Abstract
Over the past years, in books and journals (this journal included), N. Maxwell launched a ferocious attack on B. C. van Fraassen’s view of science called Constructive Empiricism (CE). This attack has been totally ignored. Must we conclude from this silence that no defence is possible and that a fortiori Maxwell has buried CE once and for all? Or is the attack too obviously flawed as not to merit exposure? A careful dissection of Maxwell’s reasoning will make it clear that neither is the case. This dissection includes an analysis of Maxwell’s ‘aberrance–argument’ (omnipresent in his many writings) for the claim that science implicitly and permanently accepts a substantial, metaphysical thesis about the universe, which then paves the way for his own metaphysical-realist hierarchy-view of science. This aberrance-claim, which Maxwell directs against a widely shared and harmful ideology of science called ‘Standard Empiricism’, generally has been ignored too, for more than a quarter of a century. Our conclusions will be that (i) Maxwell’s attacks on CE can be beaten off, and (ii) his ‘aberrance–arguments’ do not establish what Maxwell believes they establish, but (iii) we can draw a number of valuable lessons from these attacks about the nature of science and of the libertarian nature of CE.
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Notes
Maxwell (2005, p. 181).
Maxwell (1993, pp. 61, 81, 1998, pp. 36–38, 2002a, pp. 3–5, 2002b, pp. 263–265). We need not and therefore do not go into Maxwell’s ‘aim-oriented-empiricism’; see Smart (2000) and Muller (2004) for reviews of Maxwell (1998). Rescher (2000) is in spirit and sometimes the letter very similar to Maxwell’s view but he does not even mention a single publication of Maxwell. For CE, see Fraassen (1980, 1989).
For the sake of brevity, by “science” we mean the Master Argument “the (overwhelming majority of the) scientific community” unless specifically stated otherwise.
We call a declarative sentence a statement, and classes of logically equivalent statements propositions. We shall confuse ‘statement’ and ‘proposition’ on a regular basis and we apologise for that in advance.
See Maxwell (1998, pp. 2–3, 38–45) on the topic of how widely SE is held among philosophers of science and scientists.
All accepted scientific theories are not aberrant. Although Maxwell makes an exception for quantum mechanics (1998, pp. 228–229), we joint him in ignoring this when considering the aberrance–argument.
For further discussion of the distinction regular/aberrant, including a more-or-less precise definition, and of why aberrant theories have to be taken seriously (Hume, Goodman and their commentators did), we refer to Maxwell (1998, pp. 47–56) and Kukla (2001). Since Maxwell’s definition is rather elaborate, and since our elucidation of the concept of abberancy by means of several examples (NG1–NG7) ought to be enough to understand this paper, we gloss over it. The very fact that a more-or-less precise definition of abberancy can be given removes a worry that may have arisen, namely that if the explanation of ‘an aberrant version of’ were to rely on a regular theory being given first, the explanation would have been circular because ‘regular’ is supposed to mean ‘not aberrant’.
Maxwell (2002a, pp. 4–5).
No claim is being made that the definition of “comprehensible” is in full agreement with everyday use; we need a name for the predicate described in U and we have chosen “comprehensible” because Maxwell has chosen it. Notice that U is what Maxwell asserts in the displayed quotation above: “no grotesquely ad hoc theory is true”.
Cf. Maxwell (1998, p. 10). Notice that any assumption, metaphysical or not, that can be the basis of a rule of how to achieve a particular aim is a methodological assumption. Therefore to say that methodological assumptions are not or cannot be metaphysical is to utter a falsehood.
Imaginary although strikingly similar to the scientific community of the sixteenth-century…
Maxwell (1998, p. 271).
Logically weakening Meta by replacing ‘iff’ in (17) with ‘if’ or ‘only if’ will not do: if (17) is only a sufficient condition, we have no ground to call thesis U metaphysical and the non sequitur remains; if (17) is only a necessary condition, then we have no grounds to call U (3) not metaphysical by virtue of it.
Fraassen (1989, pp. 131–150).
Only in the case one has accepted a so-called ‘deductively complete theory’ (meaning: if statement S is not provable in the theory, then not-S is a theorem), this holds for sentences in the language of that theory. Such cases are extremely rare; most theories, in so far as investigated by formal means, turn out to be deductively incomplete.
Fraassen (1989, pp. 171–172).
Maxwell (1998, p. 38).
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Acknowledgments
Warm thanks to N. Maxwell (London) for exhaustive discussions (electronic and otherwise), to B. C. van Fraassen (Princeton) for his encouragement to publish the current defence of Constructive Empiricism, and to J. N. Butterfield (Cambridge) and D. G. B. J. Dieks (Utrecht) for helpful comments and discussions. Thanks to the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO) for financial support.
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Muller, F.A. In Defence of Constructive Empiricism: Maxwell’s Master Argument and Aberrant Theories. J Gen Philos Sci 39, 131–156 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-008-9065-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-008-9065-x