The semantic conception

Starting in the 1960s, philosophers of science explored alternative approaches to scientific theories. Prominent among them was the so-called semantic conception, originally formulated by Patrick Suppes, according to which theories are viewed as collections of models together with hypotheses about how these models relate to parts of nature. Versions of the semantic conception differ in their views about the character of models, sometimes taking models to be abstract mathematical structures, susceptible to precise formal specifications, and sometimes taking them to be more concrete (as chemists do, for example, when they build models of particular molecules).

The semantic conception of theories has several attractive features. First, unlike the older approach, it provides a way of discussing aspects of science that are independent of the choice of a particular language. Second, it appears to do far more justice to areas of science in which theoretical achievements resist axiomatization. Darwinian evolutionary theory is a case in point. During the heyday of the axiomatic approach, a few philosophers attempted to show how the theory of evolution could be brought within the orthodox conception of theories, but their efforts tended to produce formal theories that bordered on triviality. The consequent debates about whether the theory of evolution was more than a tautology should have generated serious philosophical embarrassment. Philosophers deploying the semantic conception, by contrast, shed light on theoretical issues that arise in contemporary evolutionary biology.

Finally, the semantic conception is far better suited to an aspect of the sciences that was frequently neglected, the practice of idealization. Instead of thinking of scientists as aspiring to offer literally correct descriptions of general features of the world, the semantic conception supposes that they propose models accompanied by claims that particular parts of nature correspond to these models in specific respects and to specific degrees.

When the ways in which meaning accrued to theoretical vocabulary constituted a burning question for the philosophy of science, it was natural to adopt an axiomatic approach to scientific theories and to focus on the connections between theoretical terms and language that are more readily understood (and, to the extent that questions remain in the wake of Putnam’s insights about the theoretical-observational and observable-unobservable distinctions, the axiomatic approach can still be of value in this area). Similarly, when a philosopher (or scientist) wonders whether a specific assumption or a particular choice of a parameter value is necessary, the device of axiomatization helps to resolve the question; given an axiomatic presentation, one can explore whether every derivation using the assumption can be transformed into one without. However, when the topic under study is a science in which there are few generalizations, or when one is concerned to elucidate issues about idealization in science, the semantic conception seems much more illuminating. Finally, in probing the dynamics of large-scale change in science—reconstructing the ways in which Darwin won acceptance for his evolutionary theory, for example—the concepts introduced by Kuhn and those who reacted to his work seem more readily applicable. The insistence that there must be a unique answer to what scientific theories really are seems like misplaced dogmatism that obstructs philosophical inquiry.

Unification and reduction

One large question about scientific theories that excites philosophical and scientific attention concerns the possibility of producing a single theory that will encompass the domains of all the sciences. Many thinkers are attracted by the idea of a unified science, or by the view that the sciences form a hierarchy. There is a powerful intuitive argument for this attitude. If one considers the subject matter of the social sciences, for example, it seems that social phenomena are the product of people standing in complicated relations to each other and acting in complicated ways. These people, of course, are complex biological and psychological systems. Their psychological activity is grounded in the neural firings in their brains. Hence, people are intricate biological systems. The intricacies of biology are based on the choreography of molecular reactions within and between individual cells. Biology, then, is very complicated chemistry. Chemical reactions themselves involve the forming and breaking of bonds, and these are matters of microphysics. At the end of the day, therefore, all natural phenomena, even those involving interactions between people, are no more than an exceptionally complicated series of transactions between the ultimate physical constituents of matter. A complete account of those ultimate constituents and their interactions would thus amount to a “theory of everything.”

This argument builds on some important scientific discoveries. Whereas earlier generations thought that living things must contain something more than complex molecules (some “vital substance,” say), or that there must be something more to thinking beings than intricate brains (an “immaterial mind,” for example), contemporary biology and contemporary neuroscience showed that there is no need for such hypotheses. Given the firm consensus of contemporary science, there is a constitutive hierarchy: all molecules are made out of fundamental particles; all organic systems are made out of molecules; people are organic systems; and societies are composed of people. Yet there is a difference between a constitutive hierarchy of the things studied by various sciences and a reductive hierarchy of those sciences. Biology studies organisms, entities composed of molecules (and nothing more); it does not follow that biology can be reduced to the science that studies molecules (chemistry).

To understand this distinction it is necessary to have a clear concept of reduction. The most influential such proposal, by Ernest Nagel, was made within the framework of the axiomatic conception of scientific theories. Nagel suggested that one theory is reduced to another when the axioms of the reduced theory can be derived from the axioms of the reducing theory, supplemented with principles (“bridge principles”) that connect the language of the reduced theory with that of the reducing theory. So, for example, to reduce genetics to biochemistry, one would show how the principles of genetics follow from premises that include the principles of biochemistry together with specifications in biochemical language of the distinctive vocabulary of genetics (terms such as gene, allele, and so forth).

Many philosophers criticized the idea of unified science by arguing that, when reduction is understood in Nagel’s sense, the constitutive hierarchy does not correspond to a reductive hierarchy. They focused specifically on the possibility of reducing biology to physics and chemistry and of reducing psychology to neuroscience. Attempts at reduction face two major obstacles. First, despite serious efforts to formulate them, there are as yet no bridge principles that link the vocabulary of biology to that of chemistry or the vocabulary of psychology to that of neuroscience. It is evidently hard to think of chemical specifications of the property of being a predator, or neurological specifications of the generic state of desiring to eat ice cream, but the problem arises even in more tractable cases, such as that of providing chemical conditions for being a gene. Every gene is a segment of nucleic acid (DNA in most organisms, RNA in retroviruses); the challenge is to find a chemical condition that distinguishes just those segments of nucleic acid that count as genes. Interestingly, this is a serious research question, for, if it were answered, molecular biologists engaged in genomic sequencing would be able to discover the genes in their sequence data far more rapidly than they are now able to do. The fact that the question is still unanswered is due to the fact that genes are functional units that lack any common chemical structure (beyond being nucleic acids, of course). The language of genetics and the language of chemistry classify the molecules in different ways, and, because of this cross-classification, there is no possibility of reduction.

