Abstract
This paper pursues Ernan McMullin’s claim that talk of theory virtues exposes a fault-line in philosophy of science separating “very different visions” of scientific theorizing. It argues that connections between theory virtues and virtue epistemology are substantive rather than ornamental, since both address underdetermination problems in science, helping us to understand the objectivity of theory choice and more specifically what I term the ampliative adequacy of scientific theories. The paper argues therefore that virtue epistemologies can make substantial contributions to the epistemology and methodology of the sciences, helping to bridge the gulf between realists and anti-realists, and to re-enforce moderation over claims about the implications of underdetermination problems for scientific inquiry. It finally makes and develops the suggestion that virtue epistemologies, at least of the kind developed here, offer support for the positions that philosophers of science know as meta-scientific pluralism, and normative naturalism.
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- 1.
“The Virtues of a Good Theory” (2009), 506.
- 2.
Connected with this is Sankey’s point that “while empiricists explain consensus but have a hard time with disagreement, post-empiricists emphasize dissensus at the cost of being unable to explain how agreement is arrived at. But [any] adequate philosophical model of scientific rationality must explain both consensus-formation and the existence of widespread disagreement” (1996, 1).
- 3.
As Laudan points out, in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” Quine “propounded [but did not give any good reasons for believing] a thesis of normative, ampliative, egalitarian underdetermination” (334). Laudan defines and then argues against Quinean underdetermination:
(QUD) Any theory can be reconciled with any recalcitrant evidence by making suitable adjustments in our other assumptions about nature.
- 4.
For an admirably clear explanation of the differences between Duhem and Quine, and the Quinean history of retracting (QUD), see Massey (2011).
- 5.
E. McMullin, 501.
- 6.
On virtue epistemology’s role in respect to recent calls for the “thickening” of epistemology, see the papers in the 2008 Philosophical Papers edition, Epistemology Through Thick and Thin, 37(3). These include Guy Axtell and Adam Carter (2008), “Just the Right Thickness,” which identifies and challenges an epistemological analogue of the (ethical) “centralist” thesis (of the primacy of thin concepts over thick) that Bernard Williams criticized.
- 7.
Rosenberg, 212. I lean on Rosenberg especially here because he seems to acknowledge that even strong empiricists see a substantial role for theory virtues and for ampliative reasoning more generally in theory choice. Any attempt at a more directly empiricist justification for the methodological rules we employ in theory choice, he concedes, “is circular as an argument against the threat of underdetermination,” (214) and appeals to them as a priori are unavailable to empiricists. Thus neither the rationalist nor the empiricist account of an algorithm of theory choice is at all satisfactory (214).
- 8.
Like Daston and Galison in their book Objectivity (2007), I would argue that the concept of scientific objectivity has a history, but that the epistemic norms that have informed scientific practice can be historicized without leading to relativism. I have elsewhere argued that considerations stemming from underdetermination problems motivate the claim that historicism requires agent-focused rather than merely belief-focused epistemology, and that this is partly what makes it possible to distinguish weak or moderate historicism from radical historicism about the epistemic values recognized in science. See Axtell, “The Dialectics of Objectivity,” (2012) in a special topical issue of Journal of the Philosophy of History, on intersections of historicism, naturalism, and virtue epistemology.
- 9.
Allan (2006), 81.
- 10.
“In scientific research one always hopes for determination: that the world should determine the observations we make of it; that evidence should determine the theories we adopt; that the practice of science should determine results independent of the sort of society in which that practice takes place” (McMullin 1995, 233).
- 11.
Rosenberg 2012, 212.
- 12.
Dawid 2011, 4. “Assessments as to how likely it is that no or few alternative theories can be fit to the available data thus lie at the root of all considerations regarding the prospective viability of a so far empirically unconfirmed or insufficiently confirmed theory. We want to call such assessments ‘assessments of scientific underdetermination’ (2011, 3).
- 13.
“The emerging new paradigm moves away from an understanding…that attributes the status of mere hypotheses to scientific theories which have found no empirical confirmation. But Dawid also qualifies his claim in certain ways: “Non-empirical theory assessment thus crucially relies on empirical testing and can never fully replace it. Nor does non-empirical theory assessment award the same status to a theory as strong empirical confirmation. It is vaguer and less conclusive than the testing of theories by empirical data. Its vagueness induces the risk that its deployment might be overstretched….” (2011, 18–19).
