Abstract
Stein has raised a fundamental problem for any attempt to characterize instrumentalism and realism as substantive alternatives. This is the distinguishability problem, which consists in the problem of developing a form of instrumentalism (or realism) that is substantially different from a plausible realist (or instrumentalist) alternative and the problem of showing that this form of instrumentalism (or realism) does justice to actual scientific practice. Using Stein’s own discussion of Maxwell, I formulate instrumentalism and realism as a scientist’s attitudes toward models, where an attitude is understood to be a complex of the scientist’s belief and intention regarding models. Developing a case study of Benzer’s modeling practice, I show that each attitude can structure inquiry differently and argue that to understand certain aspects of scientific practice, such as the practice of genetic mapping in Benzer’s work, we sometimes need to appeal to the coexistence of these attitudes.
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Notes
See, e.g., Fine (1984, pp. 84–86, 99–100).
Such an approach has been taken by Sober (1999, 2002). He has formulated a form of instrumentalism according to which the goal of scientific inference concerning statistical models with adjustable parameters is predictive accuracy rather than truth, and argued that it helps make sense of common features of statistical inference, such as testing and accepting hypotheses that are known to be false.
In addition, Benzer’s modeling practice, which made fundamental contributions to molecular biology, deserves more philosophical attention than it has received. For a pioneering philosophical treatment, see Weber (1998).
Stein’s version of the distinguishability problem is contingent on how scientists actually work, for his point is that trying to do justice to actual scientific practice makes it hard to distinguish between realism and instrumentalism. The version of the problem I describe below is not contingent in this way.
For this terminology, see van Fraassen (1980, pp. 80–82).
The ‘pragmatic dimension’ is van Fraassen’s own terminology (van Fraassen 1980, p. 13).
Whether or not the constructive empiricist can solve Blackburn’s problem is not important for my purpose here.
The realist in Stanford’s discussion appears to be a strong realist, but the present point also applies to more modest selective realism because the selective realist adopts an instrumentalist attitude toward parts of a superseded theory. I will discuss modest realism later.
This is different from the constructive empiricist’s immersion, which is not provisional. As we saw, for van Fraassen, a commitment comes with the confidence that it will be vindicated.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this line of criticism of Stanford.
My use of the term ‘attitude’ is not to be confused with a common terminology in action theory. Action theorists usually refer to desires as pro-attitudes and distinguish them from beliefs (e.g., Davidson 1963, pp. 3–4). In Davidson’s theory, a pair of a person’s pro-attitude and belief about an action is called her “primary reason” (Davidson 1963, p. 4) for the action, and it is the primary reason that explains the action. What I call an attitude here functions like Davidson’s primary reason in that it forms part of an explanation of a scientist’s practice.
Bratman’s planning theory of intention seems to me to be relevant to philosophers trying to understand scientific practice, because a large part of that practice is making and adjusting plans for research.
The label ‘(I-Belief)’ is for an instrumentalist belief, and the other label is to be read similarly.
See Maxwell (1873, pp. 437–438).
The label ‘R-Belief’ is for a realist belief, and the other label is to be read similarly. In (R-Belief), adequacy means adequacy for using the model with the intention of (R-Intention).
Who holds (R-Belief) but (I-Intention)? Is she a realist or instrumentalist? I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this question; I do not know the answer.
It seems also possible to hold (R-Intention) and (I-Belief), but it would look like the false modesty described by Blackburn.
The thrust of Stein’s interpretation of Maxwell is that Maxwell adopted a realist attitude toward the ether model even though he later uncoupled it from his theory, because the concepts Maxwell used in that theory are those he used to represent the ether in his mechanical models. This interpretation seems reinforced by some recent works on Maxwell’s theoretical practice; see, e.g., Siegel (1991), Morrison (2000, Ch. 3), Nersessian (2002) and Cat (2001).
See Maxwell (1890, pp. 486–487).
