Duhem on Good Sense and Theory Pursuit: From Virtue to Social Epistemology

ABSTRACT

The emerging consensus in the secondary literature on Duhem is that his notion of ‘good sense’ is a virtue of individual scientists that guides them choosing between empirically equal rival theories (Stump 2007. “Pierre Duhem’s Virtue Epistemology.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 38 (1): 149–159; Ivanova 2010. “Pierre Duhem’s Good Sense as a Guide to Theory Choice.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (1): 58–64; Fairweather 2011. “The Epistemic Value of Good Sense.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 43 (1): 139–146; Bhakthavatsalam (2017). “Duhemian Good Sense and Agent Reliabilism.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 64: 22–29). In this paper, I argue that good sense is irrelevant for theory choice within Duhem’s conception of scientific methodology. Theory choice, for Duhem, is either a pseudo-problem or addressed purely by empirical and formal desiderata depending on how it is understood. I go on to provide a positive interpretation of good sense as a feature of scientific communities that undergo particular forms of education that allow scientists to abandon theory pursuit. I conclude by suggesting that this interpretation entails that virtue epistemological readings of Duhem are insufficient for understanding good sense; we must employ a social epistemological perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Duhem
• good sense
• theory pursuit
• theory acceptance
• education

Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful for the questions and insights of the audiences of the meetings at the Canadian Philosophical Association (2018 in Montréal) and the Philosophy of Science Association (2018 in Seattle). I am especially thankful for the detailed feedback of Stathis Psillos, Klodian Coko, and Marie Gueguen. Thanks also to Kareem Khalifa.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 It is disputable whether conformational holism directly leads to underdetermination for Duhem. See Zammito (2004, Chapter 2) and Gueguen (2019) and the citations therein for further discussion.

2 Naess (1972, 48) claims that this does not allow for the invention of “radically new theories” which replace old concepts with incompatible ones because we could only ever have “changes in opinion about which theoretical laws are correct.” However, the gradual introduction of new hypotheses could lead to the development of radical theories eventually in a piecemeal fashion. This means we would not have a Gestalt-switch from one incommensurable theory to another, as in Kuhn, but a gradual replacement of hypotheses such that an incommensurable theory eventually descends from its predecessor. See Leite (2012) for an in depth discussion of this issue.

3 At some points, Ivanova claims that good sense plays no role in justifying theory choice but only serves as a historical posit to explain these choices. However, she also claims that good sense “can assist practicing scientists when faced with the problem of theory choice” (Ivanova 2010, 63) suggesting that good sense plays a role in theory choice.

4 Ivanova wavers on this point. She writes that “[t]he fact these choices are later supported by empirical evidence shows that good sense leads to the right choices” (Ivanova 2010, 60). In other words, good sense is a reliable indicator of future success and, therefore, “every scientist ought to cultivate his good sense to increase scientific progress and to reach the desired end of science” (ibid). However, she also claims that “Duhem departed on normative theories of rationality because he wanted to account for actual scientific practice and therefore did not want to restrict theory choice to some algorithmic procedure” (64). My guess is that Ivanova equates ‘normative’ with ‘algorithmic.’ See Çoko (2015, section 3.3) for further discussion.

5 Bhakthavatsalam (2017) discusses other roles of good sense in Duhem’s conception of scientific method as well, especially in theory construction.

6 This ambiguity is present in Kuhn (1982) where he launched theory choice as a topic of inquiry for philosophers of science. The conflation, though, makes sense given Kuhn’s understanding of paradigm acceptance which is both an evaluation of its current ability to solve puzzles and a faith that the paradigm will continue to solve puzzles (that it will be fruitful) (see also Šešelja and Straßer 2013).

7 However, as others have pointed out, the problem of theory choice is a pseudo-problem for instrumentalists since we can ‘accept’ multiple inconsistent theories as useful tools without contradiction.

8 Though Stump also states that “we need ‘good sense’ to make a judgment about which path to take” (Stump 2007, 154) which sounds more like pursuit.

9 ‘Development’ may include all sorts of activities, including testing, theoretical clarification or refinement, extending a theory to new domains, and so forth.

10 In other cases, the term ‘acceptance’ refers to what I call ‘pursuit’ and what I call ‘acceptance’ others have called ‘belief’ (see Elliott and McKaughan 2014).

11 It is also defended by Martin (1991, 83-84), though he argues that good sense also plays a role in replacing hypotheses that have been rejected which, I contend, is inaccurate (see below). See also Krips (1977).

12 Lakatos criticizes Duhem’s good sense for leaving “much to taste and fashion” (Lakatos 1970, 117).

13 “Duhem, in his famous criticism of crucial experiments … succeeds in showing that crucial experiments can never establish a theory. He fails to show that they cannot refute it” (Popper 1963, fn. 26 150). As will become evident, Popper’s interpretation is also incorrect since Duhem had a notion of refutation (though not one Popper would accept).