The second difficulty turns on points about explanation. Imagine a small child who is tired and hot. He is dragged by his harried parent past an ice-cream stand. The child starts to scream. One might explain this behaviour by saying that the child saw the ice-cream stand and expressed a desire for ice cream, and the parent refused. Suppose further that a friendly neuroscientist is able to trace the causal history of neural firings in the child’s brain. Would this replace the everyday explanation? Would it deepen it? Would it even constitute an intelligible account of what had happened? A natural inclination is to suspect that the answer to all these questions is no.

A friend of the unity of science, on the other hand, might respond by claiming that this natural inclination arises only because one is ignorant of the neuroscientific details. If one were able actually to formulate the account of the neural causes and to follow the details of the story, one would obtain greater insight into the child’s behaviour and perhaps even be inclined to abandon the explanation based in everyday psychological concepts (“folk psychology”).

Gregor Mendel (1822–84)

Once again, the objection to unified science can be posed in a case in which it is possible to give at least some of the biochemical details. One of the best candidates for a regularity in genetics is a revised version of the rule of independent assortment devised by Gregor Mendel (1822–84): genes on different chromosomes are distributed independently when the gametes are formed (at meiosis). Classical (premolecular) genetics provides a satisfying account of why this is so. In sexually reproducing organisms, the gametes (sperm and ova) are formed in a process in which the chromosomes line up in pairs; after some recombination between members of each pair, one chromosome from each pair is transmitted to the gamete. This kind of pairing and separation will produce independent assortments of chromosomal segments (including genes), no matter what the chromosomes are made of and no matter what the underlying molecular mechanisms. If one were now told a complicated story about the sequence of chemical reactions that go on in all instances of meiosis—it would have to be very complicated indeed, since the cases are amazingly diverse—it would add nothing to the original explanation, for it would fail to address the question “Why do genes on different chromosomes assort independently?” The question is completely resolved once one understands that meiosis involves a specific type of pairing and separation.

The points just made do not imply that ventures in molecular biology are unfruitful or that future research in neuroscience will be irrelevant to psychology. To say that not all explanations in genetics can be replaced by molecular accounts is quite compatible with supposing that molecular biology often deepens the perspective offered by classical genetics (as in the cases of mutation, gene replication, gene transcription and translation, and a host of other processes). Moreover, to deny the possibility of reduction in Nagel’s sense is not to exclude the possibility that some other notion might allow reducibility on a broader scale. It is important, however, to understand this particular failure of the idea of unified science, because when scientists (and others) often think about a “theory of everything,” they are envisaging a set of principles from which explanations of all natural phenomena may be derived. That kind of “final theory” is a pipe dream.

Nancy Cartwright

Proponents of the semantic conception of theories explored alternative notions of reduction. For some philosophers, however, conceiving of theories as families of models provided a useful way of capturing what they saw as the piecemeal character of contemporary scientific work. Instead of viewing the sciences as directed at large generalizations, they suggested that researchers offer a patchwork of models, successful in different respects and to different degrees at characterizing the behaviour of bits and pieces of the natural world. This theme was thoroughly pursued by the American philosopher Nancy Cartwright, who emerged in the late 20th century as the most vigorous critic of unified science.

Cartwright opposed the kind of reduction considered above (“vertical reduction”), but she believed that the standard critiques did not go far enough. She argued that philosophers should also be skeptical of “horizontal reduction,” the idea that models and generalizations have broad scope. Traditional philosophy of science took for granted the possibility of extrapolating regularities beyond the limited contexts in which they can be successfully applied. As a powerful illustration, Cartwright invited readers to consider their confidence in Newton’s second law, which states that force is equal to the product of mass and acceleration (see Newton’s laws of motion). The law can be used to account for the motions of particular kinds of bodies; more exactly, the solar system, the pendulum, and so forth can be modeled as Newtonian systems. There are many natural settings, however, in which it is hard to create Newtonian order. Imagine, for example, someone dropping a piece of paper money from a high window overlooking a public square. Does Newton’s second law determine the trajectory? A standard response would be that it does in principle, though in practice the forces operating would be exceedingly hard to specify. Cartwright questioned whether this reponse is correct. She suggested instead that modern science should be thought of in terms of a history of successful building of Newtonian models for a limited range of situations and that it is only a “fundamentalist faith” that such models can be applied everywhere and always. It is consistent with current scientific knowledge, she argued, that the world is thoroughly “dappled,” containing some pockets of order in which modeling works well and pockets of disorder that cannot be captured by the kinds of models that human beings can formulate.

Scientific Change

Although some of the proposals discussed in the previous sections were influenced by the critical reaction to logical empiricism, the topics are those that figured on the logical-empiricist agenda. In many philosophical circles, that agenda continues to be central to the philosophy of science, sometimes accompanied by the dismissal of critiques of logical empiricism and sometimes by an attempt to integrate critical insights into the discussion of traditional questions. For some philosophers, however, the philosophy of science was profoundly transformed by a succession of criticisms that began in the 1950s as some historically minded scholars pondered issues about scientific change.

The historicist critique was initiated by the philosophers N.R. Hanson (1924–67), Stephen Toulmin, Paul Feyerabend (1924–94), and Thomas Kuhn. Although these authors differed on many points, they shared the view that standard logical-empiricist accounts of confirmation, theory, and other topics were quite inadequate to explain the major transitions that have occurred in the history of the sciences. Feyerabend, the most radical and flamboyant of the group, put the fundamental challenge with characteristic brio: if one seeks a methodological rule that will account for all of the historical episodes that philosophers of science are inclined to celebrate—the triumph of the Copernican system, the birth of modern chemistry, the Darwinian revolution, the transition to the theories of relativity, and so forth—then the best candidate is “anything goes.” Even in less-provocative forms, however, philosophical reconstructions of parts of the history of science had the effect of calling into question the very concepts of scientific progress and rationality.

