-> A common debate goes like this:
View 1:
Science tries to describe the world – our world.
Unless we've made some mistakes, the world we live in is one of electrons, chemical elements, genes, etc.
Was the world of 1000 years ago one of electrons, chemical elements, genes, etc? Yes, but no one knew it back then.
View 2:
The concept of an electron is the product of debates and experiments that took place in a specific historical context.
So the world of 1000 A.D. can't be called a world of electrons, so
We must regard the existence of electrons as dependent on our conceptualization of the world.
-> This book defends a version of scientific realism.
They think it makes sense to say that science aims at describing the real structure of the world we live in, but it's complicated answering whether they think science succeeds at it.
-> 'Realism' is a term that has a wide variety of usages in philosophy, so it should be used cautiously.
-> Reality is independent of thought and language.
We all inhabit a common reality, which has a structure that exists independently of what people think and say about it, except insofar as reality is comprised of, or is causally affected by, thoughts, theories, and other symbols.
The realist accepts we can have different views about the world and different perspectives on it. Despite that, we're all living in and interacting with the same world.
The scientific realist could assert that the world really is the way it's described by our best-established scientific theories.
a.k.a. Michael Devitt (1997)
It's a mistake to express the scientific realist position in a way dependent on the accuracy of our current scientific theories. If we express scientific realism by asserting the real existence of entities recognized by science now, then if our current theories are false, scientific realism will be too.
a.k.a. Bas van Fraassen
Devitt thought that as long as we don't commit ourselves to realism about speculative ideas at the frontier of science, we needn't worry.
Devitt's approach disregards the genuine possibility that well-established parts of science will be discredited in the future, as history has shown us.
-> Should we allow for the possibility that science could conflict with common-sense realism?
This problem is exemplified by quantum mechanics, one of the basic theories in modern physics. In QM the state of a physical system is partially determined by the act of measurement, which according to some interpretations of QM upsets the common-sense realist ideas about the relation between human thought and physical reality.
If scientific realism does assume common-sense realism, then we're committed to holding an everyday, unreflective picture of the world, regardless of what science ends up saying.
Allows for causal links between thought and the rest of reality.
If we sever scientific realism from common-sense realism, it becomes hard to formulate a general claim about how the aim of science is to describe the world.
Modify common-sense realism to allow for the possibility of unexpected, uncommonsensical relations between thought and reality at large.
#3 is Common-Sense Realism Naturalized:
We all inhabit a common reality which as a structure that exists independently of what people think and say abou tit, except insofar as reality is comprised of thoughts, theories, and other symbols, and except insofar as reality is dependent on thoughts, theories, and other symbols in ways that might be uncovered by science.
Common-sense realism naturalized
One actual and reasonable aim of science is to give us accurate descriptions ( and other representations) of what reality is like. this project includes giving us accurate representations of aspects of reality that are unobservable.
Most debate about scientific realism has dealt with whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic about the aspirations of science to represent the world accurately.
What level of confidence should we have in our current theories given the dramatic history of change in science, like the proven non-existence of previously posited entities like caloric and phlogiston.
-> We have good reason to have different levels of confidence and different kinds of confidence in different domains of science.
Ernan Mc Mullin urged that we not think of the parts of physics that deal with the ultimate structure of reality as the model for all of science.
Basic physics is where we deal with the most inaccessible entities furthest from the domain our minds are adapted to dealing with.
Confidence we have about basic physics is confidence that low-level structural features of the world have been captured reliably by our models and equations – a special kind of confidence.
The factors relevant in fundamental physics don't apply in molecular biology, where we're dealing with entities that are far from the lowest levels and which we have a variety of kinds of access to.
Thus having the same attitude towards molecular biology as you'd try to work out for theoretical physics doesn't make sense.
Via accurate representation of the world
Theories can contain errors that compensate for each other
Theories can be successful despite being very wrong about the kins of things they posit, provided they have the right structure in crucial places.
Laudan presented this example: Sadi Carnot thought heat was a fluid, but he worked out some of the basic ideas of thermodynamics accurately despite this. The flow of a fluid was similar enough to patterns in the transfer of kinetic energy between molecules for his mistake not to matter much.
