Abstract
Stanford’s argument against scientific realism focuses on theories, just as many earlier arguments from inconceivability have. However, there are possible arguments against scientific realism involving unconceived (or inconceivable) entities of different types: observations, models, predictions, explanations, methods, instruments, experiments, and values. This paper charts such arguments. In combination, they present the strongest challenge yet to scientific realism.
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Notes
I’d prefer not to use this phrase, but include it because others still do. See Rowbottom (2014a).
The historical cases studied by Laudan (1981) may also be understood simply to cast doubt on the putative (probabilistic) connection between empirical success and successful reference of central theoretical terms (and/or approximate truth). No appeal to induction is then needed.
The important requirement, which will become evident in the discussion that follows, is that the confirmation (or corroboration) value depends on P(e, \(\sim \)hb). This holds for all standard confirmation (or corroboration) functions, such as those championed by Popper (1983), Milne (1996), and Huber (2008).
The form of conceivability under discussion here is ‘positive’ in the sense discussed by Chalmers (2002, p. 153), although he primarily discusses situations: ‘to positively conceive of a situation is to imagine (in some sense) a specific configuration of objects and properties’.
Here, I grant the dubious assumption that the possible is a subset of the conceivable. Some arguments for the underdetermination of theories by evidence instead rely on inconceivable theories.
Stanford (2001, p. S9) writes: ‘the history of scientific inquiry offers a straightforward inductive rationale for thinking that there typically are alternatives to our best theories equally well-confirmed by the evidence, even when we are unable to conceive of them at the time’.
The problem of unconceived alternatives, so construed, also presents a challenge to some possible forms of anti-realism. For example, it casts doubt on the view that contemporary theories save the phenomena, or some proper subset thereof, in the most elegant (or more generally, virtuous) way possible. For unconceived alternatives may have much higher priors than their conceived counterparts.
Pedantic readers might think that hares are sufficiently similar for the pictures to be seen as hare-ducks. But imagine, if you will, that the whole leporidae family was wiped out by the virus, which affected hares as well as rabbits (unlike myxomatosis).
They may also be replaced with observation statements concerning duck-rabbits, and this is potentially important from the point of view of scientific method. I will avoid discussing this possibility, however, in order to streamline the discussion.
It’s possible for some evidence to remain the same, and for some to change, on this view. My example is chosen to avoid this complication.
Perhaps there are two different senses of ‘evidence’—one subjective/intersubjective, and the other objective—employed here. That is, unless the subjective/intersubjective evidence is taken to be non-propositional. My own view is that there are some situations where the evidence itself changes, although this hypothetical scenario may not be one of them.
This may be conceded without adopting any form of extreme relativism, or completely collapsing the distinction between fact and theory. One need not go as far as Feyerabend (1958). The point can hold even if one agrees with Harré (1959, p. 43): ‘that only some descriptive statements involve terms whose meanings depend partly on theory.’ In any event, realists have used theory-ladenness as an argument for the view that the line between the observable and the unobservable can shift; see, for instance, Maxwell (1962). To deny theory-ladenness is to concede much—too much, perhaps—to instrumentalists.
An anonymous referee astutely notes that the discovery of deep-ocean chemosynthetic ecosystems around hydrothermal vents, in the late seventies, is an excellent case in point. As Van Dover (2000, p. xvii) puts it:
Deep-sea hydrothermal vents and their attendant faunas were discovered in 1977. While the hot-water springs were predicted to occur at seafloor spreading centers, no one expected to find them colonized by exotic invertebrate faunas. Accustomed to a view of the deep sea as a food-limited environment, the puzzle of how lush communities could be maintained provoked biologists into a flurry of research activity... Based on collections from the early expeditions to hydrothermal vents in 1979 and 1982, investigators identified the significance of chemoautotrophic primary production in these systems...
See also http://www.divediscover.whoi.edu/ventcd/vent_discovery/—a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute webpage that contains interviews with many of those involved in the discovery.
I reject the so-called semantic view of theories, according to which theories are collections of models. I follow Frigg and Hartmann (2012) in thinking that: ‘how models are constructed in actual science shows that they are neither derived entirely from data nor from theory... Model building is an art and not a mechanical procedure.’ See also Morrison (1999) and N. Cartwright (1999, Chap. 8).
In what follows, I mainly discuss abstract, rather than concrete, models; on the concrete side, I mention only model organisms. However, concrete models are important more broadly, in so far as they can function, for example, as means of animating theories. Think of the antikythera mechanism—see De Solla Price (1974)—as a case in point. For more on concrete models in non-biological contexts, see Rowbottom (2009).
See the discussion of expectations concerning Newtonian mechanics and the tides, in the next section.
Tractability is an important issue, which is bound up with the talk of models and reformulations. Here’s an example from D. Cartwright (1999, p. 2):
Solution of Laplace’s tidal equations, even in seas of idealized shape, taxed mathematicians for well over a century until the advent of modern computers. Even then, some decades were to elapse before computers were large enough [sic] to represent the global ocean in sufficient detail, and techniques had improved sufficiently to give realistic results.
Surprisingly, D. Cartwright (1999, p. 4) nevertheless endorses convergent realism at one level: ‘the global aspects of tidal science... seem to have reached a state of near-culmination’.
It is a matter of dispute as to whether the wave function should be understood as an element of physical reality. See, for example, Dürr et al. (1997).
As noted by Faye (2014), ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ is really ‘a label introduced... to identify... the common features behind the Bohr–Heisenberg interpretation’.
For further discussion of this phenomenon, with particular attention to interpretation of probability, see Rowbottom 2011, Chap. 3.
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Acknowledgments
My work on this paper was supported by: the Research Grants Council, Hong Kong (‘The Instrument of Science’, Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship); and also by the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, in association with the European Union (COFUND Senior Research Fellowship). My thanks to two anonymous referees for several helpful comments.
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Rowbottom, D.P. Extending the argument from unconceived alternatives: observations, models, predictions, explanations, methods, instruments, experiments, and values. Synthese 196, 3947–3959 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1132-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1132-y