Abstract
This paper aims to defend the use of the notion of experimental individuation, which has recently been developed by Ruey-Lin Chen, as a criterion for the reality of theoretical entities. In short, when scientists experimentally individuate an entity, a realist conclusion about that entity is warranted. We embed this claim regarding experimental individuation within a framework that allows for other criteria of reality. And we understand so-called retail arguments regarding the reality of a particular theoretical entity as arguments that concern choosing an appropriate criterion of reality for that entity and determining whether the relevant first-order scientific evidence satisfies that criterion. We argue that such retail arguments are philosophical because defending criteria of reality, and showing that they are or are not satisfied in particular cases, involves work that is distinctively philosophical. And we illustrate this philosophical work by applying our criterion of experimental individuation to three historical cases: Davy’s potassium, Lavoisier’s muriatic radical, and Thomson’s electrified particles.
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Reproduced from Thomson (1897, p. 296)
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Notes
We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this important distinction. It’s worth noting that so-called selective realist positions differ from one other and from other positions in the realism debate, not in terms of the argumentative strategy they adopt but in terms of the theoretical content to which they are committed. For example, entity realists commit to the reality of entities, structural realists to structures, and deployment realists to theoretical components that contribute to generating novel predictive successes.
Dicken (2013) raises an important challenge to retailism on this basis. Responding to this challenge falls outside of the scope of the present paper.
Retrieved January 27, 2016 from http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/physics/vacuum/experiment-1.html. See also Harré (2002[1981]) and Whittaker (1989).
Bueno (2018) argues for a similar point from an empiricist perspective. He uses three cases of trapping quantum particles in experiments in order to argue that Hacking’s manipulation criterion cannot successfully serve as a criterion of reality.
See Lavoisier (1965[1789], p. 156).
See Hricko (2018) for a detailed discussion of this case.
See Kirwan (1789, pp. 4–5).
One might suspect that Lavoisier’s error regarding muriatic acid was disconnected from the main posits of his oxygen theory. However, Chang (2012b, p. 8) identifies Lavoisier’s theory of acidity as one of “[t]hree major pillars of Lavoisier’s system of chemistry,” and points out that Lavoisier chose the term ‘oxygen’ (which literally means ‘acid-generator’ in Greek) because of its central role in his system as the acidifying principle (2012b, p. 9).
It’s worth noting that neither Hardin and Rosenberg nor Psillos discuss dephlogisticated acid of salt. That said, it follows from Psillos’s claims regarding the reference of ‘phlogiston’ that dephlogisticated acid of salt is a non-existent entity.
See Hricko (2018, pp. 273–275) for a retail argument for this conclusion regarding Scheele’s dephlogisticated acid of salt.
Hacking (1983, pp. 22–23) draws a stronger conclusion when he claims that he would not have been a realist about electrons even in 1908, when Millikan measured the charge of the electron.
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Acknowledgements
We’d first like to thank three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments that substantially improved and strengthened the arguments in this article. We’d also like to thank audiences at the International Workshop on Scientific Realism at Kyoto University and the Twenty-Fifth Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association in Atlanta, Georgia, and especially Juha Saatsi, Hasok Chang, and Timothy Lyons for helpful comments. This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan (MOST 105-2410-H-194-072-MY3, MOST 106-2410-H-010-001).
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Chen, RL., Hricko, J. Experimental individuation and philosophical retail arguments. Synthese 198, 2313–2332 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02207-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02207-8