ABSTRACT
The acquisition of knowledge about the earth’s deep interior raises epistemological problems that are parallel to those found in more familiar cases in the literature on scientific realism. This chapter focuses on the question: How did the acquisition of detailed knowledge about the earth’s deep interior first become possible? I argue that the answer lies in the particular way in which seismological observations allowed for a procedure in which seismologists could ask, and provisionally answer, an interlocking set of questions about the earth’s deep interior. Through these interlocking questions, ever more ways of gaining epistemic access to the earth’s deep interior could be found, and ever better agreement between these methods of access could be achieved. My aim is to show how this procedure works and to sketch out how it developed historically in seismology.
