I mentioned my last post a bit about scientific realism. I ended with the question that the scientific realist must pose. If theoretical entities claimed by a theory must be real what does that say about scientific laws or other such "universals." Are they real? Or are only existent things real? I want to answer that by turning to the pragmatists. However to do so I want to take a step back since one of the great alternatives to scientific realism actually developed out of pragmatism. So let's begin with pragmatism.
Pragmatism originally was developed by Charles Sanders Peirce in the 1870's. His pragmatic maxim was extremely influential. Roughly it was that the meaning of any term was what the practical ways we'd conduct measurements of it. So hardness for instance was wrapped up in all the possible ways we'd measure hardness. A diamond is hard because of all the ways we could potentially measure its hardness. Now Peirce wasn't terribly consistent on how he used this and sometimes he treated it akin to the positivist sense of verification criteria. But in general viewing it in terms of meaning fits his philosophy better.
He coined the term pragmatism from Kant. Kant had a notion of pragmatisch which expressed a relation to some definite human purpose. The idea then is that the meaning of things is wrapped up on its effects on human conduct. Our habits. This is very important since this can be taken in many ways. I could on that point alone go down tons of tangents showing similar notions in philosophy. But I want to focus for now on John Dewey and his influence on science.
Dewey had a very different view of the role of theoretical entities in scientific theory than the scientific realists did. These entities didn't have to exist at all. Certainly universals don't need exist. For Dewey scientific terms simply don't refer to reality. Rather the terms are tools humans use to interact with and transform our environment. Their importance is thus purely in terms of utility for our actions and technology rather than as things. They are best seen as labor saving devices. They are "hand-made by man in pursuit of the realization of a particular interest - that of the maximum convertiblity of every object of thought into any and every other." (The Quest for Certainty, 105)
Dewey actually thought that in promoting this view (termed Instrumentalism) was actually in keeping with Peirce's thought. And, given the pragmatic maxim, one can see where he is coming from. However what he was teaching was quite out of line with what Peirce believed. Indeed Peirce felt Dewey (and William James') use of pragmatism was so wrong that Peirce renamed his philosophy as pragmaticism. It was, he felt, a term ugly enough that no one would arrogate it.
Peirce strongly felt that science was about real things. He was, more or less, a scientific realist. That is he felt the truth of scientific theories was wrapped up in descriptions of and reference to reality. However where many scientific realists were nominalist, Peirce was a scholastic realist. What is the difference? The distinction goes back to the medieval era and some disputes over how to take Aristotle.
We know things only via generals. That is I know my carpet as my carpet not by coming to know all the individual pieces of matter that make it up but via general notions such as "carpet," "fabric," "floor," and so forth. Even our notion of things like matter come to us via generals. So what are these generals? One position, the Platonic one, says that it is these generals and not the particulars that are real. The other position, the nominalist one, says that generals are all mental creations or concepts and thus aren't "real." However there was a middle ground held by people like Thomas Aquinas called scholastic realism. This held that there were real universals in particulars but they existed only in the particulars and not independent from them. (This is also sometimes called moderate realism - you can find it in modern philosophy in notions like Armstrong universals and perhaps in the thought of Husserl) There are, however, many problems with this moderate realism which I'll not go into.
There was however a fourth kind of realism that was developed by Duns Scotus (also known as the "subtle doctor" -- and the notion is hard enough to follow that you'll quickly see how he got the name) The Platonist is basically saying that distinctions between things (say the matter in a horse versus a dog) are due to a real distinction (in re) - something "out there." The nominalist says, no, it's just matter. The distinction is a logical one and thus in our mind. Scotus introduces a third kind of distinction in addition to the in re and logical ones. He calls it a formal distinction. Roughly this is the idea that we have a distinction in our mind (the logical distinction) but that there is a factual basis for this. Thus we don't merely distinguish horses and dogs from each other due to our concepts but rather our concepts are informed by something real yet not existent. So we end up with universals that aren't things, aren't separate from the objects that instantiate them, but are true in a mind-independent way.
Peirce takes up this notion and it makes scientific realism make a whole lot of sense. Peirce discusses it by making a distinction between reality and existence whereas neither the Platonists nor the nominalists did. Thus to Peirce there are things that exist and are real (the matter) and things that are real (the universals) but don't exist. To Peirce to be real was merely to be true independent of how anyone thought about them.
