The past vs. the tiny: historical science and the abductive arguments for realism

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Abstract

Scientific realism is fundamentally a view about unobservable things, events, processes, and so on, but things can be unobservable either because they are tiny or because they are past. The familiar abductive arguments for scientific realism lend more justification to scientific realism about the tiny than to realism about the past. This paper examines both the “basic” abductive arguments for realism advanced by philosophers such as Ian Hacking and Michael Devitt, as well as Richard Boyd’s version of the inference to the best explanation of the success of science, and shows that these arguments provide less support to historical than to experimental realism. This is because unobservably tiny things can function both as unifiers of the phenomena and as tools for the production of new phenomena, whereas things in the past can only serve as unifiers of the phenomena. The upshot is that realists must not suppose that by presenting arguments for experimental realism they have thereby defended realism in general.

Section snippets

Two kinds of realism

Realism is in fact a family of views about unobservables, including an epistemological view (we have scientific knowledge of unobservables, for our theories about them are true or approximately true); a metaphysical view (unobservables are mind- and theory-independent); a view about truth (statements about unobservables are made true or false by the way the world is); a view about reference (many of the terms that we use to think and talk about unobservables genuinely refer); an axiological view

Two roles for unobservables

Things that are unobservable because they existed or occurred in the past can only serve as unifiers of the phenomena, and never as tools for producing new phenomena. Here is the general argument:

1. The unobservables of historical science are all unobservable because they no longer exist, or (if they are events) because they occurred in the past.

2. Things that no longer exist, and events that occurred in the past, cannot be manipulated or altered by experimenters in the present.

3. Therefore,

Two basic arguments for realism: Devitt and Hacking

I begin with a version of what Hacking calls ‘the experimental argument for realism’ (1983, p. 265), and Nola calls ‘the argument … from manipulability’ (2002, p. 9). It goes like this:

1. Scientists can interact with unobservable x’s (e.g. electrons and positrons) and thereby alter observable conditions in predictable and systematic ways.

2. The fact that scientists are thus able to control the observable by means of the unobservable x’s would be inexplicable if those x’s were not real.

3.

The classical abductive argument for realism: Boyd

Perhaps the most enthusiastically endorsed, most roundly criticized, and most widely discussed argument for scientific realism is the inference to the best explanation of the empirical success of science, which most people trace back to Hilary Putnam’s (1978) famous “no miracles” argument and J. J. C. Smart’s (1963) “cosmic coincidence” argument. This argument has undergone numerous refinements over the years, and it has been subjected to harsh criticism by Laudan (1981) and others, only to be

Conclusion

Both scientific realists and their critics have too often taken scientific realism to be a view about things that are unobservable either because of their great distance from us or, more often, because of their small size relative to us. There is some danger here of confusing the genus (realism) with the species (experimental realism). If the arguments I have made here are sound, then realists have a better motive for doing this than their critics, because the case for experimental realism is

Acknowledgements

I thank Michael Lynch, Brian Ribeiro, Michelle Turner, Mel Woody, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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