A natural conception of scientific progress is that it consists in the accumulation of truth. In the heyday of logical empiricism, a more qualified version might have seemed preferable: scientific progress consists in accumulating truths in the “observation language.” Philosophers of science in this period also thought that they had a clear view of scientific rationality: to be rational is to accept and reject hypotheses according to the rules of method, or perhaps to distribute degrees of confirmation in accordance with Bayesian standards. The historicist challenge consisted in arguing, with respect to detailed historical examples, that the very transitions in which great scientific advances seem to be made cannot be seen as the result of the simple accumulation of truth. Further, the participants in the major scientific controversies of the past did not divide neatly into irrational losers and rational winners; all too frequently, it was suggested, the heroes flouted the canons of rationality, while the reasoning of the supposed reactionaries was exemplary.

The work of Thomas Kuhn

In the 1960s it was unclear which version of the historicist critique would have the most impact, but during subsequent decades Kuhn’s monograph emerged as the seminal text. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions offered a general pattern of scientific change. Inquiries in a given field start with a clash of different perspectives. Eventually one approach manages to resolve some concrete issue, and investigators concur in pursuing it—they follow the “paradigm.” Commitment to the approach begins a tradition of normal science in which there are well-defined problems, or “puzzles,” for researchers to solve. In the practice of normal science, the failure to solve a puzzle does not reflect badly on the paradigm but rather does so on the skill of the researcher. Only when puzzles repeatedly prove recalcitrant does the community begin to develop a sense that something may be amiss; the unsolved puzzles acquire a new status, being seen as anomalies. Even so, the normal scientific tradition will continue so long as there are no available alternatives. If a rival does emerge, and if it succeeds in attracting a new consensus, then a revolution occurs: the old paradigm is replaced by a new one, and investigators pursue a new normal scientific tradition. Puzzle solving is now directed by the victorious paradigm, and the old pattern may be repeated, with some puzzles deepening into anomalies and generating a sense of crisis, which ultimately gives way to a new revolution, a new normal scientific tradition, and so on indefinitely.

Kuhn’s proposals can be read in a number of ways. Many scientists have found that his account of normal science offers insights into their own experiences and that the idea of puzzle solving is particularly apt. In addition, from a strictly historical perspective, Kuhn offered a novel historiography of the sciences. However, although a few scholars attempted to apply his approach, most historians of science were skeptical of Kuhnian categories. Philosophers of science, on the other hand, focused neither on his suggestions about normal science nor on his general historiography, concentrating instead on Kuhn’s treatment of the episodes he termed “revolutions.” For it is in discussing scientific revolutions that he challenged traditional ideas about progress and rationality.

At the basis of the challenge is Kuhn’s claim that paradigms are incommensurable with each other. His complicated notion of incommensurability begins from a mathematical metaphor, alluding to the Pythagorean discovery of numbers (such as Square root of√2) that could not be expressed as rationals; irrational and rational lengths share no common measure. He considered three aspects of the incommensurability of paradigms (which he did not always clearly separate). First, paradigms are conceptually incommensurable in that the languages in which they describe nature cannot readily be translated into one another; communication in revolutionary debates, he suggested, is inevitably partial. Second, paradigms are observationally incommensurable in that workers in different paradigms will respond in different ways to the same stimuli—or, as he sometimes put it, they will see different things when looking in the same places. Third, paradigms are methodologically incommensurable in that they have different criteria for success, attributing different values to questions and to proposed ways of answering them. In combination, Kuhn argued, these forms of incommensurability are so deep that, after a scientific revolution, there will be a sense in which scientists work in a different world.

These striking claims are defended by considering a small number of historical examples of revolutionary change. Kuhn focused most on the Copernican revolution, on the replacement of the phlogiston theory with Lavoisier’s new chemistry, and on the transition from Newton’s physics to the special and general theories of relativity. So, for example, he supported the doctrine of conceptual incommensurability by arguing that pre-Copernican astronomy could make no sense of the Copernican notion of planet (within the earlier astronomy, the Earth itself could not be a planet), that phlogiston chemistry could make no sense of Lavoisier’s notion of oxygen (for phlogistonians, combustion is a process in which phlogiston is emitted, and talk of oxygen as a substance that is absorbed is quite wrongheaded), and that theories of relativity distinguish two notions of mass (rest mass and proper mass), neither of which makes sense in Newtonian terms.

All of these arguments received detailed philosophical attention, and it became apparent that the conclusions can be met by adopting a more sophisticated approach to language than that presupposed by Kuhn. The crucial issue is whether the languages of rival paradigms suffice to identify the objects and properties referred to in the terms of the other. Although Kuhn was right to see difficulties here, it is an exaggeration to suppose that the identification is impossible. From Lavoisier’s perspective, for example, the antiquated term dephlogisticated air sometimes means “what remains when phlogiston is removed from the air” (in which case, because there is no such substance as phlogiston, the term fails to pick out anything in the world). But at other times it is used to designate a specific gas (oxygen) that both groups of chemists have isolated. As far as conceptual incommensurability is concerned, it is possible to see Kuhn’s examples as cases in which communication is tricky but not impossible and in which the parties respond to and talk about a common world.

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630)

Tycho Brahe (1546–1601)

The thesis of observational incommensurability is best illustrated via Kuhn’s example of the Copernican revolution. In the late 16th century, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), a committed follower of Copernicus, assisted the great astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), who believed that the Earth is at rest. Kuhn imagined Tycho and Kepler watching the sunrise together, and, like Hanson before him, suggested that Tycho would see a moving Sun coming into view, while Kepler would see a static Sun becoming visible as the Earth rotates.