In his Theory and Truth, Sklar (2000) argues that the historical development of fundamental physics owes much to anti-realist criticisms of realist attitudes towards fundamental theories. If Sklar is right, there appears to be the coexistence of realism and anti-realism that mattered to the successful development of physical theories. This thesis resembles Stein’s thesis although Sklar does not cite Stein’s paper, and Sklar’s discussion can provide additional support for Stein’s thesis. I am grateful to Kyle Stanford for drawing my attention to the relevance of Sklar’s work to Stein’s.
For excellent intellectual biographies of Benzer, see Weiner (1999) and Holmes (2006). Weiner gives a highly accessible account of Benzer’s research on genetic fine structure (Weiner 1999, pp. 46–60). Holmes has reconstructed in great detail the first 2 years (1954–1956) of Benzer’s research on genetic fine structure (Holmes 2006, pp. 179–298). Holmes had access to Benzer’s personal papers before they were donated to the Caltech Archives, and my analysis of Benzer’s research draws on the same personal papers as well as Holmes’s pioneering study.
The importance of Benzer’s research can also be gauged by the extent to which it was covered in the early textbooks in molecular biology (see, e.g., Watson 1965, pp. 231–237; Stent 1971, pp. 362–375). For a summary of Benzer’s important contributions to molecular biology by a contemporary biologist, see Greenspan (2009, pp. 7–10).
Seymour Benzer Papers, 10242-MS, Caltech Archives, California Institute of Technology. The collection is organized into 126 boxes, each of which is organized into folders. The finding aid is available online (http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8vh5ptc/). Hereafter when I cite Seymour Benzer Papers, I write “SBP” followed by the box and folder numbers.
See, e.g., Benzer’s “Application for Extension of Grant from American Cancer Society” (September 28, 1954, SBP 1.14); Benzer’s grant proposal to the National Science Foundation entitled “Genetic Fine Structure and Its Relation to the Molecular Structure of DNA” (February 12, 1955, SBP 9.7); his “Application for Extension of Grant from American Cancer Society” (September 21, 1955, SBP 1.15); and Benzer’s NSF progress reports dated April 29, 1957 (SBP 9.7) and March 31, 1958 (SBP 9.8). For brief published statements of his goals, see Benzer (1955, p. 345) and Benzer (1957, p. 71).
For a historical discussion of mapping in the twentieth-century genetics, see Rheinberger and Gaudillière (2004) and Gaudillière and Rheinberger (2004). With the exception of Kitcher (1982) and Weber (1998), philosophers have focused on the practice of genetic mapping in classical genetics (e.g., Darden 1991; Wimsatt 1987, 1992; Weber 1998; Vorms 2013a, b).
To focus on the details of Benzer’s practice in the limited space below, I must assume that the reader is familiar with Mendelian genetics or relevant parts of molecular genetics. For a short accessible introduction to Benzer’s genetic mapping, see Watson (1965, pp. 230–237), Benzer (1962), Stent (1971, pp. 362–372), or Weiner (1999, pp. 49–58).
A plaque is an area without host cells, which appears clear in the lawn of bacteria.
Benzer discovered the above properties of the rII mutants in the first half of 1954. Because of the lack of space, I will not describe Benzer’s early experiments with rII mutants. For a detailed account of his work during this period, see Holmes (2006). Benzer also gave a brief autobiographical account (Benzer 1966).
Doermann had sent Benzer his stocks of previously mapped mutants including \(\hbox {r}_{47}\) and \(\hbox {r}_{51}\) (A. H. Doermann to Seymour Benzer, April 3, 1954, SBP 67.6).
It is not clear to me what he means by “highly colored” here, but this does not affect the main point I am making.
Benzer thought about the correspondence between map distance and physical distance as early as May 28, 1954 when he wrote “thoughts on the gene” (SBP 67.6). For discussion of his early thoughts on this topic, see Holmes (2006, pp. 212–220).
Anomalous mutants also exhibited little or no tendency to revert to the wild type (Benzer 1955, p. 351).
