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Scientific realism: what it is, the contemporary debate, and new directions

  • S.I.: Scientific Realism
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Abstract

First, I answer the controversial question ’What is scientific realism?’ with extensive reference to the varied accounts of the position in the literature. Second, I provide an overview of the key developments in the debate concerning scientific realism over the past decade. Third, I provide a summary of the other contributions to this special issue.

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Notes

  1. It is much easier to reach agreement about what counts as a contribution to the debate than it is to reach agreement about how to characterize the debate. This should be unsurprising; similarly, it is much easier to reach agreement about what counts as a science—or, for that matter, a chair or a table—than it is to reach agreement about a definition, or a significant partial definition, thereof.

  2. Similar sentiments are expressed elsewhere. For example, Hacking (1983: p. 26) writes ‘Definitions of “scientific realism” merely point the way. It is more an attitude than a clearly stated doctrine... Scientific realism and anti-realism are ... movements’ and Leplin (1984: p. 1) notes that ‘Like the Equal Rights Movement, scientific realism is a majority position whose advocates are so divided as to appear a minority’.

  3. There are some significant exceptions to this general rule. For instance, Mäki (2005: p. 235) denies that scientific realism should be ‘taken to be an epistemological doctrine’. He writes (Mäki 2005: p. 236):

    I take realism to be primarily an ontological doctrine. Semantics and epistemology are important but not constitutive of the core concern of realism. On this I agree with philosophers like Michael Devitt whose formulation of scientific realism is put in more purely ontological terms: “Scientific Realism. Tokens of most current unobservable scientific physical types objectively exist independently of the mental” [Devitt 1991: p. 24] ...

  4. Although it was not published until 1983, Realism and the Aim of Science is a part of the postscript to The Logic of Scientific Discovery that was written (and read by many in Popper’s circle) in the 1950s. Elsewhere, Popper (1972: p. 290) instead used the notion of a regulative ideal to characterize realism: ‘[the] regulative ideal of finding theories which correspond to the facts is what makes the scientific tradition a realist tradition’.

  5. For example, there is not a single mention of realism (or constructive empiricism, for that matter) in the entry on ‘Science and Pseudo-Science’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Hansson 2014). There is a section on ‘Criteria Based on Scientific Progress’. However, this doesn’t engage with any of the recent literature on that topic, discussed in Sect. 3.4. ‘Progress’ is used in a narrower sense than most participants in the debate on scientific progress intend it.

  6. Rowbottom (2014a) says more about the bearing of this variation on talk of ‘the aim of science’, and Rowbottom (2011a, 2013) treat its significance with respect to scientific method. The existence of such variation is shown by a number of works in recent times, such as Galison (1997), Dupré (2001), Rowbottom (2011c) and Chang (2012).

  7. Kuhn (1963: p. 368) allows that scientists are (typically), nevertheless, ‘taught to regard themselves as explorers and inventors who know no rules except those dictated by nature itself’. This results in ‘an acquired tension ... between professional skills on the one hand and professional ideology on the other’. (ibid.: pp. 368–369)

  8. There are other methodological theses that realists might commit to as well, such as the thesis that scientists who are scientific realists (or realist in orientation) do better science than those who are not. Theses of this kind tend not to have been discussed much in journals or monographs, but are tackled by Hendry (1996), Rowbottom (2002) and Wray (2015b).

  9. It seems more natural to call the commitments above ‘acceptance’ and then discuss what kind of beliefs do, or should, accompany them. But for ease of comparison, I will follow the use that has now, alas, become standard in the literature.

  10. Note that this doesn’t present any obstacles to these beings doing research in a way similar to our own at the level of the group. For example, different members of the community may pursue different theories simultaneously.

  11. ‘Scientific gnostics and agnostics need not be philosophers at all’. (Van Fraassen 1980: p. 213)

  12. Note also van Fraassen’s slip between ‘understanding the character of the enterprise’ in the first sentence and ‘understanding the enterprise’ in the next sentence. These are different. Such imprecision (and hence lack of clarity) is, alas, characteristic of van Fraassen’s discussions on this topic. For present purposes I adopt the charitable route of assuming that he means ‘understanding the character’ throughout.

  13. I still don’t think all scientific realists would agree with this claim. For one thing, ‘will’ should arguably be replaced with ‘should’.

  14. Or, if one prefers, he doesn’t think there is any such thing as an aim of science, or ‘success in science as such’.

  15. Note that there are plausibly ways to connect the view that doing something is a reliable means by which to get closer to achieving X and the view that X is ‘the aim’ of doing it. See the discussion of ‘the aim of science’ in Rowbottom (2010b) for more on this.

  16. The following similar thesis features in Boyd’s (1983: p. 45) later definition of ‘scientific realism’: ‘The reality which scientific theories describe is largely independent of our thoughts or theoretical commitments’.

