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What is a philosophical stance? Paradigms, policies and perspectives

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Abstract

Since van Fraassen first put forward the suggestive idea that many philosophical positions should be construed as ‘stances’ rather than factual beliefs, there have been various attempts to spell out precisely what a philosophical stance might be, and on what basis one should be adopted. In this paper I defend a particular account of stances, the view that they are pragmatically justified perspectives or ways of seeing the world, and compare it to some other accounts that have been offered. In Sect. 2 I consider van Fraassen’s argument for construing empiricism as a stance, and look at some responses to it. In Sect. 3 I outline my conception of stances as perspectives or ways of seeing, and explain how stances so understood may be justified. I illustrate this conception by way of a discussion of the model pluralist position with respect to the units of selection debate in biology, and suggest that on the model pluralist view different perspectives on the units of selection, such as the gene’s eye view, are in fact van Fraassian stances. In Sect. 4 I discuss the view put forward by Teller and Chakravartty among others that stances should be understood as epistemic policies, and argue that it is consistent with the conception of stances as perspectives. In the final section I criticise Rowbottom’s attempt to assimilate stances to Kuhnian paradigms. I argue that he has overlooked some important disanalogies between stances and paradigms, so that the comparison obscures more than it reveals.

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Notes

  1. Bealer advances a similar argument in his (1992).

  2. Mohler (2007) sets the argument out in a similar way, but represents it as a reductio of naïve empiricism. see (Cruse (2007), p. 500) for a somewhat different reconstruction of the argument, and for a detailed discussion of it.

  3. (Cruse (2007), pp. 502–6) rejects this premise, boldly suggesting that E+ could be an analytic truth, that is, neither a factual (synthetic) belief nor a stance (recalling the claim of some positivists that the verifiability criterion of meaning does not, as is often supposed, undermine itself, since it is analytically true, and so meaningful although not empirically verifiable). He draws on two-dimensional semantics to try and show how E+ could be analytic. If it was analytic, its contraries would not have to be admissible, and it could form the basis of the empiricist critique of metaphysics without undermining itself. It’s unlikely that van Fraassen would accept that empiricism could be grounded in a thesis that is analytically true, i.e. true by definition. But Cruse’s discussion does indicate that there are more options for the empiricist here than might be supposed.

  4. To be consistent with his stance-voluntarism, he must distinguish between rational permissibility and toleration. The empiricist can grant that the metaphysics stance is rationally permissible (if it is consistent and coherent) but it is possible to be intolerant of rationally permissible stances, if they involve values and attitudes one disdains.

  5. (Lipton 2004, p. 151) argues similarly that a stance/policy is to be assessed on the basis of the consequences of adopting it.

  6. As I noted above, van Fraassen is a voluntarist with respect to stance choice, meaning that he holds that any stance that is logically consistent and probabilistically coherent is rationally permissible. But he accepts there can still be pragmatic and value-based grounds for advocating one stance over another. My discussion in this section is concerned with these grounds.

  7. See (Baumann 2011, p. 29) for a very different account of the epistemic and nonepistemic reasons for adopting and maintaining a stance.

  8. Criteria such as simplicity and explanatory power are often called ‘epistemic values’, but this does have the effect of prejudging the question of whether they are linked to truth, something empiricists such as van Fraassen deny (Chakravartty 2007a, p. 194).

  9. Wilson (2005) agrees with model pluralists that sometimes there is no fact of the matter about the level at which selection is operating, but denies that this is because the different models are equivalent, equally correct, intertranslatable perspectives between which there are only heuristic differences. He defends a more realist view according to which ‘the absence of a fact of the matter ... is a result of the fact that the reality that these models describe includes entwined or fused properties or processes’ (ibid, 241). Thus model pluralism should not be defined purely as the view that there is no fact of the matter about the level at which selection is operating, as this will fail to distinguish it from Wilson’s quite different view. We should also note that unit pluralists hold that frequently the evolutionary trajectory of a trait is influenced by a combination of selective forces operating at different levels, and thus a full explanation of the evolution of the trait will have to appeal to selection acting at more than one level. This is clearly not the model pluralists’ position (it is pluralism in the world). Although a trait may be influenced by a combination of selective forces, the unit pluralist holds that there is a fact of the matter about what this combination was in each case. The model pluralist denies this.

