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Optimistic realism about scientific progress

  • S.I. : New Thinking about Scientific Realism
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Abstract

Scientific realists use the “no miracle argument” to show that the empirical and pragmatic success of science is an indicator of the ability of scientific theories to give true or truthlike representations of unobservable reality. While antirealists define scientific progress in terms of empirical success or practical problem-solving, realists characterize progress by using some truth-related criteria. This paper defends the definition of scientific progress as increasing truthlikeness or verisimilitude. Antirealists have tried to rebut realism with the “pessimistic metainduction”, but critical realists turn this argument into an optimistic view about progressive science.

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Notes

  1. Aronson et al. (1994) operate with a weaker notion of approximate truth which has a maximal value if T is true, i.e. T is entailed by C*.

  2. For an alternative approach to epistemic truthlikeness, see Kuipers (2000).

  3. This objective notion of truth distinguishes critical realism from Ron Giere’s (2006) recent formulation of perspectival realism, which allows only a theory-relative notion “according to this highly confirmed theory (or reliable instrument), the world seems to be roughly such and such”.

  4. One way of achieving this aim would be to find a categorical theory which is able to determine the structure of the world up to isomorphism. This task is very ambitious, since no first-order theory is categorical. It is also known that quantum field theory in thermodynamic limit (with infinite number of degrees of freedom) has non-isomorphic models (Ruetsche 2011).

  5. For references, see the bibliographical survey in Niiniluoto (2012).

  6. For examples, see Horowicz and Janis (1994). Blondlot’s non-existent N-rays gives also an example of scientific regress (see Bird 2008; Rowbottom 2008).

  7. If we assume with metaphysical realism that the world has a definite structure, which can be described in a Peirceish framework P, then progress can be defined by truthlikeness relative to such framework P. In particular, if the ultimate goal is to know the unique structure of the world, as ontic structural realists think, then the appropriate measure of progress can be given by partial isomorphisms (see da Costa and French, 2003, for an account of partial truth).

  8. Rowbottom (forthcoming) argues that increasing theoretical verisimilitude is not the central dimension of scientific progress, since achieving predictive power and understanding could be taken to be the primary goals of science. I agree that predictive power and understanding are important, but they can be maximized by maximizing verisimilitude, but not necessarily vice versa.

  9. This is what Kuhn (1970) called “puzzle-solving”.

  10. For a reliabilist, theories are justified with epistemic processes which have a high truth-frequency in producing true results.

  11. The classical notion of knowledge, which presupposes truth and justification, cannot cover false theories (e.g. Newton’s mechanics). For a modified notion of conjectural knowledge, where truth is replaced by truthlikeness, see Niiniluoto (1999a, p. 84). Progress with respects to such conjectural knowledge is not cumulative.

  12. Duhem added to his instrumentalism the claim that physical theory makes progress by becoming “more and more similar to a natural classification which is its ideal end” (Duhem 1954, p. 298). One may wonder whether such a peculiar form of convergent realism makes sense without assuming that the classified laws refer to real theoretical entities.

  13. For a translation of Kaila’s work, published originally in Finnish and Swedish in 1939, see Kaila (2014).

  14. See Kuhn (1978, pp. 332–333), Laudan (1977, p. 224).

  15. Van Fraassen argues that the true hypothesis is missed if it is not included among the considered rivals. But one can always operate with a partition of mutually exclusive and logically exhaustive hypotheses so that their set must contain a true one. If the best one turns out to be the catch-all hypothesis (in the simplest case, the negation \(\lnot \)H of H), we have reason to find a richer set of hypotheses.

  16. Mizrahi (2012) argues that Kukla’s (1998) ”weak surrealism” (i.e. the observable world behaves as if our mature theories are true) and realism (i.e. our mature theories are true) are equally plausible as explanations for the success of science, since they yield the same independently testable predictions. However, weak surrealism only describes the fact about science which is in need of explanation.

  17. This is not quite convincing. The best justification of induction is not only comparative, but shows that the inductive probability of the strongest hypothesis approaches one with increasing evidence. A similar result holds in special cases also for the convergence of the estimated verisimilitude (see Niiniluoto 2007).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki, P. O. Box 24, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Ilkka Niiniluoto

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Niiniluoto, I. Optimistic realism about scientific progress. Synthese 194, 3291–3309 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0974-z

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