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Realism and Progress: Why Scientists should be Realists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Robin Findlay Hendry
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Extract

For as long as realists and instrumentalists have disagreed, partisans of both sides have pointed in argument to the actions and sayings of scientists. Realists in particular have often drawn comfort from the literal understanding given even to very theoretical propositions by many of those who are paid to deploy them. The scientists' realism, according to the realist, is not an idle commitment: a literal understanding of past and present theories and concepts underwrites their employment in the construction of new theories. The theme of this book is philosophy and technology, and here's the connection: new theories point out—and explain—new phenomena. So realism, claim the realists, is at the heart of science's achievement of what Bacon, that early philosopher of technology, identified as science's aim: new knowledge offering new powers.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 38 , March 1995 , pp. 53 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1995

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References

1 Here I (roughly) follow van Fraassen, B. C., The Scientific Image (Oxford University Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 2. The list is not meant to be independent, exhaustive or acceptable to all realists: I have tried to select methodologically relevan. claims.

2 Thus I will leave aside the causal arguments advanced by Hacking, I. (Representing and Intervening, Cambridge University Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Cartwright, N.How the Laws of Physics Lie, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Giere, R. N. (Explaining Science, University of Chicago Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar that (speaking of) manipulation in experimental contexts commits us to more than mere theorizing does.

3 See Putnam, H., ‘Explanation and reference’ in Pearce, G. and Maynard, P. (eds), Conceptual Change (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973), pp. 199–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar. References are to the reprint in Putnam, 's Mind, Language and Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Putnam, H., ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”’, in Gunderson, K. (ed.), Language, Mind and Knowledge: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), pp. 131–193, at p. 155Google Scholar.

5 Putnam, H., Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978)Google Scholar.

6 See Boyd, R., ‘Realism, underdetermination and a causal theory of evidence’, Nous 7 (1973), pp. 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Scientific realism and naturalistic epistemology’, in Asquith, P. and Giere, R. (eds), PSA 198., vol. II, pp. 613–662Google Scholar; ‘The current status of scientific realism’, in Leplin, J. (ed.), Scientific Realism, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 41–82Google Scholar; ‘Lex orandi est lex credendi’, in Churchland, P. and Hooker, C. (eds), Images of Science (University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 3–34Google Scholar.

7 Boyd, ‘Lex orandi est lex credendi’, p. 4.

8 Boyd, ‘Realism, underdetermination and a causal theory of evidence’, p. 9.

9 The procedure in (i) and (ii) might be the same: realism motivate. a method by showing that it is likely to produce success, while on at least one view of explanation to show that success is to be expected is to explain it.

10 See Boyd ‘Realism, underdetermination and a causal theory of evidence’, pp. 7–9.

11 The evidential underdetermination thesis is formulated by Boyd as the claim that evidence for a theory is evidence of equal forc. for its empirical equivalents (ibid., p. 2).

12 See Boyd (ibid. pp. 10–11) for a detailed example.

13 See Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Science., p. 21, and Boyd, ‘scientific realism and naturalistic epistemology’, p. 619, for detailed examples.

14 See Boyd, ibid, section 2.4.

15 Boyd, The Current Status of Scientific Realis., p. 60.

16 See Laudan, L., ‘A confutation of convergent realism’, in Leplin, J. (ed.), Scientific Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 218–249, at pp. 235–239Google Scholar.

17 See Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Li., pp. 44–53.

18 For instance A. Fine, ‘The natural ontological attitude’, in J. Leplin, Scientific Realis., pp. 83–107, at pp. 87–89: on the ‘small handful’ strategy; and van Fraassen, The Scientific Imag., pp. 83—87, on the conjunction argument.

19 See van Fraassen, The Scientific Imag., pp. 93—94 and section 3, below.

20 See Lipton, P., Inference to the Best Explanation (London: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar.

21 ‘We can watch no contest of the theories we have so painfully struggled to formulate, with those no one has proposed’ (van Fraassen, , Laws and Symmetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

22 Even supposing that the truth of a theory ca. explain anything.

23 See Fine, ‘The natural ontological attitude'; Laudan (‘A confutation of convergent realism’, pp. 242–243) puts the same argument in famously trenchant style.

24 Such arguments could appeal only to those who alread. entertain realist intuitions. Now Lipton (Inference to the Best Explanatio., chapter 9) sees some value in arguments that have this property: convinced realists might justifiably use such arguments to preach to those who accept the premises and rules of inference. This is a sad end for an argument of high ambition.

25 If the realist objects that the evidential underdetermination thesis has been refute. by Boyd, the anti-realist could point out that Boyd's argument showed only how pragmati. considerations dissolve the practica. underdetermination ‘problem’. Boyd's argument that these considerations are truly evidentia. employed something like the inference to the best explanation at level M. That, of course, begs the question at issue here.