  10. (Okasha (2006), p. 126) rightly notes that model pluralism can be either local (pertaining only to particular selective episodes) or global (applying to the units of selection in general).

  11. As Okasha (2006, p. 126) notes, Dugatkin and Reeve’s pluralism is local in scope—it applies only to a subset of evolutionary processes.

  12. Godfrey-Smith and Kerr (2002a, b) offer a detailed defence of a version of model pluralism. They aim to demonstrate the mathematical equivalence of group selection models and some individualist models. See also Godfrey-Smith (2008).

  13. The term ‘story’ is perhaps apposite. Model pluralists hold that we can tell the ‘story’ of evolution from the standpoint of genes and their interests, or from the standpoint of organisms and their interests, but stories are human constructions that have their value in the illumination, insight and understanding they impart, not (or not only) in their correspondence to the facts.

  14. He quotes Bonner: ‘I do not propose to say anything new or original in these lectures. But I am a great believer in saying familiar, well-known things backwards and inside out, hoping that from some new vantage point the old facts will take on a deeper significance’ (ibid, 7).

  15. As we have seen, model pluralists hold that selection processes can typically be modelled in more than one way, from the standpoint of more than one biological level. But they differ in the number and kinds of models they are willing to allow. Dawkins is less tolerant than some of the model pluralists I have mentioned. He is willing to allow that the individual-level perspective and the genic-level perspective are, generally speaking, equally correct heuristics for representing the same facts and processes in nature. But he argues that other perspectives, such as the group-level and species-level perspectives, are not in the same boat. The reason is that instead of being alternative perspectives on the reality described by the genic and individual perspectives, they in fact invoke different processes in nature; they are factually distinct from the genic and individual perspectives. But we can set this issue aside. As long as, for Dawkins, the genic perspective and the individualist perspective are factually equivalent, the gene’s eye view will qualify as a van Fraassian stance.

  16. The gene’s eye view is ‘not demonstrably more correct’ than the orthodox view, but it ‘is more elegant and parsimonious’ (ibid, 232).

  17. ‘[T]he biologist should try both ways of thinking, and choose the one he or she prefers’ (ibid, 7).

  18. van Fraassen (2002, p. 61) recognises that the gene’s eye view has much in common with stances as he understands them. He writes that, when empiricism is reconceptualised as a stance, ‘[b]eing or becoming an empiricist will then be similar or analogous to conversion to a cause, a religion, an ideology, to capitalism or to socialism, to a worldview such as Dawkins’s selfish gene view...’

  19. The different perspectives on the units of selection can also be justified on the basis of their coherence with one’s values, both epistemic and nonepistemic. In terms of epistemic values, if one values reductionist explanations and approaches, one may be inclined to adopt the gene’s eye view, as it is clearly an expression or manifestation of the general reductionist orientation. There is little doubt that one of the factors that makes the gene’s eye view attractive to theorists such as Williams and Dawkins is the way in which it chimes with their reductionist sympathies, or values.

  20. See Sterelny and Griffiths (1999, p. 110): ‘[M]any of the arguments for gene selection (and other rivals of the received view) are heuristic. They allow us to see certain similarities more easily, help us to avoid errors we could easily make, and make us less likely to overlook important phenomena.’

  21. Sterelny et al. (1996, p. 395) suggest that problems such as this can be formulated from perspectives other than the gene’s eye view, but they are not ‘in your face’. This indicates that the different perspectives are not factually distinct, but rather differ with respect to the kinds of facts and phenomena they emphasise and draw attention to.

  22. What about Dawkins’ suggestion that there is no difference in kind between the causal links that connect beaver genes with beaver dams, and those that connect beaver genes with, say, beaver tails? Arguably this is not an empirical claim about those causal links; it is rather a conceptual claim about categorisation.

  23. It would seem then that this dispute would qualify as a verbal/terminological dispute on Chalmers’ view (2011; see also Sidelle 2007). He suggests that we have a verbal/terminological dispute whenever the disputants agree on all the relevant facts of the case, and merely disagree about the language used to describe it. However ‘verbal/terminological dispute’ carries a suggestion of insignificance or triviality that I do not wish to imply in my interpretation of Dawkins’ argument. Chalmers does note that some verbal/terminological disputes are important, but his examples are of a quite different sort to the extended phenotype case. I would prefer to use ‘nonfactual, pragmatic dispute’, rather than ‘verbal/terminological dispute’ to describe such cases.

