Abstract
It has become apparent that the debate between scientific realists and constructive empiricists has come to a stalemate. Neither view can reasonably claim to be the most rational philosophy of science, exclusively capable of making sense of all scientific activities. On one prominent analysis of the situation, whether we accept a realist or an anti-realist account of science actually seems to depend on which values we antecedently accept, rather than our commitment to “rationality” per se. Accordingly, several philosophers have attempted to argue in favour of scientific realism or constructive empiricism by showing that one set of values is exclusively best, for anyone and everyone, and that the downstream choice of the philosophy of science which best serves those values is therefore best, for anyone and everyone. These efforts, however, seem to have failed. In response, I suggest that philosophers of science should suspend the effort to determine which philosophy of science is best for everyone, and instead begin investigating which philosophy of science is best for specific (groups of) people, with specific values, in specific contexts. I illustrate how this might be done by briefly sketching a single case study from the history of science, which seems to show that different philosophies of science are better at motivating different forms of scientific practice.
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Notes
“Epistemic risk” is here understood as the chance of developing false beliefs without any potential practical benefit, in line with the discussion in van Fraassen (2002), Ch. 3.
Chakravartty (2007b, 2011) understands the relation between theories of science and epistemic stances a bit differently than I have here, seeing scientific realism and constructive empiricism as themselves epistemic stances (2011, p. 39). I think it’s important to recognize this as a simplification of the analysis, and potentially a pernicious one, for reasons that are not especially relevant to the topic at hand. In either case, his views in (2004, 2007a) are closer to the above analysis.
Consider, for example, the opening question of Bertrand Russell’s Problems of Philosophy (1912), one of the most classic and basic works of modern philosophy: “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?” (p. 2) Russell goes on to discuss our ordinary beliefs about the external world, our usual probabilistic inferences, and several other traditional philosophical issues, aiming to determine what position the “reasonable man” he refers to at the outset should take on these issues. The implicitly central task of philosophy, in this work as in so many others, is to determine what position is mandated by a commitment to rationality alone.
It should be noted that the idea of working through the scientific realism debate on pragmatic and existentialist considerations was originally put forward, in those terms, by van Fraassen (2000, p. 273, 2002). He notes that, by taking a meta-epistemologically voluntarist perspective on the debate, “[t]he element of personal decision, values, and volition has entered and received a legitimate place in our epistemic life” while noting that “[by] itself, however, this element is no cure-all” (2002, p. 91). His account is more suggestive than the version I present here in terms of explicit, methodologically grounded assumptions for further inquiry into the connections between epistemic stances and success in certain practical activities.
Even as a matter of methodology this may be an uncomfortable assumption for any philosopher used to universalizing argument, which strives to determine which position amongst an array of options should be accepted by anyone and everyone, regardless of their individual circumstances. It might even be objected that this assumption ultimately leads to a pernicious and unpalatable form of relativism, for combining an existentialist approach to the question of value selection with a voluntarist minimal epistemic stance selection means nothing less than accepting that different epistemic stances will be rational for different people, or even for the same person in different places and at different times. Such objections are misplaced. Universalizing arguments about the values informing epistemic stance choice have, to date, failed. An existentialist approach to the question of value selection is specifically meant to help us avoid that apparently fruitless mode of argument. Furthermore, justifying certain philosophical assumptions on the basis of their methodological fruitfulness is not without precedence. It is quite common in the history and sociological study of science (see Latour and Woolgar 1979), for example, where it has produced some truly fascinating results (Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Arabatzis 2006, etc.). If the existentialist assumption nevertheless proves too uncomfortable, I invite those interested in the issue of epistemic stance choice to either continue attempts to universally ground values, or to find some suitably weaker assumptions to work with. But I think it is clear that the existentialist assumption is sufficient for the purpose here intended: preventing people from arguing over the acceptability of certain values.
These issues are more extensively dealt with in Fine (1984a, b, 1986a, b) as well as Kukla (1998). Both authors echo van Fraassen’s contention that anti-realism, like realism, can account for all relevant aspects of scientific practice, and that as a result the scientific realism debate cannot be decided on the basis of some scientific activities being “laden” with realist or anti-realist assumptions. Psillos (2000) gives what I consider a failed attempt to show that some scientific activities are, in fact, “realism-laden” enough to warrant our acceptance of scientific realism as the correct philosophical account of science.
See van Fraassen (2004) for more detail on what it means for a philosopher to determine “adequacy criteria” operant in scientific theorizing.
See Wise (1981) or Woodruff (1962) for brief but excellently detailed discussions of Weber’s program, in the context of contemporary approaches. For a shorter account, see (Buchwald 1994, Ch. 1). For an extensive account of his model of the atom, including a discussion of its relation to gravitational effects, see Assis et al. (2011).
For example, see the discussion of “detection properties” in Chakravartty (2007a) for a realist understanding of scientific instruments along these lines.
Sir David Gill once reminisced of Maxwell that “his experiments always failed” (Forbes 1916, p. 17). A “failed” experiment of this sort was possible mainly because Maxwell used physical experiments not to discover new phenomena, or to make precise measurements of relevant parameters, but rather only to illustrate established physical principles. His invention of the colour top to illustrate the trichromatic theory of colour, his use of a zoetrope to illustrate the motion of smoke rings traveling in the same direction, and his plaster model of Gibb’s thermodynamic surface for water all speak to the way Maxwell treated laboratory work: as a means of illustration of broader theoretical principles. Thought experiments, by contrast, were often used to a different purpose, specifically the extraction of analytic principles that could be matched to the known phenomena and, eventually, redemonstrated in the lab. But physical experiment, in the Maxwellians’ day-to-day practice, had little to no role in the process of theory-building.
For more on Maxwell’s characteristic scientific methods, with emphasis on the philosophical commitments behind them, see Morrison (1992).
There are other ways we might characterize the Maxwellian’s chosen epistemic stance, e.g. as a form of fictionalism. Nevertheless, since our concern in this sketch is primarily with determining the way that adopting speculative metaphysics or empiricism motivates certain forms of scientific practice, we need not dwell on determining how best to characterize the Maxwellian philosophy of science or epistemic stance. Future characterization and investigations of epistemic stances beyond the empiricism/speculative metaphysics dichotomy are certainly warranted, though outside the scope of this particular paper.
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Forbes, C. A pragmatic, existentialist approach to the scientific realism debate. Synthese 194, 3327–3346 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1015-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1015-2