Answering what the right level of optimism to have about well-established scientific theories relies on distinguishing between:
different scientific fields
different kinds of theories
different kinds of success
different kinds of optimism
Types of representations in science used to describe phenomena:
Linguistic representations
Pictures and diagrams that resemble reality in the way they're supposed to
Models that have the right structural similarity to aspects of the world
Mathematical models
Other types of models
Those who opposed it (without agreeing on what's wrong with it):
Logical Positivism was mostly opposed to it
Kuhn was vague and inconsistent, but mostly opposed it
Latour and other Sociologists of Science opposed it
Goodman (inventor of the new riddle of induction) opposed it
Van Fraassen rejected it
Laudan rejected it
It's hard to assess Feyerabend's views on it
Those who favored it:
Popper
Fodor, Hull, Kitcher, and other naturalists, though not all
-> (One side of this debate has been seen as a debate between realism and empiricism)
Many empiricists think that sensory evidence isn't good enough to regard ourselves as accessing a 'real world' of the kind realists are committed to. This position says that the real world exists, but we can never have any knowledge about it.
Irrelevance
No side of the debate regarding the relation between science and reality is saying anything meaningful and the whole discussion is a waste of time because these issues have nothing to do with a theory of language.
Phenomenalism
The nature of language prevents us from hoping to describe the structure of a world beyond our senses because when we make claims about real external objects ,we're really only talking about patterns in our sensations.
There will always be a range of alternative theories compatible with all our actual evidence, and maybe a range of alternative theories compatible with all our possible evidence. So we never have good empirical grounds for choosing one theory over another and regarding the chosen one as representative of how the world really is.
-> a.k.a. Social Constructivism
-> A family of views that includes those of Kuhn and Latour
Metaphysical Constructivism: We have to regard the world as created or constructed by scientific theorizing.
Kuhn: When paradigms change, the world changes too.
but he also expressed a different view, skeptical realism
Latour: Nature (the real world) is the product of decisions made by scientists in the settlement of controversies.
Nelson Goodman: When we invent new languages and theories, we create new worlds
For a metaphysical constructivist, it's not possible for a scientific theory to describe the world as it exists independent of thought, because reality itself is dependent on what people say and think.
The concept of construction (and similar concepts) should be used to express the relationship between theories and reality.
Some metaphysical constructivist views are modified versions of Immanuel Kant's views.
Kant distinguished between the 'noumenal' world and the 'phenomenal' world, and posited that all humans apply the same basic conceptual framework and have no choice.
Kant's noumenal world: The world as it is in itself, a world we're bound to believe in but can never know anything about
Kant's phenomenal world: The world as it appears to us. It's knowable, but partially our creation. It doesn't exist independently of the structure of our minds.
Constructivist antirealism: Works by combining the Kantian picture with a kind of relativism, with the idea that different people/communities create different 'phenomenal worlds' via the imposition of their different concepts on experience.
-> Posits that we construct/make our theories, a.k.a. classifications of objects + includes other moderate theories
Sociology of science doesn't explicitly distinguish between the construction of ideas and the construction of reality.
-> Posits that reality determines thought by stamping itself on the passive mind; reality acts on scientific belief with unmediated compulsory force
Suggests a a passive, inactive view of human thought
Many traditional philosophical theories are interpreted as implicitly committed to the Bad View
In Sociology of Science has very much been a reaction against the Bad View – a reversal of the Bad View's relationships between the mind and the world, wherein theories instead construct reality.
So ultimately, one error (the idea that reality stamps itself on the passive mind) is exchanged for another (that thought or theory constructs reality).
-> Bas van Fraassen's opposition to scientific realism came in a more careful and moderate form that wasn't related to linguistics or psychology.
Instrumentalism -> scientific theories are devices for helping us deal with experience. Instrumentalists don't worry about whether a theory is a true description of the world, or whether theorized entities actually exist.
If a theory enables us to make good predictions, what more can we ask? But we shouldn't wonder whether the right answers result from a deeper match between the theory and the world.
Since we can never know the answer to this question, what relevance does it have to science?
-> Pragmatist tradition in philosophy is related to this.
All we should ask of theories is that they accurately describe the observable parts of the world. Theories that do this are 'empirically adequate'.
