Abstract
Our purpose in this paper is to contribute to a practice-based characterization of scientific inference. We want to explore whether Brandom’s pragmatist–inferentialist framework can suitably accommodate several types of ampliative inference common in scientific reasoning and explanation (probabilistic reasoning, abduction and idealisation). First, we argue that Brandom’s view of induction in terms of merely permissive inferences is inadequate; in order to overcome the shortcoming of Brandom’s proposal, we put forward an alternative conception of inductive, probabilistic reasoning by appeal to the notion of degrees of commitment. Moreover, we examine the sorts of inferential commitments operative in other types of ampliative inferences, such as abduction or reasoning involving idealizations and assumptions. We suggest that agents engaging in these forms of reasoning often undertake restricted inferential commitments, whose scope and reach are more limited that in the case of the commitments associated with full beliefs.
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Notes
There have already been some fruitful applications of inferentialism to the study of scientific practice. For instance, an inferentialist account of causal claims has been put forward by Reiss (2012). Also, Suárez (2004) has developed an inferential theory of scientific representation. Moreover, de Donato Rodríguez and Zamora-Bonilla (2009) have explored an inferentialist approach to scientific idealizations and models. An inferentialist view of attributions of collective intentionality has been proposed by González de Prado Salas and Zamora-Bonilla (2015). Finally, it is worth mentioning Rouse’s analysis of how discursive practices, normativity and the material world are connected in Brandom’s inferentialism even if, though sympathetic to it, the result of his analysis is also critical (see Rouse 2000, ch. 6–8).
What MacFarlane calls non-cotenability is related to this: two propositional attitudes (for instance, beliefs) are non-cotenable with each other iff it is incoherent for a subject to adopt them at the same time, so that a subject cannot hold both attitudes simultaneously under penalty of being considered irrational (for the notion of non-cotenability see MacFarlane 2014, pp. 121–213).
To be sure, there may be further types of cognitive commitments (other than Brandom’s doxastic ones) that leave room for the possibility of being properly committed to incompatible propositions, perhaps in different ways (for discussion, see Shaffer 2011, 2013a, b). Think of the commitments involved in imagining, considering or assuming. Arguably, another example is provided by the attitude of accepting, as opposed to outright believing (see Cohen 1992; Shaffer 2013b). As Shaffer argues (2012b, p. 342), a distinctive feature of non-doxastic commitments is that in general they are not governed by a truth-norm, as believe arguably is. We will explore some of these further notions of commitment in Sect. 4. For the time being, however, we focus on the notion of full doxastic commitment and the attitude of outright belief.
Brandom stipulates that the relation of incompatibility is non-defeasible (if p is incompatible with q, it is also incompatible with q and r), so incompatibility-entailments will cover counter-factually robust (i.e., monotonic) inferences. If committive entailment is also taken to be non-defeasible, then it becomes equivalent to incompatibility entailment, as Andrade-Lotero and Dutilh Novaes show (2012, p. 48).
Perhaps some may argue that, in order for this inference not to be enthymematic, one always needs auxiliary premises stating that certain background conditions hold (for instance, that the pressure is not very low). However, this seems to go against the spirit of Brandom’s view of defeasible inferences. Anyway, the resulting inference would still be empirical unless one adds a conditional premise such as ‘If the water is boiling, it will be very hot,’ which would make the inference an instance of modus ponens. Brandom is explicit that such conditional premises are not required for an inference to be materially good (1994, pp. 94–116).
This problem is closely related to Hempel’s ‘inductive inconsistency’, according to which we can have two independent good inductive arguments leading to contrary conclusions (see Hempel 1965). As it is well known, the reason for this is that both arguments rely on different relevant reference classes. Hempel’s solution to this problem was the requirement of maximal specificity. In Brandomian terms, though an epistemic subject can be entitled to contrary conclusions about the same fact (given Hempel’s problem of explanatory ambiguity), two equally or maximally informed subjects cannot be entitled to contrary conclusions (at least not if the inductive inference is analogous). And, of course, one subject cannot be committed at the same time to both conclusions.
Perhaps there is some theoretical use for a notion of merely permissive inference that does not rely on the possibility of acquiring an entitlement to incompatible conclusions. For instance, if one thinks that being committed to a proposition involves an explicit attitude towards such a proposition, then it is plausible that being committed (with entitlement) to some premise does not need to bring a commitment to all its inferential consequences: it may be that one has never considered some of these consequences. For instance, rational agents will not typically form explicit attitudes towards the many trivial logical consequences of their beliefs.
This is not the type of merely permissive inference that Brandom seems to have in mind (on his view, one can implicitly undertake a commitment to some proposition without acknowledging or realizing it, and even without having ever explicitly considered such a proposition). Moreover, this notion of merely permissive inference does not seem to offer grounds for a distinctive characterization of inductive reasoning (arguably, it would apply as well to deductive inferences). Thus, we will focus our discussion on merely permissive inferences that may leave open the possibility of entitlement to further incompatible conclusions.
Something similar to permissive inferences might also play a role in the creation of fictional discourse: having written some parts of a novel, for example, a writer is ‘entitled’ to follow the plot in different ways (ways that would ‘make sense’ according to what is already written), but not, or less entitled, to do it in other ways; permissive inferences would be in this case something like ‘appropriate steps’ in the creation of a story. Closer to the type of inferences Brandom might be thinking about, we could extend this idea of ‘permissible step’ to cases of hypothetical thinking in science: for example, once you have built a model which is not fully realistic, there are some additions that you may incorporate to it, but others that you cannot, or that are less reasonable. Note, at any rate, that all these ‘steps’ would not really count as ‘inferences’ in the strictest sense, though they could do in some more latitudinarian sense.