Now this really does solve a lot of the problems of scientific realism because it lets us keep theoretical terms that don't refer to space-time objects. So we can talk about gravity being real rather than it merely being a description of how objects move with only the objects being real. It really was a significant discovery and it's unfortunate that more people in the philosophy of science don't embrace it. It also solves our problem with the three kinds of mechanics we'd discussed last week. We can talk about forces, masses, energy and so forth all as real things because they refer to these universals that enable us to make distinctions. The reality need not be the ultimate constitutents of reality to be real. Thus all three of the the forms of mechanics have in there "literal" interpretations real references.
Further unlike Dewey who found all these terms to merely be useful fictions designed to help us interact with a world forever out of our grasp, Peirce felt that everything real was knowable. Thus we can in fact know all these universals (at least in theory).
It really is a revolutionary way of thinking. As we empirically investigate the world around us and see things that are in common or that might appear to be a kind of cause we can postulate an universal and test for it. Because the meaning of terms are wrapped up in their practical consequences - that is the ways they'd be measured - the meaning of universals are also so determined. Thus gravity is real and has its meaning in terms of how we'd empirically test (measure) gravity. We test for it by postulating the idea in our mind, seeing if it as a structure holds, and then recognizing that such consistent structures in our mind only make sense if there is a formal structure out there in a mind-independent way.
Personally it is this approach to science that I find most inspiring about Peirce and primarily why I've kept studying him.
This gives an interesting historical twist to realism, where as our studies advance we come to tell more detailed stories of concepts, including how to understand what is practically involved in the measurements associated to a universal.
I've been developing a similar line of thought for mathematics. But one stumbling block I run up against is what to take as the end of scientific enquiry. I know Peirce spoke of what will be discovered in the hypothetical scientific long run, but I've never been quite clear on what he intends that to mean. Our actual descendants? This won't do if science dies tomorrow. What could be achieved if only we proceeded as we have been? It seems rather vague to me. Are there any limitations placed on the type of hypothetical intelligence operating in this distant future?
For this purpose, Alasdair MacIntyre adopts the Aristotelian language of perfected understanding, i.e., that which cannot be shown to be partial. Again there's the question of shown by whom. The Thomistic-Aristotelian notion 'perfected understanding' comes along with a certain kind of theological metaphysics, with which many today will not be too comfortable. Four comments down from this post I carry on a discussion about perfected mathematical understanding.
I probably didn't make it sufficiently clear, but most scientific realists end up being nominalists.
Regarding scientific knowledge, I think Peirce means the ideal community as a kind of regulative principle. It explains, for him, what truth is. Further it explains his principles that to exist or be real entails being knowable (contra Kant). So it's wrapped very much up in his explanations of habit, inquiry and belief. More important when Peirce considers science he tends to devalue the individual in leu of the community of inquirers. Thus knowledge isn't something the individual necessarily holds but what the community holds. Which makes a lot of sense when you consider how science is done and how it progresses.
However I think that truth as what the community of inquirers would assert if inquiry were carried out sufficiently entails that it is wrapped up in Peirce's notion of infinity. i.e. this is never a finite process. Thus, for us finite beings, this "end" is always endlessly deferred even though we may actually reach a point of stability of believe where we believe what this ideal community might believe.
So this "ideal community" is never a real community.
It is, however, fairly close to the notion of a telos in Aristotle. Given Peirce's realism this telos is something real even if it is not something present.
I imagine that to understand any significant difference for philosophy of science between Peirce and an Aristotelianism which has been inflected by the history-oriented philosophy of science of the 1970s (Lakatos, Shapere, Kuhn, etc.) one would need to find out Peirce's views on 'agape' and evolution. Much seems to me to be shared, e.g., focus on a community of inquirers, and anti-cartesian conception of knowledge.
Yes, I think that's right. I think that in some ways Peirce's three notions of evolution (roughly Darwinianism, Lamarkianism/memes, and agapism) are one way of understanding what he's after. Of course his agapism is also one of the things that probably makes him less savory to many philosophers of science. The Lamarkianism is becoming more in vogue these days with cognitive science. (We did a reading club on Tomasello's book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition last year that deals with this, for instance -- then there is the notion of memes that's so popular right now even though it's not exactly the Peircean conception IMO)
I think that ultimately though the key to understanding Peirce is to realize he's fundamentally talking in terms of semiotic processes rather than things that are present before the individual or community. Once one realizes that then he makes a lot more sense. But there's a bias, especially in American philosophy, to talk about present things, ideas and so forth rather than processes.
BTW - I still keep meaning to read some MacIntyre. I've just been so busy that I'm way behind in my reading.
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