Evidently Tycho and Kepler might report their visual experiences in different ways. Nor should it be supposed that there is some privileged “primitive” language—a language that picks out shapes and colours, perhaps—in which all observers can describe what they see and reach agreement with those who are similarly situated. But these points, while they may have been neglected in earlier philosophy of science, do not yield the radical Kuhnian conclusions. In the first place, the difference in the experiential reports is quite compatible with the perception of a common object, possibly described correctly by one of the participants, possibly accurately reported by neither; both Tycho and Kepler see the Sun, and both perceive the relative motion of Sun and Earth. Furthermore, although there may be no bedrock language of uncontaminated observation to which they can retreat, they have available to them forms of description that presuppose only shared commonsense ideas about objects in the vicinity. If they become tired of exchanging their preferred reports—“I see a moving Sun,” “I see a stationary Sun becoming visible through the Earth’s rotation”—they can both agree that the orange blob above the hillside is the Sun and that more of it can be seen now than could be seen two minutes ago. There is no reason, then, to deny that Tycho and Kepler experience the same world or to suppose that there are no observable aspects of it about which they can reach agreement.

The thesis of methodological incommensurability can also be illustrated through the Copernican example. After the publication of Copernicus’s system in 1543, professional astronomers quickly realized that, for any Sun-centred system like Copernicus’s, it would be possible to produce an equally accurate Earth-centred system, and conversely. How could the debate be resolved? One difference between the systems lay in the number of technical devices required to generate accurate predictions of planetary motions. Copernicus did better on this score, using fewer of the approved repertoire of geometrical tricks than his opponents did. But there was also a tradition of arguments against the possibility of a moving Earth. Scholars had long maintained, for example, that, if the Earth moved, objects released from high places would fall backwards, birds and clouds would be left behind, loose materials on the Earth’s surface would be flung off, and so forth. Given the then-current state of theories of motion, there were no obvious errors in these lines of reasoning. Hence, it might have seemed that a decision about the Earth’s motion must involve a judgment of values (perhaps to the effect that it is more important not to introduce dynamical absurdities than to reduce the number of technical astronomical devices). Or perhaps the decision could be made only on faith—faith that answers to questions about the behaviour of birds and clouds would eventually be found. (This illustrates a point raised in an earlier section: namely, that attempts to justify the choice of a hypothesis rest on expectations about future discoveries. 

Methodological incommensurability presents the most severe challenge to views about progress and rationality in the sciences. In effect, Kuhn offered a different version of the underdetermination thesis, one more firmly grounded in the actual practice of the sciences. Instead of supposing that any theory has rivals that make exactly the same predictions and accord equally well with all canons of scientific method, Kuhn suggested that certain kinds of large controversies in the history of science pit against each other approaches with different virtues and defects and that there is no privileged way to balance virtues and defects. The only way to address this challenge is to probe the examples, trying to understand the ways in which various kinds of trade-offs might be defended or criticized.

Responses

One way to think about the Copernican example (and other Kuhnian revolutions) is to recognize the evolution of the debates. In 1543 the controversy might have seemed quite unsettled; the simplification of technical machinery might have inspired some people to work further on the Copernican program, while the dynamical problems posed by the moving Earth might have prompted others to articulate the more traditional view. If neither choice can be seen as uniquely rational, neither can be dismissed as unreasonable.

Later, after Kepler’s proposals of elliptical orbits, Galileo’s telescopic observations, and Galileo’s consideration of the dynamical arguments, the balance shifted. Copernicanism had shed a number of its defects, while the traditional view had acquired some new ones. Since both approaches still faced residual problems—sciences rarely solve all the problems that lie within their domain, and there are always unanswered questions—it would still have been possible in principle to give greater weight to the virtues of traditional astronomy or to the defects of Copernicanism. By the mid-17th century, however, it would have been unreasonable to adopt any value judgment that saw the achievements of the tradition as so glorious, or the deficiencies of the rival as so severe, that Copernicanism should still be rejected. That type of valuation would be akin to preferring a decrepit jalopy, with a nonfunctioning engine and a rusting chassis, to a serviceable new car solely on the grounds that the old wreck had a more appealing hood ornament.

Although a few philosophers of science tried to make this line of response to Kuhn’s challenge more general and more precise, many contemporary discussions seem to embody one of two premature reactions. Some hold that the worries about revolutionary change have been adequately addressed and that the philosophy of science can return to business as usual. Others conclude that Kuhn’s arguments are definitive and that there is no hope of salvaging the progressiveness and rationality of science (some more-radical versions of this position will be considered in the next two sections).

Kuhn’s discussions of incommensurability challenge claims about the rationality of science by asking whether it is possible to show how the accepted views of method and justification would allow the resolution of scientific revolutions. The philosophical task here is to adapt one of the existing approaches to confirmation (Bayesianism or eliminativism, for example) to the complex contexts Kuhn presents or, if that cannot be done, to formulate new methodological rules, rules that can be defended as conditions of rationality that will apply to these contexts.

Equally, the points about incommensurability challenge the thesis that the sciences are progressive by denying the possibility of understanding the history of science as a process of accumulating truth. Here the philosopher of science needs to provide an account of progress in terms of convergence on the truth or to show how progress can be understood in other terms.

During the 1960s and ’70s, a number of developments tipped the controversy in favour of the realists. First was Putnam’s diagnosis, discussed above, that the logical-empiricist account of the meanings of theoretical terms rested on conflating two distinctions. Second was the increasing acceptance, in the wake of the writings of Kuhn and Hanson, of the view that there is no neutral observation language. If all language bears theoretical presuppositions, then there seems to be no basis for supposing that language purporting to talk about unobservables must be treated differently from language about observables. Third was an influential argument by the American philosopher Grover Maxwell (1918–81), who noted that the concept of the observable varies with the range of available devices: many people are unable to observe much without interposing pieces of glass (or plastic) between their eyes and the world; more can be observed if one uses magnifying glasses, microscopes, telescopes, and other devices. Noting that there is an apparent continuum here, Maxwell asked where one should mark the decisive ontological shift: at what point should one not count as real the entities one thinks one is observing?

