Realism, Reliabilism, and the ‘Strong Programme’ in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

Abstract

In this essay, I respond to Tim Lewens’s proposal that realists and Strong Programme theorists can find common ground in reliabilism. I agree with Lewens, but point to difficulties in his argument. Chief among these is his assumption that reliabilism is incompatible with the Strong Programme’s principle of symmetry. I argue that the two are, in fact, compatible, and that Lewens misses this fact because he wrongly supposes that reliabilism entails naturalism. The Strong Programme can fully accommodate a reliabilism which has been freed from its inessential ties to naturalism. Unlike naturalistic epistemologists, the Strong Programme’s sociologistic reliabilist insists that all scientific facts are the product of both natural and social causal phenomena. Anticipating objections, I draw on Wittgenstein’s rule‐following considerations to explain how the sociologistic reliabilist can account for standard intuitions about the objective elements of knowledge. I also explain how the Strong Programme theorist can distinguish between a belief’s seeming reliable and its being reliable.

 Ich setzte

 den Fuß in die Luft,

 und sie trug.

 (Hilde Domin)

Acknowledgements

The preparation of this paper was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The following people provided helpful comments on a much earlier and longer version of this paper: Biella Coleman, Alex Rueger, Estheranna Stäuble, and, especially, Martin Kusch. More recent comments from four anonymous referees for this journal saved me from several egregious errors and otherwise helped me to sharpen up my argument. My thanks to you all.

Notes

[1] Here, and throughout, I assume the reliability of cognitive apparatus. Lewens presumably does the same, as the topic is hardly broached in his paper.

[2] I am suppressing an important issue which I cannot hope to adequately address within the scope of this essay. My focus throughout will be on the Strong Programme’s methodological sociologism, as well as the metaphysical background (‘residual realism’) against which Strong Programme theorists attempt to articulate this methodology. This sociologism is essential to the symmetry principle. However, there is another element of the Strong Programme which appears to undercut its sociologistic commitments, namely, its materialism. Indeed, Strong Programme theorists seek to ground their sociologistic methodology in materialistic, that is to say, neurological and more broadly biological, categories. See, for example, the passages at Barnes (1974, 171 n. 13), Barnes (1983, 534, 543 n. 19), Bloor (1997, 148 n. 148), Bloor (2004, 598). In this essay, I take it for granted that the Strong Programme’s methodological sociologism can be coherently separated from its metaphysical materialism. For a detailed discussion and debate on this issue, I refer the reader to Kusch (2004a), who argues that Bloor’s materialistic commitments are inessential and contradict the general Wittgensteinian spirit of the Strong Programme’s explanatory methodology. For Bloor’s response to Kusch, see Bloor (2004); for Kusch’s reply, see Kusch (2004b).

[3] Barnes’s residual realism appears similar to what Devitt has called ‘fig‐leaf realism’ or ‘relativistic weak realism’ (Devitt 1984, 22, 139). Devitt argues that fig‐leaf realism gains plausibility only when set against the alleged difficulties faced by more traditional forms of realism (Devitt 1984, 141). This may be true to some extent. However, the minimal realism of the Strong Programme is also strongly motivated by a desire to secure its realist credentials against the ever‐looming charge of sociological idealism. Explicit attempts to repudiate the charge of idealism can be found at Barnes, Bloor, and Henry (1996, 202) and Bloor (1996, passim).

[4] One of the most influential examples of this work is Shapin and Schaffer (1985). In their study of seventeenth‐century experimental science, they claim to ‘identify the technical, literary, and social practices whereby experimental matters of fact were to be generated, validated, and formed into bases for consensus’ (Shapin and Schaffer 1985, 18). In this passage, matters of fact are clearly being analysed as the effects rather than the causes of scientific activity.

[5] In developing my understanding of Pettit’s work on rule‐following, as well as its relation to Wittgenstein’s own considerations, I have benefited from the excellent, unpublished work of my former student, Andrew Buskell.

[6] The Strong Programme’s explicit endorsement of the view that rules can be followed blindly gives the lie to Lewens’s bizarre and unsubstantiated claim that ‘[l]ying behind Barnes and Bloor’s epistemology is the Cartesian internalist principle that for beliefs, and the processes that form them, to be good demands that the possessor of those beliefs, or processes, can establish their qualities through reasoning that could convince any coherent doubter’ (Lewens 2005, 575).

[7] Here Bloor is responding specifically to Prior’s runabout inference ticket (Prior 1960).

[8] Laudan commits a similar interpretive error when he attributes to Bloor the claim that ‘we are always rationally free to decide when and whether to let evidence shape our beliefs’ (Laudan 1996, 53).

[9] For a more detailed discussion of this aspect of Wittgensteinian relativism, see Stroud (2000).

[10] Kusch (2002, 220–222) makes a similar point, and contrasts it with Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of ‘idealized consensus’. Peirce argued that: ‘The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what is meant by truth’ (quoted in Kusch 2002, 221). Kusch rejects this definition of truth in terms of agreement of opinion, arguing instead that agreement only provides the conditions for the appropriate application of such terms as ‘true’ and ‘truth’.

[11] The example only requires recognition of the possibility of alternative deductive practices. The particulars of the alternative need not be intelligible to us. Indeed understanding the alternative’s minutiae would entail our indoctrination into the form of life wherein that alternative fully achieves its intelligibility. Cf. Stroud (2000, 8ff.).