Abstract
I review prominent historical arguments against scientific realism to indicate how they display a systematic overshooting in the conclusions drawn from the historical evidence. The root of the overshooting can be located in some critical, undue presuppositions regarding realism. I will highlight these presuppositions in connection with both Laudan’s ‘Old induction’ and Stanford’s New induction, and then delineate a minimal realist view that does without the problematic presuppositions.
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Notes
Cf. Stanford (2006) on the scope of New induction:
The set of scientific beliefs [...] most vulnerable to the challenge of unconceived alternatives will almost certainly include many or even all [fundamental theories] that form the very heart of our scientific conception of the world. (p. 32)
Laudan’s article is easily the most influential article ever written on historical challenges to realism. For example, its Google Scholar citation index is 720 (in October 2014).
Cf. Laudan (1981):
I must stress again that I am not denying that there may be a connection between approximate truth and predictive success. I am only observing that until the realists show us what that connection is, they should be more reticent than they are about claiming that realism can explain the success of science. (p. 32, my emphasis)
In the context in which Laudan was writing it is easy to understand why he construed ‘empirical success’ and ‘realism’ as he did, since the realist writings lacked clarity in these key respects. Perhaps Laudan’s presuppositions are pertinent and justified in the context in which he operated. But realism has evolved since then; the context has changed. It is, of course, somewhat ahistorical to criticise Laudan’s argument independently of the details of the views he explicitly opposed to, but by now those details seem to have been since forgotten by many, both realists and anti-realists alike.
For just one recent example, Wray (2013) notes the distinction between predictive and explanatory success and discusses it in a parenthetical way, but he does not acknowledge the importance of this distinction for Laudan’s argument and the dialectic on the whole.
See Psillos (1994):
Generally, not all deep-structural claims of a theory play the same role in the derivation of predictions and in providing well-founded explanations of observable phenomena. Some theoretical claims may be used centrally in the derivations of predictions and explanations of the phenomena, some others may be ‘idle’ (p. 181).
By comparison, Psillos (1996) is already much less ambiguous.
See e.g. Sankey (2008):
I seek to extend the argument of McMullin (1987) that we are warranted in taking a theory to be ‘approximately true’ if it exhibits ‘a high degree of explanatory success’ (1987, p. 59). McMullin takes the explanatory success of a theory to be determined by how well it satisfies the various methodological criteria of theory appraisal (1987, p. 54). Where a theory exhibits a high degree of explanatory success, as indicated by satisfaction of the criteria, there are good grounds to take the general kinds of entities postulated by the theory to really exist, as well as what the theory says about such entities to be broadly correct, though open to further development (1987, pp. 59–60) (p. 106).
In a similar spirit Cordero (2011) appeals to the essential (explanatory) role of ‘ether’ in 19th c. wave theories of light.
See Stanford (2003a):
It is the very fact that some features of a past theory survive in our present account of nature that leads the realist both to regard them as true and to believe that they were the sources of the rejected theory’s success or effectiveness. So the apparent convergence of truth and the sources of success in past theories is easily explained by the simple fact that both kinds of retrospective judgments about these matters have a common source in our present beliefs about nature. (p. 914)
It is commonplace to state that structural realism is a matter of being committed to our theories’ structural claims about the unobservable reality, or knowing the structure of unobservable reality.
Selective realism then amounts to providing a reliable recipe for picking out the ‘bits’ of our current theories that we can trust.
In Saatsi (in progress b) I characterise and challenge recipe-realism in more general terms.
In Saatsi (in progress a) I discuss minimal realism in more detail in the context of epistemic conceptions of scientific progress.
See also Saatsi (in progress a) and Saatsi (in progress b) for related discussion.
Cf. Chakravartty (2007):
Most commonly [realism] is described in terms of the epistemic achievements constituted by scientific theories ...What all of approaches [to defining realism] have in common is a commitment to the idea that our best theories have a certain epistemic status: they yield knowledge of aspects of the world, including unobservable aspects. (p. 1, my emphasis)
There are various differences amongst the structural realists. For a review, see Frigg and Votsis (2011)
Minimal realism is also meant to be compatible with pluralism regarding different philosophical, meta-scientific frameworks that can be used to capture ‘latching onto’ in more specific terms. These include, for example, (i) the similarity approach (e.g. Giere 1988; Teller 2001; ii) the partial isomorphism approach (e.g. Da Costa and French 2003; iii) the mathematico-logical structure approach (Worrall 2007).
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Acknowledgments
A version of this paper was presented at the Unconceived Alternatives Workshop in Durham. I would like to thank the workshop audience. Special thanks to Kyle Stanford.
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Saatsi, J. Historical inductions, Old and New. Synthese 196, 3979–3993 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0855-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0855-5