Perhaps most decisive was a line of reasoning that became known as “the ultimate argument for realism,” which appeared in two major versions. One version, developed by Salmon, considered in some detail the historical process through which scientists had convinced themselves of the reality of atoms. Focusing on the work of the French physicist Jean Perrin (1870–1942), Salmon noted that there were many, apparently independent, methods of determining the values of quantities pertaining to alleged unobservables, each of which supplied the same answer, and he argued that this would be an extraordinary coincidence if the unobservables did not in fact exist. The second version, elaborated by J.J.C. Smart, Putnam, and Richard Boyd, was even more influential. Here, instead of focusing on independent ways of determining a theoretical quantity, realists pointed to the existence of theories that give rise to systematic successes over a broad domain, such as the computation of the energies of reactions with extraordinary accuracy or the manufacture of organisms with precise and highly unusual traits. Unless these theories were at least approximately true, realists argued, the successes they give rise to would amount to a coincidence of cosmic proportions—a sheer miracle.

The antirealism of van Fraassen, Laudan, and Fine

In the 1990s, however, the controversy about the reality of unobservables was revived through the development of sophisticated antirealist arguments. Van Fraassen advocated a position that he called “constructive empiricism,” a view intended to capture the insights of logical empiricism while avoiding its defects. A champion of the semantic conception of theories, he proposed that scientists build models that are designed to “save the phenomena” by yielding correct predictions about observables. To adopt the models is simply to suppose that observable events and states of affairs are as if the models were true, but there is no need to commit oneself to the existence of the unobservable entities and processes that figure in the models. Rather, one should remain agnostic. Because the aim of science is to achieve correct predictions about observables, there is no need to assume the extra risks involved in commitment to the existence of unobservables.

A different antirealist argument, presented by Laudan, attacks directly the “ultimate argument” for realism. Laudan reflected on the history of science and considered all the past theories that were once counted as outstandingly successful. He offered a list of outmoded theories, claiming that all enjoyed successes and noting that not only is each now viewed as false, but each also contains theoretical vocabulary that is now recognized as picking out nothing at all in nature. If so many scientists of past generations judged their theories to be successful and, on that basis, concluded that they were true, and if, by current lights, they were all wrong, how can it be supposed that the contemporary situation is different—that, when contemporary scientists gesture at apparent successes and infer to the approximate truth of their theories, they are correct? Laudan formulated a “pessimistic induction on the history of science,” generalizing from the fact that large numbers of past successful theories have proved false to the conclusion that successful contemporary theories are also incorrect.

A third antirealist objection, formulated by both Laudan and Arthur Fine, charges that the popular defenses of realism beg the question. Realists try to convince their opponents by suggesting that only a realist view of unobservables will explain the success of science. In doing so, however, they presuppose that the fact that a certain doctrine has explanatory power provides a reason to accept it. But the point of many antirealist arguments is that allegations about explanatory power have no bearing on questions of truth. Antirealists are unpersuaded when it is suggested, for example, that a hypothesis about atoms should be accepted because it explains observable chemical phenomena. They will be equally unmoved when they are told that a philosophical hypothesis (the hypothesis of scientific realism) should be accepted because it explains the success of science. In both instances, they want to know why the features of the hypotheses to which realists draw attention—the ability of those hypotheses to generate correct conclusions about observable matters—should be taken as indicators of the truth of the hypotheses.

“Piecemeal” realism

Realists tried to respond to these powerful points. One popular rejoinder is that antirealists cannot account for important facets of scientific practice. Thus, it is sometimes suggested that the routine method of conjoining theoretical claims from different scientific theories (as, for example, when earth scientists draw on parts of physics and chemistry) would not make sense unless there was a serious commitment to the approximate truth of the theoretical principles. Alternatively, one may take the practice of choosing certain kinds of experiments (experiments taken to be particularly revealing) to reflect a belief in the reality of underlying entities; thus, a medical researcher might choose a particular class of animals to inject with an antibiotic on the grounds that the concentration of bacteria in those animals is likely to be especially high.

Or the realist can attempt to argue that the kinds of inferences that the antirealist will acknowledge as unproblematic—for example, the generalization from observed samples to conclusions about a broader population of observable things—can be made only in light of an understanding of unobservable entities and mechanisms. One cannot tell what makes a sample suitable for generalization unless one has views about the ways in which that sample might be biased, and that will typically entail beliefs about relevant unobservable causes. Antirealists must either show that they have the resources to make sense of these and other features of scientific practice or offer reasons for thinking that the procedures in question should be revised.

Laudan’s pessimistic induction on the history of science attracted considerable scrutiny. Realists pointed out, correctly, that his list of successful past theories contains a number of dubious entries. Thus, it would be hard to defend the medieval theory of disease as caused by an imbalance of humours as particularly successful, and similar judgments apply to the geological catastrophism of the 18th century and the phlogiston theory of chemical combination.

Yet it is impossible to dismiss all of Laudan’s examples. One of his most telling points is that the account of the wave propagation of light of Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788–1827) was spectacularly successful in explaining and predicting facts about diffraction and interference; one of its most dramatic successes, for example, was the prediction of the Poisson bright spot, a point of light at the centre of the shadow of a small rotating disk. (Ironically, the French mathematician for whom the spot is named, Siméon-Denis Poisson [1781–1840], believed that Fresnel was wrong and that the prediction of the spot was an absurd consequence of a false theory.) Fresnel, however, based his theory on the hypothesis that light waves are propagated in an all-pervading ether. Since contemporary science rejects the ether, it must also reject Fresnel’s theory as false.

