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Perspectivism Versus a Completed Copernican Revolution

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Abstract

I discuss changes of perspective of four kinds in science and about science. Section 2 defends a perspectival nonrealism—something akin to Giere’s perspectival realism but not a realism—against the idea of complete, “Copernican” objectivity. Section 3 contends that there is an inverse relationship between epistemological conservatism and scientific progress. Section 4 casts doubt on strong forms of scientific realism by taking a long-term historical perspective that includes future history. Section 5 defends a partial reversal in the status of so-called context of discovery and context of justification. Section 6 addresses the question of how we can have scientific progress without scientific realism—how progress is possible without the accumulation of representational truth. The overall result (Sect. 7) is a pragmatic instrumentalist perspective on the sciences and how to study them philosophically, one that contains a kernel of realism—instrumental realism.

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Notes

  1. See Nickles (2009 and forthcoming d, Sect. 5) for hints about how to make distant futures more “present” to our thinking. See also the TED talk by Daniel Goldstein, "The Battle Between Your Present and Future Self."

  2. Giere agrees with some of this, and perhaps Marco Buzzoni (2016) as well. At least we agree that there is a fine line between nonrealism as I understand it and non-absolutist forms of realism.

  3. Feyerabend (1975) appreciated this point but went overboard with his “anything goes” theme.

  4. See Nickles (1987, 2013, forthcoming c). To fully cash out my “inverse relation” claim would require an extensive survey of the history of science, one that would take into account the exponential explosion of scientific work since the seventeenth century.

  5. The realists’ main answer, “the miracle argument,” is discussed briefly in Sect. 6 below.

  6. In Nickles (forthcoming e) I contend that realists are tempted by various perspectival illusions, several having to do with lack of a sense of history. I am not claiming that fertile research frontiers last forever; but how can we ever tell that a field is stagnating now because it has reached its core truths, rather than for some other reason such as lack of imagination or impenetrable complexity or insufficient funding?

  7. From a letter to the editor, Scientific American, February 1996, p. 10, as quoted by Asaro (2008, 104) and partially quoted by Heilbron (1986), p. 10, apparently from a 1924 lecture by Planck.

  8. The metaphorical slogan does not attribute a special agency to history.

  9. See Nickles (forthcoming a, b, c, d, e). The claim that future predictions (nay, forecasts, prognostications) have nearly always turned out badly, no matter what the field, has the mark of another negative historical induction. I cannot develop this point here.

  10. Thanks to Bill Wimsatt for the slogan, and for much else. Bill ends up being more of a realist than I am.

  11. Realists will reply that they do not claim to have direct access to the truth, that the IBE argument hypothetically postulates truth as a necessary explanatory factor of the phenomenon of scientific success. The miracle argument fails to engage nonrealists and antirealists, because they already doubt the force of IBE arguments to the truth of a specific theory. So why should they be persuaded by a second IBE layer now claiming to explain scientific progress as a whole, and in terms of such a weird, abstract posit as truth? (Fine 1986).

  12. Some may say that truth attribution plays an important role, indicating which areas of research are effectively “closed” at the present time; but this is surely a metaphorical use of ‘true’. Thanks here to Noretta Koertge.

  13. Kuhn (1962, ch. XIII and later articles) addresses the more difficult problem of “progress through revolutions.”

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Evandro Agazzi and Marco Buzzoni for the invitation to contribute. They are not responsible for the errors of my ways.

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  1. Philosophy Department, University of Nevada, Reno, Mail Stop 0102, Reno, NV, 89557, USA

    Thomas Nickles

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Nickles, T. Perspectivism Versus a Completed Copernican Revolution. Axiomathes 26, 367–382 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-016-9316-0

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