Abstract
Realists about science tend to hold that our scientific theories aim for the truth, that our successful theories are at least partly true, and that the entities referred to by the theoretical terms of these theories exist. Antirealists about science deny one or more of these claims. A sizable minority of philosophers of science prefers not to take sides: they believe the realism debate to be fundamentally mistaken and seek to abstain from it altogether. In analogy with other realism debates I will call these philosophers quietists. In the philosophy of science quietism often takes a somewhat peculiar form, which I will call naturalistic quietism. In this paper I will characterize Maddy’s Second Philosophy as a form of naturalistic quietism, and show what the costs for making it feasible are.
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Notes
Another well-established feature of the debate is that nearly every respective characterization of realism and antirealism has been contested. In appealing to notions like ‘approximate truth’ or ‘the aim of science’ in the following characterizations I do not mean to suggest that these notions are unproblematic. For a discussion of the aims of science, see Rowbottom (2014).
For a range of possible ways of doing so, as well as responses, see Chalmers et al. (2009).
Hazlett (2010) famously denies the first claim, Yablo (1998) and others deny the third. The second, broadly Tarskian, claim is certainly the most controversial, in large part because there are problem cases, like negative existential claims and true claims about fictional characters. For the scientific realism debate these counterexamples tend to be less worrisome, since for that debate, the claims at issue are usually positive existential claims, and scientific discourse is (usually) not regarded as involving deliberate fictions.
Psillos (1999) develops a thorough defense of all three realist claims, but also relies heavily on semantic externalism, the causal theory of reference, and the reference-ontology link.
Alan Musgrave’s (1989) argument in favor of reading Arthur Fine’s NOA as a form of realism, rather than quietism, heavily relies on versions of these orthodoxies.
Fine seems to think that adopting a deflationary approach to truth and reference is necessary, but also sufficient to dispel deep worries about ontological commitment. It is hard to see that this deflationism is relevantly different from a standard issue semantic realism when it comes to either the ontological commitments involved, or the need to provide epistemic warrant for scientific claims. See also Musgrave (1989) and Asay (2013) for discussion.
I would like to thank Darrell Rowbottom for helping me to clarify this point.
In his review of Maddy’s book, Harvey Siegel (2010) suggests that Maddy is merely presenting the method of second philosophy, not a defense of it. But to succeed as a form of quietism, such a defense must be offered, at least in the negative. That is, we at least must be given a reason to think that our engagement in the realism debate rests on a mistake, even if we are unpersuaded by the particular way forward exemplified by Maddy’s Second Philosopher.
Not all realists accept the no-miracles argument. But even realists who, like Alexander Bird, reject the no-miracles argument, think they have a response to the empiricist on general epistemic grounds. Bird (2010) argues that we should accept the thesis that evidence is knowledge, and that this thesis poses a problem for empiricism. Note that this defense of realism relies on global epistemic arguments, in contrast to the naturalistic quietist’s local arguments from within scientific practice.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the participants of the conference “Science—the real thing?” at Lingnan University, and especially Darrell Rowbottom and Jamin Asay, for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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Wolff, J. Naturalistic quietism or scientific realism?. Synthese 196, 485–498 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0873-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0873-3