This example is especially instructive, because it points to a refinement of realism. Contemporary optics takes over Fresnel’s mathematical treatment of wave propagation but denies the need for any medium in which the propagation takes place. So part of his theory is honoured as approximately correct, while the rest is seen as going astray because of Fresnel’s belief that any wave motion needs a medium in which the waves are propagated. Faced with a choice between saying that Fresnel’s theory is correct and saying that it is wrong, contemporary scientists would opt for the negative verdict. One would do greater justice to the situation, however, not by treating the theory as a whole but by judging some parts to be true and others false. Furthermore, when Fresnel’s work is analyzed in this way, it can be seen that the correct parts are responsible for its predictive successes. Appeals to the ether play no role when Fresnel is accounting for experimental data about interference bands and diffraction patterns. Hence, this example supports the realist linkage of success and truth by revealing that the parts of theory actually put to work in generating successful predictions continue to be counted as correct.

Indeed, realists can go farther than this: it can be argued that there is empirical evidence, of a kind that antirealists should be prepared to accept, of a connection between success and truth. People sometimes find themselves in situations in which their success at a particular task depends on their views about observable entities that they are temporarily unable to observe (think, for example, about card games in which players have to make judgments about cards that other players are holding). The evidence from such situations shows that systematic success is dependent on forming approximately correct hypotheses about the hidden things. There are no good grounds for thinking that the regularity breaks down when the entities in question lie below the threshold of human observation. Indeed, it would be a strange form of metaphysical hubris to suppose that the world is set up so that the connection between success and truth is finely tuned to the contingent perceptual powers of human beings. The debate about the reality of the unobservable entities that scientific theories frequently posit is not over, but realism is once again a dominant position. The contemporary realist view, however, was refined by the critiques of van Fraassen, Laudan, and Fine. The most plausible version of realism is a “piecemeal realism,” a view that defends the permissibility of interpreting talk of unobservables literally but insists on attention to the details of particular cases. Realists also learned to give up the thought that theories as wholes should be assessed as true or false. They thus contend for the acceptance of particular unobservable entities and for the approximate truth of particular claims about those entities.

The previous discussion concentrated on only one of the controversies that surround scientific realism, the debate about whether talk of unobservables should have the same status as talk of observables. Contemporary exchanges, however, are often directed at a broader issue: the possibility of judging whether any claim at all is true. Some of these exchanges involve issues that are as old as philosophy—very general questions about the nature and possibility of truth. Others arise from critiques of traditional philosophy of science that are often inspired by the work of Kuhn but are more radical.Many people, including many philosophers, find it natural to think of truth as correspondence to reality. The picture they endorse takes human language (and thought) to pick out things and properties in a mind-independent world and supposes that what people say (or think) is true just in case the things they pick out have the properties they attribute to them. A deep and ancient conundrum is how words (or thoughts) manage to be connected with determinate parts of nature. It is plainly impossible for human beings ever to occupy a position from which they could observe simultaneously both their language (thought) and the mind-independent world and establish (or ascertain) the connection. That impossibility led many thinkers (including Kuhn, in a rare but influential discussion of truth) to wonder whether the idea of truth as correspondence to mind-independent reality makes sense.The issues here are complex and reach into technical areas of metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Some philosophers maintain that a correspondence theory of truth can be developed and defended without presupposing any absurd Archimedean point from which correspondences are instituted or detected. Others believe that it is a mistake to pursue any theory of truth at all. To assert that a given statement is true, they argue, is merely another way of asserting the statement itself. Fine elaborated this idea further in the context of the philosophy of science, proposing that one should accept neither realism nor antirealism; rather, one should give up talking about truth in connection with scientific hypotheses and adopt what he calls the “natural ontological attitude.” To adopt that attitude is simply to endorse the claims made by contemporary science without indulging in the unnecessary philosophical flourish of declaring them to be “true.”

These sophisticated proposals and the intricate arguments urged in favour of them contrast with a more widely accessible critique of the idea of “scientific truth” that also starts from Kuhn’s suspicion that the idea of truth as correspondence to mind-independent reality makes no sense. Inspired by Kuhn’s recognition of the social character of scientific knowledge (a paradigm is, after all, something that is shared by a community), a number of scholars proposed a more thoroughly sociological approach to science. Urging that beliefs acclaimed as “true” or “false” be explained in the same ways, they concluded that truth must be relativized to communities: a statement counts as true for a community just in case members of that community accept it. (For an account of this view in the context of ethics.

The proposal for a serious sociology of scientific knowledge should be welcomed. As the sociologists David Bloor and Barry Barnes argued in the early 1970s, it is unsatisfactory to suppose that only beliefs counted as incorrect need social and psychological explanation. For it would be foolish to suggest that human minds have some attraction to the truth and that cases in which people go astray must be accounted for in terms of the operation of social or psychological biases that interfere with this natural aptitude. All human beliefs have psychological causes, and those causes typically involve facts about the societies in which the people in question live. A comprehensive account of how an individual scientist came to some novel conclusion would refer not only to the observations and inferences that he made but to the ways in which he was trained, the range of options available for pursuing inquiries, and the values that guided various choices—all of which would lead, relatively quickly, to aspects of the social practice of the surrounding community. Barnes and Bloor were right to advocate symmetry, to see all beliefs as subject to psychological and sociological explanation.