  17. On a later occasion, however, Boyd (1983: p. 45) didn’t include ‘typically’ as a qualification: “‘Theoretical terms” in scientific theories ... should be thought of as putatively referring expressions; scientific theories should be interpreted “realistically”’.

  18. He continues by noting, quite rightly, that: ‘a pessimistic scientific realist might think none of these things without thereby ceasing to be a realist. A slightly more optimistic realist might tentatively accept some particular theory as true’.

  19. Besides, Thomson did not intend the talk of the sphere of positive charge to be taken literally. Thomson (1899: p. 565) stated only that: ‘the negative effect is balanced by something which causes the space through which the corpuscles are spread to act as if it had a charge of positive electricity’ [emphasis mine].

  20. ‘Entities’ includes properties as well as property-bearers.

  21. This thesis is expressed imperfectly in so far as ‘approximately’ might conceivably be deleted; moreover, one might, in principle, replace ‘approximately’ with a variable expressing degree. Partly for reasons of economy and partly due to the current status of the debate, however, I don’t include such factors in my formulation.

  22. Elsewhere, Psillos (2000: p. 707) writes: ‘The... presumptuous claim is that, although this world is independent of human cognitive activity, science can nonetheless succeed in arriving at a more or less faithful representation of it, enabling us to know the truth (or at least some truth) about it’. Again, there are two distinct claims here: arriving at a more or less faithful representation of something doesn’t entail enabling us to know (some) truth about it.

  23. The notion of knowledge is close to the contemporary one of ‘information’, at least if one does not think that information needs to be true. See Allo (2010) and Rowbottom (2014b) for more on this.

  24. I assume there is some unintended imprecision in Psillos’s statement: he presumably didn’t intend to require that the methods generate the theories or beliefs, as opposed to confirm them or select them. (Confirmation or selection of generated theories will be a special case. Many generated theories will never be confirmed.)

  25. Interestingly, Boyd (1980) says something similar about scientific language and scientific methods; that’s to say, he takes these to improve successively too. Later, Boyd (1983: p. 45) also offered a weaker methodological claim:

    Scientific theories, interpreted realistically, are confirmable and in fact often confirmed as approximately true by ordinary scientific evidence interpreted in accordance with ordinary methodological standards.

  26. ‘C’ stands for ‘comparative’.

  27. A recent example of a version of realism subscribing to (virtue-C) is the ‘relative realism’ defended by Mizrahi (2013b).

  28. This is implausible, given the history of realist positions discussed previously: the significance of novel predictions on Musgrave’s view, theses of the form (virtue) and (virtue-C), and so forth.

  29. There is some lack of clarity about the definition of ‘detection properties’, because Chakravartty (1998: p. 402) later states: ‘detection properties [are those] on the basis of which we infer entity existence’. That’s to say, the initial definition seems ontological whereas the latter seems methodological. I propose to resolve this tension in the following way. I think Chakravartty’s original definition above should have read: ‘define detection properties as those upon which the causal regularities of our detections putatively depend, or in virtue of which these regularities are putatively manifested’.

  30. The idea of quietism as an option is older. For example, Suárez (2012)—which is based on a talk originally given in 2006—argues that Kitcher’s ‘real realism’ reduces to this.

  31. On the background to the no miracle argument, see Psillos (1999: pp. 72–77).

  32. For brief introductions to the fallacy, along with worked examples, see Rowbottom (2015: pp. 132–133) and Henderson (2017: §3).

  33. For more on the significance of background knowledge or information in confirmation theory, see Rowbottom (2014b).

  34. Explorations of different varieties of this argument can be found in Ruhmkorff (2014) and Wray (2015a).

  35. See also Müller (2016), which advances a different criticism concerning the burden of proof.

  36. I don’t find this charge against Vickers (2013) to be fair, because he claims that ‘Divide et impera realism needs to be challenged by, and developed in light of, the full historical record...each example has the potential to bring something new to the debate... it remains possible that we might develop a recipe for identifying idle posits’.

  37. For a formal treatment of the argument, see Rowbottom (2016; Manuscript, Ch. III).

  38. For more on the burden of proof in underdetermination-style arguments, see Belot (2015).

  39. These might plausibly be simplified into extent of imaginative labour and quality of imaginative labour factors, in line with the style of treatment in Rowbottom (2011a, 2013).

  40. Wray’s and Rowbottom’s work on this was independent, occurring at around the same time.

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Acknowledgements

I should like to thank Lingnan University for supporting the conference on which this special issue is based, and the attendees of the conference for the discussions that prompted this contribution. I should also like to thank the RGC for funding my recent work on scientific realism (via a Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship, ‘The Instrument of Science’). Finally, I am grateful to Patrick McGivern for useful comments on a previous version of this piece.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Lingnan University, 8 Castle Peak Road, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong

    Darrell P. Rowbottom

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Correspondence to Darrell P. Rowbottom.

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Rowbottom, D.P. Scientific realism: what it is, the contemporary debate, and new directions. Synthese 196, 451–484 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1484-y

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