Abstract
According to Bas van Fraassen, scientific realists and anti-realists disagree about whether accepting a scientific theory involves believing that the theory is true. On van Fraassen’s own anti-realist empiricist position, accepting a theory involves believing only that the theory is correct in its claims about observable aspects of the world. However, a number of philosophers have argued that acceptance and belief cannot be distinguished and thus that the debate is either confused or trivially settled in favor of the realist. In addition, another set of philosophers have argued that van Fraassen’s empiricist position appeals to an unmotivated distinction between observable and unobservable aspects of the world. This paper aims to reconstruct a van Fraassen-style empiricism about scientific acceptance that avoids these two objections – reconstructed empiricism.
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Notes
To be sure, van Fraassen also conceives of realism and anti-realism in terms of the aim of science, understood as the criteria for success in the scientific enterprise. However, I shall leave that part of the debate to one side in most of this paper, focusing instead on the part that concerns scientific acceptance.
This rough characterization of empirical adequacy will do for the purposes of this paper. For a much more precise characterization, see (van Fraassen 1980, chapter 3).
This is in line with van Fraassen’s own defense of constructive empiricism, since van Fraassen (1980) offers little if anything in terms of direct positive arguments for his position. Instead, as Rosen (1994, 157-8) notes, van Fraassen’s aim seems to be to show that constructive empiricism is a permissible stance, one that is not in conflict with the rationality of science.
See also (van Fraassen 2002, 90).
That beliefs are involuntary in this way was influentially argued by Williams (1973). In contrast to Dicken (2010, 161–167), I will not assume here, however, that beliefs are completely involuntary—it may be possible, with effort, to induce in oneself certain beliefs in certain circumstances. This does not eliminate the distinction between acceptance and belief with respect to the extent to which they are under our control, since acceptance would still be voluntary in a much more straightforward way. After all, there is no special cognitive effort required to adopt a policy of treating propositions as given in a particular context. (see further discussion of this point in footnote 11.)
This might very well mean that full acceptance is relatively rare in science, since most theories arguably involve approximations and idealizations in such a way that working scientists would not be prepared to rely on them for all scientific purposes in which the theory is relevant at all. Nevertheless, since van Fraassen an others participants in the debate seem to be primarily concerned with full acceptance, it is full acceptance which I shall be concerned with here. Besides, one could presumably give realist and anti-realist accounts of partial acceptance by modifying the accounts of full acceptance that are discussed here (though I shall not attempt to do so in this paper).
For example, the idealist-positivist Karl Pearson wrote in the third edition of The Grammar of Science:
Nobody believes now that science explains anything; we all look upon it as a shorthand description, as an economy of thought (Pearson 1911, xi).
Pierre Duhem seems to have advocated a similar view:
A physical theory is not an explanation. It is a system of mathematical propositions, deduced from a small number of principles, which aim to represent as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible a set of experimental laws (Duhem 1954/1982, 19).
As Dicken (2010, 157) points out, one can also believe a theory that one does not accept, although this possibility will play no role in what follows.
Indeed, something like this is suggested by Cohen himself in a brief mention of van Fraassen’s views (Cohen 1992, 89).
It may be noted that this holds even if one accepts a strict functionalist view of belief (as Horwich (1991) does explicitly), since the functional roles of acceptance and belief in empirical adequacy can come apart on Cohen’s definition. To see this, imagine someone—Bertie—who is just like Alyssa except that he believes Darwin’s theory of natural selection to be empirically adequate in addition to accepting it. In contrast to Alyssa, Bertie will function outside of a scientific context as someone who believes that the theory is empirically adequate. So, for example, Bertie will normally be inclined to assert that Darwin’s theory of natural selection makes correct prediction about observable phenomena in his day-to-day interactions outside of a scientific context in a way that Alyssa will not be inclined to do (since she does not believe that the theory is empirically adequate). So scientific acceptance and belief in a theory’s empirical adequacy will clearly differ in their functional outputs.
Moreover, these two states will differ also in their functional inputs. This is because it is relatively straightforward to accept at will, whereas it is more difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to believe at will. Consider how straightforward it is to decide to adopt a policy of using a theory in one’s scientific endeavors even if one does not find it plausible that the theory is empirically adequate. Such a decision would be on par with deciding to adopt other policies, e.g., to become a vegetarian or to exercise three times a week. By contrast, it would require much more cognitive effort to make oneself believe that such a theory is empirically adequate, i.e., to feel that the theory is empirically adequate. To induce in oneself a feeling of this sort would seem to require some special feat that most of us are unable to perform, at least most of the time and for most propositions. Indeed, many philosophers follow Williams (1973) in arguing that it is impossible to have direct control over our beliefs (and that applies to beliefs about which theories are empirically adequate just as much as it applies to beliefs about which theories are true). At any rate, if belief is under any kind of voluntary control, it is clearly less direct than the sort of control we have over whether we accept a theory, i.e., whether to adopt a policy of treating the theory as given in some context. Thus it is clear that acceptance and belief—including in particular belief in empirical adequacy—differ functionally not just with regard to their outputs, but also with regard to their functional inputs.