26 Hughes, R. I. G., ‘The Bohr atom, models and realism’, Philosophical Topics, 18 No. 2 (1990), pp. 71–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 74. This contrast is open to a historical objection: Kepler di. embed his model in a wider cosmological framework (see Kuhn, T. H., The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 209–219Google Scholar). Nor was his model kinematic in the technical sense: his second law was derived by considering the action on the planets of a driving forc. originating in the sun. Perhaps these aspects have been ignored because only the surfac. of his model has lived on as an advanc..

27 Hughes, ‘The Bohr atom’, note 26.

28 Hughes, ‘The Bohr atom’, p. 81.

29 In terms of the semanti. view of theories, the weak view of what is justified is that part of reality is correctly described by the empirical submode. of the successful model.

30 Suppe, quoted in Hughes, ‘The Bohr atom’, note 28.

31 Hughes, ‘The Bohr atom’, p. 81.

32 Unlike the causal arguments (see above, n.2), we are given no special feature that picks out some subset of our theoretical claims about atoms for special attention.

33 Giere in ‘Scientific rationality as instrumental rationality’, in Studies in the History & Philosophy of Science, 20 (1989), pp. 377–384CrossRefGoogle Scholar, seems to offer an argument with a similar structure: he raises the question of realism, giving a methodological answer (in DNA research, a realist programme yielded the greatest ‘payoff’). What is unclear is whether we are meant to conclude that therefore DNA exists and has the structure attributed to it by Crick and Watson, or just that, with hindsight, their methods yielded the greatest payoff.

34 Unless, of course, we know more about the mechanis. by which the means are appropriate to the ends. If we knew the mechanism, and it required that the presuppositions were tru., we could say that the truth of the presuppositions was the best explanatio. of our achieving our aims. That, however, is another argument.

35 As, ever, Duhem provides an apposite quote: ‘Chimerical hopes may have incited admirable discoveries without those discoveries embodying the chimeras that gave birth to them. Bold explanations which have contributed greatly to the progress of geography are due to adventurers who were looking for the golden land—that is not a sufficient reason for inscribing “El Dorado” on our maps of the globe’ (Duhem, P., The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, translation by Wiener, P. of his La Theorie Physique: Son Objet, Sa Structure of 1914 (Princeton University Press, 1954), pp. 31–32Google Scholar).

36 Leplin, J., ‘Methodological realism and scientific rationality’, Philosophy of Science, 53 (1986), pp. 31–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, defends a similar position to MR, but does not consider its logical relation to scientific realism.

37 In effect I will take a cue from elementary logic: if I exhibit models of (A & B) and (A & ⌉B), I have shown that B is independen. of A.

38 Van Fraassen, The Scientific Imag., pp. 11—12.

39 See van Fraassen, Laws and Symmetr., pp. 171–176.

40 In terms of the semantic view of theories: belief in the empirical adequacy of a theory is just the belief that part of one of its models—the empirical sub-model—corresponds to part of the world.

41 See van Fraassen, B. ‘Empiricism in the philosophy of science’, in Churchland, P. and Hooker, C. (eds) Images of Science (University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 245–309, at p. 255Google Scholar.

42 The Scientific Imag., p. 202.

43 See his discussion of Putnam on conjunctions and Boyd on experimental design in The Scientific Imag., Ch. 4.

44 Feyerabend, , in ‘realism and instrumentalism: comments on the logic of factual support’ in Bunge, M. (ed.), The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 280–308Google Scholar, cites the impetus to developments in dynamics provided by difficulties encountered by the Copernican system—realistically construe. —against the background of the prevailing Aristotelian dynamics.

45 The Scientific Imag., p. 93.

46 ‘Thus a Utilitarian may reasonably desire, on Utilitarian principles, that some of his conclusions should be rejected by mankind generally; or even that the vulgar should keep aloof from his system as a whole, in so far as the inevitable indefiniteness and complexity of its calculations render it likely to lead to bad results in their hands’ (Sidgwick, H., Methods of Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1877), pp. 448–449Google Scholar).

47 There need be no hint of self-deception here: the appraiser stands outside the community—scientists—whose beliefs are appraised on their effects. Another analogy is to the functionalist explanation of religion in primitive societies (see Elkana, Y., ‘A programmatic attempt at an anthropology of knowledge’, in Mendelshon, E. and Elkana, Y. (eds), Sciences and Cultures (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981), pp. 42–44)Google Scholar.

48 Fine, ‘The natural ontological attitude’, p. 89.

49 See Laudan, ‘A confutation of convergent realism’.

50 See Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Li., pp. 100–127.