Some proposed solutions to certain paradoxes, in particular the preface paradox, involve granting that an agent may rationally (and knowingly) believe the relevant inconsistent propositions (for instance, Williams 1987). However, these solutions are controversial and, we think, ultimately unsatisfactory (although we do not have space to argue for this here). Anyway, it does not seem that every inductive inference leads to a paradoxical situation, so it is problematic if this is a consequence of a purported distinction between inductive and deductive inferences.
Note that we leave open the possibility that in paradoxical situations agents are entitled to undertake some form of non-doxastic commitment to the inconsistent propositions (see Shaffer 2013b).
Perhaps it could be argued that in some cases the agent may not know that the incompatible conclusions of permissive inferences are in fact incompatible—and that in these cases the argument against Brandom will require the stronger (and more controversial) premise that agents cannot be entitled to fully believe false propositions, regardless of whether they are aware of their falsity. However, in most of the examples that Brandom has in mind (e.g. 1994, p. 169), it is obvious that the alternative conclusions are actually incompatible and the agent is taken to be aware of this.
This view becomes much more plausible if it is granted that an agent may be epistemically blameless when believing or asserting a false proposition, for which she is not properly entitled. Perhaps there seemed to be very good reasons supporting such a proposition. Still, on the view under consideration, if the proposition is false, the agent will not be actually entitled to fully believe it (for the distinction between blamelessness and correctness, see Littlejohn 2012, forthcoming).
As Andrade-Lotero and Dutilh Novaes (2012) argue, the distinction between permissive and committive inferences collapses if one considers only monotonic, indefeasible inferences (they also show that if committive inferential entailment is taken to be monotonic, it becomes identical to the monotonic incompatibility-entailment introduced by Brandom).
The same goes for the Hempelian cases of the alleged explanatory ambiguity of inductive inferences, like his example of the recovery of a patient. Once the relevance class has been fully specified, the ambiguity vanishes, as well as the problem of having two contrary conclusions, because, given the whole relevant information, the agent is not entitled anymore to both conclusions.
We will say more about these scenarios in Sect. 4. It should be noted that, while Brandom often says ‘entitlement to \(p'\) meaning ‘entitlement to a (full) commitment to \(p'\), in principle nothing prevents us from talking about entitlements to other types of attitudes (e.g. partial commitments or assumptions).
To be clear, our main aim in this paper is not to compare the pragmatist–inferentialist approach to other (non-inferentialist) accounts of scientific reasoning. Our point is rather that, given that induction is central to science and given that Brandom’s view of induction in terms of merely permissive inferences is (if we are correct) inadequate, one has to modify Brandom’s view by including the notion of degree of commitment if one wants to provide an adequate account of scientific ampliative reasoning in pragmatist–inferentialist terms.
An alternative strategy would be to operate with a notion of degree of entitlement, so that when an agent has some reason to believe a proposition, she would be ‘partially entitled’ to believe it. This option would be analogous to Carnap’s (1950) logical account of inductive and probabilistic inference, in terms of partial implication (deductive inferences would involve full implication). We leave the discussion of this proposal for another occasion.
In a Brandomian framework, probability modals like ‘might’ or ‘probably’ are naturally seen as expressive resources that allow the speaker to make explicit, via an assertion, her adoption of a probabilistic attitude (i.e. to make explicit the undertaking of a partial commitment to a proposition). We leave a detailed discussion of this expressivist proposal for another occasion.
The probability of rain given that there is a rain-induced traffic jam is 1.
We assign numerical magnitudes to degrees of commitment in this example for the sake of illustration. We remain neutral on whether degrees of commitment can always be so quantified.
Interestingly, van Fraassen uses in this context the term ‘commitment’, but in a slightly different sense than Brandom’s: ‘ Theory acceptance has a pragmatic dimension. While the only belief involved in acceptance, as I see it, is the belief that the theory is empirically adequate, more than belief is involved. To accept a theory is to make a commitment, a commitment to the further confrontation of new phenomena within the framework of that theory, a commitment to a research programme, and a wager that all relevant phenomena can be accounted for without giving up that theory. That is why someone who has accepted a certain theory, will henceforth answer questions ex cathedra, or at least feel called upon to do so. Commitments are not true or false; they are vindicated or not vindicated in the course of human history’ (van Fraassen 1980, p. 88; italics in the original).
See de Donato Rodríguez (2016) for a survey of Meinong’s theory and its relation to scientific contexts.
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Acknowledgements
This paper has received financial support from the following research projects: FFI2014-57258-P and FFI2013-41415-P of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and PICT-2014-1741 of the National Agency of Scientific and Technological Promotion, Argentina. For their helpful feedback, we want to thank several anonymous reviewers for this journal, as well as the audience at the IV Madrid Workshop on New Trends in the Philosophy of Social Science (UNED, Madrid), where a version of this paper was presented.
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González de Prado Salas, J., de Donato Rodríguez, X. & Zamora Bonilla, J. Inferentialism, degrees of commitment, and ampliative reasoning. Synthese 198 (Suppl 4), 909–927 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1579-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1579-5