in the way I was clumsily talking about all these paths leading to the fountain, blueprints that's a better example because you have to build the house and it's almost like a, I want to say third space, somehow the model or the representation, are those different? I don't know. I would like to know what you think is the space where everyone can meet somehow. The blueprint becomes a place where we can, when you're building a house, you need many different kinds of people with different kinds of skills. But then you have this place where you can all meet and talk about it in a way. And I guess what the reason I brought up the stable events and regularities is because there is this real thing going on that we're all seeing from these different perspectives. And the model gives us a place to what, I don't know how you would say it. Meet, discuss, test all of that together. 

Michela Massimi: Yeah, exactly. So the, the [00:33:00] modeling so the perspectival modeling is the wider practice of making inferences about those phenomena. The models are some of the key tools that we use in that perspectival modeling, but I insist it's not modeling is broader than models because it's not just about the models.

 We can have a perspectival modeling or reality using experiential know how of local communities that don't have a model, don't use models as we understand the concept of modeling the way I was just explaining before with the, I don't know, models of the nucleus, for example. So the model, going back to the kind of more nerdy example from, from nuclear physics.

So the models is really the the place where, as you rightly said, the different communities, doesn't matter if they're working on nuclear physics or quantum chromodynamics or whatever, meet and they can exchange information, make inferences, that sort of thing. That's why they're called inferential blueprints.

So it's the place where the inference takes place. It's the inferential space where [00:34:00] we come to encounter reality. And, and we do that because we have very sophisticated way of using those models as a way of imagining or conceiving what the object might look like, uh, within the constraints given by some laws of natural or like dependencies.

So the imagining is not totally unconstrained and it's not totally free floating, it's actually. constrained by the practice that includes obviously background knowledge on, uh, whatever the, you know, the law like dependence in the community happens to know. But then there is a point where the rubber hits the road.

So it was how that imagining and, conceiving about a certain target system, proves, uh, reliable or not. So this is where stable events come in place. So if you ask me, but where is the realism in all story? I mean, if we have to tell a story of realism from within, from the situated vantage point of particular communities, and they're encountering each other within the [00:35:00] space of models as inferential blueprints, How do I ever know that the inference I'm making are trustworthy, are reliable, are actually telling me something about what the nucleus is or whatever the object I'm studying is.

And so this is, this is where the stable events come in. So, I'm a realist in the sense that I believe that the world is made of events that are stable in the sense that they have some kind of, uh, inbuilt, uh, low likeness in the way in which an electric charge is repelled by a magnetic field, that, that for me is a stable event in nature.

It's there and will be there even if, you know, J. J. Thomson had never existed. So whatever model J. J. Thomson or any, any other scientists that come up with to explain, you know, reality, there's a point, as I said, where the rubber hits the road, which is the point where those stable events. effectively kind of constrain the space of the inferences that we make and kind of guide us, uh, very often down [00:36:00] different paths.

So as I said, this process is never a process of convergence. It's never a process of one to one mapping, but it's a process of zigzagging, finding our way through yeah, the bogus garden of inferential forking path, where we have to make inferences about What is the, yeah, what is the size of this object that we are observing as being deflected by a magnetic field?

It seems like the same size of a hydrogen ion or is actually smaller than an hydrogen ion. So we rely on low like dependencies to make those kinds of inferences. And that's what stable events do. They kind of constrain the space of possibility that we explore through models as inferential blueprint.

Andrea Hiott: And that's that flipping the script part that I really love is the stable events are there before we've named them, in a way it's weird because we use language and it's kind of this representation and model within itself. I don't know if you would agree with that. You talk a lot about language in one of the examples as you're building the positivist script.

Yeah. case for perspectivalism. [00:37:00] And by the way, for everyone listening, I do want to say that you spend many, many chapters going into for example, that positive case and talking about the atom, climate change, language, really building it up with a lot of great nerdy examples. So 

Michela Massimi: there's a lot of 

Andrea Hiott: substance here for everyone to go and look at.