But nothing momentous follows from this. Consistent with the emphasis on symmetry, as so far understood, one could continue to draw the everyday distinction between those forms of observation, inference, and social coordination that tend to generate correct beliefs and those that typically lead to error. The clear-eyed observer and the staggering drunkard may both come to believe that there is an elephant in the room, and psychological accounts may be offered of the belief-formation process in each case. This does not mean, of course, that one is compelled to treat the two belief-forming processes as on a par, viewing them as equally reliable in detecting aspects of reality. So one can undertake the enterprise of seeking the psychological and social causes of scientific belief without abandoning the distinction between those that are well-grounded and those that are not.Sociological critiques of “scientific truth” sometimes try to reach their radical conclusions by offering a crude analogue of Laudan’s historical argument against scientific realism. They point out that different contemporary societies hold views that are at variance with Western scientific doctrines; indigenous Polynesian people may have ideas about inheritance, for example, that are at odds with those enshrined in genetics. To insist that Westerners are right and the Polynesians wrong, it is suggested, is to overlook the fact of “natural rationality,” to suppose that there is a difference in psychological constitution that favours Westerners.But this reasoning is fallacious. Sometimes differences in people’s beliefs can be explained by citing differences in their sensory faculties or intellectual acumen. Such cases, however, are relatively rare. The typical account of why disagreement occurs identifies differences in experiences or interests. Surely this is the right way to approach the divergence of Westerners and Polynesians on issues of heredity. To hold that Western views on this particular topic are more likely to be right than Polynesian views is not to suppose that Westerners are individually brighter (in fact, a compelling case can be made for thinking that, on average, people who live in less-pampered conditions are more intelligent) but rather to point out that Western science has taken a sustained collective interest in questions of heredity and that it has organized considerable resources to acquire experiences that Polynesians do not share. So, when one invokes the “ultimate argument for realism” and uses the success of contemporary molecular genetics to infer the approximate truth of the underlying ideas about heredity, one is not arrogantly denying the natural rationality of the Polynesians. On the contrary, Westerners should be willing to defer to them on topics that they have investigated and Westerners have not.

Yet another attempt to argue that the only serviceable notion of truth reduces to social consensus begins from the strong Quinean thesis of the underdetermination of theories by experience. Some historians and sociologists of science maintained that choices of doctrine and method are always open in the course of scientific practice. Those choices are made not by appealing to evidence but by drawing on antecedently accepted social values or, in some instances, by simultaneously “constructing” both the natural and the social order. The best versions of these arguments attempt to specify in some detail what the relevant alternatives are; in such cases, as with Kuhn’s arguments about the irresolvability of scientific revolutions, philosophical responses must attend to the details.

Unfortunately, such detailed specifications are relatively rare, and the usual strategy is for the sociological critique to proceed by invoking the general thesis of underdetermination and to declare that there are always rival ways of going on. As noted earlier, however, a blanket claim about inevitable underdetermination is highly suspect, and without it sociological confidence in “truth by consensus” is quite unwarranted.

Issues about scientific realism and the proper understanding of truth remain unsettled. It is important, however, to appreciate what the genuine philosophical options are. Despite its popularity in the history and sociology of science, the crude sociological reduction of truth is not among those options. Yet, like history, the sociological study of science can offer valuable insights for philosophers to ponder.

Science, Society, And Values

Traditional philosophy of science is relentlessly individualistic. It focuses on individual agents and on the conditions they should satisfy if their beliefs are to be properly supported. On the face of it, this is a curious limitation, for it is evident that contemporary science (and most science of the past) is a social activity. Scientists rely on each other for results, samples, techniques, and many other things. Their interactions are often cooperative, sometimes competitive. Moreover, in the societies in which most scientific research is carried out, the coordinated work of science is embedded in a web of social relations that links laboratories to government agencies, to educational institutions, and to groups of citizens. Can philosophy of science simply ignore this social setting?

Many philosophers believe that it can. It is worth recalling, however, that one of the principal influences on the development of modern science, Francis Bacon, was explicitly concerned with science as a social endeavour and that the founders of the Royal Society attempted to create an institution that would follow Bacon’s direction. Furthermore, as the discussion of the Copernican revolution above seems to show, the notion of social (or collective) rationality is philosophically important. As of 1543, the choice between Copernicanism and the traditional Earth-centred astronomy was unclear; the discussion evolved because some scientists were willing to commit themselves to exploring each of the two views. That was a good thing—but the good was a feature of the community and not of the individuals. Had one of the rival positions languished and all of the community members dedicated themselves to a single point of view, it would have been hard to accuse any single individual of a failure of rationality. It would not, however, have been a rational community.

This is an elementary example of a social feature of science that calls for a broader approach to rationality than what is standard in philosophical discussions. One way of understanding why some methods or principles deserve the label “rational” is to suggest that the ultimate standard for appraising them is in terms of their capacity to yield true beliefs. By the same token, one could suppose that institutions or methods of organizing inquiry count as rational if they are likely to enhance the chances of a future state in which members of the community believe the truth. (There are lurking complications here, which will emerge shortly, but they can be ignored for the moment.) It is not hard to think of ways of promoting diversity in a scientific community. Perhaps the educational system could encourage some people to take large risks and others to pursue relatively safe strategies. Perhaps the system of rewards for scientific achievement could be set up in such a way that individuals would gravitate to lines of research that looked neglected. Standard techniques of mathematical modeling reveal that institutional structures like these produce collectively rational outcomes in situations that seem to recur in the history of the sciences. One thus discovers that factors one might have thought of as antithetical to the rational pursuit of truth—individual biases or interest in social rewards—actually play a positive role in the collective venture.

Detailed sociological investigation is required to discover the ways in which scientists interact with each other and with parts of the broader society; detailed psychological investigations are needed to understand the ways in which they make choices. A satisfactory philosophical account of the sciences should be just as interested in whether the sociopsychological matrix is conducive to the attainment of truth by the community as it is in whether particular lines or styles of reasoning lead individuals to correct beliefs. At present, however, the sociology and psychology of science are in their infancy, and philosophy has little by way of data on which to build. It is already possible, however, to envisage a future philosophical account that avoids the limitations of the individualistic perspective now current.

Such an account might find that the social structures inherited from the early-modern period are quite satisfactory as a means of pursuing the aims of the sciences (although that would be surprising). Some contemporary philosophers believe that good reasons for thinking this will not be so are already apparent. Pointing to the exclusion, or marginalization, of some groups of people, they suggest that the current collective practice of science is biased toward the realization of a partial set of values. The most vigorous articulation of this perspective is offered in recent feminist philosophy of science.

