Abstract
At stake in the classical realism-debate is the clash between realist and anti-realist positions. In recent years, the classical form of this debate has undergone a double transformation. On the one hand, the champions of realism began to pay more attention to the interpretative dimensions of scientific research. On the other hand, anti-realists of various sorts realized that the rejection of the hypostatization of a “reality out there” does not imply the denial of working out a philosophically adequate concept of reality. Against the background of this double transformation, new arguments in the realism-debate emerged. The present Introduction is an attempt at systematizing these arguments within the spectrum of doctrines between the poles of scientific realism (exposed and defended by Howard Sankey) and hermeneutic realism (advocated by Dimitri Ginev). The authors try also to demonstrate that after the classical debates the issue of scientism has to be addressed in new ways.
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Notes
See Stein (1989).
See Fine (1996b, 254).
See Fine (1996a, 142).
This is also the reason why Fine is not quite enthusiastic about the neopragmatist and postmodern receptions of NOA.
See, for instance, Ellis (1996).
We think that Fine would agree with this claim. The zero-degree of realism debate is what he takes to be the core position about entities that exist and propositions that are true. On his view, the higher degrees of this debate take place when conflicting philosophical doctrines are added to the core position. Introducing such additions is a common business among the philosophers of science. Yet in the form of epistemological and/or metaphysical credo additions to the core position are not unusual for the working scientists as well. However, in this case—so Fine’s argument goes—the additions are not brought in the world by the intrinsic dynamics of scientific research. They are reactions to the cultural context into which the research activities are embedded. Thus, realism and anti-realism play the role of motivational doctrines. Fine makes use in this regard of the psychoanalytic concept of an imago. In this “psychoanalytic account”, Einstein’s realism, for instance, proves to be a replacement for the “religious paradise of youth”. Like any other kind of realism or antirealism, it is not advocated in terms of cognitive appeal, but rather in terms of what motivates, enlivens, and gives meaning to one’s activities.
Fine (1996b, 250) claims that his piecemeal approach does not suggest a global hermeneutic orientation.
In particular, many realists combine the position of scientific realism with rejection of Humean regularity accounts of causation or laws of nature. Moreover, some scientific realists hold that the world is populated by independently existing natural kinds, the essential natures of which may be discovered by scientific inquiry. There is a close affinity between scientific realism and anti-Humean and essentialist metaphysical theories. However, we believe that the issues which arise in relation to such metaphysical theories form part of a distinct debate from the debate about scientific realism strictly construed. So, for present purposes, we shall treat theories about causation, laws of nature and natural kinds as optional, rather than as core doctrines of scientific realism.
The question arises of how precisely the notion of knowledge is to be understood in the context of scientific realism. In the present context, it may be assumed that something along the lines of the traditional justified true belief account of knowledge is a minimal condition for a realist conception of knowledge. This is particularly the case, given the need to produce a clear distinction between realism and assorted relativist and social constructivist conceptions of knowledge with which it contrasts. For related discussion, see Sankey (2000, 219f).
The requirement of referential realism may be satisfied by a variety of theories of reference, which range from pure descriptive, to causal-descriptive and pure causal accounts. See Sankey (1994). However, no commitment to a specific account of reference is required by the realistic interpretation of theoretical discourse.
The expression ‘external world’ is the expression traditionally employed by philosophers to formulate the claim that there is a material world, which exists independently of the human mind. However, the expression itself is objectionable, since it seems to imply an untenable metaphysical divide between internal and external worlds, as well as to suggest that we are not part of the world. A further problem is that talk of an external world may provide the basis for the sceptical problematic—e.g., Cartesian questions about the certainty of our knowledge of an external world—which should itself be rejected in favour of a naturalistic perspective which denies the legitimacy of such sceptical questions.
See Putnam (1981, 49).
The issue of the truth of theoretical claims raises a question about theoretical discourse. Ian Hacking distinguishes between entity realism and theory realism (Hacking 1983, 27). Entity realism asserts the reality of unobservable entities discovered by science. Theory realism asserts that scientific theories may be true or have a truth-value. Traditional scientific realism combines entity realism with theory realism. However, Hacking notes that the two doctrines are logically distinct. The entity realist may allow that there are unobservable entities of which scientists possess knowledge, but of which no current theory provides a correct description. By contrast, the theory realist may assert that a theory is true though none of its terms denote unobservable entities, but refer instead to logical constructions out of experience. In thesis 3, we have characterized the realist interpretation of theoretical discourse as a defining principle of scientific realism. Given this, it is not possible for scientific realism to deny that theoretical discourse purports to refer to real unobservable entities. However, it is no great departure from scientific realism to assert the reality of theoretical entities while denying theory realism. Entity realism may therefore be considered a special version of scientific realism.
See, for instance, Devitt (1991, 36, 44–45).
While not all minimalist conceptions of truth may count as correspondence theories of truth in the broad sense at issue here, at least some do. Paul Horwich, for instance, argues that his own minimalist conception of truth is able to embrace ‘the idea that each truth is made true by the existence of a corresponding fact’ (1990, 112). For more substantive theories of truth, compare the attempt by Hartry Field and Michael Devitt to analyze the relation of correspondence as a function of a relation of reference between terms and their extension, where the latter is in turn to be analyzed by means of a causal theory of reference (Field 1972; Devitt 1991, 29).
