Online research in philosophy

The antirealist argument from the underdetermination of theories by data relies on the premise that the empirical content of a theory is the only determinant of its belief-worthiness (premise NN). Several authors have claimed that the antirealist cannot endorse NN, on pain of internal inconsistency. I concede this point. Nevertheless, this refutation of the underdetermination argument fails because there are weaker substitutes for NN that will serve just as well as a premise to the argument. On the other hand, antirealists have not made a convincing casefor NN (or its weaker substitutes) either. In particular, I criticize van Fraassen's recent claim that all ampliative rules in epistemology must be rejected on the grounds that they lead to incoherence. The status of the underdetermination argument remains unsettled.

The instrumentalist argument from the underdetermination of theories by data runs as follows: (1) every theory has empirically equivalent rivals; (2) the only warrant for believing one theory over another is its possession of a greater measure of empirical virtue; (3) therefore belief in any theory is arbitrary. In this paper, I examine the status of the first premise. Several arguments against the universal availability of empirically equivalent theoretical rivals are criticized, and four algorithms for producing empirically equivalent rivals are defended. I conclude that the case for the first premise of the argument from underdetermination is very strong. The disposition of the argument itself depends on the fate of the second premise.

Antony Flew's ?A Strong Programme for the Sociology of Belief (Inquiry 25 {1982], 365?78) critically assesses the strong programme in the sociology of knowledge defended in David Bloor's Knowledge and Social Imagery. I argue that Flew's rejection of the epistemological relativism evident in Bloor's work begs the question against the relativist and ignores Bloor's focus on the social relativity of mathematical knowledge. Bloor attempts to establish such relativity via a sociological analysis of Frege's theory of number. But this analysis only succeeds if the rejection of an explanatory theory entails that there are reasonable grounds for the rejection of the set of propositions which that theory was intended to explain. I argue against such an entailment, and thus against Bloor's attempt to relativize mathematical knowledge.

In this essay, I respond to Tim Lewens's proposal that realists and Strong Programme theorists can find common ground in reliabilism. I agree with Lewens, but point to difficulties in his argument. Chief among these is his assumption that reliabilism is incompatible with the Strong Programme's principle of symmetry. I argue that the two are, in fact, compatible, and that Lewens misses this fact because he wrongly supposes that reliabilism entails naturalism. The Strong Programme can fully accommodate a reliabilism which has been freed from its inessential ties to naturalism. Unlike naturalistic epistemologists, the Strong Programme's sociologistic reliabilist insists that all scientific facts are the product of both natural and social causal phenomena. Anticipating objections, I draw on Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations to explain how the sociologistic reliabilist can account for standard intuitions about the objective elements of knowledge. I also explain how the Strong Programme theorist can distinguish between a belief's seeming reliable and its being reliable. Ich setzte den Fu in die Luft, und sie trug. (Hilde Domin).

Abstract In this paper the basic aim of the so?called ?strong programme? in the sociology of knowledge is examined. The ?strong programme? is considered (and rightly so) as an extreme version of the anti?realist view of science. While the problem of scientific realism has normally been dealt with from the point of view of the ?context of justification? of theories, the paper focuses on the issues raised by law?discovery. In this context Herbert Simon's views about the existence of a ?logic of scientific discovery? are discussed and criticized. The main thesis of the paper is that if the structure of both discovery and prediction is properly understood, then the basic anti?realist claims become untenable. A fortiori, the ?strong programme? appears to be unable to explain some basic features of the structure of science.

In this essay, I address a novel criticism recently levelled at the Strong Programme by Nick Tosh and Tim Lewens. Tosh and Lewens paint Strong Programme theorists as trading on a contrastive form of explanation. With this, they throw valuable new light on the explanatory methods employed by the Strong Programme. However, as I shall argue, Tosh and Lewens run into trouble when they accuse Strong Programme theorists of unduly restricting the contrast space in which legitimate historical and sociological explanations of scientific knowledge might be given. Their attack founders as a result of their failure to properly understand the overall methodological concerns of Strong Programme theorists. After introducing readers to the technique of contrastive explanation and correcting the errors in Tosh and Lewens’ interpretation of the Strong Programme, I argue that it is, in fact, Tosh and Lewens’ own commitment to scientific realism which places an unacceptable restriction on the explanatory space open to historians and sociologists of science. The happy ending is that the Strong Programme provides more freedom for analysis than does scientific realism, and that careful attention to the methodological benefits of contrastive explanation can help lighten the burden on historians and sociologists of science as they go about their explanatory business.

In this paper I criticize one of the most convincing recent attempts to resist the underdetermination thesis, Laudan’s argument from indirect confirmation. Laudan highlights and rejects a tacit assumption of the underdetermination theorist, namely that theories can be confirmed only by empirical evidence that follows from them. He shows that once we accept that theories can also be confirmed indirectly, by evidence not entailed by them, the skeptical conclusion does not follow. I agree that Laudan is right to reject this assumption, but I argue that his explanation of how the rejection of this assumption blocks the skeptical conclusion is flawed. I conclude that the argument from indirect confirmation is not effective against the underdetermination thesis.

A basic question confronting programs in the sociology of science is: "Can the thesis that cognitive claims are socially determined be interpreted in a way that preserves the credibility of the sociology of science, when that thesis is reflexively applied to the sociology of science?" That question is approached here by means of a critical comparison of two versions of the "strong programme" in the sociology of knowledge. The key difference is the effort in one of the two versions (B. Barnes') to develop a context within which to articulate the distinction of science and ideology.

After a thorough examination of the claim that "the underdetermination of theory by evidence forces us to seek sociological explanations of scientists' cognitive choices", Samir Okasha concludes that the only significant problem with this argument is that the thesis of underdetermination is not adequately supported. Against Okasha, I argue (1) that there is a very good reason to question the inference from the underdetermination of a theory to a sociological account of that theory's acceptance, and (2) that Okasha's own objection to the argument is too weak.

I examine the argument that scientific theories are typically 'underdetermined' by the data, an argument which has often been used to combat scientific realism. I deal with two objections to the underdetermination argument: (i) that the argument conflicts with the holistic nature of confirmation, and (ii) that the argument rests on an untenable theory/data dualism. I discuss possible responses to both objections, and argue that in both cases the proponent of underdetermination can respond in ways which are individually plausible, but that the best response to the first objection conflicts with the best response to the second. Consequently underdetermination poses less of a problem for scientific realism than has often been thought.