14 Ariew (2007) denies that Duhem held the ‘non-falsifiability’ thesis where theories can always be saved from refutation and argues that Duhem only held the weaker claim that recalcitrant experience does not tell us where the error lies. However, he also claims that, for Duhem, the non-falsifiability thesis is an “obvious corollary” and “is a consequence of” conformational holism which contradicts his earlier claim. Other commentators argue that underdetermination only leads to the conclusion that we can hold some proposition come what may in Quine’s generalization of Duhem’s holism (Giannoni 1967; Wedeking 1969). I agree Duhem’s position differs from Quine’s since Duhem but only in the sense that the former provides a (non-pragmatic) mechanism for theory abandonment.

15 This point has been made and emphasized before by Martin (1987, 307).

16 Duhem repeats this point a few pages later (Duhem 1991, 28-29).

17 This can be contrasted with Descartes’ view, where “Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world … In this it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken, it indicates rather that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the truth from the false—which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’ – is naturally equal in all men, and consequently that the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more reasonable than others but sole because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things” (Descartes 1637/1988, 20). Here, good sense is natural and, therefore, universal amongst humans, whereas, for Duhem, it is learned. See Duhem (1991, 12) for his response to Descartes.

18 This has been discussed before by Bhakthavatsalam (2017).

19 I’d like to thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this passage to my attention.

20 Scientists may have the same good sense but differ as to what the appropriate practical response is. This is an important qualification, since good sense is inherently vague and not accompanied by detailed practical guidance.

21 Çoko (2015, 81) argues that, for Duhem, good sense is also guided by God or ‘divine providence.’ I do not have the space to consider this view here, but his is compatible with the view that good sense is something over and above individual scientists. It may be the case that good sense requires a theological dimension to be complete.

22 Some recent literature has not made such a sharp diction between virtue and social epistemology (see Alfano et al. 2020). I will sideline these nuances for now, as they do not concern my primary objective here.

23 This point is disputed within the received view. Ivanova defends the interpretation where good sense does not justify our acceptance of a theory (sometimes), in my vocabulary, whereas Stump and Fairweather argue that good sense pertains to theory acceptance.

24 See Baigrie (1992) for an informative overview of Duhem’s ideal of convergence and Ariew and Barker (1992) for a discussion of convergence and continuity in Duhem.

25 For a discussion of this point as it pertains to the value-free ideal, see DiMarco and Khalifa (2019). Of course, there is still the open question of what to accept at a given time. I’m not aware of Duhem tackling this question in depth, so he appears to have bitten the bullet that we cannot uniquely accept a theory during some phases of pursuit. Or, perhaps, the notion of acceptance is out of place in Duhem’s framework.

26 On my view, the distinction between contrastive and holist underdetermination is not entirely sharp. Rather, the two should be seen as sides of the same coin. Holist underdetermination leads to contrastive underdetermination in the sense that the different responses to recalcitrant evidence led to distinct theories that are compatible with the same body of evidence. Holist underdetermination, at least sometimes, is the first step towards contrastive underdetermination.

27 See Frankel (1976) for a more in-depth historical discussion.

28 Duhem appears to have not considered the idea that decreased pursuit of a theory could be used to increase the pursuit as a newly imagined theory or the possibility that decreased pursuit is not met with shuffling resources elsewhere. After all, perhaps the budget for funding theory pursuit could simply be lowered and shuffled to, say, public housing or eliminated altogether to lower taxes or balance an unbalanced budget.

29 See Stuart (2019) for a related discussion, with a particular emphasis on imagination and Kindi (2005).

30 Part of Duhem’s criticism concerns Maxwell’s use of models, which is beside the point for the current point.

31 Duhem defends Helmholz’s electromagnetism over Boltzmann’s precisely because it captures the deductive consequences of Maxwell’s equations and is continuous with preceding theories (see Ariew and Barker 1986, 148).

32 The beginning date, of course, depends on which variant of the corpuscular theory we are discussing (e.g., Gassendi’s, Descartes’, Boyle’s, Newton’s, etc.).

33 It would be interesting to see how Duhem would appraise the partial revival of the corpuscular theory in Bohr’s theory. Indeed, the historical fact that theories often become ‘revived’ poses an interesting challenge more generally to Duhem’s conception of progress.

34 This means that Duhem would be committed to claiming that many scientists nowadays nowadays lack good sense since the pedagogical practices of most disciplines do not include teaching the history of science in a substantive way (see Leite 2002).

35 For a beginning of a critical discussion, see Shaw (2018, 137–144).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: [grant number 756-2019-0800].