But since we can't talk about all of that, I guess the thing I'm trying to get at is you start with that What I've thought of as regularities stable events, things that whatever you're going to call them or however you're going to model them, they're there, phenomena, right? And maybe this is a moment to kind of get into natural kinds a little bit and also this confusion that we often have, which is connected to what we were talking about earlier of assuming that we then You say it in a great way, something about like we have to determine the essential properties of the target system.

 That becomes, that's a metaphysical kind of thing that gets confused somehow, right? But how are you shifting this idea of natural kinds maybe, or, or maybe you can just even correct me a little bit in what I'm talking [00:38:00] about there, about thinking more of these regularities first, or these stable events, and those being like a natural kind which we continually figure out through this representational practice which isn't determining essential, of that target system.

Michela Massimi: Yeah, no, thank you. I guess it's a, it's a lot. You come summing up like five, six chapters. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. It's, and it's really yeah, there's a lot, you really make the case very deeply in a philosophical way, which you have to do, because it's so much assumption just around a word. it could easily be like, Oh, this is just essentialism, which you definitely show it isn't over three chapters, but 

Michela Massimi: yeah.

So, Yeah, I'll try to, I'll try to be brief in the answer. So I'm going to go through the five chapters. So 

Andrea Hiott: your book is there for people to really dare 

Michela Massimi: for everyone that wants to. Yes. So, kind of going back just to make things probably more kind of tangible, with the example of the problem and consistent model.

So [00:39:00] one of the One of the problems with the realist literature very often has been this idea that the world comes pre packaged with natural kinds. So there is an electron, there are, uh, you know, atomic nuclei, zebra lemons, you name it, whatever. It's a natural kind of water and support.

And the idea is that the aim of science is to tell us a true story about this, uh, precarved joints of nature by identifying correctly what are the essential properties of those objects. So that's the way in which the debate in the philosophy of science for many decades have proceeded with some kind of, uh, you know, debate on realism about theories, theories being true or false.

So going hand in hand with the metaphysics of nature that just buys into the picture that the world comes pre packaged with those natural kinds. These natural kinds have kind constitutive properties that are essential property of a kind. So to be an electron is to be a [00:40:00] particle that has, I don't know, spin one half, negative electric charge.

Those are all essential property. Now, If you take that picture, it's very difficult to be a pluralist about science, because then you get a plurality of models, as we were just saying before, that seems to attribute very different essential properties to the same target system. So according to the liquid draw model, the nucleus has the essential property of being a, a, a drop of incompressible fluid, but according to the quantum chromodynamics model, the nucleus is a bunch of quarks.

So those seem to be very different metaphysical feature, very different central property. How can we be realist about that? So my way of turning the script and kind of say, okay, there's something not quite right in this way of answering the question is to show that, well, again, if we take this view from within the, so from within our, practice [00:41:00] of modeling reality, and we take models as inferential blueprints.

The purpose of the model is not to attribute essential properties to the target system. In fact, we don't even know that there are those essential properties to start with, so that's an assumption. assumption that we start with. The purpose of the model is to be exploratory, to allow us to ask questions about what could be the case, what is possible about the objects that we are trying to study.

So that's my take on anti essentialism and anti kind of foundationalism in the sense that really the old way in which the debate on realism was originally posed and the dichotomy with pluralism started because we were making some pretty strong assumptions about the natural physical reality.

And once you make the strong assumption, then obviously realism, sorry, pluralism becomes some kind of weird, uh, kind of stumbling block to explain why the model is a representation of reality. So in, in a way of bypassing [00:42:00] all that and coming up with a different story of how to be a realist while also being a pluralist about science I came to kind of articulate this view, as I said, different chapter, but so I'll be brief, but there are three main elements in this kind of metaphysics of reality that I explore in the book.

So there are stable events, there are moderately robust phenomena, and then there are natural kinds with the human face. or an inferentialist view of natural kinds. I'll say very briefly what each of those elements are. So the stable event is the simplest kind of realist commitment to that, as a perspectival realist I have, as I was saying before, I believe that an electric charge would be repelled by a magnetic field, okay, that's part of the fabric of nature.