In choosing to explicitly add the thesis of the objectivity of truth to that of correspondence truth, we follow the lead of Michael Devitt, who remarks that the correspondence theory ‘is compatible with absolutely any metaphysics’ (Devitt 2002, 14).
Putnam (1981, 49).
Putnam (1981, 50).
See Putnam (1981, 55).
Cf. Putnam (1978, 125), where Putnam notes that metaphysical realism treats truth as ‘radically non-epistemic’, which implies that the ideal theory reached at the ultimate end of scientific inquiry might be false. Though Putnam does not, in so many words, assert that the ideal theory is true, this is the clear implication of his internal realist identification of truth with ideal rational justification.
See Putnam (1981, 49f).
See Putnam (1981, 55).
More precisely, to avoid relativism, it must be denied that there may be true and complete descriptions of the world which are jointly inconsistent with each other. In principle, it might be possible to formulate alternative true and complete descriptions on the basis of alternative conceptual schemes. Provided that such descriptions are consistent with each other, no threat of relativism arises.
For sustained criticism of the idea of a complete description of the ‘way the world is’, see Hacking (1983, 93–95).
See Musgrave (2001, 41).
A related treatment of the issue may be found in Devitt (1991, section 12.6). Thanks are due to Michael Devitt for drawing attention to this point, and for pointing out the naturalistic provenance of the argument in this section.
Fine (1996a, 175).
Fine (1996a, 148).
Hermeneutic realism is not to be confused with the interpretative version of the dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content: Because we are always interpreting facts in conceptual frameworks, there are no facts, but only interpretations. Hermeneutic realism is not an interpretative radicalization of transcendental epistemology. To say that all kinds of reality (objective, semiotic, historical, social, and so on) are constituted meaningfully within the world of practices does not amount to holding a sort of (social) constructivism. Social constructivism is still succumbed to the (Kantian) assumption that there is an initial (amorphous) reality that gets designed by the processes of social construction.
See Van Fraassen (1980).
Van Fraassen argues that all research practices are only the continuation of theory construction by other means. Practices of measurement, observation, experimentation and instrumentation get their meaning only within the horizon of a theory. By implication, the hermeneutic circle devised by constructive empiricism remains an intra-theoretical circle.
See van Fraassen (1980, 56–59). Strictly speaking, this is not a hermeneutic circle in the sense of a theory of interpretation, but a kind of co-dependence, in whose treatment van Fraassen avoids vicious circularity.
Van Fraassen (2006, 305). According to van Fraassen, structural realism and scientific realism are exhibiting two ways of destroying of the intra-theoretical hermeneutic circle. Reification and structuralist essentialism are the consequences. The exponent of empirical constructivism convincingly argues that it is embarrassing to start with the thesis that what is preserved through a radical change in science’s development is the structure attributed to the reality under investigation, and to have to identify structure by noticing what has been preserved. On van Fraassen’s account, the successes of older scientific programs are due to successful fitting the experimental and observational experience in mathematically codified theoretical models (mathematical structures), whereby the mutual interpretation of models and data gets accomplished. This hermeneutic circle reveals the structure, at some level of approximation, of the phenomena that are studied. The constructive-empiricist description of the deliverances of experimental and observational experience in terms of an intra-theoretical hermeneutic circle replaces the logical-positivist description of the relation between phenomena and mathematical structure in terms of privileged observation statement. The dilemma that follows from destroying this circle—so van Fraassen’s argument goes—is that the mathematical formalisms codifying science’s theoretical objects are either describing identifiable things in the physical reality or revealing structures of unknown entities.
This claim can be generalized in the following manner: the intra-theoretical hermeneutics that takes into account the interrelations between theoretical terms and empirical data has to be placed in the broader context of a hermeneutics that provides accounts of how practices of theory construction are interpretatively interrelated with the rest of scientific practices.
The hermeneutic realist champions the view that a domain of scientific research is disclosed within the interrelatedness of practices of Kuhn’s normal science. The hermeneutic realist rejects the view that the constitution of a scientific domain starts out with a mathematical projection that determines the scope of inquiry. This view is refuted in the first place by the fact that there are no mathematical idealizations that resist change during the period in which a scientific domain becomes disclosed and articulated as a manifold of possible objects. Furthermore, the hermeneutic realist asserts that all cognitive structures of science are fore-structured within the everydayness of practices of scientific research (i.e. within Kuhn’s normal science). This claim is valid also with regard to the scientific theories’ “hardest” mathematical formalisms.
See, in particular, Worrall (1989, 99–124).
See in this regard Graves (1971, 215–232).
See on this view Rheinberger (1997, 102–113).
Rorty (2004, 27).
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Sankey, H., Ginev, D. The Scope and Multidimensionality of the Scientific Realism Debate. J Gen Philos Sci 42, 263–283 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-011-9169-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-011-9169-6