Abstract
The scientific realism debate has now reached an entirely new level of sophistication. Faced with increasingly focused challenges, epistemic scientific realists have appropriately revised their basic meta-hypothesis that successful scientific theories are approximately true: they have emphasized criteria that render realism far more selective and, so, plausible. As a framework for discussion, I use what I take to be the most influential current variant of selective epistemic realism, deployment realism. Toward the identification of new case studies that challenge this form of realism, I break away from the standard list and look to the history of celestial mechanics, with an emphasis on twentieth century advances. I then articulate two purely deductive arguments that, I argue, properly capture the historical threat to realism. I contend that both the content and form of these novel challenges seriously threaten selective epistemic realism. I conclude on a positive note, however, arguing for selective realism at a higher level. Even in the face of threats to its epistemic tenet, scientific realism need not be rejected outright: concern with belief can be bracketed while nonetheless advocating core realist tenets. I show that, in contrast with epistemic deployment realism, a purely axiological scientific realism can account for key scientific practices made salient in my twentieth century case studies. And embracing the realists favored account of inference, inference to the best explanation, while pointing to a set of the most promising alternative selective realist meta-hypothesis, I show how testing the latter can be immensely valuable to our understanding of science.
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Notes
In fact, a recent study suggests we can go back farther in astronomy: due to its largely unrecognized novel successes, the Ptolemaic model deserves much greater attention than realists and non-realists have tended to suppose (Carman and Díez 2015).
Notably, some of these are, rather than highly localized and singular, properly seen as generalizations. See Lyons (2006) where, in agreement with Stathis Psillos (1999), I argue that even more credit must be attributed to those theoretical constituents deployed by scientists towards what come to be accepted generalizations.
An anonymous referee has emphasized that I should express my modus tollens arguments (the second one will be discussed below), not as a proper construal of the historical argument, but as my own repurposing of the same sorts of examples for stronger forms of argument.
Effectively, then, what is meant by the shorthand above that a constituent is “patently false” is that the constituent does not approximate by any reasonable stretch contemporary constituents that replaced it, requiring no specification of where the falsity lies. Also, because the sole justification for epistemic realism requires that the realist posit explains success—and insofar as that which does the explaining must make that which is explained “a matter of course,” as Peirce puts it—realists, despite temptation, cannot radically stretch their notion of approximate truth. See Lyons (2003, 2006, p. 556).
In a recent critique, Psillos (2016) challenges only the first layer of my modus tollens on the grounds that it does not push us to look closely at the history of science. However, this critique, even if it were correct, wholly depends on neglecting the second layer, here explicitly flagged as such.
I use “correlatively precise” here to capture two important factors: the first is the fact that such positive instances connect directly to the correlates themselves, with no intermediary guesswork; the second, is that, nonetheless, “correlatively precise” allows us to fully and appropriately avoid misleading talk of singular instances “confirming” the hypotheses.
For instance, the differentiating correlate of the realist meta-hypothesis has a lower degree of empirical precision.
There is one other way to construe this third point: increasing the evidence against the realist hypothesis permits stronger versions of this second modus tollens, where the content is changed but not the structure. For instance, in Premise 2 the “greater” evidence can shift to “far greater” and “vastly greater” evidence, and the Conclusion, 3, can change accordingly: it is not the case that we are, e.g., “even close to being justified” “have any chance of being justified,” etc., in believing the realist’s meta-hypothesis, given the evidence.
Or at least the first layer of the first modus tollens.
This position promotes the quest for truth without claiming to possess or approximate it. Elsewhere, I’ve dubbed this position, ’Socratic scientific realism’ (Lyons 2015).
For the details of this postulate and its empirically testable consequences, see my (2005).
For instance, one issue that naturally arises is whether construing science as seeking an epistemically utopian goal—as I allow truth, and even an increase in experientially concretized truth, to be—sacrifices one’s ability to construe science as a rational endeavor. Although I set this topic to the side here, I argue in detail in my (2005 and 2011) that it does not.
On the axiological realist account, those components in the accepted system are likewise deployed in the service of inquiry, but, in contrast, remain candidates for truth and hence for its experiential concretization.
Likewise for Newton after his pre-Principia (1684) arrival at his law of universal gravitation mentioned above.
That is, their explicit belief commitments stand in contradiction with any lip-service to “idealizations” they might offer unreflectively.
Though I offer here no articulation of the nature of such inference, the importance of Lipton ’s (2004) is undiminished by its incompleteness.
These are articulated only roughly and only listed roughly in the order of their introduction to the debate.
Since some of these retention hypotheses will pick out deeper constituents while others will pick out fewer constituents, comparisons of logical strength are hardly more obvious than their as-yet untested empirical strength; nonetheless, in want of an example ordering, I offer this illustrative prioritization based on rough conjectures regarding logical strength. Admittedly, it will be surprising that Ramsey sentence retention lands so low on the priority ranking, but see my (forthcoming).
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Acknowledgments
Research for this paper was supported by the AHRC, UK, Grant: Contemporary Scientific Realism and the History of Science. I thank three anonymous referees for their helpful feedback. For conversations and correspondence relevant to the topics in this paper, I am indebted to many including Anjan Chakravartty, Mathias Egg, Steven French, David Harker, James Ladyman, Kerry McKenzie, Tom Pashby, Dean Peters, Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem, Stathis Psillos, and Peter Vickers.
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Lyons, T.D. Epistemic selectivity, historical threats, and the non-epistemic tenets of scientific realism. Synthese 194, 3203–3219 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1103-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1103-3