DiscussionModels and perspectives on stage: remarks on Giere’s Scientific perspectivism
Introduction
Ronald Giere’s recent and remarkable book, Scientific perspectivism, joins a long line of attempts to go Beyond objectivism and relativism,1 Beyond realism and anti-realism,2 Beyond positivism and relativism,3 and so on.4 Giere wants to find a middle way between an absolutist, objectivist realism and the constructivist or skeptical alternatives. The search for such a via media is quite admirable, though perhaps the attempt is not as novel as Giere implies.5 He forges this path by treating scientific observations and theories as ‘perspectives’, a visual metaphor that implies a subjectively oriented side that avoids the negative aspects of objectivism, but enough of a world-oriented side that it also avoids the negative features of relativism and constructivism. Giere also takes pains to emphasize perspectivism’s pluralistic nature. He even hopes that his view qualifies as a novel species of realism.
I will attempt to show that Giere’s perspectivist project bears much in common with the work of two earlier philosophers: from the prior generation of philosophers of science, Paul Feyerabend, particularly his late work just before his death, and from the first half of the century, the experimental theory of inquiry of John Dewey. Further, I will show that their work can help improve and extend perspectivism in helpful ways, especially on the issues of representation, projection, and purpose. In the course of these comparisons, I hope also to throw light on part of Feyerabend that has thus far not been much discussed or well understood and to demonstrate the relevance of pragmatist theories of inquiry to contemporary philosophy of science. These goals face the inevitable problem of attempting to reconcile the vocabularies of three philosophers working in different moments, which I will have to overcome by doing my best to stick to a common terminology.6 Finally, I will investigate some remaining ambiguities or instabilities in the views being discussed, and I will suggest that the culprit is a continuing, but only partial adherence to the visual, spectatorial metaphor of a ‘perspective’.
Section snippets
Giere’s Scientific perspectivism7
The major claims of Giere’s perspectivism, as I see it, are:
- 1.
Human and scientific observation and scientific theories are all perspectival.
- 2.
Perspectives are an asymmetric8 interaction between human (biological, cognitive, social) factors and the world.
- 3.
Perspectives are partial and of limited accuracy.
- 4.
Perspectives are neither objectively correct nor uniquely verdical.
- 5.
Scientific truth-claims are
Feyerabend on representation and perspective in art and science
Looking at two pictures of the Madonna with child, one from the thirteenth century and another by Raphael in the sixteenth,16 and without much knowledge of recent art history and criticism, we may be inclined to
Peirce and Dewey on purpose and inquiry
The main reason to turn to a discussion of Peirce and Dewey19 is that, both for Giere and Feyerabend, the question of ‘purpose’ or ‘interest’ has arisen, but the role that purposes play in the processes of representation that have been discussed has been fairly under-specified. Clearly, it has to be part of the human contribution in both cases, what I have called ‘interest’. But this seems to be insufficient, and I also want to
Conclusion
First, I want to emphasize the ways in which these three philosophers converge: All of them provide a picture in which inquiry and representation inherently requires projection, both of facts and theory, and they make clear that the process of projection is a highly constructive, not deductive, process. Some projection is physical rather than abstract as with Brunelleschi’s viewing set-up and scientific experiments. The process of projection may become transparent as it becomes routine, thus
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Paul Hoyningen-Huene, who gave me the opportunity to present on earlier versions of these ideas at a seminar at ZEWW in Hannover and provided much-needed encouragement, to Paul Churchland, Ryan Hickerson, Helmut Heit, and Eric Oberheim for discussions of Feyerabend, to Craig Callender for discussions of Giere, to the members of the Pragmatism Reading Group at UCSD, to Jeremy Farris and Nancy Cartwright for discussion of earlier versions of the paper, to the Fjord Institute in St.
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