This practice can also be seen in the right hand side of Fig. 5, where Benzer drew a revised map on a piece of paper and stapled it over the original map. In this map he drew 47, 312, 295 and 168 as overlapping horizontal bars. Referring to the revised map, Holmes says: “This critical move appears to mark the point at which Benzer recognized that these four mutants could not be point mutations but must be alterations extending along a portion of the chromosome” (Holmes 2006, pp. 271–272).
At the bottom of this map, Benzer provided a tentative physical interpretation of map distances by indicating that 1 cm on this map corresponded to the maximum of 25 nucleotide pairs. Alternatively, Holmes (2006, p. 272) interpreted that Benzer meant that the distance between 295 and 168 is 25 nucleotide pairs, but Benzer’s annotation at the bottom of the page does not correspond to the gap between the horizontal bars representing 295 and 168 at the top of the page.
Benzer’s work described in the paragraph below was first reconstructed by Holmes (2006, pp. 289–290).
In this section I entirely glossed over Benzer’s idea that the rII region is divisible into two segments A and B, which function differently during the growth of phages in E. coli K12(\(\lambda \)). These segments came to be called A and B cistrons (Benzer 1957), and in Fig. 9 their boundary was marked by a vertical dashed line. The basic idea is this: Recall that unlike the wild type, the rII mutants do not produce progeny on K12(\(\lambda \)). If an rII mutant and a wild-type phage together infected the same host cell, both types of phage were found among the progeny. This suggests that the wild type supplied the necessary function for intracellular growth that the rII mutant could not perform. By the beginning of 1955, Benzer found that some pairs of rII mutants, when they together infected K12(\(\lambda \)), produced a lot of progeny, while other pairs produced little or none (Holmes 2006, pp. 257–258). Two mutants forming the former type of pair had different functional defects so that they could supply each other, without recombination, the function that was defective in the other. On the other hand, two mutants forming the latter type of pair had the same functional defect and could produce progeny only when recombination occurred. Benzer thus concluded that the rII region has two functional segments. Doermann’s r47 is on segment A and r51 on segment B (Benzer 1955).
If he had only a handful of mutants to map, it would not have been so important to eliminate the need to cross every mutant with every other. But this was not the case, and Benzer’s new method was so important that Gunther Stent later wrote:
It is fair to say that without this astute exploitation of deletion [i.e., anomalous] mutants for rapid mapping, our knowledge of the genetic fine structure of the phage genome would still be very rudimentary; progress would have been hamstrung by the geometric increase in the number of crosses required for the mapping of an arithmetically increasing number of mutants available for study. (Stent 1971, p. 368)
This map appeared in the paper published in the March 1961 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA, but the paper was presented at the Academy on April 27, 1960.
In addition, all point mutants were represented as points under bars.
638 (the last row) did not produce wild-type plaques with any of the mutants tested, so Benzer wrote, “638 is most anomalous!” In this note, Benzer drew 638 as a bar below other bars, probably because he was drawing a map by going down the rows of the table. In a polished map, 638 was drawn as a bar near the top of the map: it is one of Benzer’s big seven in Fig. 10.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for alerting me to this interpretative possibility.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this response.
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Acknowledgements
I thank James Lennox, Sandra Mitchell, Elizabeth O’Neill, Kenneth Schaffner, and Kyle Stanford for comments on early versions of this paper. I am grateful to Alirio Rosales for his insightful comments and criticisms at the final stage of writing. Charlotte Erwin, the then head of the Caltech Archives, granted me access to the Seymour Benzer Papers, which were still being processed at the time of my visit, and Loma Karklins, Archivist at the Archives, helped my research on the Benzer papers. I thank them for their expert help. Parts of this paper were presented at the 2013 meeting of the International Society for the Historical, Philosophical, and Social Studies of Biology. I wish to thank the audience for discussion. The archival research was supported by a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from National Science Foundation (NSF #1230201), and the materials from the Seymour Benzer Papers appear here by permission of the Caltech Archives. I thank these institutions for support.
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Ishida, Y. In dialectical tension: realist and instrumentalist attitudes in scientific practice. Synthese 197, 2665–2694 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1855-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1855-z