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Notes
Nancy Cartwright, of course, has long been engaged in rich examinations of such phenomenological laws, their reliability and partial independence from the theoretical principles that we accept (1983, 1998); Cartwright’s work offers a much less idealized account of the relation between theoretical principles and inferential connections between phenomena. However, I don’t agree with her rather dismissive attitude towards the logical and mathematical liberties taken in the course of arriving at applicable phenomenological laws from fundamental principles: it has always seemed unfair, to me, to dismiss these inferences, which often take liberties such as applying approximation techniques without demonstrating their applicability to the case at hand as illegitimate, while lauding the special insight and skill of experimentalists in eliciting regular phenomena from recalcitrant and incompletely understood physical apparatus. Instead, I think that theoretical physicists deserve equal credit for their insight and ingenuity in extracting useful results from principles whose precise formal application to the problems they address is beyond our mathematics.
See Rudwick, 2008, for a detailed examination of the debate, beginning with Cuvier and de Luc and continuing on to Lyell and others, over whether ‘actual’ causes (i.e. causes currently in operation) are enough to account for the geological record.
The channel separating Bali from Lombok is only about 35 kilometers wide, but deep enough that it remained open ocean even during the last glacial maximum, when sea level was as much as 110 meters lower than now.
See Du Toit (1937), for a rich discussion and defense of mobilism from this period.
See Oreskes (1999) for a detailed study of the reception of continental drift by American geologists, from its proposal by Wegner to the emergence of plate tectonics.
Though theory seems a rather grand word for the range of narrative tools employed by geologists, they clearly had a rich conceptual toolkit for interpreting the geological record, including Steno’s principles of superposition, initial horizontality and continuity along with principles for interpreting cross-cutting formations, Smith’s principles of fossil correlation, and much more besides.
Of course, if we regard the age of the earth, or observations that would settle it, as part of the empirical substructure of these theories, then this particular example is not telling; on this view, these theories could not both be empirically adequate any more than they could both be true. But it is difficult to imagine that any humanly possible observation could establish the age of the earth without some reliance on theoretical inference. More subtly, the inferential constraints that inconsistency imposes on our account of things involve a cognitive cost that is separate from any question of semantics or truth. Consequently, neither Putnam’s argument nor this dual to it provides a terribly strong argument for realism. The desire for consistency need not be motivated by the aim of arriving at a true theory; instead, it could simply aim at achieving the logical benefits (in terms of the simplicity and generality of our methods of reasoning) that come with consistency; similarly, the tendency to combine our commitments may not reflect the belief that they are true, but that doing so is simple, straightforward and often (when things go well) productive.
It might be possible to account for their practice by appeal to consistent beliefs or coherent probability assignments. But to do so will require a new account of the content of their commitments—it will not be the sentences they apparently assert in various contexts, but other sentences that somehow make the contextual constraints on their commitments explicit. One candidate would be conditionals with antecedents expressing the sort of contexts in which the consequents are taken to hold (Smith 1988). But there are drawbacks to this approach. First, we often don’t know exactly what picks out the contexts of commitment; one important result of scientific inquiry is a gradual refinement of our understanding of the contexts where various commitments are applicable and the features that pick them out, but we make commitments before this work is done. So there is a (probably ineliminable) vagueness in this approach to characterizing commitments; the clarity we may seem to gain by replacing the things we say with conditionals is an illusion, since the antecedents of the conditionals are difficult to specify. Second, the value of pro-tem consistency is questionable. Given that we have systems of logic and systematic accounts, more broadly, of patterns of context-constrained reasoning that don’t collapse in the face of these inconsistencies, imposing consistency does little if any work for us. Finally, the sort of rules that Bohr prescribed for managing the inconsistency of his account of the hydrogen atom offers a different (and I think, more credible) picture of how to manage such inconsistencies explicitly—a picture, not of belief-style commitments to conditionals, but of pragmatic commitments to the contextually limited descriptive/explanatory powers of certain bits of conceptual apparatus. After all, it’s not correct to say even that we believe the descriptions we arrive at in these contexts are true, tout court; what we may well believe is that, restricted to such contexts, they are close to true, close enough that we can rely on the inferences we make using the apparatus to give us good (never precisely true) figures for further calculation
Consider the late Henry Kyburg’s heterodox response to the lottery puzzle (1970)—note, I say puzzle here because Kyburg did not regard the lottery ‘paradox’ as paradoxical at all.
The early calculus is another very interesting example—see Priest and Brown (2004).
This has been called the pragmatic theory of observation: the central idea here is that any sentence that is reliably used to make descriptive reports, such as ‘lo, an electron!’ qualifies as an observation sentence. Note in particular the famous example of Apollo astronauts reporting retinal flashes that were determined to be caused by electrons.
More generally, the terms that ‘succeed’, referentially speaking are assigned to the items they succeed in referring to, and the predicates that succeed in characterizing items are assigned to the extensions they successfully characterize. But this kind of partial mapping of linguistic items onto the world raises complexities we must set aside here.
See Brown (2004) for a more detailed examination of van Fraassen’s anthropocentric account of observation and empirical adequacy.
Perhaps we actually face such a challenge, if the probabilistic approach to thermodynamics really does entail that it is far more probable that I, along with my apparent memories and sensations, am really just a small local thermodynamic fluctuation from maximum entropy, than that the entire universe (so far from thermal equilibrium) that I seem to experience should exist.
See Wilfrid Sellars’ essay, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” republished in (Sellars 1963, pp. 1–40), for some helpful distinctions between different types of unification in science on pages 21ff.
Of course in the circumstances this credit is defeasible—a proof that the model’s empirically successful predictions are empirically incompatible with the actual predictions we would derive from the theory would defeat it. Precise predictions are usually logically incompatible—but that doesn’t imply they are not also empirically compatible with our evidence. It is perverse, at best, to give all the credit for empirical success to an approximative model based on a theory, and none to the theory that inspired and guided our attempts to produce a model. As empiricists we’ve all learned to live with the defeasibility of evidence. Given how such models and their constraints on phenomena are derived, it is plausible to suppose that our theories would often produce empirically compatible, though not logically identical, constraints.
See Philip Kitcher’s The Advancement of Science (1993) for an approach to philosophy of science in something like this spirit.
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Bryson Brown, M. The shape of science. Synthese 191, 3079–3109 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0475-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0475-5