  24. It may be that all questions of classification are at least partly pragmatic. Dupre (1981, 1993, 1999) has argued for instance that all classification schemes in biology are relative to interests and purposes. Thus he defends pluralism with respect to classification schemes, which would bring with it a pragmatism: different schemes are acceptable for different purposes—no one scheme is ever the ‘objectively correct’ one—and we should decide to adopt a particular scheme if the benefits of doing so, given our interests and purposes, would be significant enough. (This is of course analogous to Dawkins’ and other model pluralists’ position on the units of selection).

  25. van Fraassen, in his response to Teller (2004b, p. 174), accepts that the analogy is helpful, but suggests stances are not quite the same as epistemic policies. In particular, a stance is broader than a policy, and includes other components (ibid, 179). Also, we tend to be more committed to stances than to policies (ibid, 191).

  26. This may sound like standard scientific realism. Indeed van Fraassen suggests there is a close relationship between scientific realism and the metaphysics stance (roughly, the former is a manifestation, or application, of the latter). The difference lies precisely in the fact that the metaphysics stance involves the policy of seeking to explain the observable in terms of the unobservable, rather than any particular belief, while standard scientific realism can be understood as the belief that unobservable entities exist, and scientific theories are (approximately) true.

  27. For examples of the sort of arguments he is responding to see Jauernig (2007), Ladyman (2004), and especially Ho (2007).

  28. There may be questions about how we judge the effectiveness of a stance in doing P (say, generating factual beliefs) but that is a further question.

  29. The epistemic policies that Teller and Charkravartty discuss are typically broader than perspectives on the units of selection such as the gene’s eye view. But the latter can still be understood as lower-level epistemic policies. Stances exist at different levels. For instance, the broad anti-realist pluralist stance is the stance from which one asserts that the various positions on the units of selection are factually equivalent. But at the lower level those perspectives on the units of selection can themselves be understood as stances, as I have argued. So for example Dawkins accepts the anti-realist pluralist stance at the higher level, and at the lower level he accepts the gene’s eye view stance, just as van Fraassen endorses the general high-level stance position (that we may call the stance stance) according to which views such as empiricism are stances, and also accepts, at the lower level, the empiricist stance itself.

  30. In his response to Rowbottom van Fraassen (2011) doesn’t seem displeased with the analogy between stances and paradigms, although he doesn’t say a lot about it.

  31. Rowbottom does not claim that stances are DMs, but he claims that they are ‘highly similar’ to DMs (2011, p. 112), and that the only real difference—the only thing preventing DMs from being ‘stances writ large’ (ibid)—is the presence within DMs of ‘exemplars’. (Horsten (2004), p. 96) similarly likens stances to research programs in Lakatos’ sense.

  32. Kuhn also presumably thinks of these metaphysical commitments as factual beliefs or doctrines, rather than stances.

  33. There are two further similarities that Rowbottom does not mention. Firstly, the way Kuhn talks of the shift from one paradigm to another being like a ‘gestalt switch’ is quite similar to the ‘neckercubing’ approach to rival metaphysical stances that I mentioned above (the neckercube flip is itself a kind of ‘gestalt switch’.) (Kuhn (1996), p. 150) says that ‘practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists (working in competing paradigms) see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction.’ This is similar to the idea of a stance as a way of looking or perspective, and different stances as different ways of looking at the same facts. Secondly, van Fraassen advocates voluntarism with respect to stance choice, and Kuhn advocates voluntarism with respect to paradigm-choice. See Lipton (2004). But again, it is doubtful whether these represent deep and important similarities that indicate that understanding stances along the lines of paradigms is illuminating in either direction.

  34. Rowbottom has also suggested that stances may be construed as ‘modes of engagement’ and ‘styles of reasoning’ (Rowbottom and Bueno 2011). To the extent that I understand the proposal, it doesn’t seem obviously to be in conflict with the view of stances as perspectives that I have argued for.

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to the following people for helpful advice and criticism: Greg Restall, Howard Sankey, Brett Calcott, John Wilkins, Anne Hiskes. Thank you also to the two anonymous referees for this journal for helpful suggestions that have improved the paper.

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Boucher, S.C. What is a philosophical stance? Paradigms, policies and perspectives. Synthese 191, 2315–2332 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0400-y

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