- 14.
One of the most common objections is that it is circular; another is that it is simply intuitionism in new garb—apprehension or bon sens as ‘the Emperor’s new intuitions.’ Holt acknowledges keen critics of his view, including Hintikka (2002), who argues that intuitionism is a failed view in the philosophy of science, and “apprehension” is nothing but a re-working of intuitionism. Holt’s Chapter 3, “Apprehension and the Apprehensive Virtues”, offers a direct reply.
- 15.
Stump (2007), 149–159, 149–150. The personal habits that comprise the scientist’s methodological cognitive character describe real or ideal excellences of inquirers, not of theories or hypotheses per se. Perhaps for this very reason, they are less purely intellectual, and indeed those who emphasize their role in inquiry, from Pierre Duhem to Daston and Galison, often want to insist that they are or include character traits in the full Aristotelian sense, engaging motivations and sometimes crossing boundaries between the epistemic and the ethical. See Stump (2011) for a further development of this view.
- 16.
In fact it represents only one strong form of virtue epistemology that would define justified true belief in terms of what an intellectually virtuous person would believe. Stump (2011) does come close to endorsing such a view.
- 17.
I tend to agree with Laudan that we should distinguish the (true but weak) general claim that theories are underdetermined by data from the (false because over-generalized) claim that theory-choice is always underdetermined by methodological standards. On my view Ivanova presents a straw-man version of McMullin in numbering him among those who supposedly “believe that we can always choose a unique theory from a set of empirically equivalent rivals by simply pointing to the amount of virtues the chosen theory possesses”. Nor is it true that “both views [realism and empiricism] assume that theory virtues lead to a conclusive choice between underdetermined theories” (this volume).
- 18.
McMullin 1996, 17. Indeed McMullin sees this as extending to Duhem himself: “Theory assessment involves the faculty of good judgment (bon sens) which permits disagreement between competent scientists.…What tends to decide the issue between competing theories is how they develop over time, to what extent their response to anomaly appears ad hoc, and so forth” (17; see Duhem 1954, 216–218, and compare Duhem 1991).
- 19.
Moderate historicism, according to which the ‘units of selection’ in theoretical enterprises of all types are historical research programs, and a moderate confirmation holism, according to which a test of one theory always depends on other theories and/or auxiliary and background assumptions, are well-suited to provide this kind of pluralism, but more radical versions of historicism and holism are not.
- 20.
Methodology so conceived is basically “restricted to the study of means and ends,”; they are “best understood as relativized to a particular aim” and judged by whether they guide inquiry to its achievement. But far from the Quinean version of epistemology naturalized qua replacement thesis for normative epistemology, Laudan holds that “methodology gets nowhere without axiology,” and that “We thus need to supplement methodology” with an investigation into an axiology of inquiry (1987, 29). Axiology in turn is multi-faceted, and while generally naturalistic also “preserves an important critical and prescriptive role for the philosopher of science” (29).
- 21.
Rosenberg 1990, 42–43.
- 22.
“In light of the requirement that the means reliably conduce to the desired end, normative naturalism might appear to be a form of reliabilist epistemology. There do, however appear to be a number of salient differences between normative naturalism and reliabilism, at least as it is classically understood (e.g., Goldman (1979)). First, for Goldman a reliable method is one which leads reliably to truth, whereas for Laudan the cognitive ends in question are typically something other than truth. Second, reliabilism is a theory of the justification of an agent’s epistemic states, whereas normative naturalism is a theory of the justification of method. Thus, rather than take a reliabilist view of individual epistemic rationality, Laudan operates with an instrumental account of rationality on which an agent’s belief that an action will lead to their aim is required for the act to be rational” (Sankey).
- 23.
Longino 1990.
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks go out to Abrol Fairweather for comments on an earlier draft, as well as to Lynn Holt, Milena Ivanova, David Stump and James Kidd for comments and discussion on related 2010–2011 posts at JanusBlog: The Virtue Theory Discussion Forum, http://janusblog.squarespace.com.
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Axtell, G. (2014). Bridging a Fault Line: On Underdetermination and the Ampliative Adequacy of Competing Theories. In: Fairweather, A. (eds) Virtue Epistemology Naturalized. Synthese Library, vol 366. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04672-3_14
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