When a theory passes a lot of tests and becomes well-established, it should be 'accepted' in a special sense. IN Van Fraassen's view, to accept a theory is to:
Believe (provisionally) that the theory is empirically adequate
To be deemed as such, a theory must describe all observable phenomena that come within its domain, including those that have yet to be investigated.
Use the concepts the theory provides when thinking about further problems and when trying to extend/refine the theory
A scientist can 'live inside' a theory while remaining agnostic about whether the theory is true.
The distinction between the observable and unobservable parts of the world is vague
Realists argue there's a continuum rather than a sharp boundary
Is it still observation if you use a tool to help (e.g. telescope, microscope, x-ray machine, MRI scan)
The distinction between observable and unobservable is vague
There's nothing 'unreal' about the unobservable
We learn about the boundary between the observable and unobservable through science itself
but he insists that it's never reasonable for science to aim at describing the structure of the world beyond the boundary between the observable and unobservable that science has provided.
Possible boundaries in science can be expanded ad infinitum, which is why this line of argument fails:
observable vs unobservable
detectable vs undetectable
There's no boundary marking the distinction between features of the world that science can reasonably aim to tell us about, and those that it can't.
As we learn more about the world, we learn more about which parts of it we can expect to have reliable information about.
As we move from one field to another, our level of confidence has to be adjusted.
We might sometimes have reason to adopt empirical adequacy in some situations, but not all
-> On the topic of accurate representations
Most discussion in the 1900's about this topic treated theories as linguist entities – collections of sentences.
Concepts from philosophy of language were used to describe relationships between theories and reality. Two especially important (perhaps misguidedly so) concepts were:
Truth
A good scientific theory is a true theory.
How can we determine which theories are true?
Reference
Electrons exist if the word ‘electron’ refers to them
How do we decide whether a term in scientific theory refers to anything?
Representational vehicles / media used by science are not always expressed as sentences in ordinary or technical language
Hypotheses can be expressed using models, like mathematical ones.
They’re abstract mathematical structures that are meant to represent key features of real systems in the world.
Linguistic concepts of truth, falsity, reference, etc don’t seem to be useful in thinking about how a mathematical model might succeed in representing the world.
Models have a different kind of representational relationship with the world than language.
A good model has some kind of similarity relationship (probably abstract) with the system it’s ‘targeted’ at.
Models became more important in after the 1950’s in philosophy, and some argued we should use them to give a different description of how all theories work in science.
But not all of science uses the same vehicles to represent the world, so we need a range of different ones to choose from – model-based analysis, language-based analysis, etc.
Using ordinary language, Darwin expressed a set of hypotheses about the world, and supported them with elaborate arguments.
Using mathematical models (formulated using mathematical symbolism and supplemented with a commentary explaining which phenomena in the real world are being represented by the model), modern scientists now discuss how natural selection changes biological populations.
Still, we can’t expect an analysis of how mathematical models relate to the world to use the same concepts as an analysis of how hypotheses expressed in ordinary language can relate to the world.
Model: A structure that’s intended to represent another structure by virtue of an abstract similarity relationship between them.
Bohr’s early ‘solar system’ model of the atom is an example of aiming to understand the unfamiliar by modeling it on the familiar.
Abstract mathematical models = attempts to use a general-purpose, precise framework to represent dependence relationships that could exist between the parts of real systems.
treats one variable as a function of others, which in turn are functions of others, etc.
as a result of the above, a complicated network of dependence structures can be represented.
using commentary it can be treated as representing the dependence structure that could exist in a real system
Different people can use the same mode with different interpretations:
a predictive device
an I/O device
a highly detailed picture of the dependence structure inside the real system being studied
an only semi-accurate representation of the real system in question
The difference between models and linguistically expressed theories may be important in understanding scientific progress. Old theories can seem like failures when truth and reference are applied to them. But when recast as models, some of them have some correct structures.
Summary: Truth and reference in philosophy of science falter because representational vehicles require a different kind of analysis.
Different interpretations of truth:
Calling a theory true is described as a correspondence relationship in philosophy.
Calling a theory true just means that we agree (untrue = disagree) with others, not to describe real connections between language and the world in sociology of science and other disciplines
Godfrey-Smith describes truth as accurate representation.
Postmodernists argue that even the idea of representation as a genuine relationship between symbols and the world is mistaken – regardless of whether those symbols are language, models, thought, etc.