Of course I need an instrument, I need a cathode ray tube to even know that there is such a stable event to be able to explain it. So in a way we're always within our perspectival modeling, but there's a sense in which that reality is [00:43:00] there and it will be there even if we didn't have a colored ray.

It's not a colored ray that create some kind of figment of the imagination about The electric charge being repelled.

 I think 

Andrea Hiott: about like Amber or however they used to do it. Was it with Amber and Amber or something? 

Michela Massimi: Exactly. And you can see they attract pieces of paper, right?

I mean, , You can just have that 

Andrea Hiott: experience without having understood it, named it and all this, but if you want to do that, you need to develop these models, right?

Michela Massimi: That's right. Because if you want to have an understanding of what goes on, why is it that attract pieces of paper, then obviously becomes exceedingly so complicated because you need to come up with a, with a theory that tells you what was on at the subatomic level.

And obviously it's a fascinating story how Thomson had his own kind of partially false view, partially true view of what the electron was, but somehow, you know, he was the one that discovered the electron, got a Nobel prize for it because he was able to measure with precision this, uh, this kind of stable like.

event in nature, how [00:44:00] there is a mass to charge ratio that tends to remain fairly stable. So this is the simple level of stable events. Then there's the level of what I call the modally robust phenomena. This is the Kantian bit, if you like, in metaphysics, because it's the idea that really our knowledge is knowledge of phenomena.

Alacant, but those phenomena are effectively stable events, okay, that we have been able to infer and re infer over and over again, using different models, different techniques. So it's the, in your example, it's the fountain that we meet at the center of the garden. There's a point where all these paths somehow intersect and intertwine and, and you encounter reality.

So where they intersect, what we encounter is what I call a robust phenomena that can be sometimes incredibly complex things like global warming, as well as one of the case studies I discuss in chapter 4a of the book, or the stability of, [00:45:00] of particular isotopes. So at the level of phenomena, we're not talking about things, we're talking about phenomena like stability of, Particular kind of atoms, or we're talking about exactly global warming in the sense of how do we measure the sensitivity to greenhouse gases in the mean global surface temperature of the planet and so forth.

And then there is a final level, which is natural kinds with a human face, which I borrowed from, the human face is borrowed from Putnam. I had this 1990 book, Realism with a Human Face. So I developed a view of natural kind as an inferentialist view. And I have to say that a bit of natural kind has been dwindling, and I share the sentiment that, you know, there's good reason why it's been kind of dwindling over time.

The fact of the matter is that we use terms in our language every day. We talk about water, we talk about electron, and we talk about atoms and global warming [00:46:00] and, you know, climate. And those are natural kind terms, are terms that in philosophical language refer to the joints of nature. Then the question is, What can we as philosophers say about those joints of nature?

So, for me, the story about essentialism had already gone out of the window in chapter three of the book, because, as I said, that was the main stumbling block to my own question about how to be a realist and a pluralist about science. And I thought the only way of being, uh, Realist and pluralist, it's just by getting rid of essentialism and getting rid of this idea that the model represent by attributing essential properties to a target system.

So the question then is, okay, what becomes a natural kind? What is an electron? If you are a perspectiva realist. And so the story I tell is that, well, natural kinds are just concept, sort of concept, concept that we use to sort phenomena into [00:47:00] grouping that are open ended, revisable and our grouping of phenomena.

So, the level of reality is the level of the stable event and the phenomena of a stable event that have been inferred and re inferred. But that's all there is, really. So, we hang on to the categories of natural kinds because they are part of our natural languages. We talk about theories of the electron, theories of water and so forth.

But if you ask the metaphysical question, what is there? I would just say what we have are open ended grouping of historically identified phenomena. Then obviously we can change and revise as we discover new phenomena. But again, the grouping is not kind of random. The grouping is the outcome of this walking in the garden of inferential forking path.

So the fact that we have arrived at this grouping is just because of how this particular community historically and related Their discovery of particular phenomena with others, [00:48:00] not because there is some sort of predefined catalog or what are the phenomena they are part of the natural kinds, not because there is a predefined sets of necessary condition or kind constitutive essential properties and so forth.