A slightly weaker form of (R*) replaces “true” with “at least approximately true”. Nothing in what follows depends on which version of (R*) one adopts, so for simplicity’s sake I shall stick with this formulation of (R*).
This follows from a general principle: If ϕ-ing involves ψ-ing, then one should only ϕ if it is permissible to ψ. This principle seems to me obviously and transparently true. However, in case you’re not convinced already, consider the following argument for it. Suppose ϕ-ing involves ψ-ing. Now suppose that ψ-ing is not permissible. Then there is no permissible way to ϕ, because all ways of ϕ-ing involve ψ-ing, which is ex hypothesi not permissible. Put differently, every possible ϕ-ing is impermissible. But that is just to say that ϕ-ing is itself impermissible. So, if ϕ-ing involves ψ-ing, then ϕ-ing is impermissible if ψ-ing is impermissible. This is logically equivalent to the principle.
This choice will be vindicated in the next section, where the relevance of empirical adequacy in this regard will be defended against an objection.
Van Fraassen’s voluntarist epistemology should not to be confused with the more familiar thesis of doxastic voluntarism, which is the view that beliefs can be voluntarily adopted. The latter is of course a thesis that we have come across earlier in this essay in discussing the difference between acceptance and belief (see especially footnotes 6 and 11).
I am thankful to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to explore this connection explicitly here.
This should not be surprising, since as Psillos (2007, 135) points out, van Fraassen’s voluntarist view in epistemology is quite independent from his empiricist view of scientific acceptance.
Of course, (B) refers to the truth of p and not its empirical adequacy, so one may wonder how (B) says anything relevant to (E*). However, for our purposes, to say that T is empirically adequate is equivalent to saying that there is a theory, call it E(T), which holds that T is empirically adequate. Since this theory is true just in case T is empirically adequate, (B) may be used to derive (E) from (E*). (Another way to derive (E) from (E*) would of course be to appeal to a modified version of (B) which replaces “truth” with “empirical adequacy”.)
As before, nothing in what follows turns crucially on this, so those who reject (B) may safely replace (E) with (E*) in what follows and modify the discussion accordingly.
Of course, the corresponding realist position is not ruled out either. Indeed, as advertised in Section 1, this paper contains no direct positive arguments for reconstructed empiricism as against the corresponding realist position. However, having shown that an empiricist position about acceptance is not (contra Blackburn, Melchert, Mitchell, Horwich, and Teller) incoherent or confused, we can conclude that one may be an empiricist about acceptance, should one be so inclined, and that realism about acceptance is not “the only game in town”.
A similar points were made by Nancy Cartwright in a recent sympathetic discussion of van Fraassen’s position: “To accept a theory is to decide to use it to make all those predictions about what we might observe that will help us chart our actions.” (Cartwright 2007, 40)
Here, I am disagreeing with what seems to be Cartwright’s position in the quote in the previous footnote, where she seems to suggest that acceptance of a theory involves nothing other than using the theory to make empirical predictions.
It may be worth adding that the points made in this section about the relationship between acceptance, empirical predictions, and empirical adequacy do not also provide a rationale for the relevance of empirical adequacy in van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism. To see this, note that even if accepting a theory involves using it in empirical predictions, which in turn are all correct only if the theory is empirically adequate, it does not follow that any belief in the theory’s empirical adequacy is involved in acceptance. After all, it is clearly possible to use a theory in empirical predictions even if one does not feel it to be true that the theory is empirically adequate. (Alyssa from Section 2 is a case in point.) So even if acceptance involved using a theory in empirical predictions, which in turn are all correct just in case the theory is empirically adequate, it would not follow that acceptance involves belief in the theory’s empirical adequacy.
I would like to thank Marc Lange, John Roberts, Matt Kotzen, and Lindsay Brainard for very helpful comments on drafts of this paper. Versions of this paper were presented at the University of North Carolina Work-in-Progress series in 2013, the North Carolina Philosophical Society Annual Meeting in 2014, and the 15th Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science at the University of Helsinki in 2015. I am grateful to members of the audience on all three occasions for their questions and comments.
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Dellsén, F. Reconstructed Empiricism. Acta Anal 32, 95–113 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0289-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0289-9