Feminist themes

There are various ways of pursuing feminist themes in connection with the sciences. An important project often dismissed as too limited, is to document the ways in which women have been excluded from participation in research projects. More philosophically ambitious is the attempt to show how women’s exclusion led to a bias in the conclusions that scientists accept. Here there is a classic and compelling example: during the 1950s and ’60s, (male) primatologists arrived at hypotheses about territoriality and aggression in the troops of primates they studied; as an increasing number of women entered the field in the 1970s, aspects of primate social life that had been invisible came to be noted, and the old hypotheses were forced to undergo radical revision. The specific moral of this case is that pooling the observations of both men and women may enlarge the range of evidence available to the scientific community; the more general point is that a diversity of social backgrounds and social roles can sometimes provide the most inclusive body of data.

Feminists sometimes wanted to argue for a bolder thesis. Appealing to the general thesis of the underdetermination of theories by evidence, they claimed that choices between equally good rivals are made by introducing considerations of value that reflect the masculine bias of the scientific community. Yet this style of argument works no better in this context than it did in the blanket sociological invocation of underdetermination considered in the last section. Where feminists can make a detailed case for the existence of equivalent rivals, it is important to probe their decision making to see whether an arbitrary choice is being grounded in a problematic way. There is no general reason for believing that evidential considerations always fall short, creating a vacuum that can be filled only by the irruption of masculine values.

The feminist argument does, however, point toward a deeper issue. Once it is understood that science is a social enterprise, it may be supposed that the institutions that guide the development of the sciences absorb major features of the background society, including the privileged position of men, and that this affects the goals set for the sciences and the values placed on certain types of scientific achievements. This form of the feminist critique is extremely important in bringing into the open issues that were skirted in previous discussions and that have been neglected in the traditional philosophy of science. They can best be approached by returning to the unfinished question of the nature of scientific progress.

Progress and values

Suppose that scientific realism succeeds in fighting off challenges to the view that the sciences attain (or accumulate, or converge on) truth. Does this mean that there is now a satisfactory understanding of scientific progress as increasing grasp of truth? Not necessarily. For the truths about nature are too many, and most of them are not worth knowing. Even if one focuses on a small region of the universe—a particular room, say, during the period of an hour—there are infinitely many languages for describing that room and, for each such language, infinitely many true statements about the room during that time. Simply accumulating truth about the world is far too easy. Scientific progress would not be made by dispatching armies of investigators to count leaves or grains of sand. If the sciences make progress, it is because they offer an increasing number of significant truths about the world.

The question of scientific progress is unfinished because this notion of significance was not sufficiently analyzed. Many philosophers wrote either as if the aim of the sciences is to deliver the complete truth about the world (a goal that is not obviously coherent and is surely unattainable) or as if there is some objective notion of significance, given by nature. What might this notion of significance be? Perhaps that the truths desired are the laws of nature or the fundamental principles that govern natural phenomena. But proposals like this are vulnerable to the worries about the role of laws and about the possibility of unified science discussed above. Moreover, many thriving sciences do not seem to be in the business of enunciating laws; there appear to be large obstacles to finding some “theory of everything” that will integrate and subsume all the sciences that have been pursued (let alone those that might be pursued in the future). A sober look at the variety of scientific research undertaken today suggests that the sciences seek true answers to questions that are taken to be significant, either because they arouse people’s curiosity or because they lend themselves to the pursuit of practical goals that people want to achieve. The agenda for research is set not by nature but by society.

At this point, the feminist critique obtains a purchase, for the picture just outlined identifies judgments of value as central to the direction of scientific inquiry—we pursue the truths that matter to us. But who are the “we” whose values enter into the identification of the goals of the sciences? To what extent do the value judgments actually made leave out important constituencies within the human population? These are serious questions, and one of the main contributions of feminist philosophy of science is to bring them to philosophical attention.

The main point, however, is general. An account of the goals of science cannot rest with the bare assertion that the sciences seek truth. Philosophers should offer an analysis of which kinds of truths are important, and, unless they can revive the idea of an “objective agenda set by nature,” they will have to conclude that judgments about human interests and values are part of a philosophical account of science. This means that philosophy of science can no longer confine itself to treating issues that relate to logic, epistemology, and metaphysics (questions about the reconstruction of scientific theories, the nature of natural necessity, and the conditions under which hypotheses are confirmed). Moral and political philosophy will also enter the philosophy of science.

Insofar as philosophers have reflected on the ethics of science, they have often regarded the questions as relatively straightforward. Application of virtually any major moral theory will support restrictions on the kinds of things that can be done to people in scientific experimentation; everyday maxims about honesty will generate the conclusions about fraud and misrepresentation that are routinely made when cases of scientific misconduct surface. These issues about the ways in which scientists are expected to behave in their daily work are superficial; the deeper moral and political questions concern the ways in which the goals of inquiry are set (and, correspondingly, in which progress is understood). One might say, vaguely, that the sciences should pursue those truths whose attainment would best promote the collective good; but this, of course, leaves the hard philosophical task of understanding “the collective good.” How should the divergent interests of different groups of people be weighed? How should the balance between satisfying human curiosity and solving practical problems be struck? How should future gains be judged in relation to short-term demands? Philosophy of science has so far said too little in response to these questions.

Many of the philosophical topics so clearly formulated by the logical positivists and logical empiricists are, rightly, still the focus of 21st-century concern. Increased understanding of the history of the sciences and of the social character of scientific practice has set broader tasks for the philosophy of science. In a world in which the power of scientific research, for good and for ill, is becoming increasingly obvious, it is to be hoped that issues about the values adopted in the pursuit of science will become more central to philosophical discussion.

Source: britannica.com