So it's a very interesting topic. It's an inferentialist malleable view of what kinds are, and really it's a view of kindness, just concepts that are useful only to the extent that they're useful, but can also obviously trade on power structure and sometimes hide something. power structures in how we cluster some of those phenomena and support.

, this is 

Andrea Hiott: really important stuff in here for science, for philosophy, but , also for life and what we're doing here, what's the big picture, what are we really trying to do with science and philosophy? But how do I get into that? It's interesting because as you were talking, I'm thinking, I don't know how you would feel about this.

It's too big of a question, but language itself almost seems like it's telling us that we have these stable [00:49:00] events and regularities, right? Otherwise you wouldn't have the term that people understood because it's a little model of that stable phenomena in a way, we're trying to find the formula or the essential properties or the one thing that's going to tell us the answer.

And what you're doing, there's a whole lineage, that you're combining is open that up and say, okay, instead of saying, what's the formula, one formula or the one recipe of essential properties, let's look at let's hold those things together, maybe there's many different ones, let's open the space for exploration, and then you open new possibility, and this becomes really important, in terms of what we're trying to do with science, and if we're not exploring and we're not finding possibilities, if we're just trying to find the one formula, this develops us into a certain mindset, I know I'm getting abstract, but it feels very important to me, and I think it does lead into the last part of the book with the multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism because if we think there's only one way to get to the fountain, then if you didn't take that [00:50:00] way, you must be wrong or

you just aren't heard. You're not part of science or you're not part of philosophy. And I think what you're trying to do, you can correct me, is okay, let's stop talking about winners and losers and all these things and step back, hold it all, try to understand how there might be more things to explore and therefore we also find more potential.

I don't know, that's a lot, 

Michela Massimi: no, no, thank you. Yeah, so, no, it's exactly right. So there are two really. You know, as I explained at the beginning of the book, really, that, I had two main motivations behind the book. One was historical, because I do history and philosophy of science, so it always struck me as a bit, a bit weird as well, this story about realism that doesn't really give history its due, or take history as some kind of, as I said, kind of collateral damage about the successes and the winners, so, and then, okay, there's a bunch of theories, there are a bunch of losers.

But. You know, if if you're serious about the history of science, [00:51:00] and you look back and delve into the history as I as I did when going back to the beginning of our interviews, right, I was keen to go down the archive in physics and kind of go down this dusty basement to look at the book, you discover that You know, the history is not done by winners and losers.

The history is done by communities that got it partially right, partially wrong, had their own views, speculations, imaginations about what the reality was going to be like. But in a way that the fabric of how we produce scientific knowledge is immensely diverse. And we don't tell the story about the diversity of the people.

of the public very often. We tend to tell the story that becomes some sort of ex post facto argeography of the winner. So, now we know, and now we know that this was the real story and all the others were false, but obviously ex post facto, we can always say that, but once you are situated, you are from within, you don't have any [00:52:00] privilege view of knowing where this garden or forking path is going to lead us.

So, I've always found very strange that kind of lack of historical sensitivity in the debate about realism. And in addition to that, I always find it very striking that exactly the lack of historical sensitivity tends to go hand in hand with the lack of sensitivity to multiculturalism and science, in the sense that of recognizing that science is not just the product of one community at one time, the dominant community in the dominant, uh, social, cultural, economic setting, the one that, you know, got it right.

But in a way, something that humankind does over time, over and over again. So by shifting emphasis on reliability and the reliability of the practices and the reliability of making those inferences, I wanted to create a space where. scientific perspective as situated practices were not just understood in the kind [00:53:00] of classic way in which we understand, I don't know, climate science, nuclear physics or whatever, but could allow the space for local communities repository of knowledge that may be lived experience, experiential knowledge, experiential know how, but not necessarily codified in curricula, but still part of a perspectival modeling, an important part of how we come to know the world in a reliable way.

And so this is the theme that I kind of tease out very briefly in the last part of the book, and something on which I hope to work more as, as, as we speak, since, since I finished the book, is the idea of uh, how the situated knowledge, uh, thesis really forces us to reassess questions about who produces knowledge and who ought to benefit from scientific knowledge.

