Abstract
Scientific realists argue that a good track record of multi-agent, and multiple method, validation of empirical claims is itself evidence that those claims, at least partially and approximately, reflect ways nature actually is independent of the ways we conceptualize it. Constructivists contend that successes in validating empirical claims only suffice to establish that our ways of modelling the world, our “constructions,” are useful and adequate for beings like us. This essay presents a thought experiment in which beings like us intersubjectively validate claims about properties of particular things in nature under conditions in which those beings have profoundly different personal phenomenological experiences of those properties. I submit that the thought experiment scenario parallels our actual situation, and argue that this shows that successes in intersubjectively validating empirical claims are indeed enough to claim victory for the realist. More specifically, I champion a variation of realism that marries Ronald Giere’s brand of ‘perspectival realism’ with Philip Kitcher’s ‘real realism,’ and posits that causal relations between ourselves and properties instantiated in nature ground our references to the relevant properties even though our conceptions of them are perspective relative (or filtered through, and distorted by, a perspective).
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Notes
There is an enormous amount of neuroscience research establishing that phenomenal content can vary drastically across subjects perceiving the same things. Color-blindness and other color perception disorders serve as obvious, severe, examples. For instance, ‘synesthesia’ is a well-documented condition in which a brain activity abnormality can result in perceiving black and grey text (letters and numerals) in character-isomorphic colors—e.g. Q’s may always appear red to someone with the condition; see Robertson and Sagiv (2004) and Byrne and Hilbert (2003) and the sources cited therein.
In response to the van Fraassenian view that empirical models are valued primarily on the basis of their epistemic adequacy, Giere (1988, pp. 193–195) has demonstrated that, in physics at least, scientists demand more of theories than just adequacy.
Active debates in metaphysics regarding the ontological status of emergent “ontic structures” are a testament to this.
It is to be noted that others have recognized that divergent phenomenological content may be irrelevant to intersubjective validations; see, for example, Shoemaker (1975, pp. 293–294) and the source cited therein.
Even the stalwart materialist Jaegwon Kim advocates this position on the basis that it is metaphysically possible that different qualia may result from the same mechanisms of contact with the same things out in the world; see 2005, pp. 167–168.
It is possible that there are properties like our qualities instantiated in nature, and also possible there are many more qualitative properties than we can even possibly come to experience; cf. Unger (2007, p. 168). It is also possible that properties are multiply natured and may each have dispositional, categorical, and/or qualitative aspects; see Chakravartty (2007, p. 79); Heil (2003, pp. 111, 247).
It is easy to imagine that P1–3 could have distinctive qualia owing to their having different physiological process; perhaps due to differences in the structures of their respective eye-like apparatuses.
Searle (1995, Ch. 8) argues that we must assume that external realism is true to communicate. My suggestion is that the fact that we can communicate about the objects of perception and intersubjectively correct for errors in our empirical models is compelling evidence that we detect and model the world at least partially correctly.
Interestingly this is compatible with the fact that perceived qualities do not always match up to what would be considered their regular causes. For example, in certain, irregular, circumstances we can perceive different colors than those that regularly correspond to the wavelengths received by the eye. For instance, observing green color patches and then white or gray color patches can elicit experiencing the latter as green; see Campbell (1993, pp. 253–256). Alternative examples include common cases of color blindness; see Heil (2003, pp. 201–202).
Some argue that properties of objects are similar only if they bring about the same qualities in their possessors; see Heil (2003, p. 145) and Giere (2006, p. 14). In my view, the same properties can sometimes cause different qualia, and I leave open the possibility that some qualities may just be qualia that do not supervene on any other properties; cf. Campbell (1993, pp. 256–258).
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the Philosophy & Humanities Department at SUNY Buffalo State for giving me the opportunity to try out the arguments in this paper at the Fall 2015 Faculty Colloquia. I would also like to thank Amanda Hicks for commenting on a very early version of this work.
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Donhauser, J. Invisible disagreement: an inverted qualia argument for realism. Philos Stud 174, 593–606 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0698-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0698-z