Scientific Realism and Blocking Strategies*

ABSTRACT

My target is the epistemological dimension of the realism debate. After establishing a stance voluntarist framework with a Jamesian background, drawing mostly on Wylie, Chakravarty, and van Fraassen, I argue that current voluntarists are too permissive. I show that especially various anti-realist stances but also some realist and selective realist stances block themselves from refutation by the history of science. I argue that such stances should be rejected. Finally, I propose that any disagreement that cannot be resolved by this strategy frequently boils down to an epistemic value disagreement about balancing the truth-goal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I will utilise here the common distinction between observables and unobservables even though it is widely recognised that there is no such context independent distinction to be had. However, nothing in my argument depends on the choice of the empirical basis for the anti-realist. In fact, this should be read as a placeholder for ‘those portions of reality your preferred anti-realist deems problematic (e.g. those not sufficiently accessible by experience (e.g. Hume), or by detection (e.g. Bogen 2011), or by narrow observation (van Fraassen 1989), or by wide observation (Bueno Shalkowski 2020)) and those portions that are deemed unproblematic (e.g. those that can be seen with the naked eye)'.

2 I will use for now ‘justification’, but you can pick your preferred notion of rational standing here.

3 Following, for instance, Berker (2013) that epistemology is about what we ought to believe. Some philosophers think that there cannot be any obligations to believe because of the problem of doxastic involuntarism (see e.g. Alston 1988). It is outside the scope of the paper to taggle this argument. In the end, I agree with Feldman (1988) that even if we had not any control over our belief-forming processes, there are still epistemic belief obligations.

4 Something similar can be said for Rowbottom’s (2019, 461) suggestion of an epistemic realist thesis (ET): ‘A proper subset of science’s content, E, is approximately true (on a proper subset of theories of truth, T).’ Note first, that for a specification of a realist, it is not enough that (ET) is true. For any S to be a realist, S at least has to affirm or believe that (ET) is true. But again, I can believe (ET) without any epistemic reasons, which makes me a minimal realist, but not one that is epistemically committed to a lot.

5 E.g. ‘it is reasonable to accept […]’ (Musgrave 1988), ‘it is reasonable to believe […]’ (Musgrave 2007). ‘Why We are Justified to Believe in Colored Quarks’ (Massimi 2004).

6 For a different criticism see Rowbottom (2019, 463–465).

7 For instance, (a) selective realists frequently argue on grounds of synchronic evidence to dismiss some ontological commitments but not others (cf. e.g. Magnus Callender 2004), (b) it is frequently maintained by realists that theories under consideration need to fulfil some theoretical virtue, such as maturity, predictive success, or being past a ‘take-off point’ (e.g. Boyd 1983). Theories lacking such virtues will be discredited even by realists, and whether some theory is past the take-off point is a matter of synchronic evidence.

8 Going back to Poincaré’s Science and Hypothesis (1902) and Laudan (1981).

9 It also has many challenges. Major ones are interpretative problems on the semantic dimension of scientific realism. For instance, could we redescribe ‘caloric’ as badly described thermal energy rendering various claims by the caloric theory at least as approximately true? (see e.g. Psillos 1999, 110–124) These deep problems need to be engaged with if we give a bigger role to the history of science (as suggested in the present paper). However, this paper focuses on specific points of the epistemological dimension only.

10 Take, for instance, Kuhn (1962), Laudan (1981), or Stanford (2006) who draw various anti-realist conclusions, or selective realists who draw realist conclusions but for structures only (Worrall 1989), entities only (Hacking 1983), properties only (Chakravartty 2008), or only for various stable, invariant portions of theories (Kitcher 1993, Psillos 1994, Nola 2008).

11 For early accounts in epistemology see BonJour (1985, 7–8), Goldman (1979, 29–30), and Lehrer (1990, 112). For a defence see David (2001).

12 Since I adopt this trade-off, I need to respond to a likely objection. The realist usually adopts a notion of ‘approximate truth’ and not ‘full truth’. As such, since approximate truth involves some kinds of error, must there not be a trade-off between acceptable and unacceptable error instead? Following Musgrave (2007), my view is the following. If S tells me that they believe that theory T is approximate truth, then S should tell me instead in which limit, in which domain, or under what conditions they believe it is fully true. If they cannot do that, then they are not clear about what they believe. Suppose some S would tell you that the caloric theory is actually approximately true. What does S believe? What S should believe (given current science) is something like the following: Some parts or implications of the theory are fully true. For instance, one implication of the theory is that a cup of hot tea cools down in a cold room. This S believes. Some parts were fully false. For instance, that there is a fluidal substance of heat that passes from warmer to colder bodies. This is fully false, and S does not believe it. Believing in the ‘approximate truth’ of the caloric theory means believing in the full truths of various parts of the theory and its implication. Realists believe that these parts are fully true but also believe that sometimes they are in error. The trade-off is between full truth and full error.

13 This leads to a challenge pointed out by Grimm (2008): irrelevant truths are arguably justified. I think these problems can be bypassed by differentiating narrow justification and wider norms of belief acquisition.

14 Already present in Chakravartty (2007, 187; 2013, 31) but it appears to be now even more permissive.

15 See, for instance Lyons (2013) and Mizrahi (2015), arguing that UA needs to be empirically and historically informed.

16 Arguably, we do not long for certainty, so it is not demanded from the realist to show a perfect track-record.

17 ‘Relevant category’ because selective realists might want to restrict those inferences to stable subparts of a theories, e.g. structural portions.

18 Something similar can be said about the general problem of how historical case studies can function as evidence and how they can be systematised to even get something akin to an inductive inference of the ground (cf. Chang 2012; Kinzel 2015; Nickles 1995).

19 This is, of course, a quite far-fetched scenario but it is only presented to make the logical point coming up. One may replace the example with an example that explains a more realistic increase in the occurrence of radical theory changes of future scientific development. Such an example would serve the same purpose.

20 Something similar can be said about Boyd (1983) but I will not go into the details here.

21 This criterion suggests that there is not a clear-cut demarcation between full-blown realism and selective realism if one does not want to strawman ‘full-blown’ realists into stating that it is justified to believe all ontological commitments of current science.