So duties and obligations in science, which is the other big theme at the end of the book. And, uh, it seems to me that As soon as we open up the space for, [00:54:00] recognizing a plurality of ways of knowing, uh, and, and the fact that really the reliable knowledge is not the prerogative of one particular community at a particular historical time, then we need to open a much bigger conversation about how do we make sure that the benefit of scientific knowledge and the benefit of technology and innovations are really shared widely.

And obviously that's a huge topic that goes well beyond most of your science that I simply briefly, uh, kind of touch at the end of the book, because it's the question of as I said, not just one's knowledge, but really how to think about access and benefit sharing when it comes to that kind of knowledge.

Once you take into account today's. Is the product of myriad of communities of different historical cultural time. And so it latches on questions about the right to science that I've been working on more recently as it has this idea of participating in science, something that, you know, it's a [00:55:00] human right is enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

We all have a right to benefit from scientific progress. And the stark reality of how, you know, we're seeing that during the COVID pandemic with the vaccine nationalism and how very often the way science is done through patents and trade secrets and intellectual property right actually poses Barrier and clear delimitation to sharing that knowledge as knowledge that belongs to, you know, just not the rich and wealthy developed country, but it's a product of humankind at large.

So I touch on those themes, but it's at the very end of the book, and as I said, it's something that I'm working on now, uh, more. 

Andrea Hiott: It's very rich. And as you're talking, I think something we haven't made really clear that you do make really clear in the book is that this isn't like saying that there are many ways to the same. place, like many paths to the same fountain and there's a matrices of gardens and so on doesn't mean that, it's not saying everything is meaningless, [00:56:00] anything goes relativism, you're building in the book a case for the opposite of that, right? I want to make that sure that's clear. Yes, please. But that, that said Thank you. I think when we start to, to talk about all of this but it can be very hard to not collapse into the kind of relativism , or go the other way and hold on to, well, my community must be right, or my science must be right. We talked about at the beginning, how you had to choose between philosophy and science and academia itself is still kind of built where you need to become part of a community and publish and so on and so forth in order to succeed or make money.

a living. Maybe it's changing a little bit. But do you see what I mean? There's a kind of tension that, that scales up to where we need to choose between relativism or constructivism or instrumentalism and then make our career in that which I think can nest or scale up into the topics you began to unpack a bit with multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.

So I guess what [00:57:00] I'm asking is, do you think this, practicing what we've been talking about, Do you think that could be even help, has it been helpful in your own life or do you see a way in which that could be helpful in terms of the way we do science and philosophy and, and life or?

Michela Massimi: Yeah, well, it's a difficult question, right? So, in a way I guess what, the way of what philosophers can do in this space, where you're really kind of addressing, you know, why their issue, they're more structural, they're more systemic they're more embedded into into reality, is really to highlight where the point of tensions are.

So, I don't know whether this answer your question, but you know, to me, what was important was to show exactly that there was another way of thinking about those, those issues that didn't necessarily have to fall back into, uh, relativism or constructivism. So I had this exchange with my very good colleague, Martin Krusche, just actually a few months ago that was visiting Edinburgh.

Martin has been [00:58:00] a scholar of relativism, so we had this, uh, exchange about, uh, very discussing the extent to which perspectivism is different, uh, or not different, as he might, uh, probably, argue for, uh, from form of, uh, relativism. So, in my mind, it was important not to fall back into that dichotomy of, again, realism, anti realism, form of anti realism, because,, Ultimately I wanted to show that exactly all that dichotomy is based on a series of assumptions that we make about the natural reality, about classifying and grouping things.

And we don't need to take that face value. That was, it's possible to actually question all that. And that's, that's the beauty of philosophy doesn't mean form the world, change the world. Yeah.

But no, but you know, it's important if our world, our work, you know, gets taken up aside philosophy and people that actually are, [00:59:00] uh, you know, engaged more directly in addressing some of those tensions.

So I don't know people that work in human rights law, for example, on the right to science or, people that work on, ocean governance when it comes to, you know, Participatory mode of, sharing into the biodiversity without cutting off or, subjecting the local coastal communities to injustices.

