Pyrrhic victories for scientific realism

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 100, Issue 11, 2003, Pages 553-572

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EID: 35348888616     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
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References (31)

1. Two anonymous referees rightly note that I here follow the regrettably common practice of characterizing the relevant sorts of success at a painfully vague or intuitive level, though I am happy to accept the appealingly commonsensical account of such success (grounded in the potential for solving practical problems of prediction and intervention) offered by Kitcher (in "Real Realism: The Galilean Strategy," The Philosophical Review, CX, 2 (April 2001): 151-97, especially pp. 166-67).
2. As a general matter, however, defenders of the PI have resisted tying themselves too closely to any particular conception of scientific success, seeking instead to argue that there is (at most) a difference of degree and not in kind between present and past theories with respect to whatever sorts of success realists suppose could only be explained by the truth of the theories which enjoy them (see, for example, Laudan's "A Confutation of Convergent Realism," reprinted in David Papineau, ed., Philosophy of Science (New York: Oxford, 1996), pp. 107-38).
3. This last formulation is similar to that offered by John Worrall in "How to Remain (Reasonably) Optimistic: Scientific Realism and the 'Luminiferous Ether'," in D. Hull, M. Forbes, and R. M. Burian, eds., P.S.A. 1994, Volume 1 (East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, 1994), pp. 334-42, here p. 334.
4. Of course, even if I am right to think that recent realist efforts achieve only Pyrrhic victories for the realist cause, we will still be left with a difficult question about just how to regulate our beliefs about the world in response to our historical predicament. Although I have characterized the PI as a challenge to our scientific theorizing about "otherwise inaccessible domains of nature," the distinction between observables and unobservables which figures so centrally in other influential challenges to realism (including, most famously, Bas van Fraassen's in The Scientific Image (New York: Oxford, 1980)) does not seem especially apposite here, for our characterizations of many observable entities (for example, chemical elements, evolutionary adaptations, Supernovae) would seem to be routinely grounded in just those sorts of theoretical conceptions of the natural world that stand challenged by the PI itself. In forthcoming work I argue that the historical challenge is correctly focused not on our beliefs about entities of a particular sort (for example, "unobservables") but instead on beliefs arrived at in a particular way: more specifically, beliefs about nature that are reached eliminatively, that is, by coming to embrace one belief among a set of possibilities by eliminating its competitors, whether we so reason about observable or unobservable aspects of the natural world. But we would do well to settle first whether any serious challenge survives the most sophisticated and dogged recent efforts to convince us that the history of science actually poses no significant threat to scientific realism at all, and I will therefore defer to another occasion the general question of precisely which sorts of contemporary scientific beliefs the challenge of history calls into question.
5. "In Defense of Convergent Realism," Philosophy of Science, XLIX (1982): 604-15.
6. See Worrall, "Structural Realism: The Best of Both Worlds?" Dialectica, XLIII (1989): 99-124, especially pp. 116-17;
7. Laudan, "Discussion: Realism without the Real," Philosophy of Science, LI (1984): 156-62, especially p. 161;
8. and Psillos, Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth (New York: Routledge, 1999), especially chapter 12.
9. The Advancement of Science (New York: Oxford, 1993), chapter 4.
10. This strategy of analysis is further developed in connection with a general causal-descriptivist account of reference for natural kind terms in Stanford and Kitcher, "Refining the Causal Theory of Reference for Natural Kind Terms," Philosophical Studies, XCVII (2000): 99-129.
11. The Germ-Plasm: A Theory of Heredity, W. Newton Parker and Harriet Rönnfeldt, trans. (New York: Scribner's, 1893 [1892]).
12. "Mémoire sur phlogiston," as translated in A. Donovan, Antoine Lavoisier: Science, Administration, and Revolution (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), here p. 171, original emphasis, translation modified.
13. "A Confutation of Convergent Realism," p. 33, original emphasis. Laudan avails himself of this shortcut in part because he argues that realists have failed to provide any account of approximate truth on which the presumption that the approximate truth of a theory implies or entails its likely success can be defended. He suggests that typically this presumption is uncritically assumed to follow from the unobjectionable fact that a perfectly true (and, we might add, complete) theory would be perfectly successful - an inference that he insists is patently invalid - and he challenges realists to provide an analysis of approximate truth on which the presumption of success for approximately true theories is defensible. Thus, Laudan cannot afford to pin his argument on any particular conception of approximate truth itself.
14. "Realism without the Real," p. 159.
15. "Real Realism: The Galilean Strategy," p. 171;
16. see also Kitcher's Science, Truth, and Democracy (New York: Oxford, 2001), pp. 18-19.
17. Science, Truth, and Democracy, p. 19.
18. A Novel Defense of Scientific Realism (New York: Oxford, 1997).
19. For example, while none of creationism's causal or explanatory mechanisms are accepted in current biology, its theoretically motivated division of organisms into species is nearly identical to the leading approach in contemporary evolutionary theory (the biological species concept). The other three examples arguably enjoy some degree of representational accuracy by present lights even at the level of causal and explanatory mechanisms: for example, one of the important respects in which Kuhn famously suggests (in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edition (Chicago: University Press, 1996), pp. 206-07) that "Einstein's general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle's [mechanics] than either of them is to Newton's" is presumably that general relativity (like Aristotelian mechanics) recognizes gravitational motion as itself a "natural" state of motion (that is, along a "straight" trajectory in curved spacetime) not requiring further causal explanation rather than a deflection from natural (inertial) motion as in Newtonian mechanics.
20. This also seems the appropriate response to Larry Sklar's contention (in Theory and Truth (New York: Oxford, 2000) especially section 4.1) that our best current theories should be viewed in light of history as "on the road to truth," "pointing towards the truth," or "heading in the right direction"; however, it is far from obvious that Sklar would disagree with this assessment and his central contention is that the most interesting and important issues are simply obscured at this level of abstraction in any case.
21. See "Real Realism: The Galilean Strategy," and Science, Truth, and Democracy.
22. "Real Realism: The Galilean Strategy," p. 170.
23. "Selective Confirmation: No Refuge for Realism," forthcoming in Philosophy of Science, supplemental volume to P.S.A. 2002.
24. and "Structural Realism: The Best of Both Worlds?"
25. "Structural Realism," p. 117;
26. "How to Remain (Reasonably) Optimistic," p. 340.
27. "How to Remain (Reasonably) Optimistic," pp. 336, 341.
28. "Structural Realism," pp. 117-18;
29. "How to Remain (Reasonably) Optimistic," p. 334.
30. "Structural Realism," pp. 118-20;
31. Galton's clearest formulation of the law of ancestral inheritance is found in his "The Average Contribution of Each Several Ancestor to the Total Heritage of the Offspring," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, LXI (1897): 401-13.