So, you know, what you are, yeah, what you're asking is the broader questions of what difference can philosophy, I think, make, and that really depends to some extent on what other practitioners in other fields, uh, think of philosophy or how they may even be aware of philosophical work or relate or see that as resonant with, you know, some of the work that gets done in this area where questions about local knowledge becomes more and more important as part of the governance and policy and practice of how we have a more diverse and participatory way of thinking about science and enjoying the benefit of scientific progress.[01:00:00] 

Doesn't matter if we're talking about biodiversity or we're talking about I don't know, uh you know, food systems or any other area. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, the book is wonderfully written, I should say, too, . I'm making it sound like it's somewhat nerdy, but it is in a great way, but it's also very easy to read.

 There's a practice to the book, that helps us take steps back. It's actually very delightful, right? To be able to have a practice by which you can explore and see more possibility, and I think a lot of philosophy has tried to do that. I'm getting into my own focus in here of holding the paradox doesn't mean there isn't. differences but that practice of it, does something really wonderful, and I think it's happening in a lot of different ways. You talk about art in the book a lot, which we haven't mentioned yet, so I just got to mention it, in terms of perspective it's another way of of showing there's different perspectives and how that opens up possibility.

But I also bring it up because Calvino is in the book a lot. And, Writing is a way to do this too. Borges Calvino shows us this too, these [01:01:00] different paths to similar places whereby the place itself opens up into different possibility and so on.

So I'm talking a lot, like you can tell me whatever you're thinking, but I do want to get into kind of just to end, what that's meant to you, because the book too has a lot of quotes from that book you just raised, Invisible Cities by. So what comes to mind when I say it?

Michela Massimi: Well, so Calvino yeah, it's one of the authors that, uh, I loved reading when I was growing up as a teenager in Italy, so I read a lot of Calvino. And yeah, Invisible City is one of those, and I don't know whether it, I don't know, I started thinking that a bit like in Calvino, right, those cities are not the reality of the city is not a given, it's it's a process of coming to imagine and conceive the existence of this incredible city, uh, the very funny architecture and and structural features, but they're really central.

City seen through the [01:02:00] lenses of the emotions and, uh, and feelings of the inhabitants. So a city is not just a bunch of buildings and squares and streets. A city is The piercing tensions of some of the feelings of the people that live in the city. And I think this is the beauty of Calvino's short story about an invisible city, where there's this imagining of possible cities and then asking the questions whether the cities are even real, whether they exist or not, or they just exist in the imagination of the main character, Marco Polo.

And so that became a bit of a kind of meta meta. This book because it was a bit like in perspectival modeling, right? Going back to this idea that we use uh, situated practices, including models to model reality. And then we asked the question of whether what we are modeled is real or not. So we, we use the stable events.

We use the role like [01:03:00] dependency as a way of testing whether our inferences are real or not, but the reality is not given to us in a silver plate. It's constructed in a way through this Uh, uh, network of, of human emotions and human imagination. And so in a way that's, uh, I thought it was a nice meta narrative to to the story about perspectival modeling and how we encounter reality, not as a given on a silver plate.

from the word go, but it's the outcome of those inferences. And so that's why I wanted to use some of the yeah, some of the passages from the Invisible City 

Andrea Hiott: it's wonderful that book is an experiment in phenomenological framing devices showing how many Ways we can experience a city and that it's not about It's not holding on to the model or the story or 

Michela Massimi: it's

like magical realism, but I think it's not just magical realism.

It's really, it's, Yeah. It's this, uh, it's this unique way of Calvino, we're talking about reality, but really from a [01:04:00] deeply human point of view, like really from being set out, 

Andrea Hiott: yeah. that local knowledge. I think you call it maybe local knowledge and universal knowledge, coming from a sort of smaller town, and a lot of those people there, your mom for example, or I come from a small town too in the States, and I think of my grandmother, who has this incredible knowledge, but it wouldn't necessarily be called science wouldn't really call it knowledge, and it seems to have something to do with the fact that in her life, she had to understand a lot of different perspectives and be able to negotiate them. In a way

Michela Massimi: in terms of Yeah, so as I say in the, I think I said this in the chapter one of the book that in a way there's a kind of autobiographical element in the, in, in the book in that, you know, the reason why I got interested in in a way for perspectivism and then this much broader notion of what, what is a perspective, including varieties of local knowledge is precisely because I wanted to counter this idea that, science or scientific knowledge [01:05:00] is this well defined thing that we tend to associate with scientists, people that are well educated, and so forth, and have a sense in which the participatory element of the fact that, in a way, scientific knowledge is It's the product of humankind at large, so you don't need to have a PhD in botany, uh, to understand sometimes phenomena about apiculture.

So I mentioned my grandfather at the start of the book and that uh, you know, cultivated olive trees, but also had bees and so forth, but he was uneducated, he was illiterate. So, you know, I come from a family, I was the first gen person. So my parents didn't have a first degree and my grandparents finished school pretty much at the level of a primary school.

Uh, but as I said that the other biographical element there is, is the fact that I see a lot of reliable knowledge in that kind of local community where I grew up. If not anything in the form of very specific [01:06:00] Phenomena like, uh, you know, the example. And it's, it's reliable in the sense that you need to know what the pollination peak is for a plant. Obviously, the local, the local, farmers will will know what that is fairly reliably. And so I wanted that to be part of the story of Yes, how we come to know the world in a reliable way and again without, uh, falling back on the dichotomy between, what the SDS scholar would say, you know, certified knowledge versus experiential knowledge or, uh, you know, science versus, uh, I'm sure that the peasants may be a repository of knowledge 

Andrea Hiott: So both of us have left our little small communities. In our pursuit of knowledge and philosophy and so on, we've explored and many different possibilities.

And that's a tension, too, for me. I don't know if it is for you. I think I remember in the book you do say something about it being hard that you're not spending more time with your mom or something. I brought up community at the beginning, and it does feel like that's been a very important part for you. there's these layers in the [01:07:00] beginning of the book of family, community, that's important, and also your academic community, a lot of people that you had learned from, or that had changed Your direction in different ways were passing away around the time you were putting this book out do you feel the sense of kind of continuance? I also know you wrote the book in the time of COVID, and maybe even had a son, you have a philosopher husband, which haven't even brought up, there's a lot of layers here, that feel connected , but what does that bring up for you? 

Michela Massimi: Well, it brings up life, right? 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, the real life, right? The realism. It 

Michela Massimi: brings up real life. You know, writing a book is not just the sort of things you do in your ivory tower. It's actually part of this daily fabric where, yeah, you're dealing on the phone with, you know, your mom and co in law, COVID lockdown at the other side, obviously, of the English channel and you know, you're homeschooling your, your son for, uh, for long periods of time while trying to, yeah, get on with your work.

You have, yeah, you have your local [01:08:00] community that, obviously to whom I owe a lot, but I don't get to see very often. You get your philosopher community that you get to see a lot on zoom and, and then so life in between. And so, yeah, , the book, kind of unwittingly became a slightly yeah, probably there's more.

More about me than I thought myself when I was writing, but I think that's I mean, that's inevitable, right?

Andrea Hiott: Your real life when you're writing the book isn't actually different from the book. Yeah. Yeah. 

Michela Massimi: And then writing the book becomes really, you know, it's a, it's your daily life of a sustained period of time. Definitely was this one I went through several, yeah, it was a very long process of writing, rewriting and, you know, changing it and support about But yeah, it's also, it's also your life as you can't really have a dichotomy between, you know, Michela the philosopher and Michela the, the daughter, the wife, the mother, the colleague, you know, all the other roles that, that we have.

So this is not a great answer to your question. No, it is 

Andrea Hiott: because it speaks to that scale and it's something [01:09:00] I'm interested in, because we can see our own selves in this. Or when you went down into those dusty archives to find this stuff from Bohr Einstein A lot of that stuff is personal Philosophical scientific and from where we sit now from this perspective you can see how much those inner personal Philosophical scientific struggles that were all of that at once have changed our potentials and what we can explore now, 

I guess I bring it up not to be too you know, whatever praising you too much, but I think this book is important. There's a lot of things going on like this in different parts where, we're trying to, you're trying to open up some spaces in places that were traditionally maybe, Try, uh, choices. And so I guess just in that continuity, I wanted to place it in there and just say thanks. And hope you keep going. I'm sure you will with this thank 

Michela Massimi: you so much, Andrea. Yeah. Thank you so much. And yeah, just to say that. You know, those personal threads are, you know, what keep me going on a daily basis is the reason why I love doing philosophy.

It's not because it's some sort [01:10:00] of alien field, uh, but it's because, it's because of the things that we care. I think probably that applies to all of us, right? The things that we care, the thing that the mother to us, somebody's level that, you know, We get into particular topic into particular area of research and then, and so yeah, unwittingly, there is always a kind of somewhat biographical element that slips in here and there.

But just because it's what it's what got us there in the first instance in terms of interest and in terms of, yeah, just keep going on a daily basis in terms of. You know, it's hard work, philosophy. I'm writing a book, sorry. You're writing a book in the time of a pandemic and isolation. It's a lot, 

a bit of a Googling exercise there. But yeah, there was this wonderful community of people there, you know, were willing to read the drafts, a part of drafts, and provide feedback. feedback and comments in Zoom, actually. It's one of the first thing I started doing, because I finished the first draft just when we were entering the [01:11:00] lockdown in the UK.

And so, uh, now obviously knowing for how long that was gonna last, I remember reaching out to colleagues and say, I've got the first draft, would anyone be willing to? And I think it's just because everyone was desperate to You know, get to see other people on Zoom at the time. That was before. Good timing 

I just saw them at the right time. It was in March of 2020. Yeah, it's a wonderful group of people. Yeah, right. They provided comments and obviously that changed the book quite a bit. And yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: You're very generous in the book, I think naming people that have helped you. And I think that's very important and it's great you do it.

And also I'm glad you said what you just said too, about this all, being connected and mattering because I think a lot of young people often feel like they have to do it alone or choose a side and , we can help each other and. Yeah. 

Michela Massimi: I reach out to people because people, you know, you'd be surprised how many people are willing to actually.

 if you find them on a good day, that they're not in a grumpy [01:12:00] mood, or they're not too pumped, or they don't have already Zoom fatigue, then they'll be willing to, they'll be willing to read and provide feedback and comments. And then you grow the community together, since that's what's happened to me since I wrote this book that, you know, I developed very good.

kind of friendship with colleagues that up until the point were just colleagues, but then you discover that you're kind of fellow traveler on a very similar parallel path about topics that again matter and we both care for. So Yeah. 

So you create your own community, your macro niche ecosystem 

where you 

Andrea Hiott: don't have to choose between the personal and like, I mean, we didn't get into the epistemology versus metaphysics or something like that.

But I think a lot of people can cling onto metaphysics because you want to explore the personal and understand all these really. Important everyday feelings and things. And, what I love about the book is you show that you can be [01:13:00] really robust and you can be really. Hard on yourself in the way that we have to be as philosophers and scientists, and it is hard work, but you're doing it, connected to your personal, feelings and desires and goals, right?

 I think it would be great if we had more of that. Cause people, it's there, right? It can be. 

Michela Massimi: Absolutely, yes. Well, thank you for bringing all this up. 

Andrea Hiott: well, thank you.

And thank you for your time. 

Michela Massimi: Is 

Andrea Hiott: there anything we didn't talk about that you want to make sure we say? I don't 

Michela Massimi: know. I mean, it's been very extensive. No, thank you so much for, yeah. First of all, for inviting me and secondly for, yeah, engaging with my, my, yeah, so much. detail and caring attention, you know, so it's now greatest reward knowing that the book is read. 

Andrea Hiott: It's very important and I still have a lot I want to go through and think about more. So it's definitely one of those books that's very meaningful for me. And I'm, I'm not just saying that it's really true. So thank you. 

Michela Massimi: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Andrea Hiott: I'm going to stop [01:14:00] recording, but.